Weird News Thread ....

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BEAVER FALLS, Pa. (AP) - As many as 1,700 spectators and participants are expected to gather this weekend as volleyball buffs play in the buff.

The 105-acre White Thorn Lodge nudist park in South Beaver Township, Beaver County, will host the 33rd annual Volleyball Superbowl on Saturday and Sunday. Nude & Natural magazine once called it "the most unique event in nudism."

Some members of the nudist park admit a few of the spectators who will attend the tournament will do so to take in the sights. But event organizers said the tournament's a seriously competitive event. The competition is divided into six skill levels, from novice to college caliber.

"And people do dive. Even on the asphalt courts," White Thorn spokesman Scott Coatsworth said. "The ones who know how to do it don't even get skinned."

Jeff Poland, of Canton, Ohio, plans to attend the tournament for the fifth consecutive year. He plays volleyball with other - clothed - leagues, but believes nude volleyball games have their benefits, such as friendlier players.

"You don't sweat as much," he said. "You don't get overheated because you don't have clothes keeping the heat in."

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CLUJ, Romania (AP) - Residents of a northwestern village have freed hundreds of sheep they locked in the courtyard of a local community center after the animals nibbled away at their lawns, authorities said Friday.

About 500 sheep belonging to farmer Pavel Stoian, from the neighboring county of Sibiu, were trapped Thursday after they were caught feeding in residential gardens, said Gavril Felecan, the deputy mayor.

The shepherds looking after the flock repeatedly were asked by villagers in Aschileul Mic, 280 miles northwest of Bucharest, to keep the sheep off their property.

Felecan said the residents and Stoian's representative made peace late Thursday, after the sheep owner promised not to let his animals destroy people's lawns and fields.

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OSLO, Norway (AP) - Polar bears on Norway's Arctic Svalbard islands are changing color, at least on the signs that caution residents and visitors alike that the animals are both an attraction and a danger.

The old signs show black bears on a white background, even though most people know that the bears are in fact white.

So when residents of the islands, some 300 miles north of Norway's mainland, pointed out the error to visiting national highway department officials, they took it to heart.

The department's magazine, Vegen og Vi, said the officials immediately started on the paperwork needed to give Svalbard an exemption to standard warning sign colors of black on white and ordered new signs with white bears on a black background.

The new signs will soon be posted along the roughly 25 miles of rough road around Longyearbyen, the main town on the remote island.

Svalbard and the adjacent ice pack sustain a population of 2,000-3,000 bears, which can grow to 440- to 880-pounds.

The bears sometimes wander into settlements or try to break into cabins, so residents and tourists routinely carry high-powered rifles for protection.

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SEATTLE (AP) - A new action figure of a frumpy-looking librarian who moves her index finger to her lips with "amazing push-button shushing action!" is prompting librarians around the world to raise their voices in protest.

"The shushing thing just put me right over the edge," said Diane DuBois, library director of Caribou Public Library in Caribou, Maine. "We're so not like that anymore. It's so stereotypical I could scream."

The 5-inch Librarian Action Figure, which shows a bespectacled woman in a cardigan, long plain skirt and sensible shoes, goes on sale in October for $8.95.

It is produced by Seattle kitsch retailer Archie McPhee and Co., whose lineup of action figures includes Sigmund Freud, Nico the espresso stand barista, and the McPhee action figure that started it all, Jesus Christ.

On Web sites and discussion groups, in phone calls and e-mails, librarians from as far as Australia have made it clear how annoyed they are with the doll and Nancy Pearl, the 58-year-old real-life librarian who posed for the action figure.

One unsigned e-mail accused Pearl of setting the profession back 30 years.

The criticism moved Pearl to stop reading about the figure online.

"It's a little bit disconcerting to read about how dowdy you are on somebody's blog," said Pearl, executive director of the Seattle Public Library's Washington Center for the Book.

Pearl, who knew she wanted to be a librarian from age 10, started "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book," a book-reading project that has caught on in communities across the country. She loves books so much, she offers reading recommendations on her voice mail.


