Bus Stops - October 20

At Front of Brooklyn Bus, a Clash of Religious and Women’s Rights (NY Times) 

(It does not take long to recognize that the B110 bus in Brooklyn is not like others in the city. The exterior colors are different: red, white and blue. The price for a single ride is the same, $2.50, but MetroCards are not accepted. The bus does not run Friday night or most of Saturday.)

8 Injured in Crash Involving Bus, Truck (Wall Street Journal) 

(A Trailways bus rear-ended a tractor-trailer Tuesday on the state Thruway in the New York City suburbs, crumpling the bus driver's compartment, police said. Eight people were hurt but only the driver was hospitalized. He was listed in stable condition. State police said the 5:35 a.m. accident on the state Thruway near Sloatsburg, about 35 miles north of New York, may have been triggered when the tractor-trailer slowed to accommodate a car that was entering the southbound lanes highway from a service plaza.)

Driver charged after bus kills pedestrian (Edmonton Journal) 

(A 51-year-old bus driver has been charged with two Traffic Safety Act offences after a 28-year-old woman was killed by an Edmonton Transit bus in April. The man was charged with failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk and driving without due care.)

Police nab drinking minors aboard party bus (Montreal Gazette) 

(After being tipped off by parents, police pulled over a "party bus" Friday night that was transporting minors from across the West Island downtown for a night of drinking. The bus was intercepted by police, and the SAAQ's highway pa-trol at about 10 p.m., on the TransCanada Highway, said Montreal police community relations officer Liliana Bellucci in Pointe Claire.)

Electric Version Of 'Back To The Future' Car Set For 2013 (Huffington Post) 

(Need to readjust a moment in time that would change the entire trajectory of generations of your family's lives? Now you can do so -- in an environmentally friendly way. Having long been in the business of revamping the old, out of production models, The DeLorean Motor Company of Texas has announced that they'll be building brand new, electric versions of the DMC-12, the car made famous in "Back To The Future." Initially a business disaster, the gull-wing vehicle became iconic when it was used as Doc Brown's time machine in the three Robert Zemeckis-directed films.)

(SUBMITTED BY: @travisteaspoon)

Zachary Quinto: I'm a Gay Man (People) 

(Zachary Quinto's eight-month run in the recent New York stage revival of Angels in America was an eye-opening experience for him. Since the project, the actor, 34 – who had an acclaimed role as Louis Ironson, a man who abandons his AIDS-stricken boyfriend – publicly discusses his much-questioned sexual orientation for the first time.)

Parents 'force daughter to have medieval duel' as punishment (Metro) 

(The parents of a 16-year-old girl in the US forced their daughter to have medieval-style duels - beating her with a tree branch and making her wear Renaissance-style body armour, a shield and sword, according to police.)

Hunt on for escaped lions, tigers in Ohio (Toronto Sun) 

(Authorities closed schools and urged residents to stay in their homes Wednesday as they tried to round up dangerous animals that escaped an Ohio farm after their owner opened their cages and then committed suicide, officials said. Lions, tigers, cheetahs and grizzly bears were among the 48 animals that ran loose on Tuesday near Zanesville in eastern Ohio.)

Ice cream vendor gets prison for selling drugs with treats (Reuters) 

(An ice cream vendor who peddled prescription painkillers from the same truck he sold frozen treats to kids, was sentenced on Tuesday to three and a half years in prison. The sentence was part of a plea deal struck by Louis Scala, 30, the head of a $1 million drug-trafficking ring run out of his Lickety Split truck, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in August to one count of conspiracy and one count of criminal possession of a controlled substance.)

Gay ABC News anchor comes out while talking about ‘Star Trek’ actor Zach Quinto on the air (Yahoo) 

(Dan Kloeffler, a co-anchor for ABC News' very, very early "World News Now" show, revealed on the air that he is gay. While delivering a report on Zach Quinto, the "Star Trek" actor who recently came out in an interview with New York magazine, Kloeffler said he would consider dropping his rule against dating actors for Quinto.)

Actress sues Amazon over her age on its IMDb site (BBC) 

(An actress has sued Amazon.com for more than $1m (£639,000) after her age was posted on its Internet Movie Database. The unnamed actress says the website misused her legal date of birth after she signed up to the IMDbPro service in 2008.)

Fraud claim thrown out in 'Happy Days' lawsuit (CNN) 

( A California judge Wednesday threw out a claim by cast members of the hit television show "Happy Days" that CBS committed fraud by not paying them for merchandising sales. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Allen White ruled in favor of CBS on the fraud claim, meaning the case will proceed only with a breach of contract suit. The cast had sued CBS for $10 million, alleging fraud.)

