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Despite the many forces trying to keep crowds away (fire at Miami airport, delays into Ft. Lauderdale Airport, traffic all over Miami, overbooked cab companies) over 150,000 enthusiastic fans made their way to Bicentennial Park on Friday for the 13th annual Ultra Music Festival. It was hot, it was packed and the schedule was chaotic, yet fans banded together for one simple reason: to dance the days away to one of the best electronic music lineups ever put together.
What once started as a small party on the beach in 1999 is now the world’s biggest dance music festival, encompassing three days, eight stages and more than 200 musicians, evidence that the electronic dance music craze has exploded into a full blown pop-culture revolution here in the United States.
The sold out show — 150,000 tickets sold — rivals last year’s Coachella Music Festival in numbers, which features a variety of music for all different

Opening Day of Major League Baseball and the start of the new season this week provide an ideal opportunity for the Supreme Court to ask what it can learn from the ethical rules that govern umpires in professional athletics.
“Judges are like umpires,” Chief Justice John Roberts famously declared at his confirmation hearing, but if several of his colleagues were professional baseball umpires, they would have been fired or disciplined long ago for egregious breaches of professional rules that insist upon scrupulous neutrality and the avoidance of fraternization with players and their club employers.
The Supreme Court, which has not adopted for itself any comprehensive code of ethical conduct like the ones that govern professional athletics (or for that matter lower court judges), is now embroiled in controversy over its lax approach to rules requiring justices to recuse themselves from real and perceived conflicts of interest. Although the judge-as-umpire analogy is flawed in some ways, the Court could certainly benefit from studying and embracing the code of conduct rules that professional umpires and referees follow.
The Major League Baseball Umpire Manual provides that “umpires should avoid excessive casual unnecessary conversation with players, coaches, managers, or spectators” during games and, off the field, may not even “visit club offices unless official business requires otherwise” (emphasis

Nothing irritates me more than when the left-wing drive by media jumps on our elected officials as they try to do what they think is best for our country.
It really hit close to home earlier this week when they focused their sights on my good friend, Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy.
It all started when Sean opened his heart at a town hall meeting in Polk County. Knowing many of his constituents were suffering due to the county’s current economic situation, Sean let them know that he, too, was reeling:
After he made that statement, the media vultures swooped in for the kill. How could he dare to compare his troubles to the average worker when he was making a Congressional salary?
How little they know.
Sympathizing with my friend’s plight, I dropped in to see him earlier this week. Since he was diligently finishing paperwork in another room, the butler Jarvis told me to have a seat.
“The congressman will be with you in a moment,

Just 12 months ago Dan ‘The Outlaw’ Hardy was supposedly one punch away from becoming the UFC welterweight champion of the world. He met champion Georges St. Pierre in Newark, New Jersey and, in doing so, became the first British mixed martial artist to ever compete for a UFC championship. Though a heavy underdog going into the fight, some felt Hardy’s punch power — in particular, his left-hook — could do damage should it land anywhere in the vicinity of GSP’s

Lafcadio Hearn could be a cruel correspondent. One-eyed, diminutive and poor — and self-described as painfully awkward — he was nonetheless a hit with certain ladies — at least fifty, by his own count. One of these ladies, Ellen Freeman, emphatically did not excite reciprocal feelings.
Hearn’s relationship with Ellen Freeman seems to have formed in 1875, around the time he was fired from the Cincinnati Enquirer following his marriage to Mattie Foley, a former slave. Interracial marriage was illegal at the time, and it scandalized Hearn’s

Citizen scientists broaden the scope of climate-change research and public understanding
It’s hard to think of a citizen-based science project that doesn’t have a catchy name: Nature’s Notebook, Christmas Bird Count, eBird, iNaturalist, Project BudBurst, to name a few. But don’t let the cheery-sounding monikers fool you. These projects broaden the scope of scientific research and the collection and analysis of scientific data.
Because scientists can’t be everywhere, information collected by trained volunteers is data that would not otherwise be easily

This article was written by Gawain Kripke of Oxfam America, it originally appeared on The Hill’s Congress Blog.
Good news! Congress finally does what U.S. voters say they want and dedicates 13 percent of the federal budget to life-saving international poverty-fighting assistance.
April Fools!
As the current budget drama gripping Washington continues, foreign aid remains on the chopping block.
While all kinds of theatrics go on, some of us are waiting to see what will happen to the tiny fraction of the federal budget that is dedicated to the life-saving international health programs, emergency aid, poverty reduction, climate change adaptation and economic development assistance. Oxfam America doesn’t take funding from the US government, so our budget doesn’t depend on the

Hey, folks, Code for America is a bunch of people building government style software that’s actually useful for people.
They’ve joined forces with Simpl, the social innovation market place,that connects innovators with the public sector to bring about radical change.
The deal is to bring together people with ideas and people who can offer support to make those ideas a reality – for social good in the city.

