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[Jolie Rouge]

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[Jolie Rouge]

Thousands of 'Liberated' Minks Rounded Up

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-RTO-reodd&idq=/ff/story/0002%2F20030827%2F102673875.htm&sc=reodd


SEATTLE (Reuters) - More than 9,000 minks set free from a Sultan, Washington, fur farm by an animal liberation group this week were back in their pens but hundreds more were still roaming the nearby woods, police said.

Police and volunteers helped Roesler Brothers Fur Farm workers capture the foot-long critters, worth about $40 apiece, with nets, snares and their bare hands.

"They're not real tame -- they'll bite if you pick them up," Sultan Police Chief Fred Wasler told Reuters Tuesday by telephone. "I've never been around minks, so I'm far from an expert and I got bit a few times before I learned how to pick them up."

Workers found holes cut in fences surrounding the farm and all of the cages opened, though thousands of the animals never ventured from their pens.


Local news outlets received e-mails from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which has struck fur farms across the U.S. Northwest, claiming to have released the minks.


Since ALF is considered a domestic terrorist group by law enforcement agencies, the FBI has been called in to help investigate, Wasler said.


Critics say releasing domesticated minks is more inhumane than killing them for fur, arguing that the caged animals are ill-equipped to survive in the wild, even in the rich woodlands of western Washington.


"They found four or five squashed on the highway," Wasler said. "A lot of them just milled around the open cages."



08/27/03 10:25

[Jolie Rouge]

Moonshine Alive, but Not Well, in Atlanta


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A cluster of patients who showed up at hospital emergency rooms with lead poisoning show that moonshine did not die out with Prohibition but is still popular in some cities, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

An investigation in Atlanta showed more than 8 percent of patients surveyed said they had drunk illegally distilled alcohol in the past five years or so, the researchers report in the latest issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

"We were under the misconception that moonshine drinking was relatively rare these days, particularly in an urban area," Dr. Brent Morgan of the Georgia Poison Center, who led the study, said in a statement.

Morgan and colleagues started their survey after four adults showing up at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta had potentially fatal lead levels in their blood.


The patients, all of whom said they had recently drunk moonshine, had seizures, a hallmark of lead poisoning, abdominal pain, kidney problems, ulcers, and anemia.


Lead gets into moonshine when certain containers are used to make or store it. Car radiators were once notorious for producing poisonous brew.


"These four patients made us realize that perhaps lead exposure from moonshine was being overlooked in the emergency department," Morgan said.


His team surveyed 531 people in the Atlanta area, of whom 8.6 percent reported they had tasted moonshine within the past five years.


Of them, more than a quarter had drunk some of the harsh liquor within the previous week.


These patients were very likely to have high levels of lead in their blood. Moonshine drinkers were more likely to be men between ages 40 and 59 and heavy alcohol users.


"To our knowledge, our study is the first to provide rates of moonshine consumption, which was higher than we expected," Morgan said.



08/27/03 10:25

[Jolie Rouge]

Thousands Ask for Spoiled Milk Money


NEW YORK (Reuters) - Thousands of New Yorkers may be crying over spoiled milk when they find their utility is not going to pay for food ruined by a colossal power blackout earlier this month.

An official-looking form circulating on the Internet claims that New York utility Con Edison will reimburse residents up to $350 for household food that spoiled during the power outage, which darkened refrigerators for up to 29 hours beginning August 14.

"It's not true," said Joe Petta, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison Inc. unit Consolidated Edison Co. of New York Inc.

"There is a claim form on our Web site, but it has always been there -- we have said since day two (of the blackout) that we are not liable."


Con Edison has said the blackout likely originated outside its service area.


Petta said Con Edison, which provides power to more than nine million people in and around New York City, has been inundated with thousands of the spoiled food claim forms.



08/27/03 10:21

[Jolie Rouge]

Bobbies Go After 'Ugly Brits'


ATHENS (Reuters) - British holidaymakers may have deserted the cool waters of Blackpool for drunken debauchery in the Greek sunshine but Blackpool, it seems, is coming after them.

The long arm of the northern English resort's police will reach out to Faliraki this week when a team of three Blackpool officers visits to help authorities on the island of Rhodes tackle raucous British tourists, Greek police said Tuesday.

Three Britons have died in drink-fueled incidents this summer in Faliraki. Its nightclubs and bars are a magnet for hundreds of thousands of young people, and drunkenness and lewd behavior have led locals to brand some the "ugly Britons."

Britain offered to help out after scandalized Greek authorities cracked down and the news hit headlines back home.


"The British officers will be in Faliraki to offer advice, but they will not be involved in any police operation," Greek police spokesman Lefteris Economou told reporters.


"They will exchange methods and experiences with our officers and what they have done to contain problems in Blackpool and they will remain in Faliraki for three days," a Greek police official told Reuters.



08/27/03 10:20

[Jolie Rouge]

Guess Who Makes $41 Million a Year?

Cameron Diaz.

There's just something about her paycheck that will make everyone else sit up and notice: At $41 million, it's the highest for any actress in Hollywood. Diaz has now topped the likes of Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, and Nicole Kidman for the coveted spot of who makes the most, according to none other than the Guinness Book of World Records. Being a Hollywood hottie pays well. Very, very well.

And $41 million is just her take in 2001 for her work in "Charlie's Angels," "Gangs of New York," "Vanilla Sky," and the voice of Princess Fiona in the animated smash hit "Shrek." Her income is expected to go even higher next year, reports The New York Post, when the actress could bank close to $45 million. She'll earn between $10 million and $15 million for reprising her role in "Shrek 2," and she's said to be making a whopping $25 million to $30 million for "Fun With Dick and Jane." That sure buys a lot of fun.

Diaz has done all this in just nine years. She started out in 1994, co-starring with Jim Carrey in "The Mask," making the paltry sum of less than $500,000. And then the hits kept coming, including "There's Something About Mary," "Being John Malkovich," and "Any Given Sunday." The Post notes that richy rich Diaz is down-to-earth. She refuses to have plastic surgery and is honest about her longtime battles with acne. "I was the plain one. I had no style," she recalls. "I was the tough kid with the comb in the back pocket and the feathered hair." Look who's laughing now.

[Jolie Rouge]

Remarkable Find In a Trailer In Phoenix

The trailer was so dilapidated that Neil King purchased it for just $75 at a public storage auction in Phoenix, Ariz. It was filled with garbage bags that were packed with what appeared to be old clothing and assorted junk. But Neil King essentially hit the lottery when some of the garbage bags contained artwork by the Flagg family, well-known and eccentric artists from Scottsdale, Ariz. The loot could be worth as much as $1 million, reports The Associated Press. "This is like winning the lottery. This will never happen again," King, who is a certified appraiser, told AP.

The Flaggs were truly unconventional. Dee, who sported a handlebar mustache and dressed in Western garb, drove around town in either a Rolls Royce or a 1914 fire truck with an Indian as his passenger. Brother Monte liked to dress as Buffalo Bill Cody.

The trailer booty contains a wooden Indian carved by Dee and portraits of American Indian children painted by Monte. The trailer was owned by the Flaggs, but the storage company in which it was being housed was unable to locate anyone in the family, who had stopped paying rent on it earlier this year. Dee Flagg died in 2000. State law regarding the auction prohibits anyone from inspecting the contents beforehand. So you might find $1 million of American art--or a box of dirty underwear.

[Jolie Rouge]

ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY CLEANING


Using common, natural household products for cleaning is recommended from both a financial and an environmental standpoint. There are a number of great environmentally friendly cleaning solutions.

Mix 1 cup white vinegar with 1 quart of water to clean windows. After the solution softens the window's grit and grime, wipe with old newspapers.

Combine 1/2 cup of ammonia, 2 tablespoons of baking soda and 1 quart of warm water to break down grease and cooked-on grime on pots, pans, stovetops and ovens.

Use club soda or white vinegar to remove spots and stains around the house.

Clean silver and eliminate pet odors in carpets or upholstery with pure lemon or lime juice.

Make a paste of baking soda and water. This paste is a mild abrasive cleanser for everything from jewelry to moldy bathroom grout.


Wood Floor

You'll want to match the cleaning method and material to the finish of your wood floor. The most popular types of finish are wax, oil and polyurethane.


Wax finish: Strip periodically with chemical strippers and buff numerous coats of wax back into the floor. Sweep up any dirt and grit and then give the floor a quick buffing to bring out the luster.

Oil finish: Clean oil-finished floors with oil soap mixed into water.

Use as little water as possible and buff dry after cleaning. When the floor is clean apply a high-quality floor oil with a rag in even coats. After the oil soaks into the floor for one to two hours, buff it to a shine with a clean rag.

Polyurethane finish: Clean polyurethane-finished floors with a weak solution of soap and water. Don't use cleaning oil, furniture polish or chemical strippers on polyurethane as they can break down the finish and cause flooring problems later.

No matter what type of product you choose - those from your grocery store or those made especially for the environment - having the right ones for the job will cut down on your cleaning time and make your home shine.

[Jolie Rouge]

Your Boss May Be Job-Hunting Soon


Looking for a promotion? Your boss's office may be empty soon. Once the job market improves, fully 83 percent of executive or managerial employees recently polled by the Society for Human Resource Management admitted they are extremely or somewhat likely to start looking for a new position.

You may call it jumping ship. People who work in human resources called it "voluntary turnover," and it's something that typically happens with an improving economy. And we all know we're long overdue for an improving economy. Companies, take heed: If you don't want to lose your top managers, it's time to focus on retention efforts.

So when will the job-based musical chairs begin? It depends on who you ask. According to the survey, just 23 percent of HR professionals expect the job market to improve in the next three to six months, but 42 percent of employees think the turnaround is that close, reports the Washington Business Journal.





Want to take a three-hour lunch?

Here are four techno-tricks you can do to make the boss think you're hard at work at your desk--when you're not.

Wouldn't it be cool to sometimes make the boss think you're hard at work--when you're not? With a little ingenuity and a lot of high-tech equipment, you can do it.

None other than The Wall Street Journal, the daily bible for hard-working suits, laid out all the facts involved in deceiving the one who determines your annual raise. (That was a hint: Be careful if you do this!) As long as there have been bosses and employees, those employees have been trying to fool those bosses. The only difference now is the tricks have changed. Say hello to the high-tech slacker. To make this work, you're going to have to spend some money on gizmos and gadgets. Better yet, convince your company to buy them for you.

Here are some of the ideas, cleverly explained by The Wall Street Journal:


--Control Your PC Remotely

Get a handheld computer, such as a Handspring Visor. Add on a program, such as GoToMyPC.com, that will allow you to manipulate the screen on your office computer via the hand-held. This kind of sophisticated remote control even lets you move the cursor on your screen, open documents, and print them on the shared office printer. That means you can be sitting in a coffee shop or poolside and create the impression for anyone who walks by your computer that you just stepped away from your desk. And every time a person walks by, something different will be on your screen.

--Time Your E-Mail So It Looks Like You Work 24/7

Take advantage of your e-mail system's timing capabilities. Write one or more e-mails to your boss at your convenience, but don't send them. Instead, set the e-mail system's timer to send the e-mail messages late at night or better yet, in the middle of the night. Assuming the boss checks the time the e-mail was sent, you'll get brownie points for working half the night. Hey, we live and work in a 24/7 world. This way you can look like you do--when you don't.

--Reconfigure Your Instant Messenger

When Instant Messenger is fired up and you haven't been active for a while, IM lets others know you're idle. If you know how to do it, you can crack into the program settings so it looks like you're always available. Less tech-savvy users can just not leave an away message.

--Call Forwarding

This is easy for anyone to do. Forward your office calls so they go to your cell phone or house phone. Pick up where ever you happen to be. Some call-forwarding services even allow you to transfer your calls to different phone numbers throughout the day. (Hint: If you're really at your son's baseball game, the other parents' loud cheering might give you away.)

Beware!

You could get fired if you get caught. That happened to David Wiskus, who gladly outlined for The Wall Street Journal how he tricked his boss into thinking he was working when he was really taking three-hour lunches almost every day. Funny thing. The boss figured it out. Wiskus landed on the street with the classifieds in his hand.

[Jolie Rouge]

Want to impress your boss? Just do this...

The surprising answer.




If you want the boss to sit up and take notice of the memos and reports you write, here's a tip: Don't use big words. Obfuscation hurts. (Oops. That's a big word.)

Reuters reports that a new study from Stanford University concludes that people who use complicated language when simple words will do tend to be viewed as less intelligent than those who use a more basic and understandable vocabulary. Before you purposely forget all those great SAT words you learned or throw away your thesaurus, note this: "I think it's important to point out that this study is not about problems with using long words, it's about problems with using long words needlessly," lead study author Daniel Oppenheimer explained to Reuters. "If the best way to say something involves using a complex word, then by all means do so. But if there are several equally valid ways of expressing your ideas, you should go with the simpler one."

Since Oppenheimer is a professor at Stanford and has easy access to student essays, he designed part of the study based on students' feedback on each other's writing. Here are two sentences that say the same thing; the only difference is the complexity of the language:

"The primary academic goal I have set for myself is to use my potential to the fullest."

"The principal educational aspiration I have established for myself is to utilize my capabilities to the fullest."
The results: When people read simpler language, they actually rate the author's intelligence higher than they do those who write using large words and a more complex sentence structure. Oppenheimer said this result held no matter what was being read--from student essays and graduate school applications to sociology dissertations and philosophical works from Descartes. He told Reuters that he has no idea why people linked intelligence with simpler language, but suspects it's because we like to read things that are easy to understand.

So the next time you want to throw in a big word just to impress the reader--be it the boss or a teacher--forget about it. Chances are, it will backfire on you. The research findings were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

--Cathryn Conroy

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DALLAS (Reuters) - An out-of-court settlement has been reached in the case of a North Texas man who woke up from bladder surgery only to find that doctors had amputated his penis without permission, lawyers said on Thursday.
Terms of the out-of-court settlement were not disclosed but Hurshell Ralls, 67, had been seeking over $5 million in a civil suit he filed in Wichita Falls, Texas, against the two doctors who removed his penis. They did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement.

The hospital where the surgery was performed was also named in the suit.

Ralls' attorney Steve Briley said that his client was having surgery in 1999 to remove a cancerous bladder, which would likely include the removal of his prostate gland.

He contends that doctors removed Ralls' penis after they mistakenly thought the cancer had spread to the male sex organ. He charged the doctors -- John S. Dryden and Farid Khoury -- with not seeking consent for the penis amputation and negligence.

He also said a pathology test indicated that Ralls' penile tissue was not cancerous.

Joel Steed, the attorney who represented the doctors, said Dryden had informed Ralls that his penis might have to be removed to treat the cancer he had in his bladder. He also questioned the results of the pathology tests on the amputated penis.

Steed said during surgery the two doctors saw tissue indicating the cancer spread from the bladder to the urethra, and they felt removing the penis would provide the best chance for Ralls' survival.

Hearings in the case before a jury of eight men and four women had started earlier this week and were underway when the out-of-court settlement was reached.

Ralls and his wife have not been able to recover from the anger and shock they felt after the surgery, his attorney said.

"Mr. Ralls was not informed that he was going to wake up and not have a penis," Briley said.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. airport baggage screeners, displaying seized chain saws, machetes and knives, warned travelers to check their luggage for offensive objects before boarding a flight.
Officials of the Transport Security Administration, speaking ahead of this weekend's Labor Day holiday -- a busy travel time -- said that since February 2002 more than 7.5 million prohibited items had been seized.