Viking chieftain's burial ship excavated in Scotland after 1,000 years (The Guardian) 

(A Viking ship, which for 1,000 years has held the body of a chieftain, with his shield on his chest and his sword and spear by his side, has been excavated on a remote Scottish peninsula – the first undisturbed Viking ship burial found on the British mainland. The timbers of the ship found on the Ardnamurchan peninsula – the mainland's most westerly point – rotted into the soil centuries ago, like most of the bones of the man whose coffin it became.)

Disabled Woman's Dog Held For Ransom; Kidnappers Demand Cash, Painkillers (Huffington Post) 

(Jennifer Thomas just wants her dog back. The Woodland, Wash., woman says she is currently feeling pressure from kidnappers who are holding her dog, Jaggar, for ransom, demanding not only $1,000 for his return, but her prescription drugs as well. Thomas says she saw a man and a woman drive off with the dog more than a week ago.)

Kevin Smith’s “Red State” makeover (Salon) 

(Never has the director of an 80-minute, straight-to-video B-grade action flick gotten quite the level of publicity that Kevin Smith has gotten for “Red State.” This has very little to do with the movie, which reaches DVD and Blu-ray this week at the end of Smith’s extensive self-distribution tour, and just isn’t all that memorable. I finally caught up with “Red State” from the comfort of my living-room sofa and liked it better than I expected to. I suppose it must have once been intended to read as an allegory about American life, but instead it feels like a late-night oddity along the lines of Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” a basic-cable throwback that’s simultaneously good and bad. It’s a charming if conspicuously unfinished film, a half-riotous, half-idiotic send-up of the teen horror genre with a vaguely hip political twist.)

New Jersey Filmmaker Offers "Red State" Director Kevin Smith $10,000 to Review Film (SF Gate) 

(Jim Riffel, whose feature film "Black-Eyed Susan" won the Grand Prize at New Jersey's "Garden State Film Festival," is making a unique offer to New Jersey native and Hollywood filmmaker Kevin Smith: "If you review my feature film I'll give you $10,000 to donate to the charity of your choice and I'll also give you the worldwide rights to the film to sell to any company you want as long as you take the money from that sale and also donate that to the charity of your choice.")

You, Batman, Keep Arkham City in Line (NY Times) 

(I’ve never been a comic book guy. As I kept telling people last week while New York Comic Con was in town: I’m not anti-comics; I just never got into them. But I do know a stupendous game when I play one, and that is Batman: Arkham City, released this week by Warner Brothers for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. In its ambition, scope and sheer love for its decades of lore, Arkham City is the finest comic book video game ever to slip into spandex.)

Batman's Butler Takes Time Off to Be Your Search Engine (Game Pro) 

(Look out, Jeeves, you've got competition: Alfred Pennyworth's on the case. As part of the Arkham City marketing campaign, Alfred will be offering his services to web browsers everywhere via his very own search engine. The fully-functional search engine also hides a selection of content behind specific search terms, offering new screenshots, audio files and even the chance to win a special edition 360 console to those who uncover Alfred's secrets.)

Bryan Cranston goes from 'Breaking Bad' to Batman (USA Today) 

(Bryan Cranston knows a thing or two about playing a man who fights to find his identity and, although he means well, sometimes heads down a not-so-great path. Sounds a lot like his character Walter White, a teacher with cancer who becomes the Southwest's No. 1 meth cook, in the AMC drama Breaking Bad, doesn't it? It also describes his newest role, that of Gotham City cop Jim Gordon in the animated movie Batman: Year One.)

Study Says Most Women Are Bisexual (The Sun) 

(Like most women, I have no shame in admitting that I find other females attractive. I have even admitted to being open to experimentation ("Of course I would sleep with Halle Berry! It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity"). For women, it's perfectly acceptable to be a little bi-curious (cue every male fantasy), and according to the latest research, it's the norm.)

Dee has baby after sex while hubby is asleep (The Sun) 

(Ryan has the rare medical condition sexsomnia, which makes people perform sexual acts they later cannot remember. He regularly wakes Dee, 25, for sex without regaining consciousness himself. She said they were about to start fertility treatment when she discovered she was pregnant.)

Junk food can make young men infertile (News AU) 

(JUNK food, particularly products containing trans fats, can make healthy young men infertile by damaging their sperm, a joint American and Spanish study out today showed. Fertility doctors from Harvard University and the University of Murcia, southeastern Spain, analysed sperm from hundreds of men aged between 18 and 22 and found those who ate a high proportion of junk food had poorer quality sperm than those with a nutritious diet.)

