Broward Palm Beach News Blog

Flickr: crazyphotoman

​Technology. It's supposed to be our friend. But friends don't conspire with a Deerfield Beach company to help police officers write more speeding tickets. In its methodical march toward world domination of the ticket-writing technology market, Advanced Public Safety on Fairway Drive just landed a contract with the police department in Bowie, Maryland.

You're welcome, Bowie drivers! Now, after cops give you a ticket, they don't have to haul their paperwork into the station. The APS device allows them to send it there electronically, Less hassle, less time. Leaving cops with more time to write more tickets.

Oh, don't fret, South Floridians. The nefarious technology is already in place here -- Broward Sheriff's Office has it; ditto Fort Lauderdale P.D., Hollywood P.D., and West Palm P.D., among some 750 law enforcement agencies in the APS empire.

Courtesy of walletpop.com

​This week's feature follows one kind of internet scam: 419 fraud, usually originating in Africa or Asia, and the people fighting the scammers at 419Eater.com. But one of the fastest growing scams in tough economic times is the "work from home" fake employment scam, and many of these can be traced to scammers in the U.S.

New Times' classified ad department receives hundreds of employment scam ad insertion orders every year. Most of the ads claim you can work a few hours a week and earn as much as $2,000. Take this ad, which landed in our in-boxes this week. It's identical to ads placed on monster.com, usjobscatalogue.com, hotjobs.yahoo.com, and newspapers like the Fort Meade Ledger:

This week's New Times feature details my foray into the world of scambaiting -- the practice of turning the tables on email scammers by playing along as a gullible victim -- with advice from a worldwide scambaiting site called 419Eater whose main administrator lives in Broward County.

In Nigeria, the people who run 419 scams -- those pesky, fraudulent emails that fill up your spam folder promising payouts of millions of dollars -- call themselves "Yahoo-yahoo Boys," after their favorite email service. It's been estimated that 250,000 internet scammers operate in Lagos alone, and the promise of easy money from gullible Europeans has created an industry centered around internet cafes, where teen-aged boys and girls congregate to send out mass emails. Or, as pictured in the video after the jump, they just work from home (discussed in this excellent article).

Above, African hip-hop artist Olu Maintain celebrates the Moet and Hennessey that goes along with being a Yahoo Boy. And after the jump, another much more explicit new song by Prince Hollywood -- not in English, but you  get the drift. Those are definitely "Benjamins" they're throwing around.

​
























 


Given the overdose of media coverage of the swine flu virus, there are a couple of points not being discussed:

1.) We keep hearing that clinical trials are underway -- but where? And by who? And how many people are getting tested?

There are five private companies manufacturing the virus, and each is doing their own tests. According to a Reuters article, the five companies are Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi-Aventis SA, Glaxo, Novartis AG and Baxter International Inc.  The five companies are said to be getting $2 billion from the federal government for 250 million doses of the vaccine.  To get the deets on who's being tested, it helps to check out the companies' websites. 

Here's Sanofi Pasteur's press release about its test in the U.S. on 849 adults, and here's a release about tests it did in Europe on 300 children and 450 adults.

Novartis tested 784 adults in Costa Rica, did pilot trials on 100 people in the UK, and is in the midst of testing 6,000 people around the world. 

Baxter has tested 400 adults and 400 children.

Glaxo says they'll post results on www.clinicaltrials.gov -- where there are actually, at press time, 80+ swine flu-related tests underway -- but few reported results.

The National Institutes of Health is also conducting testing.    

We asked Dr. John Livengood, Director of Epidemiology at the Broward County Health Department, about the testing, and he said "The NIH trials are specifically [testing whether people need] one versus two doses, and whether those can be given sequentially versus simultaneously. The answers are pretty much back and it looks like younger people should get two doses, while those ten and over can get one dose. The analysis isn't quite finished, but it looks simultaneous doses is fine."

Dr. Livengood said the vaccine is nothing to be worried about, despite the media hype:
"It's just a strain change like we'd do with the flu vaccine anyways. A strain substitution. Each year in January, we pick the strains that we expect to appear the coming flu season. Almost every year it changes."  He characterized it as routine and said that he doesn't expect there will be any adverse long-term effects. "We give a hundred million does of flu vaccine each year in the U.S. Flu is a very well-monitored vaccine."

2.) Pregnant Women: Beware which type of flu vaccine you get.

