TIMMINS, Ont. - A 65-year-old woman in this northern Ontario city has been jailed for telling a 911 dispatcher she would kill any police officer who showed up to her house.
Lois Markovic, 65, was sentenced to 15 days in jail after pleading guilty in court Tuesday to uttering death threats and breach of probation. At the time of the offence, Markovich was on probation after being previously convicted of making harassing phone calls.
Markovich dialed 911 on Aug. 25 after experiencing chest pains during an evening of drinking, court heard. She told the dispatcher she only wanted an ambulance, she didn’t want the police. Wood said the dispatcher was told if the police came, Markovic would kill them.
The police did arrive to her home, however, Markovic was arrested.
SIMCOE, Ont. — A volunteer firefighter in this southern Ontario town did a double-take when he was called to a fire at his own home.
Trevor May listened to the call twice Wednesday morning around 6:30 a.m. before he realized the home he shared with his wife, three children and parents was ablaze. May, a firefighter in Simcoe for 12 years, was at the scene in under two minutes. He arrived ahead of his colleagues from the Simcoe firehall and took an active role in putting out the flames.
"It was contained to the basement in a backroom, a storage area," May said at the scene. "There was quite a bit of damage there."
Norfolk Fire & Rescue estimates the damage at $40,000. A cause of the fire has yet to be determined.
Is your child younger than two years old? Has your child ever caught a glimpse of your household television set in the "on" mode? Congratulations: you need to read this.
THAT is a highly sensationalized version of what the American Academy of Pediatrics now says, which is that kids under two should not be watching TV, period. What part of "period" do you not understand, Al Bundy? It's right here on the internet's leading parenting advice site, MSNBC: no TV for your babies.
However, the recommendations run counter to what most parents actually do. About 90 percent of parents say their kids younger than 2 watch some type of media, according to a 2007 study. By the age of 3, nearly one-third of kids have a TV in their bedrooms.
Let's see, all parents are awful failures wiling to sacrifice their children's well being at the altar of "shut up so I can relax for five damn minutes." Got it. Fortunately, you're all so ambitious for your children that you'll ruin them in a totally different way by the time they reach high school. Ah, well. They couldn't have afforded college anyhow.
It sounds like the Steve Jobs memorial event on the Apple Inc. campus today turned into something of a Stevestock: Randy Newman, Norah Jones, and Coldplay performed at the outdoor event.
All the singers have ties to the recently departed Apple co-founder. Jones has played at least one Apple press event; Newman voiced movie scores for Pixar; and Coldplay spent time with Jobs backstage at one of their concerts.
Coldplay performed "Fix You," "Yellow" and other songs in an outdoor amphitheater in an interior courtyard on Apple's campus. The singer Norah Jones covered the Bob Dylan song "Forever Young."
The show was webcast live to Apple Stores for employee-only screenings, while San Francisco TV station KPIX photographed the event from a helicopter for the benefit of the rest of us.
It's nice that Apple said goodbye to their former CEO with such a nice, mild Jobsapalooza. Even if Jobs himself would most definitely have preferred Bob Dylan to Randy Newman.
[Photo of Apple CEO Tim Cook at today's event via AP]
This is what it feels like to have your world completely engulfed in a hell of dust. Lubbock, Texas just got nailed by an 8,000-foot-high wall of red dirt. Dust storms make awesome video, but this is terrifying.
An ongoing drought in the Southwest combined with 75 mph wind kicked up this holy hot mess of disorienting darkness. According to commenters, the worst of the storm lasted 45 minutes. Think about that. Forty-five interminable minutes inside that cloud.
There's probably no way to adequately describe the feeling of an epic dust storm. The eeriest parts of this video come when the otherwise silent camera man interjects with terse play-by-play as the storm rolls in. "There goes the sun," he says. It could be mutterings of a jaded fatalist used to West Texas dust storms. Maybe it's just shock and horror—at least he's inside! The storm knocked out power and plowed over trees, but damage appears to be minimal. Residents of Lubbock are still digging themselves out.
First came Zucks joining his counter-enemy, Google+. Then Oprah and Saturday Night Live and an imitator. Now Mark Zuckerberg has moved up to the next celebrity accessory, his own security guard.
