Posts from — November 2008

The lovely Jamie-Lynn Sigler (forever known as Mob kid Meadow Sopranao) is guesting this season on the HBO series Entourage. Turtle (played by Jerry Ferrara) and his character this season is trying to be the regular guy that lands Jamie-Lynn Sigler. All of this has led to reports the two are dating in real life.

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Journalist Tim Reiterman began investigating Reverend Jim Jones, the leader of the Peoples Temple cult, for the San Francisco Chronicle 18 months before Jones burst on the world’s stage 30 years ago.

TIME: Do you think that the 900 deaths that immediately followed were suicides, or were they murders?

I believe that this was a mass murder. First of all, there were over 200 children who could not have formed the intent to commit suicide. Second, Jim Jones had isolated his people and conditioned them through suicide rehearsals and mock sieges to accept death…

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LOSE YO LIFE

I been whipping the butter for years…

Federal immigration officials allowed scores of violent criminals — some ordered deported decades ago — to walk away from Harris County Jail despite the inmates’ admission to local authorities that they were in the country illegally, a Houston Chronicle investigation found.

A review of thousands of criminal and immigration records shows that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials didn’t file the paperwork to detain roughly 75 percent of the more than 3,500 inmates who told jailers during the booking process that they were in the U.S. illegally.

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Pirates have seized the biggest booty ever taken on the high seas, capturing a fully-laden Saudi oil supertanker and its multinational crew, among them, two British merchant seamen.

The Sirius Star — three times the size of an aircraft carrier and carrying its full complement of two million barrels of crude oil worth at least $100 million — was hijacked in the early hours of Sunday 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, according to the US Fifth Fleet.

“This is unprecedented,” Lieutenant Nathan Christensen, spokesman for the fleet said today. “It’s the largest ship that we’ve seen pirated.”

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In 2006, marijuana was named America’s most valuable cash crop, with an estimated production value exceeding $35 billion annually, which exceeds corn and wheat production combined.

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The US economy probably went into recession in April in a downturn likely to last 14 months, according to a survey of forecasts released Monday by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve.The 51 economists on average predicted an annualized drop in US economic output of 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter and a 1.1 percent decline in the first quarter of 2009, the Philly Fed said.

More than half of the panelists say their outlook is based on the assumption that Congress will pass a new stimulus package, with a size estimated at 211 billion dollars.

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Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry. Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

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They probably expected a goody bag of some sorts as a going home gift after the primary school trip to Sainsbury’s.

But what the 42 children  -  not to mention their parents and teachers  -  did not expect was to be given a book with explicit illustrations of sexual positions.

And the advice under the dozen drawings, which feature in a section about saving water by ‘bathing with a friend’, reads: ‘Save water. Have fun. Just get out before everything becomes wrinkled.’

Other inappropriate suggestions in the £5 book from Sainsbury’s  -  whose advertising slogan is Try Something New Today  -  include encouraging readers to shave in intimate places, streaking, talking to strangers and handing out your phone number to five people on the street.

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