They included 50,000 box cutters -- a weapon said to be used by the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers -- and 1,437 firearms as well as 2.3 million knives.

The TSA officials told a news conference most people with such items in their bags intended no malice but advised passengers to consult the Web site www.tsatraveltips.usa for advice on what to leave behind when making a trip.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks screeners have confiscated seemingly harmless items like nail clippers and cigarette lighters from passengers.

But some carry more obviously dangerous items. Chain saws, a weed cutting machine, hand saws and machetes, steak knives, bottles of camping stove fuel and perfume bottles shaped like hand grenades were among items displayed as a sample of objects seized at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.

While some carry-on items may have been innocent -- a hockey stick or a child's plastic sword -- other discoveries by TSA have yielded razor blades in tennis shoes and a bayonet hidden in a hollowed-out artificial leg.

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BEIJING (Reuters) - Surgeons in Beijing said on Thursday they had successfully operated on a baby born with a leg of her undeveloped twin protruding from her back after the third limb deprived her of nutrients she needed to live.
For weeks Chinese newspapers have tracked the ordeal of 14-month-old Qing Qing, discovered abandoned on the streets of the capital in March and later adopted by a woman farmer.

Three anesthetists, four surgeons and four nurses toiled for six hours at Dongzhimen Hospital to remove the curved, tail-like parasite, said one of the surgeons, Yu Xing.

"The operation was very smooth and satisfactory," he told Reuters. "She was in dangerous condition, and even faced death, had we not operated in time.

"After the operation, she can now lie down. We hope she can sit in the near future. If her nervous system recovers well, and some other small operations succeed, she can even walk some day."

Yu said the hospital had performed the surgery free of charge.

[DAVESBABYDOLL]

:eek: That's terrible ! "amputated his penis without permission"

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PARIS (Reuters) - A heatwave this month in France has killed hundreds of thousands of trees in the worst crisis to hit forests since violent storms in 1999 and has claimed Marie Antoinette's favorite oak tree at the Palace of Versailles.
Forestry experts said the heatwave, which saw temperatures topping 104 Fahrenheit in some regions in the first half of the month, has decimated forests due to lack of water and insect plagues and is now making other trees shed their leaves early.

"Practically everything that was planted this year in the northeast area of France has died," said Celine de Bohan, spokeswoman for the federation representing private owners, who control 70 percent of France's woodland.

The most high-profile casualty, now likely to face the axe, is a 321-year-old oak tree at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris which is said to have provided shade for Marie Antoinette, the wife of King Louis XVI. They were beheaded in the French Revolution.

Standing 30 yards high, with a trunk circumference of 6 yards, it was considered one of 16 outstanding trees in the imposing gardens which are one of France's top tourist attractions, said Alain Baraton, chief gardener at Versailles.

The tree had been weakened by the 1999 storms which destroyed a copse previously sheltering it.

"The tree was tired and unwell and found itself directly exposed to the August sun," Baraton said.

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BERLIN (Reuters) - A court in Berlin sentenced an obsessive shopper to seven-and-a-half years in prison after he admitted stealing around $270,000 to satisfy his craving for customer service, authorities say.
The court tried the 38-year-old on some 468 counts of fraud and forgery after the three-year shopping spree financed by stolen bank and credit cards ended in his arrest.

"The man said he wasn't interested in the money," Berlin court spokesman Bjoern Retzlaff said Wednesday. "He said he just couldn't get enough of being waited on in shops. To him, it was all about the feeling that the customer is king."

Many purchased items found at the man's home, which included 200 pairs of shoes, had never been opened, the court said.

"What am I supposed to do with 200 pairs of shoes?" Germany's Bild Zeitung reported him as saying. "Back at home in the shopping bag they meant nothing to me. But I couldn't stop!"

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BUNOL (Reuters) - Blood-red streams of tomato juice oozed through the streets of the tiny Spanish town of Bunol as tens of thousands of people hurled tons of squashy fruit in the world's biggest food fight.
With a thundering firework at midday signaling the start of the "Tomatina," five trucks dumped 120 tons of plum tomatoes into Bunol's narrow central street where 35,000 people were expectantly awaiting the ammunition.

Locals and visitors from around the globe lobbed the tomatoes at each other and, when the fruit turned to puree, reached down to whisk red froth into the air. The "People's Square" filled with the acidic sweet smell of tomatoes and slimy stained bodies.

People rubbed juice into each others' hair and skin while some men took advantage of the party to grab women and smear their chests in pulp.

Locals had draped plastic sheeting over their houses and some even boarded up windows but the town's white facades were still left spattered red.

Locals of Bunol -- with a population of 9,600 -- say the tradition started in the mid-1940s, under the authoritarian rule of General Francisco Franco. Goltran Zanon, 70, locally recognized as one of the founding fathers of the now world-famous event, says it all began with kids pitching tomatoes at balloons during a balloon-flying show.

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STILLWATER, Minn. (AP) - A St. Paul man who missed a court hearing appeared to have a good excuse - he was dead. But authorities soon realized his obituary was a fake and Robert Michael Mathison was later arrested.

A paper trail indicates the obituary may have been used to excuse him for not appearing in Washington County District Court on charges stemming from a June case in which he faked a heart attack upon arrest.

A short obituary ran in the Pioneer Press on July 15: "Mathison, Robert M. Age 50 of St. Paul Died on July 12, 2003. Loved by everyone; loved everyone. Survived by 3 sons, Shawn, Jeremiah, Ryan and daughter Courtney. Private services."

The same day a fax was sent to the Washington County District Court office. It was sent in care of the assigning judge from someone claiming to be Mathison's attorney.

"Mr. Mathison, who I believe has open cases in the county, has recently passed on. Thanks for your time," the fax said. A copy of the brief obituary was included.

Instead of dismissing charges against the dead man - felony fourth-degree assault, obstructing the legal process with force and driving with a canceled license - a judge added the fax to the court file.

"I've never heard of someone faking their own death," said state trooper Glen Knippenberg, who arrested Mathison in June and said he never believed the obituary. "People come up with great excuses why they can't make it to court."

While allegedly dead, Mathison was investigated in Dakota and Ramsey counties. Charges are under consideration against him in connection with felony theft in Mendota, and he has been investigated in St. Paul, authorities said.

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ST. LOUIS (AP) - Crazy carp have invaded Missouri's rivers. Two species of nonnative carp have been jumping into boats, injuring occupants and damaging the watercraft.

A state fisheries biologist motoring near Columbia had a filling knocked out of his tooth by a high-flying fish that struck him on the side of the head. Another state biologist in the St. Charles area was seriously hurt when he was hit by a giant carp.

Brian Todd of the Missouri Department of Conservation said the big head carp and silver carp were brought to private fish hatcheries from Asia by the aquaculture industry. They were intended to eat excess algae and waste in aquaculture ponds - which grow fish for food as well as bait and tropical fish. But they escaped in floodwaters in 1993, 1995 and 2002.

"This could be an indefinite problem," Todd said. "They are safe to eat, but ecologically they could damage the mussel population and are competing with native fish for food. We are going to hear more and more over the next few years about the problems these fish are causing, especially injuries to boaters and anglers."

Todd said the carp have been spotted in many of Missouri's rivers, including throughout the Missouri River.

"The sound of a propeller under water makes these fish go crazy," Todd said. "The fish don't jump if you're sitting there without the motor on, but the higher the RPMs, the greater the noise, the higher these fish jump."

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UXBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - A man accused of licking a woman's feet in a Bellingham grocery store was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to assault just before his trial was to begin.

Raymond Dublin, 36, formerly of Providence, R.I., pleaded guilty Tuesday at Uxbridge District Court to charges of assault and battery and lewd and lascivious behavior.

His attorney asked for a sentence of two years of counseling, but Judge Paul Losapio said counseling wasn't sufficient for Dublin, a two-time convicted sex offender who just completed a one-year sentence on similar foot-licking charges at a Woonsocket, R.I., supermarket.

"I don't know what type of counseling someone could undergo for this kind of behavior," he said.

Dublin was charged with sneaking up behind a woman at the Bellingham Save-A-Lot supermarket and licking her feet and toes in June 2002.

Prosecutor Paul Bolton said Dublin had three separate encounters with the woman, whom he described as "extremely annoyed."

"This individual, this gentleman, has a significant sexual problem," Bolton said of Dublin.

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PAINESVILLE, Ohio (AP) - Of all the challenges the homeless face, Michael Padula may be in for his biggest to date. The 50-year-old homeless man living out of a van in a city park wants to run for city council.

"I am not showboating. I am not doing this for the publicity," said Padula, a self-employed carpenter. "I would not wish my circumstances on anyone."

However, Padula's opponent in Ward 2, eight-year council veteran William Horvath, says Padula should be removed from the November ballot.

Padula has not established residency for one year, thus rendering him ineligible, Horvath said.

Elections Board members on Wednesday said the issue may set a precedent and scheduled a hearing for Sept. 9.

"This is certainly a unique situation," said Lake County Elections Board Director Jan Clair. "It is sad to say there are people who don't have a home, but does that preclude them from being elected to office?"

The 1995 National Voting Rights Act ruled that homeless persons are entitled to vote even if they do not have a physical residence, Clair said. But for those who lack an actual residence, the question is whether they can be considered residents.

When Padula filed for his candidacy, he listed a garage as his address. Election workers verified it through a landlord who told them that Padula had rented it for a year.

But when city officials this month discovered Padula was living in a windowless garage with no running water, he was evicted. Padula, a registered voter, then filed a new address, the Lake County Health Department across from the park where he parks his van during the day.

The former Lincoln Electric factory worker said he first became civic-minded when two teenagers were injured in the park after their bike ran into a large pothole.

Padula went to a council meeting to complain but nothing was done. He then gathered 300 signatures. The pothole was eventually fixed.

Painesville is 28 miles northeast of Cleveland.

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LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - Sorry students, there's no more free beer at the Nebraska Bookstore.

The store had been offering a coupon redeemable for one free beer or $2 off an order of buffalo wings at Brewsky's Food and Spirits.

But Barry Major, chief operating officer for Nebraska Book Co., said Wednesday the promotion was dropped because of concerns by University of Nebraska-Lincoln administrators.

"The sensitivity is very high on that issue, and we share the university's thoughts on heavy drinking and underage drinking," Major said. "Had we known that the university had that big a concern, we would never have done it."

The university's NU Directions program has worked for nearly five years to curb high-risk drinking among students.

UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman and Lincoln Police Chief Tom Casady, co-chairman of NU Directions, were pleased the promotion has ended.

While legal, the promotion had been in bad taste and created the wrong impression about campus life, Perlman said. The bookstore, located just off the campus, is privately owned and was within its legal rights to offer the promotion.

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LONGVIEW, Wash. (AP) - Don't try telling William Allan Repp Jr. that a dog is man's best friend. He's been sniffed out four times by the same cop canine.

In the latest incident, Repp was arrested Tuesday, accused of leading police on a high-speed chase in a 1980 Corvette, crashing into a tree and fleeing on foot until he was stopped by Reno, a Longview police dog.

The chase started when Officer Jason Ferriss spotted the car on Pacific Way traveling at 78 mph, according to his radar gun. The posted speed limit is 35 mph.

In his report, Ferriss said he turned on his lights, saw the car speed up, then turned on his siren and began pursuit. He said his speedometer reached 120 mph but the Corvette was pulling away at an estimated 140 mph when it missed a corner, slammed into a tree branch and ripped out some shrubbery before coming to rest.

The driver fled on foot as Officer Steve Dennis and Reno responded to assist. Reno tracked Repp approximately 40 yards to a slough and found him hiding under some bushes, police said.

Repp was taken to St. John Medical Center for treatment of dog bite wounds and injuries sustained in the accident. Officers then took him to the Cowlitz County Jail, where he was booked for investigation of felony eluding, taking a motor vehicle without permission, reckless driving, obstructing an officer, resisting arrest and third-degree driving with a suspended license. Bail was set at $35,000.

Dennis said this is the fourth time Reno has captured Repp after he ran from police. After the last incident, in October 2001, Repp received a five-day jail sentence and a $400 fine for reckless driving and resisting arrest.

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MONROE, Wash. (AP) - A 24-year-old man who led Snohomish County sheriff's deputies on a bizarre chase through the Evergreen State Fair on was seriously hurt when he tried to jump aboard a moving train.

The man, a fair employee, was seen on the midway Tuesday smoking "an unknown narcotic" from a glass pipe, sheriff's spokeswoman Jan Jorgensen said. He was fired on the spot.

The man attempted to steal money from another carnival worker, then went to a women's restroom, where he exposed himself, Jorgensen said.

When deputies arrived, the man put on his pants, took off his shirt, and fled through a window in one of the restroom's stalls.

He groped women as he ran, then scaled a chain-link fence to U.S. 2, where he attempted to steal a car from a woman.

When that failed, he ran across the highway to a train and tried to jump aboard, even though it was traveling about 45 miles per hour, Jorgensen said.

He was knocked back by the train, and was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle with multiple fractures. He was reported in serious condition Tuesday night.

When he's released, Jorgensen said, he'll likely be charged with indecent liberties and attempted robbery.

[Widgetsx3]

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) - Now that the majors are over, Phil Mickelson wants a shot at the minors - in baseball.

Mickelson is scheduled to have a tryout Friday with Toledo, the Triple-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, with hopes of pitching for the Mud Hens this weekend.

"This is a lifetime dream of mine, and I'm extremely grateful to the Toledo organization for giving me the chance to live it," Mickelson said in a statement.

Mickelson, whose 21 victories on the PGA Tour are the most of any player in the modern era to have never won a major, threw to six players from the Akron Aeros, a Double-A team, last weekend during the NEC Invitational.

He offered $300 to anyone who could hit a homer off him, and the best anyone could do was a fly to the warning track.

Mickelson, who throws right-handed, says he often plays catch to loosen his rotator cuff. He has worked recently with former Texas Rangers pitching coach Tom House.

Despite a chance to pitch in the minors, Mickelson isn't about to quit his day job.

"I know which sport is mine, but I just could not pass on this opportunity," he said.

[Jolie Rouge]

Widget -- did you see we have sailed past 1000 Posts ?!?!

[Widgetsx3]

Yes ma'am...I saw that, we are weirdo's to the extreme!...Hey, how did you do that thing that showed who posted how many times in here...

[Jolie Rouge]

Fugie showed me -- go to the User Control Panel; where it lists the threads that have been bumped it will list the number of posts and views - just click on the # of posts and it will break it down. Cool !

[Jolie Rouge]

Hubble Mars photos wow astronomers
Thursday, August 28, 2003 Posted: 2:20 AM EDT


BALTIMORE (AP) -- The Hubble Space Telescope captured spectacular images of Mars during the planet's close pass by Earth, including astonishingly detailed pictures of a polar ice cap and a giant canyon wall.

"We've never seen this kind of resolution in Hubble images, that kind of detail," Cornell University astronomer Jim Bell said Wednesday, pointing to a wall of the Valles Marineris, a canyon that runs 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) across the Red Planet.

The Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the telescope, released some of the Hubble images, made late Tuesday and early Wednesday as the planet made its closest pass by Earth in 60,000 years.

The images, taken when Mars was about 55.6 million kilometers (34.6 million miles) from Earth, show surface details as small as 27 kilometers (17 miles) across.

In the first photo released, an ice cap covering Mars' south pole is clearly visible. Craters dot the mottled orange and brown sphere, and hazy, bluish white surface clouds can be seen.