Last month Houston spent an evening with Mark Zuckerberg plotting ways to collaborate over generous portions of bison meat (the Facebook cofounder is eating only what he kills this year). As he walked out of Zuckerberg's relatively modest Palo Alto colonial, clearly en route to becoming [a] big company CEO... Houston noticed the security guard parked outside, presumably all day, every day and pondered the corollaries of the path: "I'm not sure I want to live that life, you know?"
Between the bodyguard, the weird diet, and the Oscar winning movie built on his good name, Zuckerberg might as well be a Hollywood celebrity. All the computer nerd needs to complete the transformation is, like, a boozy, tabloid-ready fight outside some exclusive LA nightclub.Oh, wait.
Celina Aarons knew something was off when she opened her 43-page monthly cell phone bill to find that she owed $201,000.
She called T-Mobile to confirm the total wasn’t a clerical error. When she found out it was, in fact, legit, she phoned a local TV station and asked for help. Aarons explained to 7 News’s Help Me Howard that she purchased a phone for her mute-deaf brother Shamir, and put him on her plan. He recently spent two weeks in Canada, where he used his cell to text and download movies — all under a plan that didn’t cover international roaming.
Shamir was charged $10 per megabyte, racking up charges of up to $2,500 per video. Channel 7 contacted T-Mobile and managed to get Aarons’ bill reduced to $2,500, which she has six months to pay.
Aarons was lucky, but don’t count on local TV stations to bail you out. If you plan on leaving the country and taking your cell phone with you, turn your data roaming off.
The Superconductivity Group at the University of Tel-Aviv’s School of Physics recently demonstrated “quantum locking,” whereby a magnet cooled in liquid nitrogen can actually levitate above (or below) a track, locked at a constant height in a magnetic field.
Scientists can tilt the magnet at an angle or push it around the track, and it stays locked. They can also pick it up and relock it at a different height.
So, does this mean we can finally have our (frozen, height-locked) hoverboards?
We’ve all been cautioned about putting too much of our private information online. Now, a new interactive website aims to drive home that point like nothing before it. The site, called Take this Lollipop, “dares” you to click on a blue lollipop. You’ll then be prompted to sign in with your Facebook account. The movie begins: a seemingly disturbed man at a computer signs into Facebook. Suddenly, he’s looking at your Facebook profile, going through your newsfeed and your photos.
As the video goes on, he becomes more and more agitated before finally getting a map (a Google Map, naturally) to see where you live. Cut to creepy man in his car, with a picture of you hanging on his dashboard as if to remind you of his target. The video ends as he arrives at his destination and gets out of his car. Then it randomly picks a friend of yours to be “next.”
Television and music director Jason Zada took credit for the site on Twitter.
The project even has a Canadian connection: Jason Nickel, the developer Zada worked with, is Canadian, Zada told the Star in an email. The whole process — from concept to filming to post-production — took about a month. Zada says the video is “less about statements and more about experience. I think a film like this works when you see yourself in a situation you don't want to see yourself in. For a brief moment, you panic. You think, ‘What have I done?’ ”
Zada said his love of Halloween and horror movies was part of the inspiration for the video, but he also wanted to delve into something we are all grappling with: online privacy.
“I wanted to create a filmed experience that was relevant to a common theme I feel we are all going through right now: how much information we share publicly and privately.
“The simple and easy answer is, I wanted to give people a good scare, with no real threat or harm at the end. Think of it as a roller coaster ride. It’s scary, but at the end, all is well.”
Parenting pop quiz! If your teenage stepdaughter goes to a party without your permission, what is the appropriate punishment? Hint: the answer is not "force her to fight a two-hour 'medieval-style duel' with you."
But trying telling that to Yelm, Wash. Renaissance Faire enthusiast Freamon Seay, who not only made his stepdaughter dress up in armour (and a helmet, and padding) and fight him with a wooden sword, but also "punched and beat [her] with a tree branch prior to the duel." Again, this was for going to a party without his permission. (He told police that "since she was 16, she was old enough to fight him.")
Seay's wife and fellow Ren-Faire fan Julie, a daycare worker, apparently watched the duel, and has been charged with abuse as well. The family's three kids have all been sent to stay with other family members.