The vaccine is being made in both a shot form and a mist that can be inhaled. Pregnant women should not use the inhaled version because it is made with the live version of the virus, Dr. Livengood said.  Instead, they should get the shot. The risk with that, however, is that some shots contain thimerosol, a preservative that contains mercury.  Even though some experts believe thimerosol poses no problem, some activists (like Jenny McCarthy) believe it has contributed to autism in their children.

Dr. Livengood broke it down: "The multi-dose vials contain thimerosol. Multi-dose vials require a  preservative -- the single-dose vials or prefilled syringes don't." Livengood saids that "the ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) says there is no evidence of harm from thimerosol" but that health workers will be advised to make sure pregnant women get the single-dose, just in case.

3) Is it true that you won't be able to sue the government if the vaccine ends up hurting, rather than helping?

The folks over at the National Vaccine Information Center -- who are skeptical about a number of vaccines -- point out that, per a 2005 law called the PREP Act (Public Readiness Emergency Preparedness Act), drug makers are protected from liability when they release vaccines in response to a public health emergency.

Dr. Livengood points out that there are some exceptions, and anyone who believes they were injured by a vaccine could file a claim through the "Covered Injury Compensation Program"  here. 

Problem is, that no funds had been appropriated for the program. When we called to ask if that's changed recently since the rise of the swine flu, the kid who answered the phone -- bless his heart, he's new -- said, "to be honest, we're not supposed to know too much about it." He said he just sends out information. "I can't take out my wallet and help everyone."  A call to the press office of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VCIP) resulted in someone saying they'd call us back. Something tells us the courts might end up having a lot of fun with this one!

 

If you think about it, the investment scam is the ultimate virtual reality game: It gives its customers the extremely life-like sensation of getting rich, albeit at considerable cost. So why not offer virtual reality itself as an investment scam? Too late. Someone's already thought of it.

The SEC is suing the Palm Beach County-based creators of 3001 A.D., a virtual reality game that purported to have deals with Microsoft and Apple, attracting some $20 million in investment capital.

The company was based in Delray Beach and feds say that five of the company's six principals live in surrounding cities Boynton Beach, Wellington, Lake Worth, and Fort Lauderdale.

Hilariously, some of the company's promotional articles are still available through a simple Google search, plus a whole slew of promotional videos, like the one above. If this was a scam, these guys did a bang-up job pretending to be on the video game vanguard.

You don't think we're going to let Professor McMichael trash our local vanity tech firm do you? After the jump, the company's owner strikes back!

flickr.com

Allen Iverson used to be "the Answer," but now he brings a lot of questions.

​Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat will be without the services of an undersized, over-the-hill veteran troublemaker this season. And Heat fans more concerned with wins and good basketball are probably rejoicing right now, but South Florida bloggers and other fans of controversy and stories ripe for the advancing will shed a tear for missed opportunity this evening.

Allen Iverson, the 34-year-old veteran known as "A.I." or just "the Answer," was reportedly interested in playing with his Olympic teammate, Dwyane Wade. But he told his twitter followers this morning that he would be signing with the Memphis Grizzlies.

In a pair of posts that went up about an hour and a half ago, Iverson, who played last season with Detroit after a short stint in Denver, said:

God Chose Memphis as the place that I will continue my career. I met with Mr. Heinsley, Chris Wallace and my next head coach Lionel Hollins.

Then:

I feel that they are committed to developing a winner and I know that I can help them to accomplish that. I feel that I can trust them. 

Aaron Jackson does a lot of good in the world.

Aaron Jackson, founder of Planting Peace -- a locally based nonprofit running orphanages in Haiti and shelters around the world -- says he does not "kill children." That's right, not even one. I've hung out with the man on several occasions, for extended periods of time, and as far as I can tell, he's not lying about this.

It's only really an issue because of a web copyediting mistake at the Orlando Sentinel. A few weeks ago, the Sentinel published a front-page story and Q&A with Jackson about Planting Peace's opening an office in nearby Clermont. The web headline has since been changed, but Jackson says the story was originally published under a headline "that basically said 'Local Hero Kills Children.'"

Jackson laughs about it now but says it was quite a hassle the day it happened. And it comes with the territory. (The territory of media attention, that is; New Times has written two cover stories about Jackson's work -- here and here -- and he was one of the original CNN Heroes.) Though he says he isn't completely relocating Planting Peace to Central Florida, he hopes the office there (close to the UCF campus) will help him find volunteers for the ever-expanding charity.

