• NYT:

    The men belong to a new militant Islamic organization called Fatah al Islam, whose leader, a fugitive Palestinian named Shakir al-Abssi, has set up operations in a refugee camp here where he trains fighters and spreads the ideology of Al Qaeda.

    He has solid terrorist credentials. A former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia who was killed last summer, Mr. Abssi was sentenced to death in absentia along with Mr. Zarqawi in the 2002 assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan, Laurence Foley. Just four months after arriving here from Syria, Mr. Abssi has a militia that intelligence officials estimate at 150 men and an arsenal of explosives, rockets and even an antiaircraft gun.

    During a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Abssi displayed his makeshift training facility and his strident message that America needed to be punished for its presence in the Islamic world. “The only way to achieve our rights is by force,” he said. “This is the way America deals with us. So when the Americans feel that their lives and their economy are threatened, they will know that they should leave.”

    Here.

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  • Radar:

    While the genial, hardworking Leary is generally liked and admired by most of his peers, Comedy Central star Carlos Mencia is almost universally reviled. According to Rogan, the famed Comedy Store in Los Angeles has even instituted a Mencia early-detection signal similar to the Improv’s for Williams, though considerably less high-tech. “Every time he walks in, the guys in the cover booth just start yelling ‘Mencia’s here!’” he says with a laugh. (Both Mencia and Leary declined repeated requests for comment.)

    Nick Di Paolo claims the Comedy Central star also swiped material from him, and notes that “every Latino comic wants to kill him.”

    One in particular is sitcom star George Lopez, who told Howard Stern last year that Mencia stole 13 minutes of his act for an HBO special, inspiring him to pay Mencia a personal visit. “I just had enough,” Lopez recalled. “So one night at the Laugh Factory, I just picked him up and slammed him against the wall.”

    Here.

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  • Radar:

    Is Time hoping a little controversy will draw attention to its redesign? The first new-look issue, on newsstands tomorrow, features what appears to be a photo of Ronald Reagan with a fat tear sliding down his cheek, illustrating the cover story, “How the Right Went Wrong.” A somewhat cryptic credit in small type on the (revamped!) table of contents describes the image this way: “Photograph by David Hume Kennerly. Tear by Tim O’Brien.” Nowhere does it specifically state that the cover is a photo illustration—in other words, that it’s Photoshopped.

    Here.

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  • PhotoEye:

    So, there sat King Vitamin next to a new version of Cap’n Crunch, Choco Donuts, on a recent trip to the grocery store. Looking at the rest of the cereal aisle, it is clear that breakfast cereal has changed. The cereal aisle has become a cornucopia of colors with marshmallows that resemble people and objects and characters from movies. It’s apparent that cereal is not just for breakfast anymore; it’s playtime. In keeping with the playtime theme, I began to construct landscapes that would utilize the natural earth tones of certain cereals. I placed enlarged photographs of actual Arizona skies (e.g. sunsets or monsoon clouds) in the background of the cereal landscapes giving the final image an odd sense of ‘reality’. Other cereals that were more vibrantly colored or made to resemble people and objects were calling out to have their portraits taken, to be the center of attention. Cereal has transformed into cultural pop objects instead of just corn pops.

    Here.

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  • SF Gate’s Daily Dish:

    Canadian singer Avril Lavigne defends spitting on photographers outside a Hollywood nightclub because they are “scum.”

    The 22-year-old was leaving Hollywood hotspot Hyde when she was bombarded by a pack of paparazzi and she lashed out.

    She tells Seventeen magazine, “I was at Hyde and there were a million paparazzi guys. They’re all these gross older men, like disgusting, scum of the earth.

    Here.

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  • Wooster Collective:

    Dan Witz has been working on a new series of figurative paintings for two upcoming shows in Europe; one in London at the Stolenspace, and the second in Paris at Addict Galerie.

    If you check out Dan’s website, you’ll notice that he’s quietly previewing a few of the pieces.

    Here.

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  • PDN:

    Our choice of new and emerging photographers to watch.