She also wrote the new book "Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason."

Archie McPhee owner Mark Pahlow said that his company admires librarians, and critics of the action figure are missing the point.

He said librarians are heroes for everything from encouraging literacy to raising concerns about a federal anti-terrorism law that lets authorities see what books people are checking out from libraries.

"They are on the front lines," Pahlow said. "They are speaking up for us."

As for the "shushing thing," it is a "playful aspect to get attention," Pahlow said.

Despite the backlash, Pearl said she does not regret posing for the doll: "It's a lovely idea and a lovely tribute to my chosen profession."

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LUDZIDZINI ROYAL VILLAGE, Swaziland (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of bare-breasted young maidens danced in front of King Mswati on Friday -- many hoping to catch his eye and become his next wife.
A record 50,000 young women staged Swaziland's annual "Reed Dance," taking part in a traditional ceremony now seen as an audition to join King Mswati's many wives.

The 35-year-old king, sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch, now has 10 wives and one fiancee -- a royal luxury that has drawn criticism as his small southern African kingdom battles poverty and a raging AIDS epidemic.

Lined up in rows, the maidens danced topless before the king for three hours, undeterred by blustery winds or last year's controversy surrounding Mswati's choice of three teenage reed dancers as his latest queens.

"I am tired of being poor. I want to be a queen. I hope the king sees me," said 17-year-old Nomsa Gama, wearing the traditional dance costume of a small piece of beaded fabric around her waist.

"There have never been this many girls before. They all want to catch the king's eye," Thulani Dlamini, a traditional warrior assigned to chaperone the maidens, told Reuters.

Mswati usually reviews videotapes of dancing girls recorded by the government-owned television station to select new brides, according to palace sources.

Controversy swirled after last year's reed dance, when the mother of one dancer charged that her daughter was later abducted from a schoolyard by palace aides and forced to join the royal household.

The mother brought suit in the High Court seeking the girl's return but eventually dropped the complaint.

The case threw a spotlight on the reed dance as a place where young women might find royal favor, and on Friday tens of thousands showed up with their own Cinderella dreams.

LIMOUSINES AND HOUSES

The dancers paraded around in military-style divisions before lining up shoulder-to-shoulder, swaying, singing songs and raising toy spoons and kitchen knives blunted with oranges on their ends.

Mswati, who came to the throne in 1986, observed the dance from a reviewing platform with his mother, coming down several times to greet the dancers.

Last month the palace announced that Mswati would marry the last of three girls chosen during last year's reed dance -- a move seen as clearing the decks for more selections to be made this year.

While women's rights activists have slammed Mswati's marriage habits as feudalistic and health care workers have raised concerns they send the wrong message about AIDS, the prospect of joining royalty has a strong allure for many young Swazi women.

"I want a limousine, and a house like they give the queens. I want my children to school in England," said 14 year-old Phindile Thwala, one of this year's dancers.

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Omega Pharma said on Tuesday it would become the sole distributor of cannabis in the Netherlands after the country became the world's first to allow doctors to prescribe the drug for medicinal purposes.
Belgium's largest drug and health products distributor said one of its Dutch subsidiaries had won an exclusive three-year contract with the Dutch health ministry to distribute the drug to pharmacies.

"Omega will exclusively distribute Medicinal Cannabis in all pharmacies in the Netherlands as from September 1, 2003," it said in a statement. "The first day already a few hundred orders have been delivered."

The Netherlands is making cannabis available as a prescription drug to treat cancer, HIV and multiple sclerosis.

Ger van Jeveren, who oversees Omega's global drug sales, could not make a precise forecast on how the deal would boost the company's sales.

"We expect it to increase sales but we don't know by how much," he told Reuters. "We will know better by the end of the year."

The ministry estimates up to 7,000 people in the country have used cannabis for medical reasons, purchasing it in special bars known as coffee shops, which are regulated by the government.