"We got a really good deal on property," Jackson told me from his new Clermont office -- the space is more than twice the size of the crammed apartment he was working out of in Dania Beach. "It's no more crammed-hippie apartment," he joked.

He's headed back to Haiti for a short stint. He says a documentary film crew will be shooting some of the work Planting Peace is doing there. If you're interested in helping out, Jackson says there will be a fundraiser at the Bubble in the next few weeks.

Experts use high tech gagetry to test drywall at Whitney

​Residents at the Whitney in downtown West Palm Beach aren't particularly happy to know that they're living in one of the only condo buildings in Florida to have a suspected problem with Chinese drywall, at least so far. Especially since that's about the sum total of what they've learned since one apartment owner found she had corroded pipes, a signature of the problem drywall, in her apartment.

A few residents have complained of headaches and allergy problems; others have demanded a full report from The Continental Group, which owns the building. But response from management has ranged from slow, to confused, to downright nonsensical.

One resident, who asked not to be named, said the company first tried a random sampling of apartments. "They went around to a couple of units on each floor with some machine that was supposed to be able to sense the presence of Chinese drywall," he told The Juice. When the results came back positive for 50 percent of the tested units, outraged residents demanded an explanation. "They told us that 'there might be people with more sensitive olfactory responses than the machine,'" the resident remembers.

Last month, Bovis Lend Lease, the Whitney's builder, hired Environ International to perform its own round of tests. This time they removed safety plates and outlet covers and took samples of drywall from every unit. On Wednesday of this week, residents received this email from property manager Paul Wilkis:

Radio Green Earth: Making the world safer for tree frogs

​Bet you thought South Florida was a lot more likely to win accolades for "best strip malls" or "extra egregious decimation of natural wildlife" than for anything much greener than development dollars. But it turns out Florida is among the top states in the nation when it comes to a clean, green energy economy, according to a study released last month by the Pew Charitable Trust. And we're also among the top ten states for jobs in the green sector (we got beat by Texas and California). To recap our victory over the forces of evil, the Pew study found:
• 31,100 jobs in Florida's clean-energy economy and 3,831 clean businesses.
• that venture capital investment in clean technology throughout the state totaled almost $117 million over the past three years.
• Florida is the only state in the country with its own cap-and-trade policy.
• Florida's clean-energy economy increased by 7.9 percent throughout the country from 1998 to 2007 compared to 3.7 percent for total jobs.

So green are we, in fact, that somebody thought a talk-radio program devoted entirely to clean energy might have a shot at making a profit. Probably safe to say that "Radio Green Earth" isn't siphoning off listeners from Limbaugh or Joyce Kaufman. Eco Advisors of Palm Beach Gardens is broadcasting the show on Mondays from 10 to 11 a.m. on WWNN-AM (1470) out of Pompano Beach. Recent shows, hosted by Missy Tancredi and John Poggi, among others, have run the gamut from best hybrid and electric cars to how to make your home greener to "the business case for sustainability." The show we caught touched on unadulterated Florida honey and also disentangled the alternative biofuels controversy over sugar cane versus algae.

Idyllic Florida landscape courtesy of FMPA

Residents of Lake Worth, many of whom have made small but successful careers specializing in complaining about their high utility bills, might not know that the city actually gets the power to turn their fans and nuke their frozen dinners not from the beleaguered Lake Worth Power Plant but from the Florida Municipal Power Agency. Lake Worth is one of 30 cities in Florida, including Key West, Vero Beach, and Homestead, that rely on FMPA for energy that comes from a conglomeration of distant coal and nuclear facilities -- and maybe just occasionally, their own hometown plant.

The FMPA's reach is wide, and so is its impact on the kinds of energy Florida invests in. The executive board rarely meets publicly in South Florida. It's a pretty sure bet they didn't expect the 15 or 20 protesters at PGA National who turned out on Tuesday, at least one of them wearing a Homer Simpson costume, to welcome arriving board members and to make it clear they don't think much of FMPA's idea to invest in a $17 billion nuclear power plant in Levy County, in northwest Florida.

"Some people want to say that nuclear energy is green energy because it's cleaner than other sources," activist Russell McSpadden, who lives in Lake Worth, told us. "But there is evidence of cancer clusters, like around the Port St. Lucie plant, where children are getting brain cancer at an early age -- at rates of 400 times the national average. And that's when the plants are running safely -- we're not even talking about a meltdown. The plants also use a huge amount of water; they're expensive, dangerous, and dirty. The FMPA is an elusive group, and this may be the closest we're going to get to them." McSpadden says the Florida Green Party and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) have filed formal complaints against the permitting of the plant.

