Researchers Believe They Have Located Jesus’ Childhood Home

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Hewn into a hillside, this is the humble stone and mortar house where a scholar believes Jesus was raised.

It has been dated to the early 1st century by a British archaeologist who says an ancient text points to the building as being the home in Nazareth where Mary and Joseph brought up the son of God.

Professor Ken Dark says De Locis Sanctis, written in 670 by Irish monk Adomnan, described the house as located between two tombs and below a church.

Writing in the journal Biblical Archaeological Review, Dr Dark says that while he has no proof, there is ‘no good reason’ to believe it was not Jesus’s home.

He has been researching the ruins, in what is now northern Israel, since 2006. (Read more about the researchers who believe they have located Jesus’ childhood home HERE)

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You’ll Never Guess Where a Man Was Found Hiding at the JFK Airport

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A flight passenger was found hiding inside the cockpit of a JetBlue airplane that landed in New York from the Dominican Republic early Tuesday after everyone else had gotten off the plane, authorities say.

The JetBlue ground crew found the 26-year-old New Jersey man hiding in the cockpit after the flight landed just before 2 a.m., according to the Port Authority. He was sitting by the window in the cockpit.

The man was a passenger who failed to exit the plane after it landed, according to JetBlue.

While he was being taken off the plane, the man opened an alarm door but he never made it through or got away from the airline workers escorting him off, authorities said. (Read more about the man being discovered in the cockpit of a plane at the JFK airport HERE)

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Mystery Drone Crashes into Window of yet Another Home

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Normally when you hear a window shatter at your home you think a burglar is breaking in or a kid’s baseball smashed through it, maybe even a hurricane is sweeping by. But what about a high-tech drone?

Not even Andres Buksh imagined that one on Thursday night.

“I thought it was the neighbors throwing the big garbage out for Friday pick up,” said Buksh.

Instead when he checked Friday morning, he found unmanned drone had crash into his Hialeah home and it had broken his bedroom window.

“I guess somebody lost control of it,” said Buksh. (Read more about the mystery drone HERE)

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The Arrival of Robot Crime: Twitter Bot Makes Death Threats, Police Question Owner

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By Kashmir Hill. Robots are starting to break the law, the law is trying to figure out what to do about it, and it all seems to be happening in Europe. Last month, Swiss authorities seized the Random Darknet Shopper art exhibit which included weekly purchases made by an automated bot given Bitcoin to surf a Dark Web marketplace. (It mainly bought drugs.) This week, police in the Netherlands are dealing with a robot miscreant. Amsterdam-based developer Jeffry van der Goot reports on Twitter that he was questioned by police because a Twitter bot he owned made a death threat.

Van der Goot’s bot used his own tweets as fodder, taking random chunks of them and trying to recombine them into new sentences that made sense. According to van der Goot, the bot tweeted something that sounded like a threat which mentioned an upcoming event in Amsterdam. Best of all, the bot was responding to another bot, according to van der Goot. He is not identifying the bot and says he has deleted it, per the request of the police. If this is not a hoax, this may be the first time police had to respond because of a robot-on-robot threat of violence. (Read more about the death threat from the Twitter bot HERE)


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Who Do We Blame When Robots Make Death Threats?

By Kashmir Hill. Last week, police showed up at the home of Amsterdam Web developer Jeffry van der Goot because a Twitter account under van der Goot’s control had tweeted, according to the Guardian, “I seriously want to kill people.” But the menacing tweet wasn’t written by van der Goot; it was written by a robot.

The police didn’t press charges. They just asked van der Goot, 28, to delete the account. The bot account only exists now as a cached page; the offending tweet has completely disappeared from the Internet’s surprisingly imperfect memory. It was a brief blip in the Twitter OMG machine, but the episode raises a fascinating and increasingly pressing question in these times of independent algorithms: Who is to blame when a robot does bad things? . . .

In this case, the bot itself got punished. It was killed off by its owner for its transgression at the urging of police. In the robot world, you can get the death penalty for a speech offense. Harsh! Who will stand up for robot civil liberties?


“Information by itself can commit a crime now,” Calo said by phone. If it is indeed a crime. A Twitter bot saying it wants to kill people isn’t really a threat because that bot can’t show up with a gun in a dark alley. (At least not yet.) But somebody on the receiving end of that threat could take it seriously not knowing that it’s a blustering bot. Here in the U.S., a yet-undecided Supreme Court case deals with exactly this issue: whether a man’s Facebook post with violent Eminem lyrics — that was interpreted as threatening by his ex-wife — is a true threat that can get him into legal trouble if he didn’t actually intend to hurt her. It would be much easier for American bots (and their owners) if the Supreme Court rules that empty threats are constitutionally protected.

I asked Calo if he thought any humans should take the fall for van der Goot’s bot, if it came to that. “I don’t know,” he said. “The law has to come up with a thing to do. It would probably look at the person who put the technology into play. (Ed. note: bot owner van der Goot.) If someone builds a general purpose tool — Ed. note: bot builder Hertling — you can’t go after them. In criminal law, you can’t go after person breeding a dangerous dog, but the person who lets it loose.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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First Full Body Transplant Two Years Away According to Surgeon

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Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off . . .

He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the proposal has caused raised eyebrows, horror and profound disbelief in other surgeons.

