Yesterday, we published an item based on a former Newt Gingrich staffer’s claim that Gingrich assembled his 1.3 million Twitter followers—a number that he’s taken to bragging about—in part by buying fake Twitter followers. A lot of people did not think that was true! But today social networking search firm PeekYou announced that it had crunched the data and come to the conclusion that roughly 106,055 of Gingrich’s million-plus followers are real people. The rest are fakes.

Our source yesterday told us that about “80 percent of [Newt's followers] are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various ‘follow agencies’” paid by his campaign. That made sense to us largely because Gingrich’s 1.3 million followers seems oddly inflated compared to, say, Sarah Palin’s 600,000. But many folks quickly, and quite reasonably, pointed out that Gingrich was one of the first GOP politicians to be listed on Twitter’s suggested user list—a perch that guarantees a torrent of Twitter followers and is as likely an explanation as any for Gingrich’s high follower count. Of course, that doesn’t disprove the claim that he buys fake followers—both can be true. The only historical data we could find on Gingrich’s followers goes back a year, and—except for a small bump that coincides with the launch of his campaign—he’s held pretty steady over that time, so we don’t know whether there are any suspicious spikes in followers prior to that or whether they all came rushing when he was added as a suggested user in 2009. Short of direct evidence of follower-buying, there’s not much more we can do to corroborate our source’s claims aside from actually pore over all those 1.3 million followers looking for fakes.

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If Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was acting “irate” during a recent visit to Nashville International Airport, it certainly hid it very well.

After being briefly detained by police officers on Monday, Paul appears to be getting some vindication in the form of a security camera’s video. Although police described him as “being irate” in an incident report, footage published Thursday shows Paul sitting calmly inside an airport checkpoint, and occasionally picking up his phone.

Paul reportedly set off an alarm on an x-ray machine designed to peer under fliers’ clothing, then refused the more aggressive search. He was briefly detained by local police before being released and re-booking his flight.

Paul has been a longtime critic of the TSA’s invasive search procedures. He told a Senate committee in June, 2011 that the TSA has “gone overboard” with “invasive searches on 6-year-old girls.”

At the time, a TSA spokesman told Raw Story that Paul was not detained, but merely “denied access to the secure gate area.” Paul returned a short time later and flew back to Washington, D.C. without incident. He’s since called for an investigation.

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It’s like the worst Terminator-inspired nightmare come to life: A robot baby with no skin, that moves and sounds just like a real child.

Created by special effects master Chris Clarke, who’s worked on films such as Alien vs. Predator, Resident Evil and even the recent Steven Spielberg epic War Horse, the freakish robo-baby was designed for a soap opera.

To see what one of Clarke’s complete robo-babies looks like, check out this video from a 2008 ad campaign.

An Oklahoma lawmaker is convinced that some food coming into his state contains portions of human fetuses.

According to the KGMG talk radio, state Sen. Ralph Shortey (R) has filed a bill that bans foods or products using aborted human fetuses.

“There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors,” he said.

Shortey said the decision to file was based on his own research. However, he didn’t provide any examples of food companies engaging in the practice.

“I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma,” Shortey said. “It may be, it may not be. What I am saying is that if it does happen then we are not going to allow it to manufacture here.”

Food makers have denied any of Shortey’s claims, with some viewing his bill as a backdoor way of banning stem cell research. Shortey, who supports banning stem cell research in the state, said his bill is not about that.

In recent days, the fact that Mitt Romney has millions of dollars parked down in the Cayman Islands has made headlines all over the world. But when it comes to offshore banking, what Mitt Romney is doing is small potatoes. The truth is that the global elite are hiding an almost unbelievable amount of money in offshore banks. According to shocking research done by the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banks. And that figure does not even count any money being held in Switzerland. That is a staggering amount of money. Keep in mind that U.S. GDP in 2010 was only 14.58 trillion dollars. So why do the global elite go to such trouble to hide their money in offshore banks? Well, there are two main reasons. One is privacy and the other is low taxation. Privacy is a big issue for those that are involved in illegal enterprises such as drug running, but the biggest reason why people move money into offshore banks is in order to avoid taxes. Some set up bank accounts in foreign nations because they want to legally minimize their taxes and others set up bank accounts in foreign nations because they want to illegally avoid taxes. You would be absolutely amazed at what some large corporations and wealthy individuals do to get out of paying taxes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the rest of us don’t have the resources or the knowledge to play these games, so we get taxed into oblivion.

So why do they call it “offshore banking”?

Well, the term originally developed because the banks on the Channel Islands were “offshore” from the United Kingdom. Most “offshore banks” are still located on islands today. The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the Isle of Man are examples of this. Other “offshore banking centers” such as Monaco are actually not “offshore” at all, but the term applies to them anyway.

Traditionally, these offshore banking centers have been very attractive to both criminals and to the global elite because they would not tell anyone (including governments) about the money that anyone had parked there.

These days some governments (particularly the U.S. government) are trying to change this, but we certainly will not see the end of offshore banking any time soon.

The amount of money that goes through these offshore banks is absolutely astounding.

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In the wake of the federal takedown of Megaupload, hacker collective Anonymous has been on a retaliatory spree.

Yesterday, they managed to divert all traffic away from CBS.com, following their takedowns of government sites and Universal Music Group last week.

And according to a video posted this morning on a seemingly Anonymous-affiliated YouTube account, Facebook is their next target. The video encourages people to download a linked program that they can use to attack Facebook.

This isn’t the first time they’ve threatened Facebook, but if this video’s authentic, it means the threat could be acted upon soon. Other sites they’ve mentioned as targets in the past include the United Nations, Xbox Live, U.S. Bank, Twitter, and YouTube.

In a rampage following the U.S. government’s takedown of file-sharing site MegaUpload, the hacktivist group Anonymous not only knocked the CBS.com website offline on Sunday, but deleted all its files.

As described by Gizmodo, “The CBS takedown wasn’t your regular DDoS attack because if you went to CBS.com at the time Anon attacked it, there was nothing except an index page with a single file. That’s it. Basically, Anonymous gained access to CBS.com and deleted EVERYTHING.”

This followed a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, during which Anonymous took credit for bringing down the websites of the Department of Justice, Universal Music, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The CBS site was soon restoried, but other targets on Sunday included Universal Music (for a second time), the French media company Vivendi, and a number of Brazilian sites.

Meanwhile, sites in European nations were being attacked by Anonymous over their support for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a treaty widely described as similar to but potentially worse than the Stop Online Piracy Act, which provoked a dramatic protest blackout earlier this week. The websites of Poland’s parliament and prime minister were among those affected, and the Anonymous Facebook page on Sunday also featured defacements of sites in Romania.

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Ron Paul isn’t taking his Senator son’s run-in with the Transportation Security Administration lightly.

He issued a terse statement today:

“The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors, and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe.

“That is why my ‘Plan to Restore America,’ in additional to cutting $1 trillion dollars in federal spending in one year, eliminates the TSA.

“We must restore the freedom and respect for liberty that once made American the greatest nation in human history. I am deeply committed to doing that as President of the United States.”

It’s pretty certain this incident and the procedures of the TSA are going to be a topic of Paul’s presidential campaign.