Weird News Thread ....

[Jolie Rouge]

Expedition sets out to trap Norwegian 'sea monster'
Selma witnesses say the serpent has black eyes and a head like a horse

http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/08/07...ter/index.html

SELJORD, Norway -- Last year scientists recorded what the Oceanographic Institute of Bergen called "an unknown sound of a mammal." This year they're back, trying to catch a mythical monster they have named "Selma."

For the third time the expedition team GUST 2000 is searching for the creature in the Seljordsvatnet, near Seljord, a town whose coat of arms features a sea serpent.

They have returned with sonar and a specially designed serpent-trap. The trap is a labyrinth net, designed to catch a sea serpent baby.
In addition to the team with a trap and sonar, a second team is being placed up in the mountains in case Selma decides to make a sudden appearance on the surface.

In addition, a third team is diving, shooting underwater pictures and searching the bottom.

GUST 2000 members are also interviewing locals to get a picture of what Selma might look like should she appear. The common view seems to be that she has big black eyes, a head like a horse without ears, is black all over, and has a considerably thicker middle region that includes flippers. Locals suggest her length is between 3 and 12 meters (10 and 40 feet).

The serpent has been part of local folklore since the first "documented" sighting in 1750. There are some villagers who don't believe in Selma, but plenty of locals do think there is something in the lake.

Whether Selma is a monster eel, a sea serpent or just a flow of dark water, Jan Sundberg and his team believe that Selma exists in some form, and that she might be living with others of her kind.

"We're trying to catch a little baby, because we think there is a whole family here. It's a long shot, but we're trying," Sundberg said.

If they do manage to catch her, then a team of two biologists will come and take samples and her DNA.

Somehow one thinks that life will never be the same for this little Norwegian village if Selma turns out to be a reality. And if they can't find her, true believers will be no doubt be unfazed.

"Of course there's something in the lake," says one local resident. "It's something, but I don't know what. I've seen it myself."

Reuters contributed to this report.

[Jolie Rouge]

Argument Erupts Over Sex Tourism During Olympics

ATHENS (Reuters) - A row over sex tourism has erupted in Athens, with the powerful Church accusing the city council of planning to license extra brothels to meet increased demand during next year's Olympics.

Athens hit back at the Greek Orthodox Church Tuesday and said it was merely planning to tighten up the laws regulating prostitution ahead of the games, when hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected to flock to the city.

"The city council is not increasing the number of brothels," the council said in a statement.

Previous Olympic hosts such as Atlanta in 1996 saw a boom in the sex industry during the games with strip clubs and red light districts packed with visitors.


Prostitution and brothels are legal in Greece and prostitutes undergo regular health checks and pay social security. There are dozens of licensed brothels in the capital.



07/02/03 08:12

[Jolie Rouge]

Baby Girl Born With 4 Legs and 3 Hands

A baby girl has been born in Zambia with four legs, three hands, three kidneys, and an abnormal liver, reports Reuters. University Teaching Hospital pediatric consultant surgeon Lupando Munkonge said the as-yet unnamed baby is in stable condition and her mother is in good health.

The prognosis for babies who are born with such deformities--especially in impoverished countries like Zambia--is not good. But doctors are hopeful the little girl will survive. Munkonge said surgeons will first remove the extra legs and hands. Later, when the baby has recovered from that operation, doctors will remove her extra kidney.

He told reporters that the deformities were the result of incomplete growth of another fetus and a multiplication of cells that would normally have resulted in conjoined twins.

[Jolie Rouge]

German Teen Shoots Teacher, Kills Self
By JUERGEN VOELKERLING


COBURG, Germany (AP) - A 16-year-old student walked into his classroom, shot his teacher in the leg and then killed himself Wednesday, police said. Two students were slightly injured in the panicked rush to flee the school in the German town of Coburg, state police Wilfried Doerfler said. One student jumped from a first-floor window but landed unhurt, he said.

The student fired two shots as he entered the classroom at about 9 a.m., police spokesman Rainer Prediger told n-tv television. Once in the class, he fired a shot that injured the teacher, who then rushed the other students out into the hall and shut the door. The teen then turned the revolver on himself, Prediger said.

``We know nothing yet about the motives,'' local police spokeswoman Ingrid Beyer said. ``The teacher is getting medical attention.''

Authorities could not immediately provide details on the teacher or the student except to say he was in the eighth grade.