    Gmb Akash, Aneta Bartos, Maxine Beuret, Julie Blackmon, Marco Bohr, Lane Coder, Kathryn Cook, Pierre Crocquet, Victoria J. Dean, Brad Dececco, Autumn De Wilde, Rena Effendi, Serkan Emiroglu, Ditte Isager, Jamie Isaia, Shuli Hallak, Kathryn Hillier, Dorothy Hong, Aaron Huey, Brian Lesteberg, David Leventi, Debora Mittelstaedt, Marcus Nilsson, Brigitte Sire, Alys Tomlinson, Brian Ulrich, Anna Wolf, Sarah Wilmer, Andrea Wyner, Alvaro Ybarra Zavala.

    Here.

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  • Dethroner:

    Hold the comically oversized mobile phone: this video of men recording their profiles for a video dating service in what appears to be the early ’80s is too good to be true. I know I haven’t gotten into fashion much yet this week, but consider this a primer on what taking a risk will net you in two decades: lots of young jerks laughing at your mistakes.

    Here.

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  • J. Garner Photography:

    GUYS, THIS IS A JOKE! Please don’t take these episodes literally. “Image” is NOT everything. For JGP, humility, character & professionalism are the real virtues. We’re just simple wedding photographers, having a GREAT time!

    Here.

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  • LA Weekly:

    The lead homicide detective of LAPD’s deadly Southeast Division found the list odd. “I can’t imagine that those are the worst gangs in the city,” said Detective Sal LaBarbera. “I think they were trying to spread it out over the whole city, because we’ve got five gangs alone in Southeast — the PJs, Grape Street, the Bounty Hunters, Hoover and Main Street — that could be on that list.”

    Southeast Division and neighboring 77th Street Division suffered 136 homicides in 2006, representing more than 28 percent of all killings in Los Angeles. Yet only two gangs from Southeast and 77th got onto the apparently geographically and politically correct list — Grape Street Crips and Rollin’ 60s Crips.

    The list does contain some truly dangerous gangs. But it also leaves out very powerful gangs: the Hoover Street Criminals, East Coast Crips, Bounty Hunters, Florencia 13 and Quarto Flats — the old-time Boyle Heights gang with close ties to Mexican cartels.

    “It’s a bunch of bullshit,” said Antony “Set Trip” Johnson, 17, a gang member with the Five Deuce Hoover, a subset of the notorious Hoover Criminals. “We should be on that list. Fuck it. We the most hated gang in Los Angeles.”

    Johnson, who was very familiar with the list, scoffed at some of the gangs on it. “204th Street? That’s bullshit. That ain’t a rough neighborhood. What they got, 10, 20 members? And Canoga Park Alabama? You gotta be kidding me. That ain’t a gang hood. La Mirada Locos? Never in my life have I heard of them.”

    Here.

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  • SF Gate:

    Fritz the Cat will be there. Mr. Natural will be there. The Snoid will be there.
    But R. Crumb will not.
    “Robert wears his nerves on the outside of his body,” explains Crumb’s wife, Aline, as they swap the Sheraton room telephone back and forth. “He appreciates the fact that all these people love him. He wants that love. But he doesn’t know what to do with it. And when he shows up to these things, it takes him a while to recover and get back to work. The only reason he’s in New York City now is because it’s a Valentine’s Day present for me. I eat it up. That’s why I can’t wait to get to San Francisco.”
    To call Robert and Aline Kominsky Crumb eccentrics would be too simple a way to describe a very complicated but content couple, who met and started drawing comics together in the 1970s in San Francisco.

    Here.

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  • SF Gate Daily Dish:

    Rocker Eddie Van Halen has revealed his supergroup’s reunion plans have stalled because he needs to check into rehab.

    In a message to fans, the rocker admits he put a planned reunion tour on hold because he felt he wouldn’t be able to perform at his best until he sorted out a few personal demons.

    Here.

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  • Boing Boing:

    Three people were awarded TED prizes today: Bill Clinton, sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, and photographer James Nachtwey, who specializes in capturing startling and disturbing, yet moving and beautiful images of people whose lives have been destroyed by the hatred and greed of other people. As Nachtwey spoke, his photographs were displayed on a large screen behind him. No one made a sound as the images of maimed, starved, tortured, and slaughtered people were put on display. The final photo he showed stunned everyone — a skeletal man, crawling past a dilapidated hut. (Here’s the image, be warned that it’s very powerful.)

    Here.