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

As April has come in with a growl in New York and the Northeast, with winter-weather-like conditions, who can utter the word “spring”? Not even the start of baseball season puts you in the mood. The official start to spring every year for me begins the first Monday of every April and takes place in a setting much like one in a fairy tale: Augusta National, home of The Masters.
Waking up in Augusta on Monday morning and entering the gates off of famed Magnolia Lane (the long row of magnolias were planted before the Civil War) is like stepping into a dream world where order and beauty seem to dominate. Greeting official visitors at the end of Magnolia Lane is ‘Founders Circle,’ where a flowerbed sits in the shape of the Masters logo — the continental United States — which is filled with yellow flowers and has a flag stick planted in the location of Augusta, Georgia. Players get dropped off in this area with easy access to the clubhouse, which was originally constructed in 1854 by Dennis Redmond, who owned the land when it was an indigo

Chancellor Meryl Tisch and the New York State Board of Regents seemed determined to purge social studies and the study of history from the New York State elementary and middle school curriculum. First they dropped 5th and 8th grade social studies assessments for academic year 2010-2011 to help close a budget deficit.
Now, according to recommendations made by Deputy Commissioner Jon King, they want to integrate social studies and art into the England/Language Arts curriculum, which given testing pressure, means schools and students can kiss art and history goodbye.
Tisch and the Regents justify the attack of history and the social studies as part of their response to Race to the Top (the top of what is not

Yes, Rubber was released theatrically on April 1st. No, it’s not some kind of a joke — I’ve seen it, I know. It’s actually a film about a tire that gains consciousness in the middle of the desert, finds it has the power to destroy objects and animals (including the human kind) with its mind, and then goes on to wreak fear and destruction amongst the inhabitants of a small motel. That director Quentin Dupieux

The mighty Mekong River is about to face its greatest test. This month, the governments of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam will decide whether to give approval to the first ever dam planned for the lower Mekong mainstream, the Xayaburi Dam.
Much is at stake in this decision. The Mekong River is the world’s largest freshwater fishery, providing the main source of protein for 60 million people in the lower Mekong

Pulitzer Prize winner Leonard Pitts at the Miami Herald tells it like it is. In a recent column about “birthers,” Pitts calls them “morons,” ”jackasses,” “imbeciles,” “idiots,” “doofuses” and “pinheads.”
After admitting that name calling “lowers the level of discourse… forestalls thoughtful response and…does not suggest an excess of class,” Pitts says:
Later on, Pitts calls the birther nonsense “not just claptrap, but profoundly racist claptrap.” While I agree with Pitts on the claptrap, I would not call the birthers morons, imbeciles, idiots, etc. I believe that these people, especially the founders and leaders of this “movement,” are extremely intelligent, capable and resourceful.
How else would a movement that started in mid-2008, following Obama’s win in the Democratic primaries be able to convince, a mere two years later, 20 percent of all Americans and 30 percent of Tea Partiers into believing that the president was not born in the United States?
How else would people such as Andy Martin (known as “King of the Birthers”), Jerome Corsi (of John Kerry swift-boating fame), Alan Keyes, Orly Taitz, etc., be able to convince a majority (51 percent) of likely Republican presidential primary voters that the president was born in another country? (2011 survey from Public Policy Polling)
According to the same poll, “Another 21 percent say they are ‘not sure’ if the president was born in the United States.” This means that “72 percent of the people who will be choosing the next Republican presidential nominee are either birthers or birther-curious.”
How else could this movement attract reputable and intelligent Republican Party leaders, notables and pundits such as Senator Richard Shelby, Tracey Mann, Liz Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Camille Paglia and others to grant the movement legitimacy, to defend the birthers or at a minimum to humor these conspiracy-minded people?
Even House Speaker John Boehner, when asked recently about his responsibility to repudiate “birtherism” avoided the issue by replying, “it’s not my job to tell the American people what to

For the second year in a row, I have masterminded a number of successful over-the-top April Fool’s Pranks without a single friend (or, more importantly, Facebook “friend”) calling my work into question.
Have people forgotten about April Fools’ Day or are we a prank-free society?
As a young person, probably because I didn’t have athletics or good looks to earn me much attention, I turned to pranking for social amusement and gratification. It all began during March of 1994, in balmy San Antonio Texas.
***
It’s approaching 9pm on a Friday night, and I’m sitting Indian style on my friend Maica’s bedroom floor. Scattered around me are Teen People and YM magazines, along with small misshapen clippings and a pair of scissors. Maica is putting the final touches on this weekend’s photo collage, its center snapshot bordered by personalized messages to the guests of her slumber

In a surprising political turn, a Presidential Exploratory Committee will itself be forming an exploratory committee to gauge a possible run for the Republican Presidential nomination. “I’m sick and tired of doing all the exploratory work for jerks who may or may not actually run for President,” said the Presidential Exploratory Committee. “I want in on the action. And who knows more about exploratory committees than I do?”
In a gesture of solidarity, exploratory committees for Republicans Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain have defected to the Presidential Exploratory Committee’s team to form a Super Exploratory Committee to more thoroughly explore the Presidential Exploratory Committee’s chances for exploring a Presidential

I’ve been sitting at my computer continuously for the last two years. When I finally stood up, I was fat and broke. Had to get something out of it. Here’s my new

April 1st is the Internet’s favorite day, and food bloggers were all over it this year. Here are the seven funniest foodie fools we saw around the web.

