Meteor shower: An excuse for folks with binoculars to look less weird.

Keep your eyes on the skies, folks. It’s time for another Orionid meteor shower, guys! “From tomorrow up to 30 meteors an hour could be seen as they burn up, which can be best viewed in the northern hemisphere, with the optimum viewing times likely to be at around 1am or 5am.” This happens every October as the Earth passes through what’s been left by Haley’s Comet. source

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Coldplay’s latest album will be a “love story in a big, dark, scary city.” So, part dream and part nightmare? “So you have a boy and a girl and a group of like-minded people in a sort of George Orwell-type or Kafkaesque world. But it’s hopeful, because it’s about people trying to transcend troubles,” said Chris Martin, regarding Coldplay’s soon-to-be-released album “Mylo Xyloto.” Martin probably hopes it also transcends the pop charts — each of the band’s four albums have sold more than 2 million copies in the U.S., though that number’s been on the decline the past couple of years, matching the music industry at large. Will the fifth buck the trend? source

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The previous definition the FBI used dated way back to 1929, a bad era for victims’ rights. The Federal Bureau of Investigations has been operating a definition of “rape” from an era which was not especially kind to victims of sexual assault (which is not to say our present times are sterling by any stretch). The definition: “Carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” That’s self-evidently a very broad and vague way to describe it. The new proposed definition: “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This notably removes the requirement that the event be “forcible” to qualify as rape, as well as the gender-specific expression that only women can be rape victims. source

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thenChristian minister Harold Camping, he of the Family Radio network, predicted that the world would come to an end on May 21st when the Rapture occurred. This didn’t happen. He’d also incorrectly predicted this for 1994.
now Camping is again claiming that doomsday’s a-comin’: “Oct. 21, that’s coming very shortly, that looks like it will be, at this point, it will be the final end of everything.” We humbly predict this won’t happen. For the third time. source

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Libyan NTC claims credit for Gaddafi killing: It’s been a rather wild day as far as world news is concerned, which you’d probably expect when a notorious dictator of forty years is slain; in the aftermath, Libya’s National Transitional Council has said that Gaddafi’s capture and subsequent death (what happened exactly is yet unknown, as video has surfaced of Gaddafi once being alive under rebel custody, albeit in chaotic circumstances) was the work of Libyans, contrary to speculation NATO may have had a hand in it. Said spokesman Ahmed Bani: “It was our courageous revolutionaries who have killed the tyrant and not NATO.” source

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So what I’m saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn’t have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.
GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain • Expressing his views on abortion on Piers Morgan Tonight. We applaud Cain for being willing to split with his party’s orthodoxy, here, but in doing so he’s exposed himself to a damaging contradiction; he also said he believes life begins at conception, and that abortion was appropriate “under no circumstances.” What that means to a passionately anti-abortion GOP base is that Herman Cain, while believing a fertilized egg is in fact a human life, is not willing to defend that life through the law. And if he was striving for independent appeal (which wouldn’t work even if he supported abortion rights wholesale), his personal objection to abortion under any circumstance blunts that. Cain’s Twitter account has since said he is “100% pro-life,” which follows exactly with what he implied before; pro-life personally, but not legislating his opinion. This could be a critical blow to Cain’s recent success in GOP polling. source

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20 Oct 2011 23:47