According to the school's Web site, there were 34 students in his class and 757 at the school. Classmates were being treated by psychologists at the school, and the rest of the building had been cleared, police said.

Coburg is about 145 miles north of Munich near the former East German border.

In April 2002, 17 people in the eastern city of Erfurt were killed in Germany's deadliest school shooting. Robert Steinhaeuser, a 19-year-old who had been expelled, shot and killed 13 teachers, a police officer and two students before fatally shooting himself in the head.

Last October, a teen entered a school near the southwestern city of Stuttgart and took four students hostage at gunpoint, but the kidnapping ended after several hours without incident.



07/02/03 07:31

[Jolie Rouge]

FIFA President: Keep Your Shirts On
By CLARE NULLIS


GENEVA (AP) - Keep that shirt on, Brandi Chastain. FIFA has ordered soccer players to keep their shirts on during matches and banned all celebratory post-goal stripping, president Sepp Blatter told the Swiss newspaper Blick on Wednesday.

He also said the sport's governing body is considering whether to impose a heat limit on games following the death of Cameroon's Marc-Vivien Foe, who collapsed and died during the semifinals of the Confederations Cup in France on June 26.

Temperatures were in the 90s during the match. The cause of Foe's death has not been determined.

Blatter will attend Foe's funeral tomorrow in Lyon and his memorial service on July 12 in Cameroon's capital, Yaounde.


Blatter told Blick that the decision to ban players from taking off their shirts was made by FIFA's executive committee last weekend in Paris because too much flesh was shown at the Confederations Cup.


``There were several awkward situations at the Confederations Cup,'' he said. ``One player needed five minutes to put his jersey back on because his vest was sewn into it.''


In 1999, Chastain famously pulled off her shirt after scoring the winning goal for the United States in the Women's World Cup final against China.


Players who ignore the new regulation risk receiving a yellow card.


FIFA first introduced the ban in 1996 but then relaxed it. Details of the new regulation will be distributed shortly to national soccer associations before the upcoming season.



07/02/03 14:59

[Jolie Rouge]

Chilean 'Blob' May Be Giant Octopus, Whale Blubber
By Louise Egan

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...4.htm&sc=reodd

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - Scientists said on Wednesday a huge mass of slimy flesh that washed up on a Chilean beach last week may be a rare type of giant octopus or just discarded whale blubber.

European zoologists contacted by the Chileans to help identify the 40-foot-long (12-meter) piece of gelatinous tissue said it closely resembled descriptions of a bizarre specimen found in Florida in 1896 that was named "octopus giganteus" and has confounded experts ever since.

Other informal sightings of similar deep-sea creatures by fishermen and divers from the Bahamas to Tasmania are the stuff of folklore on the "Bermuda Blob" as well as academic study.

"We've been in touch with zoologists from different countries. We've had responses from France and Italy from people who say, based on the preliminary data we sent them, it could be a gigantic octopus," said Elsa Cabrera, director of the Center for Cetacean Conservation in Santiago.


The center plans to send tissue samples abroad to be examined.
"I don't dare say what it is. I'm hoping the experts can tell us," she added.


James Mead, a zoologist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, thinks it is whale blubber. "I don't have enough data to say, yes it's an octopus or its a whale but I would hazard a bet that when it gets firmly identified, it'll be a whale," he told Reuters by telephone. He said a whale could have died of old age, decayed and a big piece of it could have drifted to shore.


Photographs of the carcass showed a pinkish-gray blob on the beach resembling a squashed elephant.

The largest of the over 100 officially recognized species of octopus can measure up to 20 feet.

Cabrera went to see the carcass last weekend after the Navy alerted her center to what it thought were two beached whales. One carcass was a humpback and the other a complete surprise. "We'd never seen such a strange specimen," Cabrera said.


Its characteristics match those given by 19th Century scientists that examined the creature found in 1896, who described pulling at the 60-foot (18-meter) animal with a team of horses and hacking at it with an axe without making a dent.

07/02/03 17:13

[Jolie Rouge]

Sex While Speeding Down the Highway?

No Problem!

BERLIN (Reuters) - Having sex while driving down a highway at 60 miles per hour is not an offence in Germany. But if you hit something, make sure you don't run off.

A Cologne court fined a man who admitted he was having sex with a blonde hitchhiker sitting astride him when he drove his car into a road sign. But only because he fled the scene of the accident with his naked accomplice.

