KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia—Police say a Malaysian man has been stabbed to death by customers at a karaoke bar for singing too much and refusing to share the microphone.

A district police official says witnesses saw a group of men punch and stab 23-year-old Abdul Sani Doli with a knife at the bar late Wednesday in eastern Sandakan town on Borneo island.

The official says a brawl broke out because the men were furious that Abdul Sani was hogging the stage. He says police detained two suspects after Abdul Sani was found dead outside the bar.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity Friday because he was not authorized to make public statements

In short no, but there is one chemical that makes you feel so good you can’t help but tell the truth, which I thought was interesting since most depressed people or people with child trauma lie a lot. So I guess if you feel good you tell the truth and if you have issues then you lie. Interesting. So here is the details on the chemical used for Truth Sirum.

What does the term “truth serum” mean?
That’s a term that was used to describe the use of certain drugs, most commonly barbiturates like sodium amytal and sodium pentothal, to try to extract truthful statements from people about their past experiences.  What the term really meant was that the people who used the serum believed that it made people unable to censor themselves and they would just empty their memories into a narrative statement.

Who discovered these effects?
In the mid-1910s, Dr. Robert House was an obstetrician who noticed that the popular obstetric anesthetic drug, scopolamine, also known as twilight sleep, would put his patients into a state where they would deliver information in a way that seemed automatic.

He didn’t want to use it in interrogation, for the purpose of getting people to admit to criminal acts, so this is a quite different beginning from the association we have now. At the time, he wanted to use it to provide support for claims people made about their innocence — not their guilt.  If somebody said ‘I wasn’t at the crime, I was in the library but nobody saw me,’ then, perhaps, this would give support for the claim, because you would think they could not lie under the drug’s influence.

It was only later when other people used these drugs that they got the reputation for having the power to force people to provide information against their will.

How did they begin to be used for interrogation?
In the 1930s, there were these committees to evaluate corruption in American policing, and it first came out that police were using these drugs in interrogations to get suspects to incriminate themselves. But there’s not a lot of documentation of that.

During World War II, these drugs were used in a very different way. They were the first intravenous anesthetics and were used to treat traumatized soldiers who had lost their memories or had aphasia [loss of the ability to speak or process language due to brain injury]. Doctors found that using these drugs would make it easier for people to say what happened, and this helped them feel better.

As a result, a lot of doctors who had been in the military during the war were familiar with these drugs. Sodium amytal and pentothal were no longer just used as surgical anesthetics, although that was their most common use, but they were sometimes used for this psychiatric purpose of getting people to talk.  In most cases, the drugs were not used in interrogations, but to help people talk about their memories in psychiatric consultations.  However, some of these military doctors eventually became consultants for police forces or they did psychiatric research for the government and began exploring different ways of using these drugs for interrogation.

Do experts believe they really work?
The idea of a “truth serum” has never been widely accepted. Although there have been waves of enthusiasm for the idea of a drug that can extract information reliably, there has been even more skepticism. Ever since the 1920s, many judges, psychiatrists, and scientists have rejected the idea that there is a drug that can get memories out intact. They have claimed, instead, that it makes people feel like talking, but it also puts them in a state of extreme suggestibility: people will pick up on cues about what questioners want to hear and repeat that back. This is one of the reasons that statements made under the influence of these drugs have never, as far as I know, been accepted in an American court.

After 9/11, there were discussions in the national papers about whether it’s a good idea to interrogate suspects using these drugs. Every time there is a desperate need for information from people, you get speculation about whether these drugs are going to get that information. But you also get consistent warnings that the information may be less reliable than what you would get without the drugs. That skepticism was there right form the start 80 years ago.

BANGKOK, Thailand – Anti-government demonstrators in Thailand declared victory Tuesday and said they will end their occupation of the country’s two main airports after a court decision forced the country’s prime minister from office.

While an estimated 300,000 travelers stranded by last week’s airport takeovers breathed a bit easier, the question of who will hold power in a democratic Thailand remained unanswered.

The protesters — who seek to eliminate the one-person, one-vote system — left open the possibility of more unrest saying they will return to the streets if political change does not occur. At least six people have been killed and scores injured in clashes in recent months.

Also unclear was the extent of damage the weeklong airport blockade inflicted on the country’s economy, which relies heavily on tourism.

But none of that seemed to matter Tuesday as members of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, which led the protest, reveled at the fall of Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat.

“We will party all night long before leaving tomorrow,” said Saisuri Pantupradij, a 45-year-old woman who camped out at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi international airport. “It’s sad to say goodbye, but our job here is done. So we must go home.”

