Quoted: A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country's royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.
Brian Ross Investigates

Quoted: A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim's arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man's wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.

Awesome.

Quoted: The Monster List of Freelance Job Sites - 2009 Update

Or it could lead to people getting their ears cut off.

Quoted: YOU are the victim of identity theft and the fraudster calls your bank to transfer money into their own account. But instead of asking them for your personal details, the bank assistant simply presses a button that causes the phone to produce a brief series of clicks in the fraudster's ear. A message immediately alerts the bank that the person is not who they are claiming to be, and the call is ended.

Quoted: Such a safeguard could one day be commonplace, if a new biometric technique designed to identify the person on the other end of a phone line proves successful. The concept relies on the fact that the ear not only senses sound but also makes noises of its own, albeit at a level only detectable by supersensitive microphones.

Can you imagine being this captain? One moment you've got a gun pointed at you, then BAM BAM BAM and all of your captors are dead.

Quoted: Two of the captors had poked their heads out of a rear hatch of the lifeboat, exposing themselves to clear shots, and the third could be seen through a window in the bow, pointing an automatic rifle at the captain, who was tied up inside the 18-foot lifeboat, senior Navy officials said.

Quoted: It took only three remarkable shots — one each by snipers firing from a distance at dusk, using night-vision scopes, the officials said. Within minutes, rescuers slid down ropes from the Bainbridge, climbed aboard the lifeboat and found the three pirates dead. They then untied Captain Phillips, ending the contretemps at sea that had riveted much of the world’s attention. A fourth pirate had surrendered earlier.

Quoted: But what caused the fall and rise of inequality? A lot of very high incomes, both in the pre-1930 world and now, have been in the finance sector. A recent paper by Phillipon and Reshef (cited today by Gillian Tett in the FT) traces the path of relative compensation in finance, and ties it to regulation and deregulation.

Awesome.

Quoted: Google's ambitious plan to offer a 3-D street level view of communities across three continents hit a snag when angry residents of a UK village blocked the search engine's camera car from photographing their homes.

Quoted: Want to know how to write programs for the iPhone and iPod touch? Beginning this week, a Stanford computer science class on that buzzworthy topic will be available online to the general public for free.

Oops!

Quoted: Earlier this month, about 17,000 students were offered admission for the fall, leaving nearly 29,000 hopefuls out in the cold. But on Tuesday, the school's communications office said an e-mail was sent Monday afternoon to all 46,377 students who applied for admission -- including the 29,000 rejects -- welcoming them to the campus.