"They are quite spectacular. You knew they were going to be good; seeing them is something else," said Michael Wolff, an astronomer with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "These are the best that have ever been, and will ever be taken with the Hubble Space Telescope."

Scientists will study the pictures in detail, and hope the images lead to discoveries.

"Before we were looking at broad areas and things tend to get averaged out," Wolff said. "There's the possibility something we missed before will be there."

While spacecraft orbiting Mars can show objects in greater detail, they often cannot make an image of the entire planet at once, or at all times of the Martian day, Wolff said.

Earth-bound telescopes, meanwhile, have to deal with the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere. The Hubble also has instruments that allow it to capture wavelengths that spacecraft orbiting Mars cannot see.

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Total Posts: 1,030
User Posts
Jolie Rouge 637
Widgetsx3 247
gemini26 51
the fugative 26
jaybird 21
janelle 9
zitra 7
Gumball1960 6
julie_angel 4
Incredible 3
Victorious 3
newwiccan 3
Ladytiger 2
jinydale 2
SaraSmiles 2
miccit 1
justinenycole26 1
ckerr4 1
DAVESBABYDOLL 1
lucybp 1
Ravenlost 1
odyssey 1

Woohoo...thanks Jolie!

[Jolie Rouge]

;)

[Jolie Rouge]

Social Security numbers sold on Web

Group buys data on top U.S. officials to underscore need for tougher laws

Thursday, August 28, 2003 Posted: 1:48 PM EDT

www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/28/privacy.concerns.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Almost everything is for sale on the Internet -- even the Social Security numbers of top government officials like CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft, consumer advocates warned Wednesday.

The California-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights said for $26 each it was able to purchase the Social Security numbers and home addresses for Tenet, Ashcroft and other top Bush administration officials, including Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser.

That illustrates the need for stronger protections of personal information, the group said.

Concerned about bill

Specifically, the foundation is concerned about legislation in the House that would amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The bill, sponsored by Reps. Spencer Bachus, R-Alabama, Darlene Hooley, D-Oregon, and dozens of other members, aims to prevent identity theft and improve the accuracy of consumer records, among other things.

While backing the overall goals of the bill, the group's executive director, Jamie Court, objected to a portion of it that would continue a current pre-emption of tougher state privacy laws.

California Gov. Gray Davis signed such legislation Wednesday, which allows consumers to block companies from sharing personal information with affiliate businesses.

"Banks and insurers should not be able to go to Washington as an end-run around the most protective state privacy laws," Court said.

The Bush administration has urged Congress to act quickly to strengthen the nation's credit laws and has praised the House bill. It is expected to come up for a vote in the first few weeks after lawmakers return from their August recess.

A spokesman for Bachus, Evan Keefer, said the legislation has important new provisions that will be tough on fraud. He said the issue raised by the foundation is something lawmakers would look at in conference, after votes in the House and Senate.

National law proposed

The foundation wants to see a strong national law on credit reporting, but Court said that should not preclude states from passing even stronger privacy protections.

He said stopping trafficking of information among corporate affiliates is key because some companies have hundreds of businesses under the family umbrella. For example, a banking corporation might have a number of insurance, securities and real estate affiliates it does business with and financial data might be swapped among all.

"If you cannot stop the traffic in your information among corporate affiliates, you don't have privacy in this nation," Court said.

Easy to get

In addition to Social Security numbers, Court said some online sites will give out a person's bank account balance for about $300.

Beth Givens, director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse based in San Diego, said there are at least a dozen sites that provide social security numbers and other private data.

"If you're willing to spend a little money, you can get this type of information very easily on the Internet," said Givens.

[the fugative]

News of the Weird
Chuck Shepherd



The future of war: Although India and Pakistan have backed off of their recent potentially nuclear confrontation over Kashmir, computer hackers from both countries have stepped up their wars against each other's government Web sites and networks, according to a July Washington Times dispatch. Retaliating against increased hacking that accompanied the attack on India's parliament in 2001, Indian hackers unleashed the annihilating Yaha virus, which has been answered by a massive flood of Pakistani attacks (at about seven times the Indian attack rate), which has provoked Indian hackers to consider an even-more-devastating Yaha virus.

• As straphanger Joyce M. Judge, 42, stared out the window of the Boston subway car during morning rush hour on July 30, she started dripping profusely, and a minute or so later, a baby fell out from underneath her skirt and slid around on the car's floor. According to witnesses, Judge at first acted as if nothing had happened, then finally picked up her newborn, declined the help of passengers, nonchalantly continued the ride, and left the train at the next station (stopping only to pick up the placenta when it fell to the ground). She subsequently reported to Boston Medical Center, where the baby was in good condition (and where the mother was referred for a mental health evaluation).

People different from us

• According to Houston newsletter publisher and devout Roman Catholic Hutton Gibson, there was no Holocaust; Pope John Paul is an impostor and a "Koran kisser"; and the church is doomed because, among other things, masses are no longer conducted in Latin. According to a July Houston Press profile, Gibson, 84, believes there is a worldwide plot that began with the 1960s changes in the church imposed by the Vatican Council, and he is using his 600-reader newsletter to get the word out, even though the Press compares him to the paranoid lead character in the movie "Conspiracy Theory," which starred Mel Gibson, who happens to be Hutton's son. Said Hutton, "I figure that as long as there's one [true] Catholic in the world, [the church] hasn't finished."

• David Mitchell, 35, was arrested in June in Omaha on charges of false imprisonment and making terroristic threats, accused of having locked up his wife, Polly, every time he left the house for two years (and maybe longer). He was always with her in public, and intimidated her so that she wouldn't report him. David had always had only a cell phone so he could take it with him when he left the house, but got a home phone for Internet access recently, and Polly used it to call her sister when he was out.

Can't possibly be true

• ABC News reported in May that it is not illegal in Massachusetts for a man to take surreptitious photographs of his adult daughter in the family home, even though in "hundreds" of the photos, she is nude or partially nude. The Easthampton, Mass., woman was 19 when she moved back into her old bedroom, where her father had been keeping electronic equipment, but later got a tech-savvy friend to examine a camera and computer. The parents are now divorced, but since the father committed no crime, he got to keep the photos.

• A rough summer for weird India: (1) Doctors at Burdwan Medical College and Hospital reported that black ants were crawling out of the left eye of an 11-year-old boy (June). (2) Six members of a family hanged themselves on a hillside near Tirupati, but the bodies were not discovered until the odor wafted into a nearby village (July). (3) After doctors in Angara found 15 students unconscious after a lightning strike, they covered the bodies in cow dung as per a traditional remedy; 13 recovered within a few hours (but not even cow dung could save the other two).

Inexplicable

• Police, having knocked on a door in Woodlawn, Ky., in June, pursuant to a neighbor's noise complaint, inadvertently stumbled across an apparent family-run retail drug business when three teenagers eagerly answered questions about the marijuana plant viewable from the front door. According to police, the kids invited them in and proudly showed them the entire elaborate hydroponic operation. The mother, Bernadette Dusing, 42, was at home at the time, but according to police, remained silent.

• In April, apparently dissatisfied with the many dictionaries on the market, the Republican-controlled Oregon House of Representatives passed House Bill 2416, whose sole purpose was to define "science" ("the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the universe and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories"). A commentator for the Oregonian newspaper speculated that the sponsor, Rep. Betsy Close, believes that the definition will somehow halt recent successes by the state's environmental activists.

• (1) Most recent mother to fall asleep next to her infant child and accidentally roll over and smother it to death: a 20-year-old woman in Pontiac, Mich., in July. (2) Latest convicted slum landlord to be sentenced (90 days) to live in her own dilapidated, roach-and-rodent-haven apartments: Sandra O'Neale (Los Angeles, July). (3) Latest enrollment figures in Florida's statewide program allowing high school students to take physical education courses by computer: 614. (Administrators say they can detect any student cheating; critics don't think so.)

Least competent people

• A July Associated Press dispatch from Jerusalem reported that a 32-year-old woman accidentally swallowed a cockroach and then, after trying to dig it out with a fork, swallowed the fork. Dr. Nikola Adid of the Poria Hospital in Tiberias, Israel, had to remove both items.

• (1) The Baltimore Sun (May) and The Wall Street Journal (July) reported on the few schools (most prominent, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and University of Texas at Dallas) that vie for supremacy in intercollegiate chess and engage in annual recruiting battles to sign up established chess masters with cushy scholarship offers. (2) In April, the Saxonia Globe Snippers of Germany beat a British team, the Black Dog Boozers, to win the World Marbles Cup in Tinsley Green, England; the winner of the match is the first team to knock out 25 of a circle's 49 marbles.

• Also, in the past month: A van and an SUV, both transporting undocumented aliens, collided, injuring 28 (Blythe, Calif.). A woman saved her drowning daughter in a backyard pool by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which she said she couldn't have performed if she hadn't seen it on "Baywatch" (Brooklyn). A 37-year-old man, having reported to a hospital emergency room with a knife penetrating his brain, waited, conscious, for six hours while doctors planned the complicated surgery (which was successful) (Wellington, New Zealand).

:p

[gemini26]

3,000 Teachers Flunk Out

"Three thousand (New York) city public school teachers have just been booted
because they flunked competency exams or failed to meet other criteria to
earn their state license, Department of Education officials said yesterday.
The bombshell was disclosed as scores of teachers who failed the tests -
some a dozen or more times - cried racism at a rally in City Hall Park,
charging the exams are culturally biased against blacks and Hispanics."

- New York Post, 8/28/03

[gemini26]

Pot Calling Kettle Black

"Left-wing comedian Al Franken readily admits he lied in a letter to
Attorney General John Ashcroft and others. And that's not all. Mr. Franken
also admits to deception by misappropriating the letterhead from Harvard's
Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy. The irony: Mr.
Franken's new book is called 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.'"

- Greg Pierce's "Inside Poltics," 8/28/03

[Jolie Rouge]

'Bridezilla' Fined $90 for Bad Behavior
By LAURA WALSH

MANCHESTER, Conn. (AP) - A woman dubbed ``Bridezilla'' after police said she went on a rampage at her wedding reception pleaded guilty Thursday to a reduced charge of creating a public disturbance.

Adrienne T. Samen, 18, was fined $90.

Samen, of North Haven, was arrested on criminal mischief and breach of peace charges on Aug. 16 after police responded to her wedding reception at The Mill on the River restaurant in South Windsor.

Samen allegedly became enraged after restaurant workers closed the bar at the party. She began throwing things, including wedding cake and gifts, police said. Samen left the restaurant, and police found her walking down the road in her wedding gown.


While being taken into custody, police said she kicked the door and window of the police cruiser and tried to bite an officer.


The incident received national attention, with the New York Post and other media dubbing Samen ``Bridezilla.''


``My behavior was very disgraceful,'' Samen told Judge Patricia Swords during her court appearance Thursday.


Swords fined Samen $90 and ordered her to pay for any damages to the restaurant. She also suggested Samen seek substance abuse and anger management counseling.


``This behavior does not bode well for the well-being of your marriage,'' said Swords.


The groom, David Samen, a 21-year-old Marine reservist, accompanied his wife to court. He came home a little over a month ago after serving in Iraq for six months, said Evelyn Vitalie, David's mother. David and Adrienne eloped before he left and wanted a bigger ceremony once he came home.


``I'm happy,'' said Vitalie. ``When he married her, I finally had a daughter.''


The couple honeymooned at Dollywood, country music star Dolly Parton's amusement park in Tennessee. But Adrienne Samen said they were forced to cut short the vacation after being hounded by reporters.


``There really wasn't one (a honeymoon),'' she said.


Samen said she will tell her side of the story during an appearance next month on a television talk show hosted by Sharon Osbourne, wife of heavy metal music star Ozzy Osbourne.


``I'm sorry to certain people, like my family and some of the police officers,'' she said.


She used a derogatory word in describing other officers, and accused them of damaging her wedding ring.


South Windsor police Sgt. Matthew Reed said the bride threw the ring to the ground. No complaint about the ring has been filed, he said.


Liz Gioielli, the banquet manager at the Mill on the River, said the restaurant was not damaged, but workers did have a lot of glass to clean up.



08/29/03 11:12

[Jolie Rouge]

Upcoming 'Doonesbury' To Be Censored

When you open your local newspaper on Sunday, September 7, Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" might not be there. On that date, the edgy comic strip will address masturbation, a topic some newspapers have determined is not appropriate. So they won't run the strip that day.

According to The Hartford Courant, that specific installment of the popular comic will attempt to find humor in recent medical research about prostate cancer. One of the strip's regular characters, the Rev. Scot Sloan, says, "There's a new study that suggests that regular masturbation prevents prostate cancer." A few panels later, another character notes that "self-dating prevents cancer."


Clever?

Sure.

Funny?

Maybe.

Controversial?

No doubt about it.

And that's why a recent poll of 34 newspapers conducted by the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal found that 19 of them would not run "Doonesbury" on September 7, opting instead for a substitute strip provided by Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes "Doonesbury." Just 12 papers said they would publish it, while three were not sure what they would do. Editors who chose not to use that particular "Doonesbury" strip said it crossed the line of what is acceptable and what's offensive for their communities. Garry Trudeau is not commenting.

[Jolie Rouge]

Teens Plead Guilty to Highway Shootings
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD

NEWPORT, Tenn. (AP) - Two teenage stepbrothers who told police they were mimicking a video game when they randomly fired at cars on a freeway were sentenced to juvenile prison Thursday for killing one person and wounding another.

William Buckner, 16, and Joshua Buckner, who turns 14 Sunday, pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault. Under state law, they can only be held as juveniles until they are 19.

Juvenile Court Judge Ben Strand said he considered granting the boys probation, but said, ``I just can't bring myself to do that because it was a grievous act.''

Kimberly Bede, who was wounded in the June 25 attack, said the sentence was not harsh enough.


``I really don't think they got what they deserve,'' said Bede, 19.


From a wooded area near their home at the Smoky Mountain Country Club, the boys fired a .22-caliber rifle up to 25 times through a break in the trees at cars driving along Interstate 40 about two miles east of Newport. They said they were bored and decided to shoot at tractor-trailer rigs, just like in the video game, ``Grand Theft Auto.''


Aaron Hamel, 45, a registered nurse who had recently moved to Knoxville, was fatally shot in the head as he returned from a day in the mountains. Minutes later, Bede, of Moneta, Va., a passenger on a sightseeing drive, was wounded in the pelvis.


The boys wrote letters to apologize to the victims' families that were read in court Thursday.


``I didn't want to hurt anyone,'' Joshua wrote. ``This will stick with me the rest of my life.''



08/28/03 14:35

[Jolie Rouge]

Embarrassing Fact About Ancient Rome

Obviously, ancient Rome had no fashion police. Archaeologists who have been digging at the site of a 2,000-year-old Roman temple in south London have determined that the ancient Romans wore socks with their sandals. We're sure you're appalled.

How was this weird tidbit unearthed?

A life-size foot that belonged to a bronze statue is wearing what appears to be a woolen stocking under a sandal. "It's embarrassing for them," said Nansi Rosenberg, senior archaeological consultant at EC Harris, told the AFP wire service. (Yes, she really said that.) "I would think their excuse would be the cold. We know from the writings of Tacitus that the weather in Britain was terrible. It is certainly an interesting find. Though there is some documentary evidence for Britons wearing socks with their sandals, this is the first physical evidence."