"The man was convicted of hit-and-run and sentenced to a fine of 600 euros," court spokesman Juergen Mannebeck said on Tuesday. "It's hard to believe but in fact no law was broken with the intercourse on the motorway. It's a situation lawmakers never thought about."

The 23-year-old man, who was tracked down through the car's registration, was also ordered to pay 400 euros to repair the sign. He did not know the name of the woman who left her clothes behind in the car.



07/02/03 08:20

[Jolie Rouge]

Home Storage for Sperm Samples?

MADRID (Reuters) - Men having fertility treatment may soon be able to have their sperm dried and store it at home if a new method being developed in Saudi Arabia is successful.

Air-drying sperm does not damage DNA and the sperm can later fertilize an egg with a technique used for male infertility, Dr Daniel Imoedemhe of the Erfan and Bagedo Hospitals in Jeddah told a fertility meeting in Madrid Tuesday.

At present, sperm samples have to be preserved in large and expensive liquid nitrogen tanks or special chemicals in fertility clinics and laboratories.

"These methods are time-consuming and cumbersome compared to our simple technique of air-drying," Imoedemhe said. "The process can be further simplified by allowing patients to take responsibility for storing their air-dried sperm at home."


Air-dried sperm can be stored at normal room temperature or in the refrigerator, but must be re-hydrated in the laboratory before being used.


More research and tests are needed, but once the technique is perfected Imoedemhe believes air-dried sperm could be transported without special equipment. Men could store their sperm in their own home and make decisions about its disposal or use.


Air-dried sperm would be able to fertilize an egg using a technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) in which a single sperm is injected into the egg.



07/02/03 08:15

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BERLIN (Reuters) - Having sex while driving down a highway at 60 miles per hour is not an offence in Germany. But if you hit something, make sure you don't run off.
A Cologne court fined a man who admitted he was having sex with a blonde hitchhiker sitting astride him when he drove his car into a road sign. But only because he fled the scene of the accident with his naked accomplice.

"The man was convicted of hit-and-run and sentenced to a fine of 600 euros," court spokesman Juergen Mannebeck said on Tuesday. "It's hard to believe but in fact no law was broken with the intercourse on the motorway. It's a situation lawmakers never thought about."

The 23-year-old man, who was tracked down through the car's registration, was also ordered to pay 400 euros to repair the sign. He did not know the name of the woman who left her clothes behind in the car.

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JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel is lighting up its camels in an effort to prevent fatal collisions between the traditional ships of the desert and motorized ones, an official said Wednesday.

Police are sticking phosphorescent safety strips on the camels of the Negev desert to make them more visible to drivers, after a growing number of nighttime crashes in which people and camels have died.

The Bedouin people of Israel's southern Negev use camels as well as pickup trucks, and some desert road crossings already have warning signs and guard rails.

"The camel safety problem is a serious one here," said Yossi Golan, a police commander in the eastern Negev. Camel-related traffic accidents have killed 10 people and seriously injured more than 50 in the past two years, he said.

Golan estimated that there are 5,000 camels in the Negev. To protect them and their riders, he called a desert-style council to find a solution.

"We brought together Bedouin elders, the Transport Ministry, the Nature Reserves Authority, and camel herd owners - and the phosphorescent strip idea was born," he said.

He said the first 40 Negev camels were fitted with the strips Tuesday; as many as 1,000 more could follow in the coming months.

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DULUTH, Minn. (AP) - An exasperated resident turned the tables on a company that hounded him with telemarketing calls, calling it more than 100 times in two days.

Marc Plaisted said he started calling Minnesota Auto Glass after the St. Peter-based company's telemarketers called him up to three times a day - even after he asked them not to.

Plaisted had figured the calls would stop when he signed on to Minnesota's "do-not-call" list months ago.

"I'm following the law and asking them to be taken off the list and they ignore me and then, on top of it, start swearing at me," he said. "That was where they flipped the switch with me and I said, 'Enough is enough. I'm going after you guys now."

Plaisted started calling the Minnesota Auto Glass's Duluth office last Thursday, and placed more than 100 calls, he said.

"I just called them every five minutes and let them know that, no, I don't have a crack in my windshield, because this seems to be something they are very concerned about," Plaisted said.

A Minnesota Auto Glass manager in Duluth said Plaisted's number had been removed from its list and that proof of the removal would be put in writing.