She and four other women, all wearing yellow feather boas, were dancing and singing karaoke to a Thai folk song in the main hall of the airport terminal.

Around them, thousands celebrated, waving Thailand’s red white and blue flag, and cheering their nation, their king and themselves.

Still, the protest alliance, which crippled the country’s administration by occupying the offices of the prime minister three months ago and saw the courts sack two prime ministers it campaigned against, vowed to resume its militant actions if future developments displeased them.

The group is seeking to purge the nation of the influence of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whom they accuse of massive corruption and seeking to undermine the country’s revered constitutional monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej. He was ousted by a September 2006 military coup.

On Tuesday, the country’s Constitutional Court found Somchai’s People’s Power Party, the Machima Thipatai party and the Chart Thai party guilty of committing fraud in the December 2007 elections that brought the coalition to power.

“Dishonest political parties undermine Thailand’s democratic system,” said Constitutional Court President Chat Chalavorn.

The ruling sent Somchai, Thaksin’s brother-in-law, and 59 executives of the three parties into political exile and barred them from politics for five years. Of the 59, 24 are lawmakers who will have to abandon their parliamentary seats.

“It is not a problem. I was not working for myself. Now I will be a full-time citizen,” Somchai told reporters following the ruling.

The current coalition will remain in power. But Deputy Prime Minister Chaowarat Chandeerakul will become the caretaker prime minister, said Suparak Nakboonnam, a government spokeswoman. She said Parliament will have to pick a new prime minister within 30 days.

Somchai had become increasingly isolated in recent weeks. Neither the army, a key player in Thai politics, nor King Bhumibol offered firm backing. Palace circles have not hidden their enmity toward Thaksin and his allies, rattling a decades old consensus of absolute respect for the monarchy.

But lawmakers of the three dissolved parties who escaped the ban can join other parties, try to cobble together a new coalition and then choose a new prime minister. If their fragile unity fails, new elections are the likeliest outcome — with the chance that Thaksin’s allies would again triumph, setting off a whole new cycle of protests.

The alliance, often referred to by its acronym PAD, claims Thailand’s rural majority — who gave landslide election victories to the Thaksin camp — is too poorly educated to responsibly choose their representatives and says they are susceptible to vote buying.

It wants the country to abandon the system of one-man, one-vote, and instead have a mixed system in which most representatives are chosen by profession and social group. They have not explained exactly how such a system would work or what would make it less susceptible to manipulation.

“We’ve finished our job for now,” top protest leader Sondhi Limthongkul told reporters. “But if Thaksin’s puppets return, we will come back.”

The alliance’s rivals, government supporters who adore Thaksin for the generous social welfare policies his government implemented for the poor and rural majority when he was in power in 2001-2006, were angry, though uncertain what to do.

“People aren’t going to just sit and watch another elected government toppled. The court’s decision was wrong and we should question that,” said Pracha Niemjaroen, an electronics technician discussing politics with his friends at an open-air restaurant in the northern city of Chiang Mai.

Some of Somchai’s political allies were less diffident. Chaturon Chaisaeng, a former Thaksin Cabinet member, noted that the protest alliance had previously called for a non-elected government, and suggested that if they pressed for that, there could be civil war.

“Why do we still condone the PAD, who are waging terrorist attacks against government buildings and the democratic system?” he said. “Do all Thai people have to bow to the PAD’s orders and demands?”

Travelers were the only clear immediate beneficiaries of Tuesday’s developments, and even for them relief may not be so quick. Thai authorities have been running flights in and out of a naval air base at U-Tapao east of Bangkok, but its limited facilities left many travelers looking more like refugees than tourists.

Vudhibhandhu Vichairatana, the chairman of the Airports of Thailand, said Suvarnabhumi international airport will resume operations Friday. He called the plan a birthday gift for King Bhumibol, who turns 81 on Dec. 5. The airport reopened to cargo flights Tuesday.

Hardships related to the severing of air links with Thailand’s capital have rippled through the country and the region. The government’s finance minister lowered the country’s GDP growth forecast from 4.5 percent to about 2 percent amid the turmoil earlier this week and the country’s Tourism Council predicted that up to 1 million workers could lose their jobs if foreign visitor numbers plunge by half next year as it now expects.

The orchid industry said it was losing $1 million a day and thousands of families who raise orchids face losing their livelihoods as exporters throw away thousands of the exotic blossoms that symbolize the country’s famed hospitality and beauty.

But travelers Jennifer Cooper, 37 and Peter Cooper, 45, from Melbourne, Australia, who were trapped for days at the airport took it all in stride.