The site, which once housed a Roman temple, is being excavated to make room for high-rise housing and a shopping complex. The statue is most likely of a Roman emperor or the god Mars Camulos, who was worshipped in northern France and Great Britain, reports AFP. In late July, the archaeologists digging at the site found a sealed box containing a white cream that still bears the finger marks of the person who last used it. The cylindrical tin box, found at the bottom of a ditch on the edge of the site, is about the size of a fist. It is half-full of a cream that was described by museum conservator as "sulphurous" and "cheesy."

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What I found most ironic, was the victims name in this story
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) - A woman in Cambodia has given herself up to authorities after accidentally killing her husband in a scuffle in which she squeezed his testicles until he fainted, a newspaper reported Friday.

Saut Chin, 46, was fed up with physical abuse from her husband when she grabbed his testicles until he passed out in the incident Tuesday, the Rasmei Kampuchea newspaper reported.

Fearing that her husband, Ouch Yan, 52, might regain consciousness and start beating her again, Saut Chin tied his neck with a scarf to a bed, the newspaper said.

The exact cause of Ouch Yan's death was not known.

The incident occurred in a village near Sihanoukville, a port city 115 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, news reports said.

Saut Chin and her husband Ouch Yan, 52, were arguing when the husband then kicked his wife in the crotch, the reports said.

"Hurt badly and fed up, she grabbed her husband's testicles and squeezed them with full strength until he fell unconscious on the spot," Rasmei Kampuchea said, citing police reports of the woman's confession.

After discovering that her husband was dead, Saut Chin reported herself to local authorities and asked to be jailed. She said she had not intended to kill her husband "but only to teach him a lesson," according to the newspaper.

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TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - A parrot's parody of a damsel in distress caused quite a commotion.

Tucson police and firefighters broke down a door after being called to a house and hearing a woman's screams coming from inside.

But police soon realized that the sounds weren't coming from a woman in woe.

"The parrot's screams sounded identical to those of a distressed adult female," Officer Andrew Davies said in his report.

The ruckus was the work of Oscar, a 2-year-old yellow-naped Amazon parrot.

Police found him intermittently making laughing and screaming sounds as he sat inside his large white cage.

The mix-up began on Saturday when a 911-hang up call was made from the house.

Police arrived to find the house locked with bars on the windows.

Hearing what they thought was a woman's voice, police called the fire department. Crews used a pry bar and a battering ram to get through a door.

Police asked a neighbor to call Dana Pannell, the homeowner. The neighbor said he was home at the time but didn't make the emergency call.

Although the dialer remains a mystery, the parrot is seemingly off the hook.

Pannell's wife, Judy, said Oscar doesn't know how to use a phone.

But Oscar - named after the Sesame Street character because of his sometimes foul moods - does have his talents, she said.

"He sings in Spanish," she said.

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SULTAN, Wash. (AP) - Days after 10,000 mink were released from a farm in southern Snohomish County, hundreds of the animals not yet captured have converged on local farms in search of food.

The animals had killed at least 25 exotic birds and attacked other livestock in the area.

"Over half our livestock was shredded. Murdered. Eaten alive," said Jeff Weaver, who discovered the dead birds on his farm Thursday. "These are not like regular farm animals. They're our pets."

Weaver, who breeds Indian Runner ducks and Banny chickens, said his field was full of the animals Thursday morning.


"One of the mink had part of a chicken in its mouth and was headed for the creek," he said. "They're starving. They'll kill anything in their path."

The mink also killed Weaver's geese, chicken and ducks, as well as wounded a dog and ate a 50-pound bag of bird feed. With an estimated loss of $2,000, he said he plans to improve fences, set traps and, if necessary, use a shotgun to fend off future assaults.

Diane and Joe Sallee are sealing their chickens in at night after they found the mink had killed six hens and injured several other that had to be euthanized.

"This has just devastated our chicken population. We are just so upset by this," Diane Sallee said. "The people who do these things don't think it through."

Animal activists argue that while the farm animals' deaths are unfortunate, it proves minks raised in captivity can survive in the wild.

"The amount of suffering that has been prevented by releasing them from cramped cages and freeing them from an extremely cruel death more than justifies a temporary disruption to the ecosystem," said veterinarian Andrew Knight, director of research at the Seattle-based Northwest Animal Rights Network.

Owners of the mink farm from which the animals were released estimate about 80 percent of the animals have been captured, leaving more than 1,000 unaccounted for, said Teresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission USA. The commission is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrests and convictions of those responsible.

The FBI, which is leading the investigation, suspects an out-of-state group is responsible for the mink release at the Roesler Brothers Fur Farm off U.S. Highway 2.

The Animal Liberation Front, considered a domestic terrorist group by the FBI, has claimed responsibility.

Weaver argues that the group that released the animals didn't think of the repercussions.

"I'm not into anyone running around with fur coats on," he said. "But you cannot let 10,000 semicarnivorous animals out without having serious consequences."

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RHINELANDER, Wis. (AP) - Jogger Laura Tromp never saw what hit her. It turns out she was blindsided by a whitetail deer.

"I went out for a jog about 20 to 6 Wednesday morning, and I was jogging on Stevens Street when all of a sudden I was face-down on the pavement," she said. "A woman who saw it all said I was hit by a deer. I never saw it coming."

Tromp, of Rhinelander, was treated at St. Mary's Hospital for multiple injuries.

"It hit me from the side," Tromp said. "I was told later that I was thrown about four feet by the impact."

She suffered a concussion, a broken nose and a broken tooth and also required six stitches to close an open wound on her nose.

Keith McCaffery, a retired deer biologist with the state Department of Natural Resources, said the accident was most likely not premeditated by the deer.

"He had to be distracted by something else," McCaffery said. "Whitetails are not particularly protective, even of their young, because they are quite vulnerable to predation.

"They are not as willing to defend their young as, for example, moose which will often stand their ground against predators as large as bears."

McCaffery has his own explanation of what happened.

"I think this incident is evidence that there are too many deer out there."

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ATLANTA (AP) - Holiday Inn wants to know what has become of the 500,000 towels a year that guests swipe from its 2,638 hotels.

But the hotel chain isn't looking to put towel takers through the spin cycle. It just wants them to spin some yarns for a national promotion.

Holiday Inn gave guests amnesty Thursday in exchange for their stories about how they've used the towels they've taken over the years.

For every story shared, Holiday Inn will donate $1 to a charity it founded in 1986 that helps children with life-threatening illnesses.


"This really is lighthearted," said Mark Snyder, senior vice president for brand management at Holiday Inn. "It's just a way for people to come on, tell us their story and relieve any lingering guilt they might have about having a Holiday Inn towel in their linen closet."

The hotel chain asked guests to provide their stories on Holiday Inn's Web site. Submissions will be accepted through the end of September. Guests whose stories are one of the best 25 chosen will receive a limited edition souvenir Holiday Inn towel.

Hundreds of stories had already rolled into the Web site by Thursday afternoon.

One man said he took a towel from a Holiday Inn hotel in Monterey, Mexico, as a memento of his honeymoon night. He said he later lost the woman, but he's still got the towel.

Snyder said the lost towels cost the hotel chain about $3 each. But, he said, Holiday Inn doesn't mind that guests take them. Snyder said most guests feel the towels are part of the cost of their stay.

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ZURICH (Reuters) - A Swiss father who searched for his mountaineer son's missing body for 18 years thought his quest had paid off this week when a glacier, thawing in Europe's record heat, gave up a corpse.
The young son and a companion vanished in 1985 while scaling the Titlis peak in the central Swiss Alps. Officials concluded strong winds blew them off the mountainside as they bivouacked.

The man's father, who police have not named, made dozens of trips to the area to seek his remains over the years, finding nothing but bits of equipment.

But police said Thursday he had discovered a corpse the day before that had been uncovered by a receding ice pack.

"Yesterday (the father) thought it was his son. Today he says it is the friend," a police spokesman said. "I would leave this wide open for the moment ... We don't know if it is the body of his son, his son's companion or someone else."

Several other people have gone missing in the area over the years. The decomposed body was given to forensics experts for tests.

Thawing Alpine ice has yielded several bodies this summer.

German hiker Helmut Weiss, last seen in 1971, was found this week at an altitude of 8,860 feet near Ischgl in Austria, German police said Thursday.

A group of German hikers came upon his decomposed upper body Tuesday, protruding 32 inches from the ice. He was identified by items in his wallet.

Austrian Police said the bodies of an Austrian and Canadian had been also found in the mountainous Tyrol province alone.

In July, hikers discovered the body of a German woman missing since 1956 near Kaprun in another part of Austria.

"Maybe we will even find a new Oetzi," a German police spokesman said, referring to a mummified 5,000-year-old corpse whose discovery in Alpine ice in 1991 caused a sensation.

Hikers who found "Oetzi" first mistook him for an unlucky mountaineer.

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TOKYO (Reuters) - A man rammed his car into the gates of Japan's ruling party headquarters on Friday afternoon, shouting abuse at Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi before being apprehended by police.
Nobody was injured in the incident at the central Tokyo headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), according to media reports, which described the perpetrator as a right-wing extremist in his 40s.

After crashing into the steel gate and toppling part of it, the man leapt from his car, scattering leaflets and shouting "Koizumi is a fool," Kyodo news agency said.

A police spokesman said the man was quickly caught, but declined to give further information.

[Widgetsx3]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Birds do it, bees do it -- well perhaps bees don't do it quite like birds and people do and scientists have found one piece of the puzzle.

The international team of researchers has discovered the gene that allows male bees to have no father.

"We found the section of honeybee genome responsible for the differentiation between female and male," Kim Fondrk of the University of California Davis, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

The discovery helps explain a lot of things that are strange about bees and may help experts preserve endangered bee populations so they can keep the busy insects pollinating crops and wild flora.

Writing in the latest issue of the journal Cell, Fondrk and colleagues in Germany and Norway said the responsible gene is called complementary sex determiner, or csd.

Csd has in 19 alternative versions, called alleles. Female bees have two copies of csd which are always different alleles. Males have only one copy.

About one-fifth of animal species including all ants, bees and wasps use a similar system of sex determination, but the actual genes and mechanisms involved are not well understood.

It helps explain their complex social systems, said Fondrk.

"There are three castes -- the queen, who is the egg layer and mother of all the bees in the hive," Fondrk said. In the wild she mates only once with a male to get the two sets of genes that go to all of her female offspring.

"Then the workers are females and they do all the work. They are the ones that sting. They are the ones that bring the honey in too."

Then there are the males -- the drones. "Drones just have a sexual function," said Fondrk. And they do not inherit a second set of genes from a father bee. They are half-clones of the queen.

Understanding why this happens genetically can help bee breeders, said Fondrk.

When bees are inbred to select desired traits, eggs can accidentally be fertilized with two copies of the same version of csd. These eggs develop into sterile males.

Worker bees find and kill these sterile male larvae and inbred honeybee colonies can die out.

"This problem has haunted bee breeding since the 1940s," Fondrk's colleague at UC Davis, Robert Page, said in a statement.

"As we understand more, there will be ways to get around this problem."

[the fugative]

News of The Weird
Chuck Shepherd

Published August 28, 2003

Wired magazine reported in August that an order screen at the big e-mail spammer, Amazing Internet Products, was left unsecured and was hacked into recently, revealing not only an inexplicably large sales volume (6,000 orders in four weeks for $50 Pinacle cream that promised to increase penis size by up to 3 inches) but some prominent, should-know-better customers, such as the manager of a $6 billion mutual fund in New York City. Wired (and earlier, Salon magazine) reported that AIP's two principals are a 19-year-old high-school dropout and chess vagabond and a 20-something former head of a neo-Nazi outfit.

• The Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune reported in August that the local superintendent of schools, Wilfredo Laboy, had recently failed (for the third time) the basic English proficiency test required of all teachers in the state. (English is Laboy's second language.) The state education commissioner said that Laboy was doing "an excellent job" but that he was still going to have to pass the test (a test that Laboy called "stupid").

• Reuters reported in June that would-be painter Rainer Herpel, 51, of Bad Ems, Germany, was speaking again, after having remained silent for the past 29 years as a reaction to his father's disapproval of art as a career. Herpel lived with his mother, spent most of the time alone in his room concentrating on his paintings, only occasionally ventured outdoors, and came out of his shell only when his father passed away. Said Herpel, "All great artists were outsiders before they had success."

Our civilization in decline

• CBS News reported in June that few states have complied with the Brady Bill requirement to list all people involuntarily hospitalized for mental illness on the FBI computer database used for gun purchases, with the result that 2.7 million people should be barred from buying guns for that reason but only 90,000 are. In Hawera, New Zealand, a 25-year-old sex worker ("Brooke") at a massage parlor set the town abuzz in July by advertising that she (who recently gave birth) would (presumably for an additional fee) allow her customers to consume her nutritious breast milk; the director of the local breastfeeding advocates, La Leche League, said she was concerned that Brooke's baby was getting shortchanged.

• Omorotu Francis Ayovuare, 55, a professional surveyor from Nigeria, has filed 72 employment discrimination complaints against British companies in the past five years, with only two minor victories to show. According to a report in London's Daily Telegraph in June, Ayovuare has cost responding employers and the government the equivalent of nearly $1 million to deal with him before employment tribunals. One panel ruled in 2001 that Ayovuare, who is "impressive on paper," keeps applying for jobs beyond his level of practical experience.

• A longstanding rumor on the inner-city "street" held that the federal government actually created AIDS for the purpose of keeping blacks' population down and the community weak, but now a man of impressive credentials has made the accusation in court. Boyd Graves, 50, a black AIDS activist who is also a Naval Academy and law school graduate, sued in San Diego in July, accusing the government of illegally withholding documents that Graves claims will prove the government engineered the whole thing and is suppressing the cure.

• The family of teenager Amy Woods, who was left brain-damaged when hit by a car seven years ago in Springfield, Mass., will get to trial in their suit, which names not only the driver who hit her but also a driver who didn't. Roger O'Neil, a repairman for the NYNEX telephone company, had just stopped on a residential street and courteously motioned Woods and a friend to cross in front of him, but as soon as Woods cleared O'Neil's van, a less courteous driver smashed into her. Woods' family said that if a driver wants to be courteous, he must be responsible for knowing that crossing the street would be safe.

Courtroom follies

• Juries of their peers: In June, a judge in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, rejected the request of a 15-year-old boy, on trial for beating another teenager to death, for a jury composed entirely of teenagers. At the other end of the spectrum, a 13-year-old boy, on trial in April in Inverness, Fla., for fondling a classmate, demanded that he be tried as an adult in front of an adult jury. (He was quickly convicted.) In Santa Ana, Calif., in June, Antonio Nunez, 16, convicted for violent crimes (kidnapping, shooting at police) that he committed at age 14, was sentenced as an adult to five life terms (one of them without possibility of parole) plus 121 years.

• Rap as a second language: In a June copyright infringement case, British High Court Judge Kim Lewison ruled against the composer of the 2001 song "Burnin' " and explaining that he could not help Lewison because he did not know what certain lyrics meant (such as "shizzle my nizzle"). The lyrics, said the judge, although written in a form of English, were "for practical purposes a foreign language" and therefore he could not be sure whether the borrowed use of the lyrics impugned them.

• Several times since 1999 News of the Weird has run stories of incidents in which someone phones the manager of a fast-food restaurant claiming to be a police officer and asks the manager to strip-search one of the employees while the caller listens to the episode on the phone. (Police later concluded that the calls were hoaxes for sexual gratification.) In July, police in Panama City, Fla., arrested supermarket supervisor James Marvin Pate, 36, on the complaint of a local woman who reported a similar situation. At least one of the calls in the previous incidents (in Wisconsin, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana and West Virginia) had been traced to a phone in Panama City, but there were no suspects in those cases until Pate's arrest.

