Union officials say the U.S. Department of Agriculture has placed three employees on paid leave of absence amid the agency's investigation of the largest meat recall in U.S. history.

Two agency supervisors and one inspector have been sent home and will receive their normal salary pending the probe, said Stan Painter, chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, the union representing USDA food inspectors. A second union official confirmed the leaves.

Hallmark/Westland on Feb. 17 announced a recall of 143 million pounds of beef. The Chino, Calif., company issued the recall three weeks after the Humane Society of the United States released an undercover video showing workers trying to force sick or injured cows to their feet using electrical cattle prods, high-pressure water hoses and fork lifts. Such activities violate state and federal laws barring animal cruelty...

This is sick! Someone (CEO's/Managers) should do jail time, or atleast have the shit beat out of them and shocked with cattle prods.... Do unto others you bastards! :)

USDA Puts 3 Workers on Leave After Largest Recall of Beef

The US study of 77,000 people found taking 400 milligrams per day long-term increased cancer risk by 28% - with smokers at particular risk.

Vitamin E linked to lung cancer

Police in Las Vegas said a man is in critical condition after staying in a motel room where ricin, a deadly poison, was later found.

And he says it is not his.... hmmm who was in this room before?

Man in Critical Condition in Ricin Case

"His press corps is bigger than mine. And we both have trouble answering questions in English. "
U.S. President George W Bush, during a meeting with Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka at the White House. (Kyodo)

Whoa where did Bush w/ wit come from... :) Haha LOL!

Bush Quote Of The Day

Herman Lay's first business enterprise was selling Pepsi-Colas from a makeshift stand in his family's front yard in Greenville. He was 11 years old. He was successful, charging a nickel a bottle while the city baseball park across the street was charging a dime. Ironically, just 45 years later, he was selling Pepsi-Colas again, but this time as chairman of PepsiCo, Inc., a multibillion-dollar conglomerate that he helped create.

As a young man searching for a career during the Great Depression, he suffered some lean years, but no hard-luck lessons were lost on Lay. He finally found his niche in the snack foods industry and literally wrote his own success story, making his name and Lay's Potato Chips synonymous with snack foods throughout the South and later the world, and becoming one of the nation's most successful entrepreneurs.

As i much down on a bag of chips here is the bio of 1/2 of the 2 man team who started the snack food craze ... :)

Herman Warden Lay

Softsqueeze is a music player for your PC that works with the Slimserver software. It complements the Squeezebox2, Squeezebox and Slimp3 hardware music players developed by Slim Devices. Softsqueeze supports synchronization with hardware players and remote streaming over the Internet using ssh tunneling. It has been developed in Java, allowing this useful application to work with Windows PCs, OS X and Linux systems.

Softsqueeze 2.0

Two master entertainers from England, and the line connecting them is palpable.

Hitchcock studied four Dickens novels at school: 'Bleak House', 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'Great Expectations', and 'Our Mutual Friend'. His favourite was 'Great Expectations', which may have inspired a theme of 'growing up' found in several of his 'picaresque' thrillers (such as North by Northwest). But it was 'Bleak House', notes Donald Spoto, which 'seems to have engraved itself on Hitchcock's memory. More than a simple treatment of political corruption and the injustices of the legal system (which the young Dickens and his family had experienced firsthand), "Bleak House" details a grim distrust in any public institution. This same sort of cynicism informs Hitchcock's films, where statesmen and judges and lawyers and policemen are venal, small-minded, driven by the most intense lust and greed, and not much better than the apparent villains.' (Donald Spoto, 'The Life of Alfred Hitchcock' [1983], p. 28. Spoto perhaps underestimates Hitchcock's personal detachment, but cynicism is certainly present in a work like The Paradine Case. See, for example, the note below on the sadistic, and lustful, Judge Horfield.)

Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Dickens

If you want some more in-depth reading jump on over here...

MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday:
From Dan Kaminsky, a senior Senior Security Consultant for Avaya, and a part of the DoxPara Research team...

http://www.doxpara.com/md5_someday.pdf
http://www.doxpara.com/research/md5/...ful-slides.pdf
http://www.doxpara.com/research/md5/confoo.pl

Stach & Liu have some well document information on MD4/5 Collisions...
http://www.stachliu.com.nyud.net:809...ollisions.html

We live in a world that has to much "security via obscurity" or a "don't ask don't" tell policy on security problems...

Even back in 2005 MS and Big Bill's Boys banned the use of DES/MD4/MD5 on their projects, but even SHA1 and other systems they have chosen are still looking to be prone to attack.

I dug up a little info for this reply to someone... Can anyone provide some more input on the problems with MD5

Just how secure is MD5?

Seventeen piconewtons: that's the force required to move a cobalt atom over a copper surface.

It takes 210 piconewtons to move a cobalt atom over a smooth platinum surface, according to a new research paper from IBM's Almaden Research Center and the University of Regensberg.

A piconewton is a trillionth of a newton. A newton is the amount of force required to accelerate a kilogram one meter per second squared. Lifting a penny weighing 3 grams takes about 30 billion piconewtons. The atoms in IBM's experiments are moved with atomic force microscopes. (Andreas Heinrich, lead scientist in the scanning tunneling microscopy lab at IBM Almaden and the lead author of the paper, recently let us move some atoms with a scanning tunneling/atomic force microscope in his lab.)

The breakthrough marks the first time anyone has been able to measure the force required to move individual atoms around, according to IBM, and helps the company move toward its goal of molecular computing.

IBM calculates the force it takes to move atoms

As structures made of metal get smaller — as their dimensions approach the micrometer scale (millionths of a meter) or less — they get stronger. Scientists discovered this phenomenon 50 years ago while measuring the strength of tin "whiskers" a few micrometers in diameter and a few millimeters in length. Many theories have been proposed to explain why smaller is stronger, but only recently has it become possible to see and record what's actually happening in tiny structures under stress.

Read on the post is very detailed ... Does this apply to humans too?

Smaller is Stronger -- Now Scientists Know Why