World in brief

Annals of the Internet
How to briefly sum up the Internet over the last few days? Let’s see: much of the Internet went dark on Wednesday to protest SOPA and PIPA, proposed American bills to combat online piracy and infringement, to the detriment of people doing homework. Millions participated to highlight the risk of censorship, leading legislators to suspend action on the bills on Friday. That same day, four men were arrested in connection to charges that online file storage giant Megaupload.com is a huge money launderer responsible for criminal copyright infringement. Hactivists responded by hacking the U.S. justice department’s website. Meanwhile, Kim Dotcom, the quirky, porky German multimillionaire and co-founder of Megaupload, was arrested in a raid at his Auckland mansion on Friday, brandishing a sawed-off shotgun in a safe room.

You’ll need to Google your desserts to find them
Fortune has named Google as the Best Place to Work for a record third time in a row. Co-founder and CEO Larry Page sat down with the magazine to share his management ethos: “It’s important that the company be a family, that people feel that they’re part of the company.” Google has long been famous for offering employees perks like free food and massages, but Page showed he wasn’t afraid to be the disciplinarian of his high-tech family by keeping sweet things out of reach. “We started putting the desserts around a wall, just around the corner, to keep minions healthy,” he told reporter Adam Lashinsky in a Q&A. Just guessing, Larry – if your pampered, genius employees crave something sweet, they will likely track it down, regardless of where you stash the cheesecake.

Saddam once again the Butt of jokes
Because apparently there’s a market for this sort of thing, Trebletap is a company that transforms war memorabilia into works of art. But director Jim Thorpe may be in a spot of trouble over a particular piece of ass. He was arrested on suspicion of illegally holding onto a prime piece of a statue of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It was taken down in central Baghdad at the end of his reign in 2003, and company founder Nigel Ely used a sledgehammer and chisel to snag a two-foot piece of Hussein’s bronze buttock. Ely brought it to the U.K., intending to sell it at auction for charity. The Iraqi government complained to British officials last week, and Thorpe was questioned under a UN order that forces anyone holding on to Iraqi cultural property to hand it over to the police.

A nail to the head ain’t nothing to fuck with
Dante Autullo didn’t notice he had shot a 8.25 cm nail in his skull in his suburban Chicago workshop on Tuesday, but he did feel nauseous the next day. It was only when his fiancee Gail Glaenzer persuaded him to go to the hospital that doctors discovered that a nail gun had indeed fired into his head, missing the area of the brain that controls motor function by millimetres. The 34-year-old’s sense of humour remains totally intact: Glaenzer told the Associated Press that Dante was in good spirits after a two-hour surgery to remove the nail, asking her to “get the TV cameras” because “I’m one of those medical miracles.”

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