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MILWAUKEE (AP) - Chicago Cubs first baseman Randall Simon paid $432 to close a case in which he used his bat to hit a woman dressed as a sausage during a race at a Milwaukee Brewers game.
Simon had been cited for disorderly conduct for his actions during the July 9 game with the Pittsburgh Pirates, for whom Simon then played.

Bond had been set at $432. Simon didn't challenge it and forfeited the money Thursday, ending the case, the court said Friday.

The race features four people dressed as an oversized bratwurst, hot dog and Italian and Polish sausages. They run around the infield warning track between the sixth and seventh innings.

Simon has said he did not deliberately try to knock down the woman. She tumbled to the ground and got a few scrapes.

[the fugative]

Chuck Shepherd: News of The Weird
Chuck Shepherd

Published September 4, 2003

Researchers Steven Potter (Georgia Tech) and Guy Ben-Ary (University of Western Australia, Perth) have created a robotic arm that makes a painter's rudimentary brush strokes at Ben-Ary's lab, directed over the Internet by its "brain" (composed of 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish) in Potter's lab, according to a July report from BBC News. According to Potter, the brain is not yet classically intelligent but does adapt (i.e., experience less chaos) and thus strokes more smoothly over time.

• In August, St. Louis school board member Rochell Moore sent Mayor Francis Slay an open letter, criticizing his school-closing management reforms and advising him that because of his obstinacy, she had placed a curse on him. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Moore's curse was modeled after Deuteronomy 28:21, in which Moses told the Israelites what would happen if they strayed from God, e.g., "The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto Francis Slay . . . " (When a former city comptroller later told reporters he thought Moore had mental problems, Moore allegedly threatened to kill him.)

More things to worry about

• The 2003 valedictorian of Alcee Fortier High School in New Orleans failed (for the fifth time) the state's mandatory exit exam, and she cannot graduate until she passes (August). And workers tearing down reactors at an old nuclear reservation in Hanford, Wash., discovered dozens of radioactive nests of mud dauber wasps (August). The district attorney of Watauga County, N.C., frustrated at the light sentences judges hand down for methamphetamine producers, announced that he will begin to charge defendants instead (via a recent antiterrorism law) with manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon (August).

• New York City's new 16-page antiterrorist preparedness manual, produced by a consortium of 20 government agencies and released in July, contains such advice as: If you encounter radiation, go outside (if you're inside a building) or go inside (if you're outside a building); do not accept packages from strangers; if you find yourself holding a mysterious substance, put it down. Also offered is the familiar advice from a generation ago: If you can't get out of a building, duck under a sturdy table or desk.'

• In March, in Lisbon, Ohio, after William Neville, 30, allegedly tried to get intimate with a woman who had taken out a stay-away order against him, police chased the man out of her home, down the street and through the Lisbon Cemetery, until he got caught in a briar patch.

• The St. Petersburg Times reported in July that Pinellas County (Fla.) judge Richard Luce was being investigated for losing his temper in May and thus becoming unsuited to sentence convicted attempted-murderer Tam Thane Vo. Luce became angry when he surmised that Vo's mother had raised her hand, middle finger extended, to her forehead in reaction to the verdict, but the mother said she was merely having an adverse reaction to her shampoo.

• In Kingsford, Australia, in May, Phyllis Newnham, vying for a larger portion of the estate of her late friend Florence Mather, claimed in court that Mather had made out a subsequent, more generous, superseding will but that one of Mather's dogs ate it (and she produced DNA testing to show that the dog had eaten a mangled document, but it was unclear if that was the will).

Least competent criminals

• At the Amoco station on Route 59 In Spring Valley, N.Y., on June 22, an unidentified man twice jumped on the counter and shouted, demanding that the clerk hand over money, but twice the clerk pushed him off, and the man finally gave up and left. And in August in Delray Beach, Fla., a man tried to carjack Larry Klein, 53, who is disabled, but Klein repeatedly jabbed at the man through an open window with one of his crutches, and the man finally ran away.

