Faked Car Crashes Increase NY Insurance Rates

From The Daily News by Celeste Katz

Faked Car Crashes Jacking Up NY Insurance Rates

An increase in auto insurance fraud helped push New York's already sky-high rates up 4% last year, the Daily News has learned.

In many cases, experts say, accidents are staged and corrupt clinics submit fraudulent claims for treatment that was either not performed - or not needed.

Most of those staged accidents occur in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, according to industry experts and state officials. The industry estimates fraud cost insurers and drivers more than $241 million last year.

Companies inundated the state Insurance Department with 12,807 complaints of suspected no-fault auto insurance fraud last year, up from 10,117 five years ago.

VH1's MOB WIVES

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From VH1

Mob Wives is a docu-soap series that follows the lives of four women at a crossroads, having to pick up the pieces and carry on while their husbands or fathers do time for Mob-related activities. They are struggling with their identities, their own families and their futures.

Mob Wives is a docu-soap that follows the lives of four struggling, "allegedly" associated women who have to pick up the pieces and carry on after their husbands or fathers do time for Mob-related activities. The women are long time friends who live in New York City's "forgotten borough", Staten Island. Along the way they battle their friends, families and each other as they try to do what's best for themselves and their children. It's not easy to maintain the lifestyle they were accustomed to when the family's primary bread winner is in lock up.

Mob Wives |Renee Graziano |Full Episodes |Reality TV Shows

Airs Sundays on VH1 @ 8/7c

Wild Otter Attacks Farmer

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From The Sun By OWEN CONLON

A WILD otter attacked a farmer in a rampage across a village yesterday.

The furry beast pounced on farmer Joe Burke and bit his hand before he managed to trap him in a canvas sack.But the creature then chewed through the bag and started munching on Joe's VAN.Joe,52, had to run full PELT to escape the furious otter when it turned on him as he tried to shepherd it back to water.

The rest of the viral article can be read here.

(Photo courtesy of The Sun)

Terje Sorgjerd's Time-Lapse Video of Canary Island Skies

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From OMP   Mike Wall

Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd captured this stunning scene — and many others — in his new three-minute video, "The Mountain," which he posted to the website Vimeo on April 15.

Earlier this month, Sorgjerd spent a week on Mount Teide, a huge volcanic peak on Tenerife, which is the largest of the seven Canary Islands off the coast of northwest Africa. At 12,198 feet (3,718 meters), Teide is the highest point in Spain, which owns the Canaries. [The World's Five Most Active Volcanoes]

Ballet Double Sarah Lane Against BLACK SWAN

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From Third Age by Alex Heigl

Natalie Portman body double Caroline Davis speaks out about her role in Portman's new film Your Highness.

Davis, a film studies student, alleges that while filming Your Highness in Belfast, she was paid $385 dollars to dive into an icy lake for Portman.

The allegation comes on the heels of controversy surrounding Portman's Oscar win for Black Swan. Portman's dance double Sarah Lane, a soloist with the American Ballet Theatre, has alleged that she was used in "95%" of the full-body shots in the movie. Lane has claimed that she was the victim of a "cover up" and that the public was misled about how much dancing Portman actually did in the film. She claims that Portman's face was digitally grafted onto her body for the majority of the film.

Portman's fiance and Black Swan's choreographer, Benjamin Millepied, refutes the claims, saying: "she [Lane] just did the footwork, and the fouettes, and one diagonal [phrase] in the studio. Honestly, 85 percent of that movie is Natalie," in a March 23 article with the LA Times.

(Image Credit: Niko Tavernise; Inset: Joe Schildhorn/PatrickMcMullan.com/Sipa Press)

The Approval Matrix: Week of May 2, 2011

[Drunk] Babies with Beer

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From Babies with Beer

Ashton Kutcher PSA

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Russel Brand Plays Arthur In ARTHUR Remake

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Steve Martin and Albert Brooks' Twitter Exchanges

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Food Curated's Ethical Slaughterhouse Video

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CADE (Part 2): The Good Slaughter: A Proud Meat Cutter Shares His Processing Floor from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

How Did Dinosaurs Have Sex? Dino-Style!

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From Slate by Brian Palmer

The American Museum of Natural History in New York will unveil an exhibition of the world's largest dinosaurs this Saturday. Some visitors may wonder how the creatures could ever eat enough to sustain their size, but the Explainer's mind is in the Jurassic gutter. How did those monsters manage to have sex?

Paleontologists know very little about how dinosaurs mated, because soft tissue rarely appears in fossils. It is highly probable that dinosaurs had a cloaca—as do most birds and reptiles—which is a single opening for urination, defecation, and reproduction. If that's the case, we might speculate that the male and female would have aligned their cloacae such that the male's penis could emerge to penetrate the female cloaca. (It's also possible that dinosaurs had no penises, and, like some birds, reproduced by squirting semen from one cloaca at another.) Modern ornithologists and herpetologists call this a "cloacal kiss." Paleontologists can only guess about mating positions, duration, and behavior. The majority view seems to be that large males like the Mamenchisaurus—a 60-foot-long behemoth featured in the new exhibition—probably mounted from behind, like modern giraffes and elephants.

MO MATH Museum Opening 2012 In Manhattan

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From Near Say

The Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) is coming to the Flatiron District next year. The museum, which will be the first of its kind, has signed a lease for 19,000 square feet at 11 East 26th Street, across from Madison Square Park.

The opening projected date of the museum opening is fall 2012.

The museum is the vision of Glen Whitney, a former algorithm manager who also taught math at the University of Michigan after graduating from Harvard. Mr. Whitney and his team of 10 staff members are developing between 50 and 60 exhibits for the museum. One exhibit, called The Ring of Fire, is already traveling to museums across the country and will come to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J. this fall.

MoMath recently received a $2 million grant from Google to help other science museums build exhibits from MoMath’s designs. For more information visit MoMath’s website.

picture via UPG

JeanPants

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The [all the rage in Japan "worn" denim look] JeanPants feature:

• Denim and "worn"-style underwear from CUW
• Can be worn by men or women
• Size: large (84-92cm, 33.1-36.2") or medium (76-84cm, 29.9-33.1")
• Materials: cotton (95%), polyurethane (5%)

Price: $61

JPMorgan's First Quarter Profit Rises 67%

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From HP by Claire Baldwin

JPMorgan Chase & Co posted a 67 percent increase in first-quarter earnings, topping Wall Street expectations, as it set aside less money to cover bad loans.

But the news was not all positive for the second-largest U.S. bank. It said it was still suffering from high mortgage losses. The bank's book of consumer loans shrank by 10 percent in the quarter, and loans to companies did not rise enough to offset that.

But the results were good enough to lift JPMorgan shares 1.2 percent in premarket trading. JPMorgan is the first of the big banks to post quarterly results, and its earnings often give investors a hint of what to expect from other financial companies.

JPMorgan said it earned $5.56 billion, or $1.28 a share, up from $3.33 billion, or 74 cents a share, in the same quarter last year.