Jennings: Spreading good energy.

Lake Worth City Commissioner Cara Jennings, who has lately been building her own solar panels ("I bought one panel for $600 and built another one in two hours for $100 -- I'm not so good with technology, but this is really easy") is encouraging South Floridians to show up for tomorrow's board meeting at PGA National.

"The FMPA is mismanaged," Jennings says. "Our City Commission is supportive of renewable energy, but the FMPA isn't investing in renewable, and they're not interested in conservation. One of the reasons our rates are so high is that FMPA bought gas at too high a price, and now we're paying for it. Customers understand if their bills go up with high gas prices; the problem is, their bills don't go down when prices drop."

Jennings wants to talk to the board about "net metering." As of now, Lake Worth residents who install solar panels, as she's doing, can't sell their extra power back to the city or receive credits from Lake Worth Utilities. The Lake Worth City Commission recently voted to withdraw from FMPA, a process that takes five years. "So we have four and a half years to figure out what our alternatives are," Jennings says.

The FMPA executive board meets Friday, July 17, at 10:30 a.m., 400 Avenue of the Champions, PGA National Resort and Spa, in the British Ballroom. Public commentary is welcome.

Kaufman: Setting her sights on Shadowood.

Fort Lauderdale's WFTL-AM (850) talk-radio host Joyce Kaufman is smelling conspiracy everywhere lately. She has hooked up with those zany folks over at the Florida Security Council and believes that there's a radical Muslim hiding under every rock. "I am obsessed with exposing radical Islam," Kaufman told us by phone. "Sharia law is infiltrating my society, and if something isn't done about it, America will fall. I'm just addressing these issues in an open and honest way. Islam needs to go through a major reformation; it's a nontolerant religion. You had the same thing with Christianity, the Crusades, early on, and eventually Christianity was reformed. I look at London; I have friends who can't live there anymore. The same thing is happening here."

 Even the high stink of the popcorn machine at Shadowood movie theaters in Boca can't throw her off the scent of a secret plot. When Kaufman and a group of friends went to see The Stoning of Soraya M. last Sunday, a film about the dire effects of Muslim sharia on a woman living in a small Iranian town, she and her group were turned away at the door.

A lens on the  projector was broken, they were told. And no, they couldn't bump one of the kids' movies showing and screen Soraya instead of Transformers.

"The manager was like an 18-year-old kid, and he was nervous. We asked him if he knew what the movie was about, and he had no idea," Kaufman says.

It's a controversial film -- maybe you don't want to show it to us, one of Kaufman's friends suggested.  

When we phoned Shadowood this week, a manager told us they'd had a power failure that night that blacked out one of the projectors. But they were showing the movie at its regularly scheduled times for the rest of the week. Had al Qaeda perhaps cut the power lines? We phoned FPL and were put on hold for a really long time.

Mayor Frankel tests the power of her new software

Ever since West Palm Beach was designated the second most "technologically advanced" city of its size in the U.S. by a Digital Communities survey last year, we've been waiting to see if Mayor Lois Frankel was going to start jetting around to commission meetings in a flying saucer. It didn't exactly make us proud to learn we'd tied with Independence Missouri and Richardson Texas, but still, we'd made the list. Maybe the new City Center was going to turn out to be a marvel to rival those cool futuristic displays at the Science Museum - you know, city employees appearing as holograms, letters whisked from office to office in pneumatic tubes, that kind of thing. That $154 million the city spent on the Center ought to buy a lot of gizmos, right?

So it was sort of disappointing to learn that all that high tech energy was going into "addressing cost inefficiencies specifically related to obtaining construction permits" according to a news release from Avolve Software. Avolve has evidently sold the city a program called ProjectDox, which "serves as a conduit that feeds a variety of programs in an effort to more efficiently manage complex internal processes and provide outward-facing tools to better serve respective constituents faced with the effects of continuing growth and budget restrictions," Avolve CEO Ron Loback told EarthTimes.com  

If you can decode that sentence without using special hi-tech doublespeak software you are a lot smarter than us. But we are in favor of anything that will speed up those needless construction delays in downtown West Palm, anything that would make it faster to waive building heights limitations. Maybe the new software will also work to muzzle the objections of property owners tired of seeing their tax dollars diverted to big-ego projects, to defang critics of "pay to play," in which developers pull out their checkbooks and make campaign donations to grease the wheels. Perhaps now secretaries will merely have to type in the word "Catalfulmo" to instantly generate reams of permits. Now that would be some cool software.

