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A Bosnian man who was banned from running in next month's local elections for using pornographic images on the Internet as part of his campaign says he will fight to be reinstated and get a chance to turn his town into "Hollywood".

Muslim Complaints Get Modern Warfare 2 Map Pulled

Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer map, Favela, has been temporarily removed from the game's playlists.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and 3 players have found themselves temporarily one venue short, as Activision has pulled one of the game's maps following complaints from Muslim gamers.

The map in question, Favela, depicts a shanty town in Rio de Janiro. One of the bathrooms in the map contains two paintings, the frames of which are decorated with an ornate quote attributed to the prophet, Muhammad: "Allah is beautiful and He loves beauty."

As was pointed out in this video released back in October, the sight of holy teachings written on or in a bathroom can be offensive to some followers of Islam. It's a minor error, and one easily attributed to ignorance rather than malice, but Activision has elected to remove the map from rotation until it can be edited via a title update. The publisher has since apologized for the slight.

As an Activision rep told Kotaku:

"We apologize to anyone who found this image offensive. Please be assured we were unaware of this issue and that there was no intent to offend. We are working as quickly as possible to remove this image and any other similar ones we may find from our various game libraries."

We are urgently working to release a Title Update to remove the texture from Modern Warfare 3. We are also working to remove the texture from Modern Warfare 2 through a separate Title Update. Until the TU is ready, we have removed the Favela multiplayer map from online rotation.

Activision and our development studios are respectful of diverse cultures and religious beliefs, and sensitive to concerns raised by its loyal game players. We thank our fans for bringing this to our attention."

The video that originally pointed out the issue has had its comments section closed, I couldn't possibly speculate as to why.

This isn't the first time Muslims have taken issue with unintentional slights in videogames. Media Molecule's Little Big Planet was famously delayed when it became apparent one of the musical tracks from the game contained lines from the Koran. More recently, Hindus took offense when Hi-Rez Studios' announced that their upcoming fighter title, Smite, would feature characters from the Hindu pantheon.

Source: Kotaku

Why would Muslims be playing Cowadoody to begin with?

Alias, on 08 October 2012 - 18:44, said:

WE MUST TEACH OUR CHILDREN TO SLAY THE INFIDELS!
AHYAAAA!

Activision and our development studios [...] sensitive to concerns raised by its loyal game players. We thank our fans for bringing this to our attention."

Toddler served whisky at Frankie and Benny's restaurant

A restaurant has apologised after a toddler was served whisky instead of fruit juice at his birthday party.
Sonny Rees drank the 40% proof whisky at his second birthday in a Frankie and Benny's restaurant in Swansea.
His mother Nina Rees only realised the mistake after he had nearly finished the drink.

Btw, Sonny's mother is fit!!

French phone bill waived after 12qn-euro blunder

A woman in south-west France, who received a telephone bill of nearly 12 quadrillion euros, has had the real amount she owed waived - after the company admitted its mistake.
Solenne San Jose, from Pessac outside Bordeaux, said she received a huge shock when she opened the bill for 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros (£9.4qn).
This is nearly 6,000 times France's annual economic output.
She had requested her account be closed after losing her job last month.
The former teaching assistant said she "almost had a heart attack. There were so many zeroes I couldn't even work out how much it was".
The phone company, Bouygues Telecom, initially told her there was nothing they could do to amend the computer-generated statement and later offered to set up instalments to pay off the bill.
In the end, the company admitted the bill should have been for 117.21 euros only, and eventually waived it altogether.
It has also apologised for the gaffe, which it says was down to a printing error and a subsequent misunderstanding between the client and staff at their call centre.

In the past week, 20 owners of Porsche Panameras and Cayennes in Amsterdam have had their headlights stolen. The police suspect that the headlights are being stolen for use as grow lights for marijuana.

http://updates.jalop...dlights-to-grow

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wat

On Monday night, Hurricane Sandy hit the armory of the New York Army National Guard’s 69th Infantry Regiment, leaving the soldiers without power, hot water, or anything but the most rudimentary means of communicating with the outside world. So the next morning, the Regiment’s officers made an emergency plea — to the producers of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

BONDI BEACH is known for putting on a show, but yesterday it turned pink and red when an algal bloom closed the beach for most of the day.

The beach reopened in the late afternoon when the algae, identified late Tuesday afternoon as Noctiluca scintillans or sea sparkle, faded and disappeared, leaving only a few traces in the sand.

Sea sparkle, which resembles fairy floss, gets its name because it may appear to be phosphorescent at night. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Sydney South Coast and Hunter Regional Algal Co-ordinating Committees, James Muddle, said the bloom was caused by a ''nutrient rich deep ocean water onto the continental shelf''.

He said sea sparkle had no known toxic effects other than it can cause a high level of ammonia when it starts to disintegrate so it can cause skin and eye irritation.

Algal experts said Noctiluca scintillans had probably caused the bloom seen on other Sydney and central coast beaches, including Clovelly, which was closed.

Spanish police arrested a Panamanian woman on Wednesday who landed in Barcelona from Bogota, Colombia with cocaine stuffed inside her breast implants.

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http://www.reuters.c...E8BB16L20121212

What in the world... her tits.....

Iran's parliament has banned on airplanes from flying in the country during the Azan call to Islamic prayer, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported on Wednesday.

A security check on a US company has reportedly revealed one of its staff was outsourcing his work to China.

The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.
He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job.

Operator Verizon says the scam came to light after the US firm asked it for an audit, suspecting a security breach.

According to Andrew Valentine, of Verizon, the infrastructure company requested the operator's risk team last year to investigate some anomalous activity on its virtual private network (VPN) logs.
"This organisation had been slowly moving toward a more telecommuting oriented workforce, and they had therefore started to allow their developers to work from home on certain days. In order to accomplish this, they'd set up a fairly standard VPN concentrator approximately two years prior to our receiving their call," he was quoted as saying on an internet security website.
The company had discovered the existence of an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang to the employee's workstation that went back months, Mr Valentine said.
And it had then called on Verizon to look into what it had suspected had been malware used to route confidential information from the company to China.

"Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China," said Mr Valentine.
Further investigation of the employee's computer had revealed hundreds of PDF documents of invoices from the Shenyang contractor, he added.

The employee, an "inoffensive and quiet" but talented man versed in several programming languages, "spent less than one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him", Mr Valentine said.
"Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day," he added.

"Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about $50,000 (£31,270) annually."

The employee no longer worked at the firm, Mr Valentine said.