Ali Reza Shahsavari, a 29-year-old man of Iranian descent, boarded a Southwest flight in L.A. headed to Kansas City on Tuesday. At some point after takeoff, according to the crew's account, he got into a fight with another passenger. They separated the two men. Shahsavari went into the bathroom and started to shout obscenities.
At some point, he made this threat:
"You're all going to die. You're all going to hell. Allahu Akbar!"
Soon after that discouraging announcement, a flight attendant succeeded in calming him down. The flight rerouted to Amarillo, where Shahsavari was taken into police custody, without resistance, while a dozen officers took affidavits from other passengers.
The initial emergency call claimed a passenger "was attempting to break into the cockpit," but Amarillo police think now that that never happened.
"He was being disruptive and unruly on the flight, but he was not specifically trying to break into the cockpit," [Amarillo Aviation Director Patrick] Rhodes said. [...]
FBI Special Agent Mark White, based in Dallas, said the event did not appear to be an act of terrorism. He described Shahsavari as a U.S. citizen who might have experienced an episode of mental illness.
"It sounded like he sort of lost control of himself," White said.
Even so, if you're name is Ali Shahsavari, don't be surprised if you now find yourself on the No Fly List. You know what they say — one Allah-praising, mass-murder-pledging apple ruins the bunch.
A special message for all you Teresas out there: stay the hell out of Atlanta for a while. If you already live there, flee at once! Otherwise you could be arrested and jailed for almost two months because of your first name, like Teresa Culpepper was.
Back in August, Culpepper called the police to report that her truck had been stolen. Instead of assisting her, police handcuffed her and hauled her off to the Fulton County Jail, where she spent 53 days for an aggravated assault allegedly committed by a different Teresa. "Her birth date didn't match. Her address didn't match. Her description didn't match. Other than the name Teresa, nothing matched" the actual suspect's information, Culpepper's attorney told the news. Culpepper regained her freedom after receiving help from a public defender.
Seems like Culpepper could have been spared all that jail time had the cops done, like, any background checking at all. Then again, maybe it was a hot day and they didn't feel like doing any work. We've all been there. At any rate, the real Teresa still hasn't been apprehended, so all Teresas in Atlanta remain at risk of arrest. Maybe you Teresas can pool together your resources and rent a plane or a fleet of buses to take you someplace safer, like Macon.
The musical Zanna, Don't! is about a high school where all the smart kids are more popular than the dumb kids, being gay is the norm, and being straight is abnormal. In one scene, two guys briefly smooch. Big deal, right?
Apparently it was for some of the kids who caught a recent performance of the musical at Hartford Public High School in Hartford, Connecticut, because they walked right out of the theater. As one of the school's principals told CBS Connecticut:
There was a public walkout by a bunch of students (when the kiss happened) … mostly male ...It was visually evident (due to the jerseys the team was wearing) that a lot of football players got up and walked out. It was almost a symbolic kind of thing."
The school has resisted calls by parents to remove the kiss scene from performances of the musical, which is being presented as part of an anti-bullying initiative at the school. If the football players at Hartford PHS are anything like the ones we went to school with, then they're the audience members who had the most to learn from such a program.
The judge handling the Lindsay Lohan case forces her to clean up after dead bodies. Rihanna settles a lawsuit with the photographer she ripped off. Demi Moore is too damn skinny and Kellan Lutz comes out (as straight). Wednesday's gossip is calling in sick.