Having romantic problems? A Pompano Beach man has just what you've been looking for... That is, if you've been looking for "easy girls" or "live ass hoes" or women he says he and his friends have hooked up with recently.

The video above, posted to YouTube by J'Quan Kabal, shows a series of women, each with a note attached, most with a phone number. He says he and his friends met these women through MySpace and MyBootySpace (the "adult myspace"), and he wants you to know that "if you see these girls, you can know they're easy to get with."

"There are all these females in Broward who don't mind sleeping with a lot of guys," Kabal tells me. "So we just round them up and collect them."

He explains: "I'm well-known on MySpace, and people were always asking me, 'Where the females at? Where the females at?' And I help them out, but people want pictures, and I have give the URL links, so I figured we'd just collect them all in one spot for guys."

I called some of the women in the video to ask how they feel about being depicted this way.

Gevinson's Jatropha: Profitable and entirely legal!

Teri Gevinson thinks money grows on trees.

That's why she's planted 9,500 jatropha trees in Delay Beach, on land where pepper and tomato farmers had long since packed up their hoes and gone home in disgust. The jatropha is the next big thing in agrofuel (switchgrass is so last year), another save-the-planet strategy to help us wean ourselves from fossil fuels. The tree, whose leaves look like a cross between pot and poison ivy, produces an oil-rich seed, and that oil has been used as gas for planes, trains, and automobiles -- some trains in India run just fine on the stuff, even when loaded down with extra passengers and live chickens.

Unlike, say, oranges, the wild jatropha can be grown densely without a lot of water (unlike the main contenders for ethanol production, as a new report details) or coddling. A mature tree can generate at least a couple of gallons of oil.

The jatropha looks like the place where the farmer and the environmentalist might meet and actually not come to blows. Gevinson, CEO of Ag-Oil in Delray and owner of Ascot Development in Boca, says her daughter came up with the idea for growing the high-yield trees when it looked like the development bubble had burst. Gevinson was so taken with the prospect of growing her own jatropha that she dove into research about mechanical harvesting, toured facilities in Brazil, and bought seeds from different jatropha test projects around the world. "So far, the Haitian seeds have done best here," she says. Her plan is to situate a processing facility on 104 acres next to the plantation, where she has so far cultivated 20 acres. She's looking forward to another delivery of 7,000 plants currently growing in the nursery.

Gevinson, the new oil baroness

Jatropha has the advantage that it's not a food source -- like corn or soybeans -- so theoretically at least, its cultivation shouldn't lead to mass global starvation. And Gevinson has a plan to combine her jatropha oil output with algae, which she says will increase yield exponentially. She expects her facility to create 276 direct job positions and 2,741 indirect jobs over five years. Capital investment on construction and engineering will be spent in Florida, she adds. Once local farmers see the processing plant in operation, Gevinson hopes they'll be persuaded to grow their own.

"There's an endless market for alternative fuels," Gevinson says optimistically. "FPL, PalmTran... they all run on diesel; they could all use our fuel. Continental Airlines already completed a test flight using jatropha plus algae in two of the plane's tanks. In the future, you're going to see more and more cars produced that run on diesel. I mean, they're already producing electric cars, and it's not like it's easy to find a place to plug into. Biofuel just makes more sense."

Flickr User: Curious Expeditions

American consumers spend billions every year to learn what the American Medical Association just told the world yesterday, for free: that hormone therapy cannot halt the human aging process. Or at least that they've found no scientific evidence to prove it.

This figures to be a setback for BodyLogicMD, the Boca Raton-based firm that connects customers to a field of 30 "anti-aging" physicians and which made the counter-intuitive decision to advertise on the same page as an article that suggests its doctors' treatments have no merit.

But there's a tradition of seeking the Fountain of Youth in Florida that dates to Ponce de Leon's exploration in the 16th Century, and a Fort Lauderdale researcher named Alan O'Donnell has embarked on a quest of his own. O'Donnell believes he's on the brink of a technological breakthrough that would allow him to achieve the immortal human mind, rather than the immortal human body that was the vision of hormone therapy promoters.

