Eideard

A Nazi sympathiser, described by police as extremely dangerous, has been found guilty of planning acts of terrorism and of possessing child pornography after investigators found homemade bombs and indecent images of children at his home.

Martyn Gilleard, 31, a forklift truck driver from Goole, east Yorkshire, pleaded guilty in two separate cases at Leeds crown court after police found “significant” volumes of extreme right-wing literature, weapons, ammunition and homemade expolsives in his flat last October.

About 39,000 indecent images of children were also seized.

Humberside police, searching only for the child pornography, found the racist material and called in the Leeds counter-terrorism unit. Gunpowder, fuses, camouflage clothing, balaclavas, a bombmaking manual, telescopic sights, knives, a machete and rifle, were discovered. Residents were evacuated as bomb disposal experts removed the explosive material.

Cripes! He did everything except eat neighborhood cats.

Sentenced to 16 years total for all offenses.

Jim Wark—Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images

Florida has reached a tentative 1.75-billion-dollar deal to buy the largest US sugar producer and turn its vast swaths of farmland into reservoirs to protect the fabled Everglades wetlands, US media reported Wednesday.

“The plan, described as the largest conservation purchase in Florida’s history, envisions restoring some of the natural flow of water to the Everglades from Lake Okeechobee,” The amount of land involved is some 187,000 acres…

Spanning 1.5 million acres, the Everglades is the third-largest national park in the lower 48 US states, after Death Valley and Yellowstone.

For decades water from areas north of the massive wetlands has been diverted to fast-growing cities and for farming. Pollution has taken a growing toll.

The deal with US Sugar would help restore more of the pre-development ecosystem; water could move from Lake Okeechobee into marshes that filter it and then on to the “sea of grass” at the southern end of the Florida peninsula. A direct lake-Everglades connection has been a dream of environmental groups.

Overdue.

And a wonder for future generations if the restoration is thoughtfully carried out.

Like a biblical litany, Sony has repeatedly recited a list of games that it believes will make 2008 the year of the PlayStation 3. However, the company will need more than a good year to climb out of the hole it’s in with the console.

The PS3 has cost the Japanese electronics giant $3.3 billion since its launch in late 2006 because of “strategic pricing” under which it sells the console at a loss, according to the annual report filed by Sony with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “Even if the platform is ultimately successful, it may take longer than expected to recoup the investment, resulting in a negative impact on Sony’s profitability,” the report said…

The year may not even be at the halfway mark, but Sony’s luck will have to change if 2008 will end up the year of the PS3. It will now have to rely on its cast of anticipated holiday hits, such as Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet, and the launch of Home, its oft-delayed virtual online community, to drive sales.

There’s always 2009. So they say.

The Vatican is defending the late archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank whose tenure was marred by financial scandal, from media reports…that he ordered the killing of a 15-year-old girl in 1983.

Marcinkus, an American who died in Arizona in 2006 at the age of 84, was accused by the girlfriend of a slain mobster of hiring hitmen to kidnap and kill Emanuela Orlandi in 1983…

There has also long been speculation of a link between the Orlandi case and alleged mafia involvement in Vatican finances.

Such theories connect Orlandi’s disappearance and the still unsolved death in 1982 of Italian Roberto Calvi, known as “God’s Banker”, who was found hanged from Blackfriars Bridge in London after the institution he ran, Banco Ambrosiano, collapsed.

Calvi was first ruled to have committed suicide, but an Italian court found last year that he had probably been murdered by the mafia for losing money he was supposed to launder.

The Vatican is upset about journalists who are “sensationalizing” the case. At least they didn’t have the chutzpah to call the story “implausible” or “unlikely”.

Wonder if there’s a speed limit?

A Whalepower test blade

A West Chester University professor has developed a new wind turbine that draws inspiration from a blubbery source: the flippers of a humpback whale. Those knobby flippers were long considered one of the oddities of the sea, found on no other earthly creature.

But after years of study, starting with a whale that washed up on a New Jersey beach, Frank Fish thinks he knows their secret. The bumps cause water to flow over the flippers more smoothly, giving the giant mammal the ability to swim tight circles around its prey.

What works in the ocean seems to work in air. Already a flipperlike prototype is generating energy on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, with twin, bumpy-edged blades knifing through the air. And this summer, an industrial fan company plans to roll out its own whale-inspired model – moving the same amount of air with half the usual number of blades and thus a smaller, energy-saving motor.

Some scientists were sceptical at first, but the concept now has gotten support from independent researchers, most recently some Harvard engineers who wrote up their findings in the respected journal Physical Review Letters…

It has all been a bit of a culture shock for Fish, who is more at home in the open world of academia than the more secretive realm of inventions and patents. Two decades ago, his only motivation was to figure out what the bumps were for.

“I sort of found something that’s in plain sight,” he says. “You can look at something again and again, and then you’re seeing it differently.”

A long, thoroughly enjoyable in-depth article. Read it and reflect.

Could be a beginning to advancements in technology in wind generation. Cripes – this may be useful in aerofoil design in general.

Lawyers who sued the makers of the video game “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” profess to be shocked that few people who bought the game were offended by sex scenes buried in its software.

Any purchaser upset about hidden sex in the violent game could file a claim under a settlement the lawyers struck with its maker, Take-Two Interactive. Of the millions of people who bought the version after its release in 2004, exactly 2,676 filed claims…

Far bigger than the payout to plaintiffs will be the fees sought by the lawyers who brought the class action. Seth Lesser and his colleagues at 10 other law firms have asked for more than $1.3 million – compared with less than $30,000 that Take-Two Interactive’s lawyers say it will spend to resolve the claims for $5 to $35 each, or a clean copy of the game.

Fracking hilarious cautionary tale. Best example on the planet of self-serving thugs in lawyer suits.

The couple walked into a Norfolk, Virginia courthouse on a spring day, exchanged a few words, and within 10 minutes, were seemingly husband and wife.

It was an unremarkable ceremony — except that several weeks later, officials realized the shapely bride might not have been a woman.

Now authorities in Virginia, where same-sex marriages are illegal, are weighing whether to file misdemeanor charges against the couple.

A prosecutor says the decision to press charges could turn on whether the pair knowingly misled officials when they applied for a license and later, traveled to a courthouse for a ceremony. If the bride was transgender, and identified as a woman, it is unclear whether the marriage would be considered illegal…

The couple has not commented publicly since the ceremony, and The Associated Press was not able to locate either person. Court clerk Rex Davis said the marriage is considered illegal because both individuals are legally considered to be men…

Transgender people are increasingly recognized by courts as matching their “gender identity,” or internal sense of gender, said Cole Thaler, an attorney with a gay rights legal group. That means “it’s not deceptive for a transgender person who lives their life as a gender different from the gender they were assigned.”

Or you could just leave people along to live their lives as they see fit. Not harming anyone. Not telling other folks how to be 2nd-class citizens.