Lindsay Lohan is going to be in court for the millionth time today to talk about whether or not she violated her probation. (Do you even remember what the probation is for at this point? Me neither. She's guilty of everything.) But the judge in her case, Stephanie Sautner, is pissed at Lindsay and has apparently ordered that she work in the L.A. County Morgue to fulfill the rest of her community service hours. Yes, the last person to touch your grandma before she goes in the ground could be Lindsay. What an honor! Apparently the judge ordered that Lindsay work at a L.A. women's center, but she found the work "unfulfilling," so her probation officer to the stars let her work at the Red Cross instead. Lindsay is trying to find something that's "fulfilling?" That's rich. We can't wait to see what happens in court, but we hope there's lots of talk of blood mopping. [TMZ]
According to Dr. Pankaj Singh, the world's leading expert on Lindsay Lohan's teeth, even though he has never seen them in real life, the starlet fixed her oral issues with an emergency dental intervention. We're sure that's not the first time she's had an intervention! He claims she's now hiding her brown chompers with bonding or veneers, which he will perform on you, yes you for the low cost of $99.99 a month for three months, no money down, and 0% interest! [Radar Online]
Rihanna has settled the $1 million suit photographer David LaChapelle brought against her for ripping off his photographs to make her "S&M" video. A judge ruled that the scenarios in the video for the song (which I heard an estimated 7,430,204 times on Fire Island this summer) were indeed more than just an inspiration. Rihanna cut a check for an undisclosed amount, but LaChapelle's rep said he's "happy" with the settlement. According to my scientific calculations, happiness is somewhere in the six figures. [Page Six]
Demi Moore looked "gaunt" at a movie premiere she attended on Monday in New York. Some conjecture she's so upset about her @APlusK drama that she's losing weight. Please, people, she's just getting ready to get back onto the dating market! [Page Six]
Sorry all you male homosexuals out there, Kellan Lutz has official come out as straight. Yes, this is now a thing to do. Yay, equality! But, and that is one very nice but, he says that he prefers to have gay roommates because they're so nice and clean. Well, Kellan, if you need a place to stay next time you're in New York, I'm sure I can lend you a room at my place. [Advocate]
Kenyan President Barack Who's Sayin' Obama visited a high school in Virginia and all the kids wanted to ask about is if he knew Justin Bieber. He said he did and then added, unsolicited, "I think he has a girlfriend," which made every girl there fly into a screaming rage. They have now all been shipped off to Guantanamo Bay for further questioning about the acts of terrorism they committed against the president. [Gatecrasher]
Law & Order: Endless Residuals Unit star Mariska Hargitay has apparently left the show to start an orphanage. Well, not really, but she has adopted her second child in six months. It's like a baby shopping spree! She sealed the deal six months ago on daughter Amaya Josephine and she and her husband just signed the paperwork for a son that she named Stabler. Ha, just kidding. It's Andrew Nicolas Hargitay Hermann. She only needs to get three babies more to go full Jolie, which is the new EGOT. [People]
Apparently Renee Zellweger paid for a ticket to go see her old friend George Clooney's new move The Descendants at the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend. Yes, it's gotten so bad for poor Renee that she is now paying real money she earned for Case 39 to go to the movies instead of getting tickets for free. The horror! [Page Six]
Apparently Blake Lively's former purse holder Penn Badgley is now dating Lenny Kravitz' actress daughter, Zoe Kravitz. They had their first display of PDA at a movie premiere on Monday (the same one where Demi was all skeletony). After hanging out at the premiere and the after party they left with someone else around 12:30. Wait, they had a threeway? Oh, they totally had a threeway. Talk about burying the lede! [Gatecrasher]
Here are photos of True Blood stud Joe Manganiello shirtless on the beach, just cause it's a rainy Wednesday here in New York, and you really need this. Trust me. [Too Fab]
Danny Masterson and Bijou Phillips got married, because this is 2003. [People]
Why would you need an ambulance to take you to the hospital, if you're already at the hospital? This is the question recently posed by Doreen Wallace, who injured herself during a visit to a hospital in Niagara Falls, Canada and was denied treatment until an ambulance was called. To the hospital. Where she already was, if that wasn't clear enough. Egads.
Wallace, 82, was at Greater Niagara General Hospital to visit her dying husband when she fell in the lobby and broke her hip. She also suffered at least one nasty cut. Instead of grabbing one of those wheeled beds or a wheelchair and taking her straight to the emergency room, hospital staff refused to help her. [They did bring her a "dirty" blanket to wrap her head in and some paper towels to staunch her bleeding. — Ed.] Wallace reportedly spent about a half-hour lying on the floor before paramedics showed up. "It was horrible. It really was. Everybody who walked through the door stopped and stared at me," she told the Toronto Star.