District of Calamity (continued)

• The District of Columbia government's inspector general reported in April that D.C.'s child-support office had been sitting on nearly $3 million in long-overdue, already-collected distributions to custodial parents and that several ranking officials in the office had long known about the delay (a problem apparently caused by incomplete records in "thousands" of cases). (Roscoe Grant, the deputy director of child-support enforcement in the District, himself resisted supporting two out-of-wedlock children until ordered by courts in 1998 and, regarding a 20-year-old son, 2002.)

• In July, New York City's deputy police commissioner, Frederick J. Patrick, was arrested and charged with taking $113,000 from an office charity fund and using it to pay jailed inmates to make calls to sex hotlines, which Patrick then allegedly listened in on for his own gratification.

Least justifiable homicides

• Recent provocations leading to murder: (1) Wouldn't give him back his New York Yankees cap (Kenneth Ware, 45, allegedly stabbed his brother to death, Brooklyn, July). (2) Parked his truck on top of a man's septic tank and wouldn't move it (Chad Landreth allegedly shot the driver to death, Samsula, Fla., June). (3) Argued over who should feed the couple's goats (Pearl Lynne Smith, 47, allegedly shot her husband to death, Eldon, Okla., June).

• Also, in the past month: Norway repealed its law that barred intoxicated people from voting in elections. Justice Barrington Black had to recuse himself from a "dangerous dog" case when he learned that his own dog appears in the background in a video for the defense, frolicking in a park with the defendant-dog (London, England). Cambodian police detained (on a charge unrelated to hygiene) a prominent 81-year-old Buddhist guru who has preached for 60 years that religious purity requires that no water ever touch his skin or hair (Phnom Penh).


:p

[Jolie Rouge]

No. 1 Complaint of Most Moms and Dads

The No. 1 complaint of parents? They don't have enough time--good, quality time--to spend with their children. The demands of long work hours, housework, and other responsibilities have encroached on the time they have to spend with their kids, The Associated Press reports of a new study of 1,000 parents and caregivers with children under 18 who are living at home. What's more, fully 94 percent of those surveyed are aware that there is a relationship between the amount of meaningful time parents spend with their kids and the way those kids deal with major issues, such as substance abuse and discipline. Knowing this doesn't make it any easier to carve out a few extra hours in the day to spend on the swings in the park or reading books together at bedtime.

The study, which was released by the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and the Pennsylvania-based nonprofit group KidsPeace, was overseen by Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Poussaint.

Here are some of the findings, which may resonate with your household:

--54 percent said they had little or no time to spend in physical activities with their children, such as taking a walk or playing catch in the backyard.

--Parents in about 3.5 million U.S. households spend an hour or less a week in some type of physical activity with their children.

--50 percent of all parents either don't have enough time or wished they had more time to read to their kids or help with their homework or other educational activities.

--Although some 56 percent of parents acknowledged that their kids are worried about war and terrorism, fully 33 percent admitted they had not yet talked to their little ones about these big issues.

--50 percent of parents and caregivers confessed they haven't talked to their children in the past year about sexual pressures or sexual activity.


The primary obstacle to all this: busy work schedules.

What's a parent to do? First, be aware of the situation. Second, recognize your child's need for your presence in his or her life. Third, figure out a way to make it happen. "They can listen to their children. They can talk, not to their children, they can talk with their children," C.T. O'Donnell, the president and CEO of KidsPeace told AP. "They can take walks in park. They can spend meaningful, interactive reading time with their kids."

[Jolie Rouge]

Where You Live Could Make You Fat

And you thought you were fat because you ate too many cookies.

Maybe you're fat because of where you live.

People who live in the sprawled-out suburbs who must drive to work, school, and the store, are likely to weigh 6 pounds more than their friends who live in the city, reports The Associated Press.

Most European cities are designed for walking and biking, and it's no coincidence that people who live there are typically skinnier and live longer than the average American. "How you build things influences health in a much more pervasive way than I think most health professionals realize," Dr. Richard Jackson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told AP. Jackson assisted with the research, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion. "Sprawl" is the hot buzzword for communities built far from the main city.


The study: Urban planner Reid Ewing rated the amount of sprawl in 448 counties that surround metropolitan areas--counties that are home to two-thirds of the U.S. population--and then tracked CDC data on the health of 200,000 area residents.

The results: When we live in such communities, we are heavier, walk less, and have higher blood pressure, compared to residents of cities who walk more frequently than they drive.


If you want to lose weight move here:

The four boroughs of New York City: Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens

San Francisco County, California

Hudson County, New Jersey (Jersey City)

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Suffolk County, Massachusetts (Boston)

Folks who live here weigh more:

Geauga County, Ohio (near Cleveland)

Goochland County, Virginia (near Richmond)

Clinton County, Michigan (near Lansing)

[Jolie Rouge]

Have you seen that bright red dot up in the evening sky over the past several nights?

To many, it's just the simple observance of Mars' closest passing of Earth in over 60,000 years. For others, it's a sign of the end of all things to come.

Over the past week, thousands of concerned believers have stocked up on tin foil and night vision goggles to prepare themselves for an alien invasion. Those with deep faith in an intelligent Martian race are viewing the extreme proximity of Mars to Earth as a sign of an ensuing apocalypse. They say it's only a matter of time before the human race succumbs to alien rule.

However, the Martian takeover won't appear in the form of a traditional battle of violence and war. Instead, many believe that mankind will be eliminated through an alternative process: breeding.

According to several alien experts, the Mars approach is going to lead to a record baby boom of half-Martian, half-human offspring. It is believed that within a year's time, nearly five to seven percent of all births on our planet will be extra-terrestrial/human hybrids.

How soon can we expect the first birth of an alien/human baby?

According to Sarah Knocke, in about seven months. The 24-year-old Wal-Mart employee is due in mid-May of 2004, expecting to give birth to her alien-fathered child.

:rolleyes:

[Jolie Rouge]

Bizarre Love STORIES

Peter the Great had his wife's lover executed and his head put into a jar of alcohol. She had to keep it in her bedroom.

After having a two year affair with Catherine the Great, Gregory Aleksandrovich Potemkin remained a valued advisor to Catherine. He even helped her pick out future lovers.

Cleopatra married two of her brothers and was the mistress of both Caesar and Mark Antony.

Fernade Olivier lived with Picasso for seven years. They wanted to marry but Olivier couldn't find her estranged husband to divorce him. In the 1940's she found out he had died right after she met Picasso - 40 years earlier.



An Animated Sex Life

Latin lovers who are bored with the same old sexual positions can now receive a helping hand. A Brazilian telephone company is sending animations of sexual positions based on the Kama Sutra directly to customers' mobile phones. For only 99 Brazilian centavos (21 pence), customers of Tele Norte Leste Participacoes' wireless arm Oi are able to down-load one of 40 different animations along with a brief
explanation and level of difficulty. If demand warranted, Oi believes it could double the number of animated positions available. Each graphic comes with the warning that the content is for adults over the age of 18. Not surprisingly, The Rio de Janeiro-based company is one of Brazil's fastest growing cellular phone operators.


What A Tease

SHARON, PA - When you're planning a kid's birthday party to ride go-carts, make sure the go-carts aren't rented out. However, if they are, you can always buy the kids beer and do a strip tease for them, such as one Pennsylvania woman did. When she took her son and three friends to a go-cart track to celebrate her son's birthday, they discovered all the go-carts were rented out. To make up for the disappointment, she took the kids to a hotel and bought them beer.
Handing them $1 bills, she told the boys she wanted to be a stripper, and asked them to put the money in her bra and panties. She then exposed herself and asked them to spank her. The woman's son said that he was embarrassed by her actions. She was free on bail and has since been barred from seeing the boys, since they have seen enough of her already.



No More Alcohol - You're Cut Off

MEXICO CITY - Construction worker Ernesto Rodriguez Hernandez was taken to the hospital after he got drunk and paid two young boys to castrate him. He was intoxicated at a building site in Aguascalientes city on Sunday when he met two 11-year-old boys who had gone there to play. After telling the boys he wished to be "castrated to live more calmly" and because he wasn't married, he then offered them money. He gave the boys 200 pesos (US$20) after they sliced off one testicle with a razor he provided. The boys' par-
ents called police after the boys told them how they obtained the money. Rodriguez was taken to the hospital and the children were put under court jurisdiction while officials investigate the case.




A Derailed Escape

MONROE, Wash. - An Evergreen State Fair employee led police on a crazy chase through the fair after he tried to steal money from another carnival worker and then went into a women's restroom and exposed himself. When deputies arrived, he put on his pants, took off his shirt, and went through a window in one of the bathroom's stalls. He groped women as he ran, and then scaled a chain-link fence to U.S. 2, where he attempted to steal a car from a woman. When that didn't work, he fled across the highway to a train and tried to jump aboard, despite the fact it was traveling about 45 miles per hour. After being knocked out from his close encounter with the train, he was taken to a medical center in Seattle with multiple fractures.



:eek:

[Widgetsx3]

ERIE, Pa. (AP) - A pizza delivery man told police he had been forced to rob a bank and asked authorities to help him minutes before a bomb strapped to his chest exploded and killed him.

On Saturday, federal agents and police in northwestern Pennsylvania were trying to solve the bizarre case of 46-year-old Brian Douglas Wells, who left to deliver a pizza to a mysterious address in a remote area about an hour before he turned up at the bank with a bomb strapped to his body.

No one else was hurt in Thursday's explosion, which happened in front of law enforcement officers as they waited for a bomb squad to arrive.

WJET-TV of Erie captured audio and video from Wells as he sat handcuffed in front of a state police cruiser. "Why is nobody trying to come get this thing off me?" he asked.

A state police spokesman confirmed Friday night that Wells had made a number of statements, including that he had been forced to rob the bank.

The tape shows Wells telling authorities someone had started a timer on his bomb under his T-shirt, and that there was little time left.

"It's going to go off," Wells said. "I'm not lying."

Erie Chief Deputy Coroner Korac Timon said Saturday the bomb appeared to have hung from Wells' neck, and that he had been told it was of a "very sophisticated construction."

FBI Special Agent Bob Rudge called the case unusual, noting that while bank robbers sometimes claim to have a bomb, few actually do.

While no one has been arrested or identified as a suspect, Rudge said the investigation was "going extremely well." Wells' death was being investigated as a homicide and investigators were looking into Wells' background.

Linda Payne, who owns the property where Wells lived, described him as a private, trustworthy person who liked music and cared for three cats. He was a friend of Payne's husband, who also had been a pizza delivery man, she said.

"I couldn't believe that he would rob a bank. He doesn't care that much about money," Payne said. "I think somebody lured him into that place delivering a pizza, dropped a bomb on him and sent him into the bank ... He would not have decided to do that on his own."

Wells' boss and one of the owners of Mama Mia's Pizza-Ria outside Erie, who asked that his name not be published, said Saturday he took a call Thursday for a pizza delivery but didn't recognize the address given.

He put Wells on the phone to get directions. Wells left to make the delivery and never returned, the pizzeria owner said.

The address of the delivery was a rural spot along a main drag that runs south of the city, where a gravel road leads to a television transmission tower.

According to police, Wells entered the PNC Bank branch outside Erie on Thursday afternoon and producing an "extensive note" demanding money and saying he had a bomb. Rudge would not provide any details about the note.

Wells left with an undisclosed amount of money and got into his car. Police surrounded him a short time later in a nearby parking lot, pulled him out of his car and handcuffed him, authorities said.

The bomb exploded about 40 minutes after he entered the bank.

Authorities obtained a search warrant and took evidence from Wells' home, but a state police spokesman refused to say what was taken. The evidence arrived at FBI laboratories in Washington, D.C., but Rudge could not say how long testing would take.

State police forensics teams also searched near the spot of Wells' last pizza delivery. It was not know what, if anything, they found.

[Jolie Rouge]

Dayum !

[Jolie Rouge]

10,000 Harleys Mark Centennial in Wis.
By MELISSA McCORD

MILWAUKEE (AP) - Ten thousand Harley-Davidsons, their riders wearing anything from Hog masks and feather boas to black leather, roared through the city Saturday on an 8-mile parade celebrating the company's 100th anniversary.

The event was as much a tapestry of red, white and blue as the motorcycle icon's signature orange and black. One Harley rider festooned his bike with two dozen American flags.

Willie G. Davidson, a grandson of Harley-Davidson's co-founder, and his wife, Nancy, led the parade, followed by riders on bikes toting large Harley flags representing riders' clubs from all over the world.

``It just shows the diversity of people, how they can get together for a celebration like the Harley-Davidson anniversary,'' said Bob Boyd, 67, who rode his 2003 Dyna Wide Glide Harley from his farm in London, Ontario.


``This Canadian feels part of the American spirit. We're family.''


Some of the motorcyclists were picked to participate in the parade because they had raised at least $5,300 for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Harley has a 23-year history with the association and hoped to raise more than $5 million for the group during the Labor Day weekend.


The parade was one of the highlights of Harley's four-day anniversary celebration, which also includes motorcycle exhibits, memorabilia sales and live entertainment centered along Lake Michigan's shoreline.


As spectators in T-shirts and shorts mingled with those in denim and leather, at least one neighbor worried about the noise Saturday. The Milwaukee County Zoo took precautions to protect its more than 2,000 animals from the roar in the parking lot just outside, where the parade began, keeping many of the animals inside until the riders were gone.


The celebration, expected to draw 200,000 to 300,000 people, concludes Sunday with a birthday party featuring music and fireworks beside Lake Michigan.


On the Net:

Harley-Davidson: www.harley-davidson.com



08/30/03 13:44

[Jolie Rouge]

Al Franken makes victory lap

NEW YORK, -- In a sort of victory lap, Al Franken co-hosted on CNN's "Crossfire" and appeared on CNN's "Live From the Headlines" Monday. Franken's appearances followed the decision by Fox News not to appeal a court ruling dismissing its lawsuit against Franken and publisher Penguin. Fox News had filed a lawsuit over its trademark phrase "fair and balanced," which appears on the cover of Franken's upcoming book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin ruled Franken's book was a clear example of parody, Daily Variety reported. The book tops the list of best-sellers at Amazon.com, most likely as a result of the publicity generated by the Fox News lawsuit, Variety reported. "It's time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he's normally accustomed to," a Fox News spokeswoman said.

[Jolie Rouge]

Dennis Miller to join 'Boston Public'

HOLLYWOOD, -- Five-time Emmy-winning comedian-actor Dennis Miller will join the cast of Fox's "Boston Public" for three episodes next season. Miller will play an investment banker who, convicted of securities fraud, avoids jail time by agreeing to community service -- his worst nightmare -- teaching math at the inner city school in Boston.

Most recently, Miller wrote, produced and performed in the cable stand-up special, "The Raw Feed," on HBO, which premiered in April. Currently, Miller is providing weekly commentary for "Hannity & Colmes" on the Fox News Channel on cable. Miller spent two years doing color for ABC-TV's "Monday Night Football" and completed 215 episodes of "Dennis Miller Live" for which he won five Emmys. He spent six years on "Saturday Night Live's" Weekend Update on NBC.

[Jolie Rouge]

The Smoking Gun published a 20-year-old interview with California governor candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger the same day 20 state Republicans endorsed his run for governor. In the interview, Arnie admitted to smoking "grass and hash," hanging out with "hookers and bar owners," and joining in a group-sex sencounter. Arnie is brushing off the story and doesn't consider it important anymore..........


