Military, Police, and Fire Men and Women will get free admission to this weekend’s Progressive International Motorcycle Show in NYC with proper ID.

The Progressive International Motorcycle Show is your #1 place to see get the latest Motorcycle news, products, and custom bikes. Already the largest motorcycle show around, this year’s New York event is going to be bigger than 2011. More bikes, more products, and more learning opportunities. There are several show features for you to enjoy, such as the Dream Pavilion, Smage Bros Stunt Show, Ultimate Builder Custom Bike show with a $90k prize, and Kawasaki Design-a-Bike.

Remember, uniformed service men and women get in for free! For anyone with any questions, visit the official site to find out more information about the events: http://www.motorcycleshows.com/

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the U.S. government to pay $17.8 million to a family that lost four members when a Marine Corps fighter jet crashed into their San Diego home in 2008.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller’s ruling came after a nonjury trial between the Department of Justice and the family, who sought $56 million for emotional and monetary loss.

Don Yoon lost his 36-year-old wife, Youngmi Lee Yoon; his 15-month-old daughter, Grace; his 2-month-old daughter, Rachel; and his 59-year-old mother-in-law, Seokim Kim Lee, who was visiting from Korea to help her eldest daughter take care of their children.

Yoon said in a statement that Miller’s ruling was “thoughtful, reasoned and just.” Yoon broke down crying throughout his testimony, which came three years to the day when he buried his wife and baby girls in the same casket. He told the judge he only looks forward to the day when he can join them.

“Our family is relieved this part of the process is over, but no sum of money will ever make up for the loss of our loved ones,” he said.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but Mr. Yoon is right, there is no way to properly compensate someone after a tragedy like this.

Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen a raft of e-mails and credit card data from U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor, promising it was just the start of a weeklong Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.

One alleged hacker said the goal was to use the credit data to steal a million dollars and give it away as Christmas donations, and images posted online claimed to show the receipts.

Members of the loose-knit hacking movement known as “Anonymous” posted a link on Twitter to what they said was Stratfor’s tightly-guarded, confidential client list. Among those on the list: The U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force and the Miami Police Department.

The rest of the list, which Anonymous said was a small slice of its 200 gigabytes worth of plunder, included banks, law enforcement agencies, defense contractors and technology firms such as Apple and Microsoft.

“Not so private and secret anymore?” the group taunted in a message on the microblogging site.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link but what is so private and secret about STRATFOR?  Anyone can subscribe to STRATFOR’s website to get full access to their various articles; so I don’t know what the Anonymous group was trying to prove?  So the US Air Force, Army, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. subscribed to STRAFOR, big deal.  I would be more surprised if people from these organizations were not subscribed to STRATFOR.  The biggest thing Anonymous did was force regular people like myself to have to call our banks and have our credit cards cancelled on Christmas Day.  Thanks jerks.  With that said it is pretty pathetic on STRATFOR’s part if true that the data that was stolen was not encrypted and very easy for Anonymous to steal.  You would think that an intelligence think tank that charges so much for membership to their website would at least have some stringent security measures in place.  This is definitely making think twice about subscribing again.

A woman cut off her husband’s penis with a pair of scissors and threw the severed member into a river in revenge for his affair with another woman and his physical abuse, police in Taiwan said Sunday.

The 30-year-old Vietnamese woman, identified only by her surname, Pan, cut off about half her husband’s penis at their home in the southern city of Tainan after he took drugs and sleeping pills and fell asleep, police said.

The woman allegedly claimed she had thrown the severed member of her drug-addicted Taiwanese husband into a river before turning herself in.

“She has been taken into custody on charges of assault,” a police officer told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The woman allegedly told police she felt no regret about what she had done to her husband, who is 29 years old, jobless and a known user of illegal drugs.

Police said she claimed to have suffered beatings even though she had worked at a local karaoke shop to support the family since the pair married two years ago.

Her husband’s affair with another woman, which he did not attempt to hide, prompted her revenge, the suspect said, according to police.

