mystery platform called PowaTag that will allow people to buy things by simply taking a photo of them with your phone."
is due for release at the end of October.

Using PowaTag will sidestep middlemen retailer sites and allow manufacturers to make direct sales. “Normally I’d look at that book and go to Amazon and buy it and they’d get 30% of the retail price,” said Wagner. “It’s a game-changer for manufacturers.”

In other words, PowaTag will be eating Amazon’s lunch, as well as that of any number of low-price online retailers. All manufacturers will have to do, it would seem, is lower their prices to match that competition.

George Zimmerman, the former Neighborhood Watch volunteer acquitted of murder in the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has been detained as authorities investigate a domestic incident in Lake Mary, police confirmed.

Police are investigating a "possible domestic battery" involving Zimmerman on Sprucewood Road, Lake Mary police Officer Zach Hudson said this afternoon. The police spokesman said it was his understanding that a gun was involved.

Hudson said the investigation is in its early stages, and it was unclear whether Zimmerman or anyone would be arrested. No significant injuries were suffered in the incident, Hudson said.

Fifteen people in three states now have been warned that they may have been exposed to a rare and fatal brain disease through potentially contaminated surgical equipment, health officials said Friday.

In addition to eight patients in New Hampshire, five in Massachusetts and two in Connecticut have received the news that they may have shared tainted equipment with a patient who died from apparent Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, an invariably fatal brain disorder, those states confirmed.

Modern Syria is built layer-upon-layer over the ruins of these empires. Many—the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Crusaders, and Ottomans—are still widely known, while others are remembered only by historians and archaeologists. The cities they built still stand and are of World Heritage or Tentative World Heritage status.

The Ancient City of Aleppo, for example, is said to have been named by Abraham, father of the Jewish people, when he grazed his flock upon the hill. Dating back at least 7,000 years, it lays claim to be the oldest continuously occupied city in the world.
Damascus, which vies for the title, is where Saul had his Damascene conversion after seeing the light of God and was taken to the House of Ananias in the Christian New Testament, a building that still stands and in which religious services are still held.

Maaoula is one of the last places in the world where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken.
The Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus reputedly contains the head of the Prophet John the Baptist, revered by both Christians and Muslims.
It is in Syria that some of the first mosques are found, containing tombs of the Prophet Mohammed’s family and companions, among the holiest places of Islam. Salah El-Din (Saladin), famous in England as the enemy of King Richard the Lionheart, is buried in Damascus. Crusader castles such as the Crac des Chevaliers litter rocky promontories, looking out over valleys which have been farmed for millennia.

Syria is a home of our stories, of our faiths, and of aspects of culture by which we define our civilization.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re on the Do Not Call List,” Lois Greisman, associate director of marketing practices at the Federal Trade Commission, which investigates and takes action against illegal robocallers, tells the Wall Street Journal. “A lot of them are fraudulent calls and people who engage in fraud are not going to abide by the Do Not Call registry.”

If you receive one of these automated calls, especially one from a company you’ve never heard of or never done business with, you’re often presented with two options: press “1? to speak to a customer service rep (though the people on the phone are usually doing you a disservice), or press “2? to be removed from the caller’s list of customers.

Pressing “2? may work, but more than likely it does nothing more than end the call; and you’ll probably continue receiving calls. In some cases, it may actually put you on additional scam-bait lists, because the caller at least knows that it reached an active line owned by someone willing to pick up when an unfamiliar number calls.

Some exasperated readers have told us they pressed “1? because they knew they could at least then yell at a real person. Problem is, the simple act of pressing that “1? puts you on a so-called “hot” list of consumers. This list will be sold and resold and resold and you will now continue to get calls from additional scammers.