• In June, Jacquelyn Allen-MacGregor, 47, a 20-year executive with United Way in East Lansing, Mich., displayed remorse after being sentenced to four years in prison for stealing more than $2 million from the agency to buy show horses; "I do believe that I'm obsessed with horses," MacGregor said. And an independent investigation revealed in August that Oral Suer, the former CEO of United Way of the Washington, D.C., area, had taken $1.5 million in improper payments during his tenure; among the alleged improprieties was that Suer made several annual gifts to United Way in his own name but then collected bogus expenses from the organization to cover the donations.

• Robin Wilkinson, a 19-year prosecutor who resigned after being charged with drunken driving, said her main defense would be that at the time of the traffic stop, police did not tell her that she had the right to an attorney (Orlando, Fla., August).

• Three teenagers with paintball guns terrorized kids on a playground until they fired into the wrong group of kids, one of whom returned fire with a real gun, wounding two paintballers (Pittsburgh). An expert in workplace violence for the Hawaii state government was allegedly roughed up by his supervisor in a policy dispute (Honolulu). The government of India's West Bengal state began distributing copies of the venerable Kama Sutra sex guide to teach prostitutes creative ways to give pleasure to clients without AIDS-risky intercourse.

[Jolie Rouge]

New Theory on Why Mars Is Red

We know this much: The mineral that gives Mars its red hue is iron oxide. It's long been thought that the planet's red color was caused by liquid water rusting Mars' rocks. Well, that may not be correct. New Scientist reports that research from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California points to another explanation: a dusting of tiny meteors falling on the surface of the planet. And this, in turn, has scientists wondering if Mars ever had enough water to be hospitable to life.

Until now scientists thought the iron oxide was formed in a chain of chemical reactions as iron in the rocks dissolved into pools and rivers when Mars was a young planet, notes New Scientist. Once the iron oxidized, it precipitated and rained all over the planet. But NASA's Albert Yen doesn't think this explanation is right. In 1997, Mars Pathfinder revealed that the topsoil on Mars has more iron and magnesium than do the planet's rocks. Yen says that means the minerals had to have originated from small, metal-rich meteors and dust particles that fell onto Mars. All of which means that Mars may not have been as wet as astronomers have long thought because red oxide can form without water.

It is hoped that when NASA's rovers land on Mars in January, they will determine the real reason why the Red Planet is red. The study findings were presented to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's planetary science division in Monterey, California.

[Jolie Rouge]

Turtles Lured to a Disco Death

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science...eut/index.html

LAGANAS, Greece (Reuters) -- Disco lights are luring baby turtles to their deaths on the fringes of a Greek marine park in the Mediterranean Sea.

Environmentalists say that rare loggerhead turtles scramble out at night from eggs in the sand on beaches in the west Greek island of Zakynthos and instinctively head for the brightest horizon -- normally the white foam of waves under the stars.

But neon lights from discos and cafes along the back of the beach at Laganas, built for tourists who also go for boat trips in the bay to try to spot turtles, are often fatally brighter.

"Some turtles crawl up the beach the wrong way and die of dehydration or get eaten by seabirds or dogs," said Anders Kofoed, a Danish volunteer working for the Greek conservation group Archelon. "The park isn't working properly."

About 2,500 delegates will attend the World Parks Congress in the South African port of Durban from September 8 to 17 to review the state of the world's conservation areas which now cover about 12 percent of the planet's land surface.

The congress says its main theme will be "Benefits beyond Boundaries" -- including how best to promote "alliances between protected areas and other sectors, such as tourism, forestry, water supply and perhaps mining."

Spin-offs of tourism, including jobs in remote areas, are often positive. But others -- like roads through African jungles or disco lights in Greece -- can be a threat to the environment underpinning the very rationale for a park.

More and more tourists want to see creatures from quetzal birds in Central America to koalas nibbling eucalyptus leaves in Australia. But the creatures probably don't want to see the humans.