With a new, state-of-the-art EEG machine, O'Donnell says he can capture 256 different locations for brainwaves in the cerebral cortex. Combined with another new technology that captures gamma waves, he says it's possible to download and save a person's consciousness. "Two hundred years from now, let's say we can take a much younger body and overlay that with an older person's mind," muses O'Donnell. "You can live your life again as a 16-year-old."

Proof that he didn't make it past Mario's second level.

I'm in line at Gamestop the other day, breaking down and finally buying the much-hated NCAA Football '09, when I hear the clerk ask the guy in front of me for his fingerprints. He's returning a game, and the clerk breaks out some kind of form. He swipes his thumb across an ink pad stuck to the counter and then puts his mark in the appropriate box.

What the deuce? "The sheriff's office has been making us do it," the clerk told me. "People hate it."

I called back and talked to Gamestop manager Carlos Rivera, who said every video game store in Broward County got a visit from a deputy back in October. The deputy told them to start collecting thumb prints from people who return games.

So what did the good folks at Gamestop do? Break out a BFG9000?

Flickr user: jitterdoug

Your phone can help you find this man.

So maybe it wasn't the best idea for a straight woman to experiment with Grindr, the new iPhone app that's supposed to help gay guys hook up. I had my roommate (the only tech savvy person in my household) download it on her phone, and was disappointed to discover that the program looked just like any other MySpace/Facebook/Match.com scenario. It's just pictures of shirtless guys cruising for sex, all using the same cheesy pick-up lines.

Then the phone started vibrating.

Seriously. When you log onto Grindr, your phone grinds. It's pretty exciting. Now, when my roommate accidentally pocket-dials the wrong button on her phone, she gets a lovely surprise.

Of course, there are other advantages. The program uses GPS technology to hunt down the men who are closest to you, giving a whole new meaning to the term "geographically desirable." I was afraid it might explode if I used it in Wilton Manors. Won't former Ft. Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle be thrilled?

Also, Grindr has many straight uses. It's way better than traditional Gaydar. With Grindr, you can instantly find out if the cute guy flirting with you in line at Publix was actually...flirting with the bronze-chested personal trainer on his phone. Ain't technology grand?

NFL.com

Corey Smith

In news stories about the four (now three) football players missing at sea, Coast Guard Capt. Tim Close has been quoted as saying that the boat they left shore in -- a 21-foot, single-engine, center-console boat made by Everglades Boats -- is "billed as 'unsinkable.' "

True, the website for Everglades Boats does call its vessels unsinkable.  But the website also describes the company's mission as building "inshore and shallow-water boats with the structural integrity usually found in yachts." Deep-sea fishing, by definition, does not take place in inshore or shallow waters. 

A person answering the phone at the company said the company would not comment until more is known about the incident.

SeaRobotics.com

Boca teachers or Navy Seals?

Florida Atlantic University has finally settled a long-running dispute with three men who used to work in the Owl Nest. 

Stanley Dunn, former chair of FAU's Ocean Engineering department, helped the program evolve from a rinky-dink operation to a considerable force. In 1999, he helped the school land a NATO contract to build high-tech submarines that could detect underwater mines.  Dunn worked alongside with and a consultant he'd once hired, Donald Darling, and another FAU professor, Samuel Smith. Darling founded a company called SeaRobotics and was planning to name the other two men as officers. SeaRobotics would market the submarine technology to private companies. Arrangements like this were generally permitted so that universities could make money from research developed in-house. 

However, around 2001, then-FAU President Anthony Catanese suspected shady dealings, that the arrangement might be inappropriate, since Dunn was not only a professor but a supervisor.  Eventually, a federal investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing, but by then the men had been forced out of their jobs and couldn't find new ones. The publicity and cloud of suspicion tainted their job prospects.  In 2007, they filed suit, asking for $1 million apiece.

Thought you were having a bad week? Not compared to these people.

If you haven't seen it yet, www.fmylife.com is a site that lets anonymous internet people confess to the world the most tragic, humiliating things in their lives. Each post ends with FML -- Fuck My Life.

Jump for a few examples, but first a warning: if you begin reading, you will probably not get much else done today.

 

Starting February 18, television signals are scheduled switch to digital, meaning that people with analog televisions (read: the elderly) who don't have converter boxes would lose their signal. But today the U.S. House of Representatives voted to push conversion back to June. President Obama is expected to sign that bill into law tomorrow.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been circulating this pamphlet to her constituents, but there are still 5,000 people in her West Broward congressional district on the waiting list for government-issued vouchers that would help defray the costs of the conversion box.