{{{ 20 years ago -- wasn't everybody ?? }}}

[Jolie Rouge]

Since being fired from The Practice, a furious Lara Flynn Boyle has been returning every gift producer David E. Kelly ever gave her. She stormed into Bloomingdale's and returned two gifts, ( a beautiful watch and a silver letter opener),for a store credit. When she received the store credit, she told the clerk that she would be back with more of his "stuff" when she finds it.......Guess there's no time limit for stars to return items huh? We'd be treated like common criminals...



DETROIT -- A pair of thieves with a sweet tooth stole a Krispy Kreme truck and then held it for ransom. During a delivery outside a gas station, the truck driver heard a noise coming from the truck's trailer, and when he jumped in to investigate, the truck began to move. The vehicle, carrying 1,800 doughnuts and some equipment, kept on moving after the driver jumped out of the trailer. The crooks called a Krispy Kreme manager on the company's Nextel phone two hours later and told him if they wanted the truck back, they would have to pay $100. The manager got the police department on the phone in Detroit. The cops found one suspect at Warren and Southfield roads in Detroit with a bag of doughnuts in his hand. The other suspect was located carrying the company's phone. However, the truck was nowhere to be found.




PINCONNING, Mich. -- Police didn't have much trouble catching an accused thief as he fled the scene in a child size All Terrain Vehicle. In fact, not only was it a child's toy that could barely carry his weight, it ran out of gas, the Bay City Times reported. The man is accused of breaking into a neighbor's shed to steal a gallon of gasoline to power the tiny ATV, which he drove to a nearby party store, while dragging a bag of empty bottles he had planned on redeeming for cash. The suspect parked his tiny vehicle in some weeds and went into the store, where he allegedly took a bottle of beer and drank it in the restroom, police said. Store employees called police, who spotted him as he emerged from the weeds on his tiny fourwheeler. The suspect was charged with breaking and entering and shoplifting.






WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- Some of life's experiences are best not talked about -- such as a man being trapped for 18 hours inside a women's toilet. The Wellington Dominion Post reported the unidentified man answered "nature's call" Saturday evening but found the men's public toilet near the Petone Public Library was locked. So he used the women's toilet. The problem arose when a night watchman locked the toilet door, unaware the man was inside. It wasn't until the next afternoon -- 18 hours later -- that passersby heard his cries for help and bolt-cutters were used to release him. A police official told the Post the man was quite "relieved" to get out but not too keen about discussing his experience.






An unruly wedding guest bit off part of a man's finger during a reception in Corunna, Michigan last Friday. Michael VanStrate, an invited guest, caused altercations and arguments with several of the guests. Although he was asked to leave several times, he kept coming back. After smearing cake on a 9-year-old boy's face, the boy's father came to his rescue and had his finger bitten off during the struggle. The bridgroom then intervened. Police said that VanStrate later elbowed a 49-year-old woman, temporarily knocking her out. He was arraigned Monday on two counts of assault, one count of aggravated assault and one count of simple assault. He remained in custody after District Judge Ward Clarkson set bond at $25,000. Doctors were able to reattach the guest's finger that was bitten off in the scuffle.

[Jolie Rouge]

Bizarre Statistical FACTS

There are 318,979,564,000 possible ways of playing just the first four moves on each side in a game of chess.

In the 1970 Census, the U.S. had 2,983 men who were already widowers at the age of fourteen and 289 women, also at fourteen, who had already been widowed or divorced.

Mollusks, soft bodied animals with hard shells, are the second largest population of living things.

The total population of the Earth at the time of Julius Caesar was 150 million. The total population increase in two years on Earth today is 150 million.

People who have never married are 7.5 times more likely to be hospitalized in a state or community psychiatric facility than those who married.

[gemini26]

Ouch!

Q. Why are Episcopalians such bad chess players?

A. Because they can't tell their queens from their bishops.

[gemini26]

Mother 'put barbed wire around children's beds'

An Italian woman faces charges of child abuse after she allegedly put barbed wire around her children's beds to stop them from leaving the room.

Four children, aged between one and seven, were freed after a neighbour heard their cries and alerted police in Rome.

Their 36-year-old mother had left them trapped in their beds while she went out shopping, reported Italian media.

On her return she was immediately arrested and now faces charges of child abuse and false imprisonment. The children's grandmother who lives with them in the house was also arrested.

A social worker who had visited the family on a number of occasions said she had never seen the "cages" and neighbours also admitted they had never suspected the children were being mistreated.

[gemini26]

Policewoman suspended over prisoner's sex request

A policewoman has been suspended from her duties at an Argentine jail after a prisoner applied to have "sexual visits" from her.

Pamela Alejandra Candasi, 22, got to know prisoner Gaston Diaz while working at the main prison in the province of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina.

They fell in love when they spent time together after Candasi was assigned to accompany Diaz to court for his hearings, Clarin newspaper reports.

But the authorities did not find out until Diaz, who's serving five years for armed robbery, filed a request to have sexual visits from Candasi.

Candasi was immediately suspended from her duties and now faces the sack at an internal disciplinary hearing.

A police spokesman said: "This behaviour is unacceptable. There are some rules a police officer has to observe, even in her personal life."

Candasi's lawyer, who is fighting for her to resume her activities at the prison, said: "There is no law that says they can't have a relationship.

"She can date him and still do her job properly. And they should give her the right to visit him straight away."

[gemini26]

Fat prisoner accidentally prevents mass escape

A planned mass escape from an Argentine jail backfired when a 16 stone prisoner got stuck.

Roque Vivas got stuck in a 12ins hole dug in the ceiling by inmates of the prison at Rosario.

Five prisoners had already escaped but another 24 were waiting behind Vivas for their turn.

They ended up having to call prison guards to help their burly fellow convict, reports Las Ultimas Noticias.

A prison spokesperson said: "It was the funniest thing I've ever seen. This fat man was stuck from the waist down and shaking his legs.

"Then all the other prisoners looking really p***ed off because he stopped them from escaping."

The five men who managed to escape are still on the run.

[gemini26]

Ananova:

Dope cake nurses fall ill

Five Dutch district nurses who were celebrating a colleague's birthday had to be taken to hospital after eating a cake laced with marijuana.

The nurses bought the cake at a bakery in Amsterdam.

But they started to feel unwell soon after eating it.

Tests on the five women revealed that the cake contained traces of cannabis.

All five women were admitted to hospital in the Thuiszorg district of Amsterdam.

Three said they felt nauseous and confused while the other two were suffering from heart rhythm disorders.

One nurse was even kept in overnight for observation, according to a Nu.nl news.

Police, who were informed of the "space cake", are investigating the matter.

[gemini26]

Cyclist to stand trial for 'falling off bike'

An 11-year-old boy in Greece is to stand trial after falling off his bike during a race.

The boy on the eastern Aegean Sea island of Chios has been ordered to stand trial on October 13 for allegedly violating eight articles of the penal code and one traffic violation for falling off his bicycle during an annual race.

The boy - identified only by his first name as Manolis - was taking part in last year's Chios bicycle race when he suddenly fell off his bike. He was not injured in the accident, nor did he cause any injuries to other riders taking part in the race, according to reports.

The island's prosecutor said the boy fell because he was "not driving carefully and with constant rapt attention" and ordered him to appear in juvenile court.

[gemini26]

Brothel sponsors women's football team

A German women's football team is being sponsored by a brothel.

Teutschenthal players will take to the field sporting shirts recommending that their fans visit X-Carree.

The slogan X-Carree: Always Worth a Visit, will be emblazoned across the player's chests, reports IOL.

The brothel, owned by a real estate firm in the eastern city of Halle, agreed to pay for the women's new grey and red kits.

Coach Andreas Dittman commented: "The women have no problem with it."

[Jolie Rouge]

Funeral Planned for Last WTC Firefighter
By KAREN MATTHEWS

NEW YORK (AP) - A vial of blood is all that will be buried at firefighter Michael Ragusa's funeral next week, nearly two years after he was killed in the World Trade Center attack.

The 29-year-old will be the last of the 343 firefighter victims to be memorialized in an official service. His family had hoped his remains would be identified, but his mother, Dee Ragusa, said Sunday that they decided they had waited long enough.

``We always knew in our hearts when it would be the right time, when we would say, 'enough,''' she said.

Of the 2,792 people who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the medical examiner has identified remains of just over half. Scientists expect to exhaust all available DNA technology in the attempt to identify the rest as early as next year, although unidentified remains will be stored in case new methods are developed.


Many families held memorial services before any remains were identified, but Ragusa's family delayed an official ceremony. His parents decided to hold a funeral after the July wedding of their younger son.


``We got him happily married, and now it was time to take care of Michael,'' Dee Ragusa said.


Instead of the firefighter's remains, his family will bury a vial of blood he had donated to a bone marrow center. The vial will be interred at a cemetery on Staten Island after the funeral Sept. 8.


Dee Ragusa said that if she could not have her son's intact body to bury, she was glad to have the vial of blood. ``I'd much rather have a bottle of blood that flowed through him while he was alive than parts of his body,'' she said.



08/31/03 12:39

[Jolie Rouge]

Originally Posted by Widgetsx3
08-30-2003 10:09 PM

ERIE, Pa. (AP) - A pizza delivery man told police he had been forced to rob a bank and asked authorities to help him minutes before a bomb strapped to his chest exploded and killed him.

On Saturday, federal agents and police in northwestern Pennsylvania were trying to solve the bizarre case of 46-year-old Brian Douglas Wells, who left to deliver a pizza to a mysterious address in a remote area about an hour before he turned up at the bank with a bomb strapped to his body.

No one else was hurt in Thursday's explosion, which happened in front of law enforcement officers as they waited for a bomb squad to arrive.

WJET-TV of Erie captured audio and video from Wells as he sat handcuffed in front of a state police cruiser. "Why is nobody trying to come get this thing off me?" he asked.

A state police spokesman confirmed Friday night that Wells had made a number of statements, including that he had been forced to rob the bank.

The tape shows Wells telling authorities someone had started a timer on his bomb under his T-shirt, and that there was little time left.

"It's going to go off," Wells said. "I'm not lying."

Erie Chief Deputy Coroner Korac Timon said Saturday the bomb appeared to have hung from Wells' neck, and that he had been told it was of a "very sophisticated construction."

FBI Special Agent Bob Rudge called the case unusual, noting that while bank robbers sometimes claim to have a bomb, few actually do.

While no one has been arrested or identified as a suspect, Rudge said the investigation was "going extremely well." Wells' death was being investigated as a homicide and investigators were looking into Wells' background.

Linda Payne, who owns the property where Wells lived, described him as a private, trustworthy person who liked music and cared for three cats. He was a friend of Payne's husband, who also had been a pizza delivery man, she said.

"I couldn't believe that he would rob a bank. He doesn't care that much about money," Payne said. "I think somebody lured him into that place delivering a pizza, dropped a bomb on him and sent him into the bank ... He would not have decided to do that on his own."

Wells' boss and one of the owners of Mama Mia's Pizza-Ria outside Erie, who asked that his name not be published, said Saturday he took a call Thursday for a pizza delivery but didn't recognize the address given.

He put Wells on the phone to get directions. Wells left to make the delivery and never returned, the pizzeria owner said.

The address of the delivery was a rural spot along a main drag that runs south of the city, where a gravel road leads to a television transmission tower.

According to police, Wells entered the PNC Bank branch outside Erie on Thursday afternoon and producing an "extensive note" demanding money and saying he had a bomb. Rudge would not provide any details about the note.

Wells left with an undisclosed amount of money and got into his car. Police surrounded him a short time later in a nearby parking lot, pulled him out of his car and handcuffed him, authorities said.

The bomb exploded about 40 minutes after he entered the bank.

Authorities obtained a search warrant and took evidence from Wells' home, but a state police spokesman refused to say what was taken. The evidence arrived at FBI laboratories in Washington, D.C., but Rudge could not say how long testing would take.

State police forensics teams also searched near the spot of Wells' last pizza delivery. It was not know what, if anything, they found.


__________________



This just gets weirder .....


Co-Worker of Pa. Bank Robber Found Dead

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030831%2F184070095.htm&sc=1110

ERIE, Pa. (AP) - A friend and co-worker of a pizza deliveryman who robbed a bank then died when a bomb strapped to his body exploded was found dead at his home Sunday.

Police said there was no obvious connection between the two deaths. Still, authorities sent a bomb squad to search the home in Lawrence Park Township as a precaution, Erie state police Cpl. Mark Zaleski said.

``There was nothing overtly obvious as to the cause of his death,'' Zaleski said, ``but because there's a relationship between the two individuals, we are over there.''

The 43-year-old man, whose name was not released Sunday afternoon, worked with Brian Douglas Wells, 46, who died Thursday shortly after robbing a bank in Erie. Minutes before the bomb went off, Wells told officers who stopped him that he had been forced to rob the bank. No one else was injured in the explosion.


Wells had gone to deliver a pizza to a mysterious address in a remote area about an hour before he turned up at the bank with the bomb strapped to his body.


Police received a call early Sunday asking for medical assistance at the home where Wells' co-worker lived with his parents, but the man refused medical assistance, Zaleski said.


A few hours later, authorities were called again after his parents found him unresponsive. He was pronounced dead at the home and an autopsy was scheduled, Zaleski said. FBI Special Agent Bob Rudge said there was no reason to connect the man's death to Wells' case. There was no answer at the pizza shop where both men worked.



08/31/03 18:39

[Jolie Rouge]

Fugitive Father Defends Medical Standoff
By PAUL FOY

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A Utah father charged with kidnapping his own son said Sunday that authorities were trying to force chemotherapy on the boy for a cancer that was unconfirmed.

Daren Jensen said his lawyers were asking Utah authorities to drop the custody and kidnapping warrants as part of negotiations to end the standoff over medical treatment for 12-year-old Parker Jensen.

``Any parent with concern for a child would want to know definitely what he has before doing something as invasive as 49 weeks of chemotherapy,'' Jensen said, speaking to The Associated Press by phone from Pocatello, Idaho.

Jensen said he wasn't satisfied by a diagnosis that Parker has a rare and deadly form of cancer, Ewing's sarcoma. He accused the doctors at Primary Children's Medical Center in Salt Lake City of trying to rush the boy into chemotherapy.


He and his wife, Barbara, left Utah two weeks ago and she tried to take Parker to Houston for another medical opinion. The mother and son returned Saturday to Pocatello after Utah authorities foiled their plans by alerting the Houston clinic of the Aug. 9 Utah warrant for Parker's custody.


``They have taken away our rights as parents. It is our decision as to treatment,'' Barbara Jensen told KUTV of Salt Lake City on Sunday.


Daren Jensen was arrested on a fugitive warrant Aug. 16 near his in-laws' residence in Idaho. He is resisting extradition. A warrant also is out for Barbara Jensen.


Utah doctors diagnosed a rare but often fatal form of cancer in Parker and removed a tumor from under his tongue last April. To prevent a reoccurrence, they recommended chemotherapy.


The Houston clinic run by Dr. Stanislaw Bur***ski treats 72 forms of cancer without chemotherapy, but Ewing's sarcoma isn't among them, said Mike Goldberg, the clinic's public relations manager.


``Ewing's is a very different form of cancer and we don't have a trial for it,'' Goldberg told The Salt Lake Tribune.


The family says the boy is testing negative for cancer and that chemotherapy would only stunt his growth and leave him sterile, claims that doctors dismiss.