If convicted, she faces a jail term of up to 12 years.  [AFP]

Steven Seagal is being threatened with a lawsuit over his part in a police raid that was taped for his A&E reality show, TMZ reported.

The actor, who has served as a reserve deputy sheriff since the mid-’80s, was part of a team that arrived at Jesus Sanchez Llovera’s Arizona house in March with a tank and armed in full riot gear, Llovera alleges in his legal documents.

Llovera claims that the raid, carried out by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, was “unfounded” because they believed Llovera was raising roosters for illegal cockfighting. But he says the roosters are only “for show.”

Llovera — who served both Seagal and Sheriff Joe Arpaio with an official notice of claim, the first step toward a lawsuit — says his 11-month-old puppy was shot and killed during the raid and that police also killed more than 100 of his roosters.  [Hollywood Reporter]

You can read more at the link, which also has a local news video of the incident you can watch.  In the video you can see that Steven Seagal is dressed in the US Army’s multi-cam uniform.  He looks like he is decked out to go to war in Afghanistan instead of busting a cock fighter.

Debt crises make great drama. The big shots attend meetings, look terribly worried, then stomp out, accusing each other of bad faith. Finally, at the witching hour, they reach agreement and tell us all is fine, for now.

The tough thing is sorting out what’s really going on. In the U.S. case, the answer is: not much. We need tax increases and spending reductions far beyond what’s being negotiated. Cutting the deficit by $1 trillion to $2 trillion over 10 years sounds like a big deal, but not when our unfunded Medicare and Social Security liabilities, by my calculations, are growing by more than $4 trillion a year.

Whatever you think of the House Republicans, they understand that our country is broke. But they have no idea how broke. They are pushing hard for a balanced-budget amendment. What we need is not budget balance, but generational balance.

If we are going to amend the Constitution, let’s prohibit today’s adults from leaving tomorrow’s generations with higher lifetime net tax rates. A Generational Balance Amendment would specify that, absent prolonged states of emergency, each generation would pay the same share of its lifetime labor earnings in taxes, net of benefits received.

Stabilizing lifetime net tax rates isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s critical to our country’s long-term economic survival.  [Bloomberg]

You can read more at the link.

For those that don’t subscribe to the Korea Economic Reader, let me share a point Tom Coyner made with this article:

must confess, reading this makes me totally ashamed to be part of the spoiled Baby-boomer generation.  I clearly remember reading a TIME magazine article in 1975 that forecasted how the Baby-boomers would be resented by subsequent generations.  I suspect that the author of that piece had no idea how incredibly correct he was in his future view.

I couldn’t find that article in the TIME archive but I did find this article from 1976 that clearly shows how long our government knew that Social Security was unsustainable once the Baby Boom Generation reached their retirement age starting in 2005 and here we are now with a debt crisis.  Here is an excerpt from the 1976 TIME article that is worth reading in full:

The payments are determined strictly by the size of the premiums paid. The original Social Security Act of 1935 set up the system in much the same way:

workers would pay taxes that would be a kind of premium and “earn” the right to receive benefits when they retired.

But in 1939, before the first benefits were paid,* Congress amended the act to base payments partly on need—a concept foreign to true insurance. Low-income workers get retirement benefits that replace a larger proportion of their former earnings than the benefits of high-income workers do. A retired worker with dependents collects more than one without, even if both have paid exactly the same amount of taxes into the system, and there is a minimum level of benefits available to someone who has paid very, very little.

As a result, Social Security has become not insurance, but what economists call an “intergenerational transfer program.” Today’s workers pay taxes to support yesterday’s workers who are retired or disabled. In turn, today’s workers must rely on the willingness of their children’s and grandchildren’s generations to continue to make this sort of transfer. Thus the trust fund is not, never has been, and never can be large enough to meet all potential claims on the system: that would require several trillion dollars.  [TIME Magazine]