The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic. (Read more about the possibility of a full body transplant HERE)

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Samsung Warns Viewers: Our TVs May Be Spying on You

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If you settle down to watch television this evening, you might want to think twice about what you say out loud.

Samsung has warned owners of its internet-connected ‘smart TV’ that anything they discuss while sitting near the device may be overheard.

The popular televisions are voice activated, so users can switch channels or ask for suggestions of what to watch simply by giving a verbal command.

However, the technology which allows this to happen has a worrying side effect: it records everything else that goes on near the television.

A clause in the Korean firm’s privacy policy warns: ‘Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.’ (Read more “Samsung Warns TV Viewers of Privacy Issues” HERE)

Read more about the Fed’s surveillance of private information you send to the cloud HERE.

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Freaky Find Inside Ancient Buddha Statue

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It’s not surprising that Southeast Asia is home to countless ancient Buddha statues, but when one of those statues contains a mummified monk, that is certainly a surprise.

A mummified monk is exactly what researchers at Norway’s Meander Medical Center found when they placed a 1,000-year-old Chinese Buddha statue inside a CT scanner. Researchers believe the statue contains the body of a Buddhist master named Liuquan, who may have practiced the tradition of “self-mummification” to reach his final resting place. . .

Scientists and medical staff performed the CT scan that revealed Liuquan’s mediating body in full detail. They also used an endoscope to examine the abdominal cavity of the mummy inside, and they discovered that the organs had been removed and replaced with paper scraps that were printed with ancient Chinese characters. It isn’t clear what specifically was written on those paper scraps.

If you were a monk that wanted to achieve enlightenment and be revered as a “living Buddha,” self-mummification was your brutal option. Monks on this spiritual path would starve themselves for almost a decade, subsisting on water, seeds and nuts. Then, they’d be sealed inside the statue and ingest roots, pine bark and a toxic, tree sap-based tea for another 1,000 days — eating and breathing through a small tube. Eventually death would come, and monks mummified in this manner were said to have reached enlightenment. (Read more about the find inside the acient Buddha statue HERE)

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You’ll Never Guess What Creepy Object Police Found in a Child Sex Offender’s Home [+video]

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Louie, the Joyland Clown mascot, was found in a sex offender’s home. Louie went missing more than a decade ago.

Louie disappeared from the Joyland property in 2005 or 2006 but wasn’t reported stolen until 2010. Louie played Joyland’s Wurlitzer organ (see video below).

The Wichita Police Department will pursue charges against two suspects in the case.

Wichita police say officers found the clown Tuesday at a home of 39-year-old Damian Mayes, who is serving a prison sentence for a 2010 conviction for aggravated indecent liberties with a child and aggravated criminal sodomy. Mayes used to build and repair organs at the park. He’s in prison on child sex crimes.

“It was quite a shock, because we had visited that residence before. They didn’t expect us back, they thought it was a done deal, closed, forgotten case, but like I said, through social media and a lot of interest not only in Joyland but the clown in particular, kind of kept it alive,” said Det. Matt Lang, Wichita Police Department. “There’s many articles that said once Louie disappeared, he would never see the sight of day again.” (Read more about the creepy object police found HERE)

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Jobless Mother Wins $564 Million Jackpot, You’ll Never Guess Her First Stop

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An unemployed mother who came forward to say that she’s one of the three winners of North Carolina’s $564-million Powerball jackpot is sharing her blessing by donating money to her church.

Marie Holmes, 26, from the town of Shallotte in Brunswick, North Carolina, said she also plans to buy a house for her kids . . .

A mother of four kids including one with cerebral palsy, Holmes is overwhelmed and “very grateful” for her winning, saying that she didn’t regularly buy lottery tickets . . .

Holmes said she scared her kids when she told them that she won. “I was telling my kids that we had to struggle no more and I was yelling when I did it. I thought I was going to have a heart attack when I saw the ticket and I actually checked it,” she said.

When asked how did she feel about winning the jackpot, Holmes said, “I don’t think it really hit me yet. I guess when it hits my account, that’s when it’s gonna hit me.” (Read more about the jobless mother winning the lottery HERE)

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Duck Dynasty Musical to Open in Las Vegas

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If the South Park guys can make a successful musical about Mormons and the Flaming Lips can re-engineer “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” into entertaining theater, it only makes sense that a Broadway team could goose curtain calls out of duck calls in a staged production of “Duck Dynasty” . . .

Yes, the Robertson family from A&E’s hit (or miss, depending on who you ask) reality show “Duck Dynasty,” the long-bearded, camouflage-wearing, culture-war clan whose mixture of faith and business acumen leaves it frequently counting blessings and money, will be the subject of a 90-minute musical. The show will debut in April in a 680-seat theater at Las Vegas’ Rio hotel and casino, a venue previously known for shows involving Chippendales dancers and Penn & Teller. Tickets go on sale Tuesday.

The musical is based on a book about the family written by Duck Commander CEO Willie Robertson and his wife, Korie. Interviewed on Fox in January, Robertson said the musical is about “redemption.”

His wife said: “When we first heard, like the first four songs they played for us, I mean Willie and I cried, like we boohooed like babies.”

“I had something in my eye,” Robertson said. “I wasn’t crying.” (Read more about the Duck Dynasty musical HERE)

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