Better than mining

"Tourism is better than mining in the Arctic or logging in the southern hemisphere," said Samantha Smith, director of the Arctic Program at the WWF environmental group.

"The problem is that you rarely get just tourists. When you build roads into the rain forest for tourists, for instance, you also facilitate both legal and illegal logging."

In Mozambique, the coastal resort of Ponta do Ouro just across the South African border is showing strains from ecotourists since the end of Mozambique's civil war in 1992.

Hundreds of divers come every weekend to explore its stunning coral reefs, helped by a paved road to the South African side of the border. But most of the jobs created by the tourists are low paid and menial. "Development here has been going very fast," said the South African manager of one bed and breakfast near the beach.

Stricter guidelines and rules for parks are part of the answer.

WWF's Smith said the Denali National Park in Alaska, home to grizzly bears, wolves and moose, was a good example of rules to minimise disturbances. The park includes North America's highest mountain, Mount McKinley, at 20,320 feet (6,194 meters).

The park, mainly a wilderness most of which is accessible only on foot, has limits for numbers of campers according to zones. And access for cars, buses and snowmobiles is restricted with roads only on the outskirts.

"These zones are a really good solution," Smith said.

In the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard off northern Norway, ecotourism guides get training in how to "Leave No Trace," including picking up cigarette butts.

Whale watching
In recent years, whale watching has exploded into a billion dollar business worldwide, from New Zealand to Norway, often with little regulation.

Like loggerhead turtles in Greece, whales are often harassed by boats cramming close to let tourists get the best photographs. Experts say that trips with a guide who knows about the animals cost more but are usually worth the extra cash.

"You have to be careful, you must approach whales not too fast from the side," says Erwin Fulterer, managing director of Whale Safari in Andenes, northern Norway. He expects a record 16,000 visitors this season to watch sperm whales.

The British-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society urges respect for the mammals in its guidelines for watchers.

"Imagine how you would feel if a coach-load of tourists descended on your living room and expected to photograph your family having Sunday lunch," it says.

[Jolie Rouge]

'Bodies in barrels' killers jailed
Monday, September 8, 2003 Posted: 3:40 AM EDT

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapc...ers/index.html

ADELAIDE, Australia -- Two men have been sentenced to life imprisonment for Australia's worst serial killings, known as the Snowtown 'bodies-in-the-barrels' murders.

A South Australian Supreme Court jury found the two men, John Justin Bunting and Robert Joe Wagner guilty of multiple counts of murder on Monday.

Bunting, 37, was convicted of 11 murders while the co-accused Wagner, 31, was found guilty of seven murders. Wagner had pleaded guilty to three counts of murder before the trial began last October.

Bunting was charged with 12 murders and Wagner eight, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on one of the murder counts, Australian media reported. Another man, James Spyridon Vlassakis pleaded guilty on four counts and was sentenced to life in prison for each case in June, 2001. A fourth man charged over the murders, Mark Ray Haydon, will be tried later.

The tiny rural wheatbelt town of Snowtown, about 150 kilometers north of Adelaide, became the focus of international media attention when a police missing persons investigation found the bodies of eight victims inside plastic barrels in a disused bank vault. Two other bodies were found buried in an Adelaide backyard, and another two bodies were found elsewhere.

In an earlier pre-trial hearing, prosecutors said the victims had been either friends or relatives of the defendants

During the trial, which lasted over 11 months, jurors heard how Bunting and Wagner killed for pleasure, the Australian Associated Press reported.

Jurors were told the pair had a incessant hatred of pedophiles and homosexuals and would torture their victims. Toes were crushed with pliers, electric shocks were inflicted and sparklers were inserted into one victim's penis and lit, AAP reported. One victim was completely dismembered and almost entirely de-fleshed, the court heard. The flesh of another victim was presented to Bunting as a surprise gift from Wagner.

The murders were the worst serial killings in Australian history.

The previous worst were the so-called backpacker murders in which seven people died in New South Wales between 1989 and 1992.

Ivan Milat was convicted for those murders and is serving seven life sentences.