Tag: VIOLENCE

Australia didn't technically ban the new 'Mortal Kombat' video game, but it might as well have. According to Kotaku, the game was deemed too violent to fit the country's MA15+ rating -- which, believe it or not, is Australia's highest classification. Because the country doesn't have an adults-only rating, 'Mortal Kombat' was refused classification, meaning that it can't be sold at retail outlets. ...

A new video game that invites players to virtually participate in Mexico's ongoing cartel war has drawn criticism for glorifying the country's devastating gang violence. According to game developer Ubisoft, 'Call of Juarez: The Cartel' asks players to "take the law into (their) own hands" on a "bloody road trip from Los Angeles to Juarez" -- the Mexican city that has been ravaged by ...

Share A 16-year-old high school student has been arrested in Indianapolis, after posting ominous threats on his Facebook page. The boy, a special-needs student at Warren Central High School, allegedly wrote that he would "shoot up the school" after the Martin Luther King Day holiday. "Your dreams will be broken by Warren Central, no more Nice Guy," reads one of the suspect's posts. "I mean ...

In the wake of this month's Arizona shootings, President Obama called upon all of us to raise the level of our political discourse and to avoid "pointing fingers or assigning blame" at a time that demanded unity. His message was pretty clear, and largely well received. But it seems to have flown directly over the head of one mayor in North Carolina. Mark Chilton, mayor of Carrboro, North ...

Six middle-schoolers in Carson City, Nevada have been arrested for using Facebook to threaten violence against their teachers. One of the six students, all of whom are 12- and 13-year-old girls, created a Facebook event entitled "Attack a Teacher Day," and allegedly invited around 100 others to do that very thing last Friday. The other five girls, among the invitees, allegedly posted threatening ...

A crazed pro-choice pro-life advocate in North Carolina will plead guilty to charges of using Facebook to spread information on how to make and use a bomb. Twenty-six-year-old Justin Carl Moose posted a series of links and instructions for constructing explosive devices to his Facebook page. As the AP reports, Moose also declared himself a "freedom fighter" in one status update, and regularly ...

After demolishing a group of hapless suckers at 'Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos,' Eric Hamber decided to indulge in some self-congratulatory trash talk.The hapless suckers then decided to beat him up. The attack reportedly went down early last week, during lunch period at Hamber's high school. According to police in Vancouver, the garrulous gamer was confronted by the same group of kids he'd ...

Every few months, researchers publish a new study about the impact of violent videos and games on teens. Although the conclusions typically differ, the studies themselves apparently have a profound effect on adults, because the researchers seemingly -- and frequently -- just become contradictory, contentious and confused. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) ...

We already knew that a BlackBerry can stop a speeding bullet, but does your phone necessarily have to be "smart" in order to save your life? Juan Camarena found out the hard way, during a recent Harlem shootout. Camarena, a 54-year-old handyman at a Harlem apartment building, recently found himself in an inexplicably heated argument with the disgruntled former super of the building. Camarena, ...

Since it launched three years ago, Ushahidi has played an increasingly crucial role in natural disaster and crisis relief efforts by allowing citizens to report violent incidents as they happen. Whenever the open-source software receives a notification from a user, it uses data collected from text messages, news reports or the Internet to geographically map the incident in real-time. In recent ...

The violent conflict between governmental and rebel forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo may not make the front pages of many Western news outlets, but it has definitely caught the attention of U.S. lawmakers. As the AP reports, a newly passed American law, which was signed into effect in conjunction with Obama's economic overhaul, will now require all gadget manufacturers to disclose ...

Most policemen, social workers and ER medics are subjected to a wide array of lurid sights and stories on a daily basis, simply because their jobs demand it. The same can be said, apparently, for Web content screeners. As more sites have adopted platforms that allow users to create and post their own content, demand for the workers who screen that content has skyrocketed. Although social ...

Texting has made it easy for people to instantly contact each other, and, for teenagers especially, has become the primary means of telecommunication. This convenience, however, has also made it all too easy for disgruntled exes, overprotective boyfriends and psychologically unstable lovers to passively keep track of their significant others. When a relationship hits a patch of turbulence or a ...

The debate surrounding the effect of violent video games on today's youth is a pretty contentious one: some insist that superfluous exposure to violence only encourages similar behavior in hormonally charged teenagers; others argue that a child's behavioral problems have more to do with parenting than what games he or she plays after school. According to a recent study, though, games' effects on ...

Some people take their video games very, very seriously. We thought the kid who hired a hit man after his parents took way his PlayStation was batty, but we've got a new mayor of Crazytown here, and his name is Julien Barreaux. Barreaux had spent the last six months of his life looking for the man that killed his character during a virtual knife fight in the online shooter 'Counter-Strike.' ...