“It was a free-for-all. People were behind the counters playing with the computers. They were everywhere, back in the duty-free area. Who knows what they did?” Peter said.

“We love Thailand,” said Jennifer.

“But when we come back we’ll have contingency plans for escaping,” she added, with a laugh.

Tis the season!

A Pasadena man pleaded not guilty Monday to accusations that he tried to run down six people with his car outside of a Newport Beach bar on Labor Day after women in the group rejected his advances.

Bryan Curiel, 23, is charged with six counts of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and several counts related to driving drunk the night of Aug. 31 when prosecutors said he sped between 50 and 65 mph in the Newport Beach Pier parking lot — trying to hit six people.

According to prosecutors, Curiel and a friend were drinking at a Newport Beach bar near the pier and then went to a nearby doughnut shop. There, Curiel hit on three women who rejected him. He persisted, even as the women met three more people, two men and a woman, outside of the shop, officials said. Curiel eventually left.

About 10 minutes later and intoxicated, officials said, Curiel saw the group in the pier parking lot and charged at them in his car, hitting one of the men in the foot. Curiel drove onto the sidewalk and slammed to a stop after hitting concrete benches, police said.

Curiel remains in custody in lieu of $1 million bail and is scheduled for a pre-trial hearing Dec. 12.

For centuries, people have recognized the power of luck and have done whatever they could to try seizing it. Take knocking on wood, thought to date back to pagan rituals aimed at eliciting help from powerful tree gods. We still do it today, though few, if any, of us worship tree gods. So why do we pass this and other superstitions down from generation to generation? The answer lies in the power of luck.

Live a Charmed Life
To investigate scientifically why some people are consistently lucky and others aren’t, I advertised in national periodicals for volunteers of both varieties. Four hundred men and women from all walks of life — ages 18 to 84 — responded.

Over a ten-year period, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, personality questionnaires and IQ tests, and invited them to my laboratory for experiments. Lucky people, I found, get that way via some basic principles — seizing chance opportunities; creating self-fulfilling prophecies through positive expectations; and adopting a resilient attitude that turns bad luck around.

Open Your Mind
Consider chance opportunities: Lucky people regularly have them; unlucky people don’t. To determine why, I gave lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to tell me how many photos were inside. On average, unlucky people spent about two minutes on this exercise; lucky people spent seconds. Why? Because on the paper’s second page — in big type — was the message “Stop counting: There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Lucky people tended to spot the message. Unlucky ones didn’t. I put a second one halfway through the paper: “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” Again, the unlucky people missed it.

The lesson: Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they’re too busy looking for something else. Lucky people see what is there rather than just what they’re looking for.

This is only part of the story. Many of my lucky participants tried hard to add variety to their lives. Before making important decisions, one altered his route to work. Another described a way of meeting people. He noticed that at parties he usually talked to the same type of person. To change this, he thought of a color and then spoke only to guests wearing that color — women in red, say, or men in black.

Does this technique work? Well, imagine living in the center of an apple orchard. Each day you must collect a basket of apples. At first, it won’t matter where you look. The entire orchard will have apples. Gradually, it becomes harder to find apples in places you’ve visited before. If you go to new parts of the orchard each time, the odds of finding apples will increase dramatically. It is exactly the same with luck.

Relish the Upside
Another important principle revolved around the way in which lucky and unlucky people deal with misfortune. Imagine representing your country in the Olympics. You compete, do well, and win a bronze medal. Now imagine a second Olympics. This time you do even better and win a silver medal. How happy do you think you’d feel? Most of us think we’d be happier after winning the silver medal.

But research suggests athletes who win bronze medals are actually happier. This is because silver medalists think that if they’d performed slightly better, they might have won a gold medal. In contrast, bronze medalists focus on how if they’d performed slightly worse, they wouldn’t have won anything. Psychologists call this ability to imagine what might have happened, rather than what actually happened, “counter-factual” thinking.

To find out if lucky people use counter-factual thinking to ease the impact of misfortune, I asked my subjects to imagine being in a bank. Suddenly, an armed robber enters and fires a shot that hits them in the arms. Unlucky people tended to say this would be their bad luck to be in the bank during the robbery. Lucky people said it could have been worse: “You could have been shot in the head.” This kind of thinking makes people feel better about themselves, keeps expectations high, and increases the likelihood of continuing to live a lucky life.

Learn to Be Lucky
Finally, I created a series of experiments examining whether thought and behavior can enhance good fortune.