08/31/03 23:11

[Jolie Rouge]

Pierce Brosnan Wins Rights to Domain Name


GENEVA (AP) - James Bond star Pierce Brosnan has won control of the Internet name www.piercebrosnan.com in a ruling by a United Nations panel.

Arbitrators from the World Intellectual Property Organization ordered the transfer of the domain name to the Irish actor, who had complained that it was being used illegally.

The ruling said the registered owner of the name - Alberta Hot Rods, of Alberta, Canada - had no rights or interests in the name and was using it in bad faith.

Brosnan's lawyers told the panel that the domain linked to another Web site, www.celebrity1000.com, which they said contained biographies of some actors but no information about Brosnan. They noted that the site carries numerous advertising messages, and that the owner appeared to be using Brosnan's name to earn money.


The owner of the site did not file a defense.


Anyone can register a domain name for a few dollars, which has led so-called ``cybersquatters'' to file for famous names to make a fast buck from those who want the names. Some names are worth millions of dollars.


Brosnan's lawyers noted that Alberta Hot Rods is linked to Jeff Burgar, whom they described as a ``notorious cybersquatter.'' In its ruling, the U.N. panel said that Burgar or linked companies have previously been ordered to hand over domain names to other celebrities.


Actors Kevin Spacey and Pamela Anderson, ``Jurassic Park'' author Michael Crichton as well as singing star Celine Dion all have won their domain names from Burgar or companies linked to him.


The U.N. arbitration system, which started in 1999, allows those who think they have the right to a domain to get it back without having to fight a costly legal battle or paying large sums of money.



09/01/03 11:48

[Widgetsx3]

I saw that update Jolie, you beat me to the post though

[Widgetsx3]

BETHEL, Maine (AP) - Dave Hart and Rockie Graham exchanged vows on Monday, pledging their hearts and souls to each other underneath next to a cardboard recycling container.

The couple tied the knot at the Bethel Transfer Station, where they met and love bloomed next to the piles of recycled cans and garbage.

"What a contrast. The tux and the trash," Hart told the Lewiston Sun-Journal.

It was nearly three years ago at the transfer station that Hart met Graham, a committed recycler who now works part-time there. Hart is the station's manager.

When they decided to marry, it was Hart's idea to hold the ceremony where they first met, and where everyone knows them.

But what started out as a low-key event turned into a national news story.

"Inside Edition" flew the couple to New York City last month and outfitted them with expensive wedding attire. The couple were wired with microphones to capture the wedding, which will be shown on the television show this week.

All the hoopla also attracted a lot of guests. Around 250 people attended the wedding, standing on either side of a red carpet laid in the middle of the dump.

Hart wore gloves, top hat and tux. His bride wore a $7,000 wedding dress with sparkling sequins and white roses.

Next to a handmade sign that read "Tires $2 paid at town," guitarist Sam Chapman sang a tune he composed for the couple: "I hope you won't dump me when we marry, or toss me out like a bag of trash, I wouldn't want your burning love to turn to ash."

The crowd pressed in close as local lawyer Mike O'Donnell led the exchange of vows. Dave choked back tears as Rockie told him he was the love of her life.

They exchanged rings, and Hart stomped on the ceremonial champagne glass. Whoops and laughter and clapping filled the air.

The coverage on "Inside Edition" will air at 7 p.m. Sept. 2 on Boston channel WCVB and 12:30 p.m. Sept. 3 on WMTW Channel 8.

[Widgetsx3]

JANESVILLE, Wis. (AP) - To track down this alleged thief, all police had to do was flick on a computer.

A 40-year-old man was arrested Wednesday and charged with stealing a computerized tracking device that uses a global positioning system to keep track of jail prisoners on home detention.

"He apparently didn't know what he had because he would be awfully stupid to steal a tracking device," said correctional officer Thomas Roth, who runs the home detention program at the Rock County Jail.

The $2,500 device was temporarily placed outside a home by a woman serving home detention. The device, which is a little bigger than a brick in size, has a built-in GPS satellite receiver.

Prisoners wear a transmitter about as big as a cigarette pack on the ankle, and it acts as a 100-foot tether to the portable tracking device.

By the time the prisoner called to report the theft Monday night, the device had automatically notified the jail that it had been taken outside the prisoner's home area.

Roth then tracked the device through the Internet on his home computer.

A trail of electronic dots led authorities to an apartment building, where the suspect was captured.

[Widgetsx3]

TOKYO (Reuters) - Hundred yen shops are all the rage in deflation-hit Japan, but an upscale department store fought back on Monday with a different sort of campaign, offering an array of luxury goods tagged at a million yen ($8,570) each.
Crowds of shoppers -- many of them elderly women -- strolled the aisles of Mitsukoshi Ltd's flagship Nihonbashi store in downtown Tokyo, eyeing a special display of wares such as mink coats, Persian rugs, gold-encrusted Buddhist altars and pearls.

"The price may be high but the items on sale are worth even more, so they're actually bargains," said a spokesman for the department store, adding he had no estimate for how much the one-day campaign was likely to rake in.

The sale was to mark the Tokyo-based company's merger with four local subsidiaries.

[Widgetsx3]

GREAT DIAMOND ISLAND, Maine (AP) - A rift has developed on this small coastal island over a subject that rarely stirs passions: golf carts.

There is no golf course here, but over the last decade or so the number of battery-operated carts has exploded to more than 100 among the vacationers and retirees who have flocked to an old Army fortress transformed into a pricey new development on one side of the island.

Golf carts have become the most visible symbol of the influx, and they've spurred a backlash among some longtime residents who feel the sleepy charm of what had been a largely pedestrian island is under threat from the newcomers.

The dispute is "the most divisive thing that's happened to the island in a long time," says Roger Robinson, a year-round Great Diamond resident. He complains that newcomers are transforming the island into another outpost of suburbia.

"It's so different from where they came from, and that's the appeal of it," Robinson said. "More and more of them keep coming until systemically it becomes where they came from."

Great Diamond, just a two-mile ferry ride from Portland and one of hundreds of islands dotting Casco Bay, has only a handful of cars. In the past, most people walked or used the island taxi service. When the new development opened on the north side of the island, cars were even banned from its historic district.

But now some people complain that the proliferating golf carts cause parking problems at the ferry landing on the south side of the island, and some say they damage the island's roads.

A compromise reached in May bars people from crossing the island in their carts during the relatively busy summer, but some openly flout the rules. Others are embarrassed that a picayune dispute has turned their community into a source of amusement for outsiders.

But no one, it seems, can find a satisfactory solution.

"You have almost mutually exclusive lifestyles at stake," said Philip Conkling of the Island Institute up the coast in Rockland. "It's hard to compromise. People don't compromise over their lifestyles."

The island's southern end was settled by summer residents in the late 1800s.

On the northern end, the Army built Fort McKinley following the Spanish-American War. Abandoned and looted after World War II, the fort was an eyesore and makeshift trash dump for decades, until a developer transformed it in the early 1990s into a luxury community dubbed Diamond Cove.

Diamond Cove's rules barred residents from driving golf carts to the island's southern end, but the restrictions were largely disregarded by Diamond Cove residents. And people on the south end routinely traveled to Diamond Cove's restaurant, general store and the northern ferry terminal.

And around the time new residents began arriving in the early 1990s, the woman who ran the island's taxi service retired. Many people who had used taxis to haul groceries from the ferry decided to buy their own carts.

To some, the influx seemed innocuous.

Others saw Great Diamond's population increase as contributing to a major change in the island's character. Current estimates on the island's summer population vary from 300 to 600.

"The island that I knew in 1978 has been sort of overwhelmed by all these new people," says Paul Gleason, one of a handful who considered going to court over the carts.

On a recent afternoon, Joy Lee Eppes and her retired husband Bill were puttering around Diamond Cove in their golf cart.

Joy Lee, 65, recalls that tears streamed down her cheeks when she first saw the fort's meticulously preserved parade ground. The couple nixed plans to move to North Carolina and decided to make Diamond Cove their year-round home.

"For me it's magical," Mrs. Eppes said. "There's no more beautiful spot than right here on this island."

Throughout the fort, lawns are trimmed, the roads smooth, and the restored brick buildings have an orderly charm.

It's different on Great Diamond's southern end. Many of the summer residents are wealthy, but some chuckle that they're putting off repairing their weather-beaten homes to avoid showing up the neighbors.

Golf carts have sparked a few disputes in other upscale communities like Put-In-Bay, Ohio, and the Hampton Cove neighborhood of Huntsville, Ala.

But the controversy on Great Diamond embodies much of what makes life off Maine's coast unique. Community bonds are tight, but once disputes erupt things can turn ugly.

Residents of both ends of the island say they want to bury their squabbling.

At the main gate to Diamond Cove, most residents seem to be complying with the restrictions, but some simply ignore the posted warnings and buzz past in their electric carts. Vandals have taken some of the warning signs.

Still, islanders seem to be maintaining a sense of humor. A T-shirt that recently went on sale reads: "If golf carts are outlawed, only outlaws will have golf carts."

[Widgetsx3]

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - When, five minutes before curtain call, one of the leading actors in Portland's Northwest Classical Theatre Company's production of "King Henry VI, Part 1" was arrested, his colleagues ensured that the show went on.

Thaddeus "Scott" Carson, who played Lord Talbot, was hauled away from the Terry Schrunk Plaza in handcuffs as 120 eager Shakespeare fans waited for the show to begin.

According to police, an off-duty officer was jogging Saturday when he encountered a fully costumed Carson, who was swinging a metal sword.

The officer said, "Hey, man. Be careful with that thing," according to Henry Groepper, a police bureau spokesman. Carson started screaming and swearing, according to Groepper.


Groepper said when Carson raised the 24-inch sword again, the officer ran to a pay phone and called 9-1-1 .

Carson, 33, was arrested and accused of menacing and being an ex-con in possession of a restricted weapon.

Listed in the play program as "Scott Carson," police said Carson's real name is Thaddeus Carson. Court records show he was convicted in 1994 of first-degree sodomy, rape and sex abuse.

Several of the play's actors confronted the police officers to explain that Carson was an actor in a play, but the officers told them Carson would be held from one to four hours while he was booked, said Donovan Snyder, who played the Earl of Warwick.

With about 120 people waiting, Snyder said one of the play's directors addressed the audience about the problem, and stepped in to read Carson's lines.

The play, free to the public, was in its final production Saturday, having been performed each weekend in August. The actors were volunteers who have been rehearsing since the end of July.

Snyder said this time, life turned out to be far more dramatic than art.

"You don't often have to go to an audience and say one of our lead actors has just been arrested," he said. "It was bizarre in the extreme. I would have liked to have cued up the music and made it part of the play."

[Widgetsx3]

MILFORD, N.Y. (AP) - Adding bubbles to milk is tricky. Pump in too many, and it foams over. Add too few and why bother.

George and Mary Ann Clark, husband-and-wife entrepreneurs, have spent the past seven years trying to find the balance. Last week, they started production on a carbonated milk-based drink called Refreshing Power Milk - RPM - and they already have orders coming in from school districts.

Mary Ann Clark, a registered nurse, said she was pained to see children drinking cola and shunning milk when she worked in schools so she decided to do something about it.

"If you take water and add carbon dioxide to make soda, why can't you do that with milk?" she asked.


She and her biochemist husband started work on a carbonated milk drink in 1996 and founded Mac Farms Inc. in 1998. The company already sells eMoo, another carbonated milk drink. On Wednesday, in a factory with a barn-red roof and purple-and-yellow cow out front, the first batch of RPM was bottled.

The Clarks combined water and powdered milk to create slightly fizzy, mildly milky-tasting drink with the nutritional value of skim milk and 40 percent of the recommended daily amount of calcium.

Each 12-ounce serving contains 90 calories and 12 grams of sugar, compared to 150 calories and 40 grams of sugar in a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola. RPM contains 9 grams of protein compared to none in a can of Coca-Cola, but is higher in sodium: 115 grams to 52 grams per 12-ounce serving.

The flavors: vanilla cappuccino, Brazilian chocolate and chocolate raspberry.

Researchers at Cornell University had been looking for ways to extend the shelf life of dairy products using carbonation when the researched teamed up with the Clarks several years ago.

Joe Hotchkiss, chairman of the Department of Food Science at Cornell University, said the drink was designed to attract people who like soda.

"People consume food based on their sensory properties, taste, what kind of emotional feelings it gives them," said Hotchkiss. "Our role is to provide that similar kind of satisfaction in foods, but also couple that to foods that are more nutritionally sound."

[Widgetsx3]

EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) - Jim Hoel is very glad to have his watch back, even though it's stopped working since he last saw it - during World War II.

The last time he remembers wearing the old Gallet chronometer was on May 17, 1943, the day he used it while navigating a B-26 Marauder before the bomber was forced to ditch in a canal in the Netherlands.

He knows he no longer had the elaborate watch when he arrived at a German prisoner of war camp a few days later.

The watch arrived at his home this past week in a package sent from England by truck driver Peter Cooper, 56, who found it in the possession of an elderly neighbor in the village of Kirton, about 75 miles northeast of London.


"It's just eerie, isn't it? That was 60 years ago. I've sort of got gooseflesh," Hoel, 82, told the Chicago Tribune.

Cooper said the neighbor, "Tiny" Baxter, 89, told him his mother gave it to him.

"Whether she found it or it was given to her, I do not know," Baxter, a retired carpenter, said in a telephone interview.

The watch, an enlistment present from the bank where Hoel worked before the war, bore his name and Evanston address on its back.

Cooper was able to track him down at his new address using the Internet and friends who had contacts in the United States. He got his neighbor to give the watch to him so he could forward it to Hoel.

Hoel said the B-26 was one of a flight of 10 that encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire while en route to bomb a power plant near Amsterdam. He and three others of the plane's six crewmen survived, as did 16 other fliers from the 60-man mission. He spent the next two years in German prisoner of war camps.

[Jolie Rouge]

So THIS Is Why Guys Cheat!

No matter if they're single, married, or gay, men are hardwired genetically to want more sexual partners than women.

That's the word from the largest and most comprehensive study ever on this topic--16,288 men and women from 50 countries--that was conducted by an evolutionary psychologist at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, report The Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. "The results are strong and conclusive--the sexes differ, and these differences appear to be universal," wrote lead researcher David P. Schmitt in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology where the study findings were published. And, oh, has that created a firestorm.

Among other things, Schmitt asked the 16,288 male and female study volunteers the following questions, which measured desire, not how likely they were to act on those desires.

How many partners do you desire to have over the next month?

Men wanted 1.87 partners.

Women wanted 0.78 partners.

How many partners do you desire to have over the next 10 years?

Men wanted 5.95 partners.

Women wanted 2.17 partners.


What does this mean for us today now that we've moved out of the cave and into homes? There are two takeaways:

1. When one's significant other has an affair, men are more bothered by the sexual infidelity, while women are more troubled by the emotional infidelity.

2. Men seek women who are young and beautiful and presumably fertile, while women seek men who are rich since money helps when raising a child.


Are men really born to fool around?

No.

Your genes don't decide what you do. YOU do that. Or so says Pamela Regan, an evolutionary psychologist at California State University in Los Angeles. She told The Post, "I have heard people say, 'I can't help it, I am a man.' That's using science to justify your bad behavior." Dr. Domeena Renshaw, director of the Loyola Sexual Dysfunction Clinic at Loyola University in Chicago, agrees. She told the Chicago Sun-Times, "No, it's not genes. It's learned behavior."

