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Brazil Carnival 2012

Dazzling costumes and elaborate floats continued to mesmerise the onlookers as the dancers kept on performing on the second night of Rio's iconic Sambadrome on Monday.
Several Samba schools paraded their lavishly costumed dancers to get the top honour, the Carnival Champion title. Up to 13 Samba schools are competing for the title which is to be decided on Wednesday.




Major Samba schools such as Salgueiro, Mangueira and Unidos da Tijuca are among the contenders for the title at the Rio Carnival, termed as the "the greatest show on Earth".
The carnival is expected to create 250,000 jobs and revenues of $640 million for hotels, bars and restaurants, according to the government estimates.

EducAtion AgAin!!

Forget the YouTube videos. If you want a real dose of cute cat, book a flight with Taiwan airline EVA Air.
The carrier has recently launched three Hello Kitty-themed aircraft [Chinese language], on which everything from the fuselage to the
flight attendants to the food is kitted out in the kawaii cat brand's images.
Passengers have been purring with delight, according to Anna Wong, an EVA Air public relations officer in Hong Kong.

A gay couple celebrated Valentine's Day by breaking the world record for the longest ever kiss after managing to keep their lips locked together for an incredible 50 hours, 25 minutes and one seconds. Nontawat Jaroegenasornsin, 31, and his partner Thanakorn Sittiamthong, 28, beat the previous winners of the Guinness World Record longest continuous kisstoday by just over four hours.

They were one of just seven Thai couples to enter the annual Ripley's Believe It or Not longest kissing challenge in the resort town of Pattaya, Thailand, which started on Sunday.

Competing couples had to keep their lips locked throughout the contest - even during bathroom breaks, eating meals and drinking through a straw.
The toilet is off-limits for the first three hours of the contest but after that, lips still together, they must be accompanied by a referee for any bathroom breaks.

JERKKKKKK....

Red indiAn cAt!!

The native american teepee for fluffy little critters by loyal luxe, canada

Cute really...

Lets get high!!

The National Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement, or the Mob Museum for short, opened to the public on Tuesday after five years of work, $42 million in public funding and generous donations of gangster artifacts -- some from people who prefer to remain anonymous.

In about 17,000 square feet of exhibits, including the brick wall that absorbed bullets aimed at seven mobsters in Chicago's infamous 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the museum attempts to tell "both sides of the story" of organized crime in America, and how it came to shape Las Vegas.
The stately downtown building that houses the museum was part of that story. A former federal courthouse, it was one of 14 sites for the 1950-51 Kefauver Committee hearings, a Senate investigation into the mob and its influence on the nation's economic, political and cultural life.

At the entrance to the repurposed site, a black and white photo half the size of a billboard hangs to the left. It's of a toe, with a white tag. The tag reads: "Homicide. Benjamin Siegel. 810 Linden. Beverly Hills."
That would be "Bugsy" Siegel, the gangster figure familiar to many through Warren Beatty's portrayal of him in the 1991 film, "Bugsy,"
about the mob's role in the birth of the Las Vegas Strip.
So begins the journey the Mob Museum takes visitors on, an arc from the 1930s to the 1980s, when organized crime was defined by family and ethnic affiliation, and law enforcement and the justice system evolved as institutions focused on curbing its influences.
Along the way are displays of Prohibition-era whiskey flasks and Kennedy-era FBI wiretaps. There is also a page from Meyer Lansky's accounting ledger and suits worn by fictional HBO mob boss Tony Soprano.
One section explains the "Web of Deceit" woven by the mob in its heyday, influencing U.S. national elections and Cuba's Fidel Castro.

The courtroom where the Kefauver hearings took place has been restored, complete with the original wooden benches from the hearing room and a film that takes visitors back to 1950.
Curator Kathleen Hickey Barrie and her husband, Dennis Barrie, developed the museum's exhibits. The two have long careers that include working on the International Spy Museum in Washington.
Hickey Barrie said locating the museum in Las Vegas was an obvious choice. "Having it here makes it more interesting than if it was in New York or Chicago, two places it easily could have been. Here is where you have this turn in history from bootlegging to mobsters creating places that people from all over the world wanted to come to," she said. "It is about Las Vegas, but I really think it's a national story," Hickey Barrie added.

