It's alive ... It's ALIVE!

A hoax video purportedly showing Michael Jackson emerging from a coroner's van was an experiment aimed at showing how quickly misinformation and conspiracy theories can race across the internet, German broadcaster RTL said Tuesday.

The video was posted by RTL on YouTube for a single day a week ago and received 880,000 hits. The broadcaster has since removed the video from YouTube, but it has been picked up by other websites around the world.

"We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the internet with hoax videos," spokesman Heike Schultz of Cologne-based RTL told The Associated Press.

Sacha Baron Cohen's fake websites help trick rubes for new film "Bruno"

Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is apparently operating behind a series of dummy companies and web sites intended to mask his involvement in the follow-up to the hit "Borat" movie. In his new film, Cohen appears as "Bruno," a gay Austrian journalist who asks embarrassing (and sexually charged) questions.

Claiming to be preparing a documentary for German television, Cohen and his production team have recently approached interview subjects (ballroom dancers, Alabama National Guard officials, and a white supremacist) claiming to be affiliated with Amesbury Chase, a Los Angeles-based production company.

Nigerian Church scams Christians

In a position paper submitted by the Anglican Church of Nigeria to a parliamentary committee, a new law is being proposed to punish gay couples who get married with five years in jail, while groups of witnesses to the marriage may be sentenced to one year in jail.

We are especially concerned about those who are using large sums of money to lure our youth to see homosexuality and lesbianism as normative. We must consistently and faithfully teach about God’s commands on this ungodly practice and help those with such orientation to seek deliverance and pastoral counsel.

Boy George gets 15 months for imprisoning male escort

British singer Boy George, convicted last month of falsely imprisoning a male escort and beating him with a metal chain, has been sentenced to 15 months in jail.

The singer, who was tried under his real name, George O'Dowd, admitted at his trial to handcuffing Audun Carlsen, a 29-year-old Norwegian model, to a wall fixture in O'Dowd's London apartment in April 2007. He said he had restrained Carlsen because he had stolen photos from his laptop on a previous visit and he was trying to trace his missing property.

At the December trial, the court was told that the two men came in contact through a gay social networking website.

Harper gets my (scape)goat

A staff member resigned and apologized Tuesday for writing a speech read by Stephen Harper in 2003 as leader of the Opposition that he plagiarized from an address days earlier by then Australian prime minister John Howard.

"Neither my superiors in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition nor the leader of the Opposition was aware that I had done so."

Lippert worked for Harper, then leader of the Canadian Alliance, when the speech calling for Canadian troops to be deployed to Iraq was written and read in the House of Commons.

Lippert, a former policy analyst for economic think tank the Fraser Institute, has announced his resignation from his current position working in the Conservative campaign headquarters.

The apology came hours after Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae accused Harper of plagiarizing from the Howard speech.

PHOTO: M.C. Escher, The Scapegoat from Diamond, S. Anger, Madness and the Daimonic, p. 80

A face you can trust

Recently, behavioral scientists have begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone's reliability.
Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.

Whom should we trust?

Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves.
We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.

Travel scams to avoid

"During a trip to England several years ago, I spied an advertisement in one of the London papers promoting a hotel-and-meals package in Yorkshire that looked too good to be true."How to avoid resort fees, ID theft and more...

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Scam I am...

By now, most of us have heard about the Nigerian Scam, whereby some mysterious email offers you the chance to make a lot of money by helping them transfer $millions to an international bank account.
Well, this website cites stories of people who act like they are being sucked into the scam just to waste the scammers time. It makes for an insightful and funny read.