This isn't the first time the hospital has turned away a patient already at the hospital, the Star reports:
Last April, 39-year-old Jennifer James died from a "catastrophic heart event" a few days after emergency department staff refused to help her in the parking lot after her boyfriend drove her there when she lost consciousness and stopped breathing. He was told to call 911 instead.
And in July, local Councillor Joyce Morocco, who has a history of heart problems and asthma, was semi-consciousness when taken to the same hospital by her husband. He was also told to call an ambulance.
FWIW, the Ontario health minister is none too pleased by the hospital's customer service, and the hospital itself has apologized to Wallace. Supposedly some policy reviews are underway. Shouldn't they have reviewed the policies after the "catastrophic heart event" incident? Not pointing fingers here, just trying to apply reasoning skills.
Good to be reminded that the rest of Canada hasn't completely cornered the market on healthcare-related dysfunction. Unless you're injured or dying Greater Niagara General Hospital, then it's not.
Scientists are obsessed with studying the impact of Facebook on our brains. Usually the news is bad. But a new study says having more Facebook friends might be make your brain bigger.
Studying 125 undergraduates, scientists at University College London found a "direct link between number of friends on Facebook and size of certain brain regions," according to Reuters. People with more friends on Facebook had more grey matter in four areas associated with memory, emotional response and social interaction.
Obviously, correlation does not equal causation, so it could be that people with a lot of Facebook friends are inborn with some awful brain mutuation that drives them to friend hundreds of people they barely know. Or, there could be an unknown third factor that is influencing both brain size and the number of Facebook friends people have. Please let it be this.
Could you imagine the future we're headed to, if Facebook physically shapes our brain? 2042: Everyone's walking around with special blue-and-white Facebook-branded helmets to keep their swollen, quivering amygdala's from jumping out of their skull and literally connecting with other peoples'; the handshake has been replaced by a mutual-poke; parenting consists of pressing a "Like" button on your kid's forehead when they do something good.
As you read this, Apple is closing its stores for a 90-minute tribute to Steve Jobs. The event is being held at Apple's Cupertino, California headquarters and webcast to the live to the stores, for employees only. This is shaping up as Apple's day of mourning.
In addition to the closure and memorial, the company today also launched a "Remembering Steve" page, excerpting some of the more than 1 million email tributes it has received since its co-founder and former CEO passed away. Anyway, if you see closed Apple Store doors and are unable to pick up your new iPhone, buy an iPad, get your MacBook serviced or whatever, try not to flip out.
As many as 48 "mature, very big, aggressive" exotic animals—including lions, cheetahs, tigers, apes, wolves and bears—have escaped from a Ohio farm whose owner was found dead earlier today. On the bright side, school's been cancelled tomorrow!
So, no one seems to know what happened to Terry Thompson, who owned an enormous animal farm in Muskingum County, Ohio, and was found dead outside earlier today by authorities investigating reports of exotic animal sightings along nearby I-70. But! Whatever about Thompson, for now, because there are lions running loose in Ohio:
In a press conference tonight, the sheriff [Matt Lutz] said his office was urging people in Muskingum County to take caution if they go outside, and Lutz said they were recommending that some local school districts close Wednesday morning. He said authorities were mainly concerned with lions, bears and cheetahs that were reported to be at the animal farm. There were reportedly 48 animals at the farm.
Lutz described the animals as "mature, very big, aggressive."
[...]
The animals' caretaker has been talking to authorities. Lutz said Thompson had some animals in the house— mainly monkeys, baboons and apes — that were still there when authorities arrived. Authorities believe they have shot 25 animals tonight, including bears and wolves.
As we noted several schools have cancelled classes tomorrow, and apparently a SWAT team has been called in to help deal with the situation alongside local zoo workers. "These are wild animals, wild animals that you would see on TV in Africa," Lutz noted.
Thompson, whom a local tipster describes as a "crazy old man," was well-known in the area not only for his animal collection but also his enormous assault weapon collection, which earned him a year-long sentence in jail in 2008. "The gossip," we're told, "is that his wife had left him (as she should have done decades ago) while he was away."
TIMMINS, Ont. - A 65-year-old woman in this northern Ontario city has been jailed for telling a 911 dispatcher she would kill any police officer who showed up to her house. 