The idea for the museum originated with Oscar Goodman, who made a national name for himself -- and a fortune -- as a defense attorney for Meyer Lansky, Tony Spilotro and other figures from the world of organized crime.
As mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 to 2011, Goodman often appeared at official events with a martini glass in one hand and a showgirl hanging off each arm. His City Hall office overlooked the former courthouse where he had once argued on behalf of his notorious clients.
Goodman, like the museum, and like Las Vegas itself, could easily be taken as a bizarre, sensational lark. But historian Michael Green, who served as a consultant on the project, says that would be a mistake.
"Ideally," he said, "the museum will help people understand better where Las Vegas comes from, and where they come from." At the same time, he allowed, "They'll also go away thinking, 'Only in Las Vegas could there be a museum like this.'"

The Japanese art of raising bonsai trees is a beautiful way to infuse greenery into indoor spaces. But artist Takanori Aiba takes the art to a new level with his incredibly intricate series of bonsai castles. The Japanese artist carves miniature masterpieces that weave in and out of the miniature trees, creating cohesive architectural marvels that burst forth with life!

Treating each tiny Bonsai as if it were a deep-rooted full-sized tree, Aiba creates incredible buildings that wind around the boughs and branches.

Using copper line, epoxy putty, plastic, resin and stone clay, he fashions detailed buildings, bridges, balconies and towers. Using the bonsai trees as the foundation, the dioramas are inspired by the unique shape of each tree, creating both vertical and horizontal landscapes and buildings.

Aiba's first few creations relied heavily on the function of the bonsai as a tree. The plants hold tree houses, and the leafy branches of the bonsai poke out of the tops and cascade to the floor. Each branch is adorned with patios, umbrellas, and tiny strings of lights, creating an incredible dwelling for a miniature Swiss Family Robinson.

COMAYAGUA, Honduras--A massive fire raged through an overcrowded prison in Honduras, killing more than 350 inmates, many of them trapped and screaming inside their cells. The blaze began late on Tuesday night at the prison in Comayagua, about 75 km (45 miles) north of the capital Tegucigalpa and killed 359 people, said Danelia Ferrera, a senior official at the attorney general's office. "It's a terrible scene. Our staff went into the cells and the bodies are charred, most of them are unrecognizable," Ferrera told Reuters, adding that officials would have to use dental records and DNA in many cases to identify those killed.

Ravaged by violent street gangs, brutal drug traffickers and rampant poverty, Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, according to the United Nations. The cramped Honduran jails suffer frequent riots and clashes between rival gangs, although it was not yet clear if the Comayagua blaze--one of the worst prisons fires ever in Latin America--was started deliberately or was an accident.

At least eight surviving prisoners said one of the inmat es had set fire to a mattress, one government official said ,speaking on condition of anonymity. Chaos erupted as the blaze swept through the prison. "We heard screaming from the people who caught on fire," one prisoner told reporters, showing fingers he fractured escaping the blaze. "We had to push up the roof panels to get out." Injured inmates were filmed being carried out of the jail, some crawling with visible burns. By the time Red Cross volunteer Jose Manuel Gomez arrived, all he could for many was gather up their remains. "We're placing them into bags in parts because when we grab them, they disintegrate," he said. It was the third major prison fire in Honduras since 2003 with dilapidated jails packed at more than double their capacity across the Central American nation. Worried and angry relatives surrounded the prison on Wednesday morning, at one point throwing rocks at police and trying to force their way inside the prison. Police responded by firing shots into the air and shooting tear gas at protesters, most of whom were women. President Porfirio Lobo said he had suspended the director of the Comayagua prison and the head of the national prison system to ensure a thorough investigation.

He promised to "take urgent measures to deal with this tragedy, which has plunged all Hondurans into mourning." Police reported that one of the dead was a woman who had stayed overnight at the prison and the rest were inmates, but noted some of those presumed dead could have escaped. Honduras' notoriously violent street gangs, known as 'maras', gained power inside Hispanic neighborhoods in the United States in the 1980s and then spread down into Central America. Their members wear distinctive tattoos and are involved in drugs and weapons trafficking, armed robbery and protection rackets.

A local police chief read out the names of 457 survivors outside the prison on Wednesday, but relatives still clamored for more information. "This is desperate, they won't tell us anything and I think my husband is dead," a crying Gregoria Zelaya told Canal 5 TV as she stood by a chain link fence. Officials were not sure of the cause of the fire. "There is one hypothesis that is was a short circuit in the electrical system, or (an inmate) set fire to a mattress," said Ferrera who was at the scene. "But there is not a definitive cause yet, we are still investigating."

Education!!