Hasta La Gadget!

PARIS — French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has been stripped of her European Parliament immunity and may now face charges of racism over comments she made comparing Muslim street prayers to an occupation of French territory.

The European Parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, voted by show of hands to withdraw Le Pen’s immunity at the request of a French prosecutor. The vote followed a recommendation last month by the parliament’s judicial affairs committee that Le Pen’s immunity be withdrawn so that she could defend herself against the charges, filed by an anti-racism association.

Read More…

Sony’s upcoming Honami Android smartphone, tipped to pack a 20-megapixel camera, has prematurely donated its camera app for other Sony Xperia devices, courtesy of a leaked app. The hack, handiwork of xda-developers‘ krabappel2548, works on Sony’s Xperia Z, ZL, or Tablet Z, and includes Timeshift burst photos, augmented reality effects, and more. Like Instagram, there

Read The Full Story

If Mayor Michael Bloomberg was trying to stem the criticism of his constitutionally suspect stop-and-frisk policy over the weekend, he took a rather strange approach with his loopy logic and discredited arguments. Speaking on his weekly radio program, Mr. Bloomberg dismissed the idea that the policy, under which hundreds of thousands of mainly minority citizens are stopped on the streets every year, is racially imbalanced because it singles out people based on race.

Read More…
More on Michael Bloomberg

An engineer has found references to 1080p Windows Phone support in Microsoft’s new Visual Studio 2013 preview—which suggests the next rash of Windows phone will offer up screens with 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Read more…

Excerpted from THE ART OF WAGING PEACE: A Strategic Approach to Improving Our Lives and the World by Paul K. Chappell ($21, Prospecta Press)

When I broke the window in my apartment with my fist, the pain gave me so much pleasure that it is difficult to describe. It reminded me of the times I used to cut my arms in high school. Imagine feeling suffocating agony and not being able to cry or even scream. As the misery gets bottled up inside you, like a clogged pipe ready to explode, cutting yourself temporarily releases the tension that is strangling you on the inside. As the blood flowed from my wounds, it felt like the pain was dripping out of my body.

I broke the window because I missed a small typo when proofreading. I had read the words numerous times without seeing the mistake, and when I finally noticed it my temper erupted. When we are lost in the mazelike tunnels of our psychological wounds, it is like seeing the world through the distorted reflection of a fun-house mirror. Just as a fun-house mirror can exaggerate the size of our heads in relation to the rest of our bodies, trauma can blow something small out of proportion, causing us to see something harmless as a lethal threat. As a child I was often beaten for making small mistakes. Enraged at myself for missing the typo, my self-loathing caused me to explode. When I punched the window I wanted to hurt myself as much as I wanted to damage the glass. After the effects of berserker rage wore off and I calmed down, I was brought back to reality. My hand started to hurt, and because injuring myself did not deal with the source of my suffering, I knew that self-destruction cannot lead to peace.

Read More…
More on ptsd