Christopher Columbus Caused a Mini Ice Age? (Xenophilius) 

(By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported.)

Facebook friend tally is associated with differences in brain structure (The Guardian) 

(The brains of people with large numbers of Facebook friends are different from those of people with fewer online connections, say neuroscientists. The researchers at University College London found that users with the greatest number of friends on the social networking site had more grey matter in brain regions linked to social skills. The finding suggests that either social networking changes these brain regions, or that people born with these kinds of brains behave differently on websites like Facebook.)

Google Unwraps Ice Cream Sandwich, the Next-Generation Android OS (Wired) 

(After months of anticipation and leaked software screen shots, Google finally unveiled Android 4.0, also known as “Ice Cream Sandwich,” the latest update to the search giant’s Android mobile platform. The new operating system should eventually merge Android’s tablet OS (version 3.0, aka Honeycomb) with the platform’s smartphone OS (version 2.3, aka Gingerbread). Dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, the unified OS isn’t an incremental update, but rather a complete OS makeover with changes that range from the elimination of physical navigation buttons to the creation of an entirely new font, “Roboto,” for user interface menus.)

Criminals Borrow Heist Scheme From 'The Town,' and It Almost Pays Off (Time) 

(NewsFeed isn't saying that The Town was a bad movie, but it seems as if it might have been a bad influence. The Associated Press reports that a group of men in New York allegedly went on a crime spree using big-screen-inspired methods. Robbing dozens of corner stores, discount stores and pizzerias, the suspected thieves would throw bleach all over the crime scene on their way out to scrub the place of their DNA; the move was lifted straight from the 2010 heist film.)

California's Coming Crackdown on Pot: What Do You Do if You Need It? (Time) 

(When Richard Kearns wakes up each morning, he vomits. A former university professor who was diagnosed with AIDS 30 years ago, Kearns, 60, resides in a Los Angeles assisted-living facility and relies on marijuana, which he gets from local dispensaries, to manage the pain, anxiety and intense nausea that would otherwise prevent him from being able to keep down the pills he also takes daily. Now those dispensaries are in danger of being shut down.)

Biggest Strike Yet Brings Greece to Halt (Time) 

(The 48-hour walkout by Greek workers on Wednesday and Thursday has been dubbed "the mother of all strikes" by leading Greek daily Ta Nea. These are the biggest strikes since the debt crisis began in the country almost two years ago. By noon on Wednesday, thousands of protesters were ringing parliament as part of massive demonstrations against the latest raft of austerity measures — measures that parliament is expected to pass this week.)

Truck Containing Obama's Teleprompter, Audio Equipment Stolen in Virginia (Time) 

(We just don't know what to say. Neither would President Obama without his teleprompter, which went missing from a parking lot Monday. It was quickly recovered, but not before giving government officials pause. The stolen prompter and other audio equipment that went missing was worth more than $200,000.)

Woman Compensated $4 for Death of Brother During Korean War (Time) 

(Sometimes old laws cause laughter, but in other instances? Expect tears. In South Korea, a woman was awarded $4.33 under an old government rule as compensation for the death of her brother during the Korean War. A law took effect during the war, which ran from 1950 to 1953, that allowed the government to compensate family members for deaths. The woman, now 63, was just 2 years old in 1950 when her brother died while fighting. Local media say the woman's mother suffered from dementia and the sister never even knew of her brother—or his death—until April, when she was granted 5,000 won, a little more than $4.)

Environmental Group to Rate the Safety of 10,000 Foods (Time) 

(Choosing the most healthful foods for your family is no easy task. You can try looking at products' ingredients lists, but who can tell whether things like xanthan gum, L-cysteine or Polydimethylsiloxane are safe to eat? To help consumers make informed decisions, the environmental health advocacy and research group Environmental Working Group (EWG) says it will soon launch a food-safety database, covering more than 10,000 supermarket items — every edible product from fresh produce and fruit juice to frozen pizza.)

Lindsey Lohan Probation Revoked, Jail Time a Possibility (Online News Website) 

(Fallen starlet Lindsey Lohan was once again in trouble Wednesday, as a judge revoked her probation and she was led from the courtroom in handcuffs. Although a Nov. 2 hearing will determine if she goes to jail, she reportedly posted a $100,000 bail and was released. Fox News reported that Lohan was sentenced to 360 hours of community service over the course of a year and, after six months, has completed about an hour and a half.)