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  • Westword, via DIGG:

    “A Rough Go” opens with a band of characters milling around inside an ominous dungeon. Over the computer voice-chat system, the players plan in nasally über-geek detail how to tackle the baby dragons nearby: “Um, I will use Intimidating Shout to kinda scatter them,” “We’re gonna need Divine Intervention on our mages,” “I’m coming up with 32.33, repeating of course, percentage of survival.” Just when it seems they will be forever mired in painful, Kafkaesque planning, a character sitting silently off to the side leaps to his feet. “All right chums, let’s do this!” he declares in a deep, slightly insane voice. He charges headfirst and alone into the fray, hollering his name as a battle cry: “LEEROOOOOY JEEEEENKINS!” The others are stunned. “Oh, my God, he just ran in!” one gasps. “Save him! Oh, jeez, stick to the plan! Oh, jeez, let’s go, let’s go!” Cursing and confused, they dash after Leeroy — and the dragons start ripping them to shreds. Soon bodies litter the floor; all the characters are dead. “Great job! For Christ’s sake!” the players whine. “Leeroy, you are just stupid as hell!” To which Leeroy responds, “At least I have chicken.” End scene.

    Here.

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  • Little People:

    ps. Got a couple of exhibitions coming up this month. The first is in a completely unofficial capacity… I will be placing some little people around The Leonard Street Gallery for the opening night of their new show Eleven on Thursday 8th March. Eleven features, unsurprisingly, eleven artists who “…question the nature of the street art/fine art divide” (or make pretty pictures anyway) and includes Blek Le Rat, SWOON, D*Face, EINE and Elbow Toe amongst others. I am not sure if my little people will survive the opening night, but if they do you might be able to find them if you go and see the exhibition (which you should because it will be cool and you will be the coolest in the class for going). It runs from 9th March to 18th April at The Leonard Street Gallery, 73a Leonard Street, London.
    More news about the second exhibition in a week or so!

    Here.

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  • Wired:

    A suite of photo-authentication tools under development by Adobe Systems could make it possible to match a digital photo to the camera that shot it, and to detect some improper manipulation of images, Wired News has learned.

    Adobe plans to start rolling out the technology in a number of photo-authentication plug-ins for its Photoshop product beginning as early as 2008. The company is working with a leading digital forgery specialist at Dartmouth College, who met with the Associated Press last month.

    The push follows a media scandal over a doctored war photograph published by Reuters last year. The news agency has since announced that it’s working with both Adobe and Canon to come up with ways to prevent a recurrence of the incident.

    “Fundamentally, our values as a company requires us to build tools to detect tampering, not just create tampering,” said Dave Story, vice president of product engineering at Adobe.

    Here.

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  • NYT:

    In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”

    The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.

    Now lawmakers and scholars are hoping to pry open the gateway to such archival documents by lifting what they say has been a major obstacle to historical research: a directive issued by the current Bush White House in 2001 that has severely slowed or prevented the release of important presidential papers.

    Here.

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  • Washington Post:

    Shortly before he was inaugurated for his second term, President Bush was asked why no one was held responsible for the mistakes of the first. “We had an accountability moment,” he replied, “and that’s called the 2004 elections.”

    Two years and a stinging midterm election later, Bush is having another accountability moment, but this one isn’t working out as well. The conviction of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has coincided with a string of investigations into the mistreatment of injured soldiers and the purge of federal prosecutors, putting the operations of his administration into harsh relief.The timing may be coincidental, but the confluence of events has revived a pattern largely missing through the six years of Bush’s presidency, in which high-level officials accused of wrongdoing are grilled, fired and sometimes even jailed. For an administration that has been unusually opaque and mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation, it may seem like a gut-churning harbinger.

    Here.

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  • Wired:

    Like everyone else, compulsive hoarders have gone digital. Infohoarding may be the first psychiatric dysfunction born of digital age.

    “Jim” is an infohoarder like few others. In the last four years, this 37-year-old Brooklyn native has downloaded and burned every piece of broadcast and print media that’s been digitized. Or so it seems. His apartment is filled with DVDs and CDs packed with bootleg anime, comic books, books, e-books, television programs, movies and, of course, music. He’s a completionist who must have every episode, every issue, every track.

    Using Jim’s stacks and drives — which contain 2,500 GB of data — aliens could recreate a low-res version of human civilization from 1990 to the present day.

    Here.

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  • Wooster Collective:

    Here.

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