First came one-on-one meetings, during which participants completed questionnaires that measured their luck and their satisfaction with six key areas of their lives. I then outlined the main principles of luck, and described techniques designed to help participants react like lucky people. For instance, they were taught how to be more open to opportunities around them, how to break routines, and how to deal with bad luck by imagining things being worse. They were asked to carry out specific exercises for a month and then report back to me.

The results were dramatic: 80 percent were happier and more satisfied with their lives — and luckier. One unlucky subject said that after adjusting her attitude — expecting good fortune, not dwelling on the negative — her bad luck had vanished. One day, she went shopping and found a dress she liked. But she didn’t buy it, and when she returned to the store in a week, it was gone. Instead of slinking away disappointed, she looked around and found a better dress — for less. Events like this made her a much happier person.

Her experience shows how thoughts and behavior affect the good and bad fortune we encounter. It proves that the most elusive of holy grails — an effective way of taking advantage of the power of luck — is available to us all.

With Tibetan exiles now considering whether to push for independence, China on Tuesday reaffirmed its hard-line stance on the future of the Himalayan region, saying that any move to separate Tibet from China was ‘doomed.’

The comments from Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang came as more than 500 Tibetan exile leaders in India held all-day closed door discussions Tuesday as part of a weeklong meeting, the first major re-evaluation of their strategy since the Dalai Lama in 1988 outlined his Nobel Peace Prize-winning ‘middle way,’ which pushes for autonomy but not outright independence for the Himalayan region.

The meeting in the northern India hill town of Dharmsala, the base of Tibet’s self-proclaimed government-in-exile, was called by the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. It comes after he expressed frustration over years of fruitless talks with China and follows this spring’s uprising by Tibetans across western China that was aggressively put down by Beijing.

‘Any attempt to separate Tibet from Chinese territory will be doomed. The so-called Tibet government in exile is not recognized by any government in the world,’ Qin told a news conference Tuesday.

Similar statements in the past from China have led the exiled leaders to question their own methods.

‘The middle way approach has failed, it has not produced any results,’ said Karma Chophel, speaker of the exile Parliament. ‘In that light, the Tibetan public should come out with an opinion about what to do.’

China insists Tibet has been part of its territory for 700 years, although many Tibetans say they were effectively independent for most of that time. Chinese forces invaded shortly after the 1949 communist revolution and the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 amid an unsuccessful uprising.

Large numbers of Tibetans remain fervently Buddhist and loyal to the Dalai Lama. If the exiles choose a more confrontational approach, Tibetans living under Chinese rule would bear the brunt of any government response.

Much of the debate is expected to boil down to two main choices: whether to continue pursuing the politics of compromise or to begin a long-shot independence movement _ a move almost certain to end talks held intermittently with Beijing since 2002.

Some factions are urging more protests, angrier protests, or more pressure on Western nations, with one very small group even pushing for sabotage of China’s infrastructure.

Samdhong Rinpoche, the exile prime minister, told the meeting Monday there would be an ‘open and frank discussion.’ He said the meeting may not lead to a new approach, and that any new path needs to have ‘the clear mandate of the people.’

The Dalai Lama was not expected to attend; he said he did not want to tilt the debate.

Any deviation from current policies was almost certain to scuttle the tenuous ties with Beijing, which has long accused the Dalai Lama of fomenting an independence movement.

Analysts said a strong anti-Beijing sentiment could play into China’s hands.

‘It seems to be a possible Chinese strategy to make the radical section much stronger,’ said Robbie Barnett, an expert on Tibet at Columbia University. ‘It would mean no contacts with China and make contacts with the international community very difficult.’

That would be fine with some delegates.

‘We can’t live with China,’ said Lobsang Phelgye, 55, who came to Dharmsala from the exile community in Nepal.

The Dalai Lama’s envoys to the recent talks with Beijing said in a statement Sunday that they had presented China with a detailed plan on how Tibetans could meet their autonomy needs within the framework of China’s constitution.

The plan calls for the protection for the Tibetan language and culture, restrictions on non-Tibetans moving into Tibet and the rights of Tibetans to create an autonomous government.

But China apparently rejected the plan. Chinese officials said no progress was made in the talks two weeks ago, calling the Tibetan stance ‘a trick’ and saying it lacked sincerity.

Tibetan envoy Lodi Gyari said the Chinese failed to respond to ‘our sincere and genuine attempts.’

China has dismissed this week’s meeting as meaningless, saying the participants do not represent the views of most Tibetans.

Chophel, the parliament speaker, said more than 8,000 of 17,000 Tibetans recently surveyed in Tibet said they would follow any decision by the Dalai Lama. More than 5,000 said they wanted Tibetan independence