• United Airlines has improved, but next time I fly to Korea I am going back to Asiana Airlines.
• It is amazing that for a major city like Los Angeles its airport sucks so bad.
• I like flying into Incheon Airport, everyone was friendly all the way through immigration, my bags showed up with no issues, and the driver from my hotel met me on time.
• The traffic in Seoul is still horrible, but seems a little bit better overall.
• The new Hyundai cars sure do look nice on the roads in Korea.
• It is weird to see all the Chevy emblems on the new Daewoo manufactured cars.
• Korean pedestrians are still oblivious and walk right into traffic without looking.
• Saw an old Korean grandpa in a electrical wheel chair taking up the right lane of traffic on a busy highway.
• Saw another Korean grandpa on a four-wheeler on the Seoul Ring Road, Highway 100.
• The mass transit in Korea continues to be one of the world’s best.
• The various parks built along the banks of the Han River are quite well done.
• Itaewon continues to be fixed up and becoming a more respectable location.
• Those floating islands they are constructing on the Han River look ugly.
• I like Ilsan, it is a well planned out  and livable city.
• It is amazing how much Uijongbu continues to grow.
• Home Plus is so much better than Wal-Mart.
• I like how Koreans actually look nice when they go shopping compared to Americans at Wal-Mart.
• The greening of Seoul continues which is good to see.
• Service in Korea is awesome, heck even some McDonald’s offer delivery service now.
• Korea may have great delivery service but the guys on the mopeds still piss me off with how they drive on the sidewalks.
• The typhoon sucked but fortunately the death and damage from it were limited. It did screw up my tour plans a bit though.

Welcome to Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden by ArgSvenne

You can read and see even more videos at the link.  It makes it perfectly understandable why Korea approves so few non-North Korean refugee applications when you see things like this happening in Europe.  

THE Muslim woman accused of lying about police trying to tear her burqa off has avoided jail – because her identity could not be proven.

Carnita Matthews, 47, from Woodbine, in Sydney’s southwest, had been sentenced to six months in jail for making a deliberately false statement that a policeman tried to forcibly remove her burqa because he was a racist.

But judge Clive Jeffreys said yesterday he was not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that it was Mrs Matthews who made the racism accusation because the person who complained to police was wearing a burqa at the time.

The absurdity of the law is that, to reach the level of proof of identity to make the case, Mrs Matthews would have been required to identify herself by lifting her burqa at the police station – what started the uproar in the first place.

More than a dozen Muslim supporters linked arms and began chanting “Allah Akbar” as they stormed out of Downing Centre Court with Mrs Matthews concealed behind them. 

Tempers rose and they began jostling with police after several members of the group attacked cameramen.

It marked a stark difference from their behaviour minutes earlier, when they had quietly assembled outside the lifts for prayer shortly after the judge’s decision.

Mrs Matthew’s lawyer Stephen Hopper defended their actions saying: “They are obviously happy with the result and are expressing it in a way that is culturally appropriate to them.  [The Daily Telegraph]

Culturally acceptable to assault a cameraman and scuffle with police?

Pope Benedict XVI has shut down a famous monastery in Rome, Italian media reports say.

The Santa Croce in Gerusalemme church is being closed because of rumours of a lack of liturgical, financial and moral discipline, La Stampa reports.

The few remaining Cistercian monks at the church said to be being transferred to other communities in Italy.

The basilica’s abbot, a flamboyant former Milan fashion designer, was moved two years ago.

Il Messaggero reports that Simone Fioraso transformed the church, renovating its crumbling interior and opening a hotel, holding regular concerts, a televised bible-reading marathon and regularly attracting celebrity visitors with an unconventional approach.

One of the nuns at the monastery, Anna Nobili, a former lap-dancer, reportedly took part in dance performances with other nuns during religious ceremonies.

But the Vatican was reportedly not pleased by rumours that circulated about the behaviour of the monks.

“An inquiry found evidence of liturgical and financial irregularities as well as lifestyles that were probably not in keeping with that of a monk,” Father Ciro Benedettini, a Vatican spokesman, is reported as telling the Guardian newspaper.- BBC

The Vatican has shown little concern for financial irregularities or money laundering in the past that have to be far larger than what a monastery could possibly be involved with. As to possible embarrassment Simone Fioraso, I don’t know  how it could be any worse than this or this.