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

Step aside, infamous Indonesian smoking baby, there’s a new gross-you-out and get-you-incensed Internet sensation in town. It’s the obese Chinese toddler!
Perhaps you have seen photos of Lu Hao, a 132-pound, 3-year-old who eats three bowls of rice at a time and refuses to walk to school. It’s compelling stuff, the swollen kid crammed into a raft, floating in a pool, the massive baby gnawing on a chicken bone or being hoisted by his sweating, regular-sized dad as his girth tests the tensile strength of a T-shirt.
If you see the story anywhere online, don’t even bother reading the comments section. This is very predictable, the kind of kid story that causes parents to do one of two things: A) lots of pontificating about how mom and dad need to take charge and are actually abusive in their neglectful/idiotic parenting or B) feel sorry for the child and post about their pity, which causes group A to attack group

SUPER ** 1/2 out of ****
In Theaters Now
This comedy was definitely one of the success stories of the Toronto International Film Festival. A similar tale to Kick-Ass (which I really enjoyed), it shows a schmucky, average Joe (Rainn Wlson) who turns himself into a superhero when his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for a drug-dealing thug (Kevin Bacon) that uses her as a guinea pig for his heroin. Wilson dons a cape, chooses a weapon (a hefty wrench) and coins a catchphrase that is increasingly funny as the film goes on: “Shut up, crime!”
Comic bookstore geek Ellen Page becomes his VERY enthusiastic sidekick, and the tone veers wildly as Wilson goes from meek to freak, beating up thugs but also mauling a guy for cutting in line at the cinema. (Actually, the guy was meeting a friend, I think, so it doesn’t even count as really cutting in the first place.) The movie is a little unsure of itself tonally because it doesn’t quite know what it thinks of its

When my book “HARD SELL: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman” came out exactly six years ago, I thought it was a no-brainer for a movie. My friends questioned my brain function. But, I figured: take a guy who pushes the little blue pill, add a love interest and, voila, we’ve got a romantic comedy. Fortunately for me, Charles Randolph and Ed Zwick used my book as a springboard for so much more than the typical popcorn rom-com in its big screen incarnation Love And Other Drugs.
I certainly enjoyed the post-movie notoriety and subsequent increase in paperback

Godaddy.com CEO Bob Parsons has convinced himself that he’s a humanitarian. I think he’s got a long way to go before he lives up to that self-billing. He’s in the news today because he traveled to Zimbabwe recently to shoot an elephant for a trophy and then released a video in which he is happily grinning over his conquest. Now the man known for racy Super Bowl ads is spinning his version of the event and trying to morph this selfish act of slaughter into some selfless act of charity.
He shot the elephant at night, and claims it was a “problem elephant.” It happened to be a bull elephant with sizeable tusks, just the type that trophy hunters like to

Only those of us who served in the U.S./ Occupation of Japan in the 1950s might have shaken our heads after Thursday’s frontpage photos in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times that showed Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko consoling evacuees from the debacle that struck Japan last month.
Prior to the ascendancy to the Royal throne after the death of Akihito’s father, Emperor Hirohito, the notion that commoners would ever have had a view of the Japanese ruler, let alone sit with him and his wife 60 years later and have a conversation with the God-like figure would have been unthinkable. Throughout the Second World War, Hirohito was regarded by millions of Americans as a war criminal, responsible for the conflict that followed the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. His image appeared in photographs and editorial cartoons that mocked him. There even were demands in America for Hirohito to be hanged.
But times began to change once the

We’re here to offer a cautionary tale of what happens when you violate the basic rules of buying from what we call “The Flash Sale Mob.”
In order to write about and report on sites like Gilt Groupe and Groupon, we need to cruise them and it’s tricky-hard to mind your dollars and sense while spending hours immersed in checking out seductive goodies. Inevitably, this leads to the ‘oy, what was I thinking’ brand of buyer’s remorse. While we have an excuse — hey, it’s an occupational hazard — we’re sharing our rules (and transgressions) so you don’t get into hurry-hurry-click-and-buy-it trouble.
Rule #1
Buy only things you are already in the market for and can return.
Rule #2
Buy a service only if you have tried it (or at least had a trusted friend tell you it is a must-do).
Rule #3
Read the fine print.
Violation of Rule #1: Non-returnable Item
A set of new placemats and napkins. Some people have shoe obsessions, others handbags, still others naughty