In 2005, 23.9 percent of adults in the United States were obese, or had a body mass index greater than 30, while in 2007, the percentage had grown to 25.6 percent, data issued by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) showed.

No state has achieved the official target to bring obesity down to 15 percent of the adult population by 2010, the report showed.

A Japanese duo who marketed charms said to glow for more than a decade ran out of luck themselves as it came to light that the products were radioactive, police said Thursday.

The pair were based in Hiroshima, site of the world's first atomic attack, where they sold cellphone straps containing tritium, a radioactive substance that can be used in nuclear weapons.

They imported the tritium from Britain and sold the straps through a website, saying the charms would "shine for more than 10 years."

It beggars belief that anyone would think that they'd first hear of World War III through a spam email. But hackers are relying on such credulous fools in an attempt to spread a new Trojan.

The tactic is far from the first time hackers used rising tensions between Iran and the West as the theme for malware-based attacks. Iraq's controversial decision to continue building a nuclear plant was used to bait attacks designed to spread a series of Trojans back in 2005, Sophos reports.

Florida attorney Jack Thompson, who made a career of denouncing, intimidating and harrassing gaming publishers and aficionados has been recommended for permanent disbarment by the referee who presided over his state bar trial.

"Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes. He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him.

This Court makes the following recommendations for John Bruce Thompson:

A. Permanent disbarment, with no leave to reapply for admission.
B. Disciplinary costs currently totaling $43,675.35."

A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®.

Every airline passenger would be tracked by a government-funded GPS, containing personal, private and confidential information, and that it would shock the customer worse than an electronic dog collar if he/she got out of line?

Not only could it be used as a physical restraining device, but also as a method of interrogation, according to the same aforementioned letter from Mr. Ruwaldt.

Why are tax dollars being spent on something like this? Is this a police state or is it America?

The film trilogy, which grossed $2.96 billion worldwide at the box office and $3 billion or so more in DVD and ancillary markets, has not made any money for the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the famous books.

According to the Tolkien lawsuit, part of the reason the Tolkien family has received no kwan from the films is that New Line has had to shell out so much money to previous rights holders Zaentz and Miramax (who both had 5% of the gross).

With the full-scale rollout of Japan's cigarette vending machine age-verification system just around the corner, a Sankei Sports news reporter has confirmed the existence of a minor flaw: magazine photos can be used to fool the age-verification cameras on some machines.

Fujitaka admits that people may, on occasion, be able to fool the age-verification cameras with photographs - but only for the time being. The company is now working on a more advanced system that will make sure each face belongs to a real human, but they are unable to say when these new machines will be put into place.

The US House Science and Technology Committee voted to deny the FBI $11 million to continue work on a massive database of government records on virtually all American citizens. The vote came after the FBI refused to tell Congress about its plans.

The idea was to use all that data to somehow predict who might be a potential so-called "terrorist" -- without a hint of probable cause to indicate any specific individual was linked to any radical or extremist group or ideology.

It is the sort of plan that the former East German STASI, the secret police thought to have employed up to one in three East Germans as government informants, would have wet its pants to have implemented. Terms that come to mind are "Panopticon" and "Orwellian."

Wikileaks has released a sensitive 219 page US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as "what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places".

The manual directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and (under varying circumstances) the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates employing terrorists or prosecuting individuals for terrorism who are not terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of subterfuge and "psychological operations" (propaganda) to make these and other "population & resource control" measures more palatable.

Mathew Ingram alerts us to the news that the band Metallica has responded on its own website to the controversy over representatives from the band demanding reviews of the band's latest album get taken offline.

It seems like a weak cop-out to say "oh, it was our managers' fault" when the band has had so much controversy concerning how it has interacted with the internet community. Besides, even this response rings hollow. The band only seemed concerned that the management team took down "mostly positive reviews," not the fact that it took down reviews.