[Jolie Rouge]

'100 women' Web scheme raises questions
'No name' actors' headshots sold online
Monday, August 25, 2003 Posted: 6:17 PM EDT

www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/25/headshots.reuters.reut/index.html


NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Until the scheme came to a halt earlier this month, buyers on the Internet auction site eBay had been enticed to an auction of actors' photographs with the following pitch:

"Where else can you get 100 women in the mail? This is a lot of 100 agency photos, with resumes attached to each one. A mixed bag of actors with a range of experience from none at all to those that have been working for years and years. Some you may know, some may be the stars of tomorrow."

Stars or not, all of the actors in this "lot" of 8x10 photos had submitted headshots to the office of Tony Sepulveda, who was until recently the casting director for the NBC series The West Wing (Laura Schiff currently casts the show).

eBay records show that a West Wing casting assistant, Elayne Teitelbaum, had made 1,100 sales of actors' headshots through auctions over two years under the name "MaxiRyder," turning the office's overflow of headshot submissions from agents, managers, and actors into a tidy side income. Prices ranged between $7 and $60.

Teitelbaum shut down her eBay headshot auctions after casting director and industry gadfly Billy DaMota sent her an angry letter and raised the issue on the popular actors' site www.wolfesden.net. Another factor in the closing of Teitelbaum's auctions may have been an Internet watchdog from the William Morris Agency, who reportedly bid on a headshot of Morris client Sarah Polley to catch the seller redhanded.

Murky moral territory?

Reached at the West Wing casting office, Teitelbaum refused to comment about the issue; Sepulveda returned a call but said he couldn't comment, either.

The practice raises several issues about the legal status of actors' headshots -- once submitted, are they the actors' property or the casting director's property? -- and about the murky moral territory of the demand for actors' images in the vast Internet marketplace.

While publicity photos, both approved and unauthorized, of well-known actors sell briskly to fans via the Internet, the sale of the headshots of "no name" actors -- headshots clearly culled from the overflow of hundreds of casting offices -- is also rampant in some corners of the Internet.

In fact, the only unusual thing about Teitelbaum's case is that she was selling them directly on eBay. Though almost all of the headshots that end up for sale can only have come from casting offices, they appear to go through a series of intermediaries: First a seller, who either acquired the headshots from a casting office for a fee or spuriously offered to "recycle" an office's old headshots, auctions the pictures in bulk, roughly sorted by gender or age. They're bought by more specialized sellers who pare the bulk piles down to the photos they think will fetch a good price.

Worried about children's pics

And here is where things get sketchy. Though Teitelbaum is not claimed to have sold many photos of child actors -- The West Wing employs few -- it is the sale of children's headshots, many with resumes attached, and many of them in eBay's untraceable "private" auctions, that has some parents and child actor advocates worried.

"What they're doing is bringing non-recognizable performers, specifically little boys, not just to public sites but to sites that are borderline pedophilia sites, and posting their photo and resume," said Bonnie Ventis, a children's agent at Kazarian Spencer Associates. "In some cases, the talent has their Social Security number on it, or it will say what school they're at, where they did such-and-such a play.

"And these aren't the kids who have a TV series. You tell me why buyers are going into a private auction 'room' on eBay and bidding $200 for a photo of a no-name boy."

Said Anne Henry, mother of three child actors whose 12-year-old son Michael had his headshot up for auction on eBay, "It started with photos of kids who had some recognizability, even minor -- that's to be expected. But I and some of my friends who are parents of child actors started realizing that there were no-name actors being sold. There was an auction last week, where sellers are getting blocks of 100; 100 boy actors, ages 5-16, sold for $103.50. A block of 100 girl actors sold for $76. That particular one was sold by a dealer called 'hightide,' who does huge amounts of adults and children."

Responding to parents

Another eBay dealer who sells a large volume of young actors' photos and goes by the moniker "showbizkids" has been responsive to parents' concerns, announcing last week that he would voluntarily cease selling agency photos that didn't come directly from actors or with their express permission. "While I don't believe there is anything illegal about it," he wrote, "I don't want to participate in an activity that might cause needless concern to a parent."

Henry understands that there is a proper place for collectibles and fan material.

"I'm not sure I want to say, Pull all headshot selling off eBay," she said. "There are collectors, there are fans, and that's your audience. There are lots of actors who sell their own headshots. But when you're seeing private auctions of your kid's stuff all the time, that's a little bit scary. I'll like to get eBay to not allow private auctions of kid's pictures."

Kevin Pursglove, a spokesman for eBay, said that agency photos of children are generally assumed to be "publicity shots, appropriately staged, and that the legal guardian of the child entered into a relationship with an agent to send those out in pursuit of employment. We would consider that a legitimate item and would let that remain. If it were a photo of random kids walking around a school, we might have some concerns."

Possible legal action?

Pursglove said that if items with personal information, such as resumes, are posted visibly on eBay, they are removed, but that a listing promising the inclusion of such material -- say, a displayed photo with a caption saying, "resume included" -- would not prompt concerns unless eBay had reason to believe that any item on sale had been obtained illegally. That criterion wouldn't apply to headshots or resumes, Pursglove said.

"There are state laws that allow individuals to control the commercialization of their name or image," said Pursglove. "But if they're photographs that are distributed to a large market, unsolicited, it would appear to us that it's the right of the individual who receives them to do what they wish with them."

Countered Bonnie Ventis, the children's agent, "Headshots are job applications, so there are legal implications. It is actionable, and I think that if enough parents come forward, there could be a class-action suit."

Said Paul Peterson, who runs the child-actor advocacy group A Minor Consideration, "There may be some rather tricky legal issues, because when you give your headshot, you are in fact making a gift of that. But the understanding is that no one in the casting business turns around and then sells them."

[Jolie Rouge]

Bada bing! Gangster grammar rules
The language of Tony Soprano passes the test of time.
Thursday, August 21, 2003 Posted: 8:18 AM EDT



LONDON, England (Reuters) -- "Bada bing" -- a catchphrase made famous by hit television show "The Sopranos" -- has earned a place alongside 3,000 other new entries in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English.

"Reality TV," "SARS" and "Muggle," someone lacking magic powers from the "Harry Potter" series of novels by author J.K. Rowling, have also been added to the tome, the largest one-volume dictionary of English, the book's publishers said.

The Oxford dictionary describes "bada bing" (also "bada bing bada boom") as an exclamation to emphasize that something will happen effortlessly and predictably. The word is also the name of a strip club in the mob drama.

Not to be outdone, British television produced "lovely jubbly" -- an expression of delight -- from wisecracking comedy "Only Fools and Horses."

From pop culture comes "Boy" and "Girl bands," "bootylicious" and "turntablist," a DJ proficient at spinning records.

Another trove of new words is the Internet, which added "cyberslacker," "egosurf" and "hacktivist" to the dictionary, which concentrates on the living language and is separate from the more established and multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary.

Though some entries may perplex and infuriate linguistic purists, the dictionary's publishers say words are only included if they are well-known and have proven they can pass the test of time.

It said texts including comics, newspapers, TV scripts, novels, scholarly journals and the Web are all scoured as fonts for new words.

[Jolie Rouge]

'Joe Schmo' duped in new reality show
Spike TV chronicles guy taken in by actors
Friday, August 29, 2003 Posted: 1:32 PM EDT

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- It sounded like the ideal job for a college dropout-turned-pizza deliveryman in today's America: go on a reality TV show, live in a fancy house, spend time with good-looking women and vie for the chance to win a lot of money and national fame.

Except the whole thing was an elaborate hoax, perpetrated on an unsuspecting "Joe Schmo" by a cast of actors and a team of producers known for reality competition shows and irreverent, male-oriented programming.

"The Joe Schmo Show" premieres next Tuesday on the Spike TV cable channel, culminating more than a year of work creating a reality series as elaborate as any that have aired on the mainstream broadcast networks.

"I never had a question about whether we could pull it off; we had a question about whether we could find the right guy," David Stanley, one of the show's producers, told Reuters.

That "right guy" turned out to be Matt Kennedy Gould, who was delivering pizzas in Pittsburgh after leaving law school. Enticed by the chance to appear on the show "Lap of Luxury" and compete for the chance to win $100,000, Gould signed on for what turned out to be a month in a mansion this June in southern California, competing in reality-style reward and immunity competitions and participating in evictions.

Among the competitions Gould is asked to endure: "Hands on a High-Priced Hooker," where the contestant who keeps a hand on the prostitute for the longest wins; a talent show; and a mock sumo wrestling battle.

"What we set out to do was to parody reality TV," said Rhett Reese, one of the show's creators and executive producers.


Stereotypical contestants

The cast of eight "contestants" includes all of the most common reality show stereotypes, including "grizzled veteran" Earl, played by Franklin Dennis Jones; "schemer" Gina, portrayed by Nikki Davis; and "buddy" Brian, played by segment producer Brian Keith Etheridge.

Producers saw 1,500 people for the cast, all of whom needed to be newer and unrecognizable talent so as not to give away the scam.

"Joe Schmo" is "hosted" by Los Angeles radio personality Ralph Garman, playing "himself." Garman, best known for his work doing comic relief on the popular L.A. morning radio show "Kevin & Bean," said one of the biggest surprises of the program was finding he actually liked Gould.

"It was definitely surprising that I developed some real genuine affection for Matt as we started working on the show," he told Reuters. But he also said it was difficult to try and maintain the fiction as time went by. "There were lots of moments where the show didn't go as planned ... there were plenty of moments where I thought the 'jig is up, this guy knows what's going on,' " he said.

Scott Stone, Stanley's partner and another producer on the show, agreed that there were mixed emotions as the project rolled on. "All of us got to that point where we realized how vested he was in the show and the people around him, that we felt bad for the emotional rollercoaster he was going through," he said.

Paul Wernick, a veteran news producer who with Reese co-created the show, was more blunt about the emotional impact. "There were times we wanted to stop the show," he said, though he also allowed that "the bottom line is Matt had the experience of a lifetime."

But does Gould agree? He was not available for interviews about the show, and all of the producers declined to talk about how happy or unhappy he is, now that he knows that he was put up, for America's amusement, as a "Schmo."

[Jolie Rouge]

Penguin poacher's fish theft charges dismissed
Tuesday, September 2, 2003 Posted: 5:06 AM EDT

CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE, New Jersey (AP) -- A man once sentenced to three years in prison for stealing a rare penguin is off the hook, for now, on charges he netted two koi from a neighbor's pond.

A judge dismissed an indictment against C. Thomas Caucci III, saying no one had proven the fish were worth $600, as claimed by the prosecution. At that value, Caucci and Michael Petitt faced charges of third-degree theft, which carries a one- to three-year prison sentence.

Caucci, 32, maintained his innocence -- and said he the fish weren't worth $600 anyway.

"I paid 30 bucks for them," he told The Press of Atlantic City last week.

Prosecutor James Herlihy said the value of the koi grew as the fish did, and their color and type also were factors. He planned to reindict the men and provide the documentation requested by the judge.

In 1991, a Humboldt penguin and two geese disappeared from the Philadelphia Zoo. Caucci's uncle found the penguin in his outdoor pond, and Caucci was sentenced to prison the next year.

In court, prosecutors also said Caucci once was charged with trading a stolen tractor for a $3,000 cockatoo.

Superior Court Judge Carmen Alvarez observed that, where animals were concerned, Caucci had "issues."

[Jolie Rouge]

Where frog legs, grits share a plate
French chef back in kitchen, this time in small-town Georgia
From Bruce Burkhardt CNN
Friday, August 29, 2003 Posted: 9:45 PM EDT


NEWNAN, Georgia (CNN) -- Like many small towns across the South, snuggled around the courthouse and the Confederate memorial in Newnan are a seed store, a gun shop, and a lawyers office -- and then a surprise: a French bistro.

"When we started selling duck here, everybody thought we were going out in the backwoods here, shooting it and bringing it back in," bistro chef Patrick Terrail says.

It's been something of an adjustment for Terrail. Most of his customers might be more comfortable with grits than with frog legs. Newnan is a nice town, but it's not Hollywood, where Sylvester Stallone, Jack Lemmon, Dinah Shore, Orson Welles and many other celebrities hung out in Terrail's previous restaurant, Ma Maison.

"Of course, everyone knows that Mr. Welles was a staple in our restaurant until he died," the chef says while showing photographs of himself and the actor. "He had his last meal there."

During the 1970s and 1980s, Ma Maison was the place to be and be seen in Hollywood, and Terrail was among the first of the so-called celebrity chefs. The restaurant was also where Wolfgang Puck got his start.

Terrail describes those times as magical.

But the magic ended when Terrail learned he had cancer, and he closed Ma Maison to focus on getting better.

Terrail got his health back, and he also married a woman from Georgia. The couple settled in Newnan, and a few years ago, Terrail got back in the restaurant business.

There are no celebrities giving the his new place of business a boost. But there is Nell Jackson, who runs the feed store across the street from the restaurant. "We've had reports," she says. "Customers that have eaten there that say its good."

But just to keep the record straight, Nell has not eaten at the restaurant -- yet. Meanwhile, that little spat the United States had with the French a while back over the war in Iraq didn't help things much for Terrail's French bistro.

If "Liberty Fries" are on most menus around Newnan, then the French-flavored escargots and the quiche aren't exactly going to move like hotcakes in the small town. "The first time I put quiche on the menu – I didn't sell it," Terrail says. "Then one day, I said, 'Maybe I'm not marketing it right,' and I changed it to cheese pie. Now it's our number-one seller."



So it turns out frog legs and grits can share the same plate.

[janelle]

Are men really born to fool around?

No.

Your genes don't decide what you do. YOU do that. Or so says Pamela Regan, an evolutionary psychologist at California State University in Los Angeles. She told The Post, "I have heard people say, 'I can't help it, I am a man.' That's using science to justify your bad behavior." Dr. Domeena Renshaw, director of the Loyola Sexual Dysfunction Clinic at Loyola University in Chicago, agrees. She told the Chicago Sun-Times, "No, it's not genes. It's learned behavior."
================================================== ===================

Boy is she not with the new times. No PC for her. So tell him he is all wet or to go get all wet by jumping into the lake. LOL The devil made me do it. Yeah, right. :mad:

[Jolie Rouge]

So, Janelle - are you agreeing with her or mocking her ?? :confused:

[janelle]

I'm agreeing with her 1,000%!!!!!!!

Just a little scarcasim. Sorry. You go girl, yeah for Pam. Whoops, I guess it was Domeena who said it.

[Jolie Rouge]

'Punk' fish, fruit piranha among newfound species
Friday, August 29, 2003 Posted: 1:58 PM EDT


CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) -- Scientists studying an unspoiled jungle river wilderness in Venezuela announced this week the discovery of 10 new fish species, including a red-tailed tiddler, a "punk" catfish with a spiky head and a piranha that eats fruit as well as flesh.

They called on the Venezuelan government and international conservation bodies to protect the Caura River Basin in Bolivar state, a vast area of pristine tropical forest and waterways covering five percent of the surface of the oil-rich country.

Conservationists fear encroachment by human settlement, as well as fishing, farming, mining and possible government hydroelectric projects, could destroy what they call one of the world's richest biodiversity "hotspots."

"The Caura River Basin requires immediate and urgent protection as a wildlife reserve," said Antonio Machado, a zoologist from Venezuela's Central University who announced the new fish discoveries in Caracas.

Among the 10 new freshwater fish species logged was a tiny fish with a blood-red tail, a previously unknown variety of the Bloodfin Tetra family, which is popular with aquarium owners.

This had been given the scientific name in Latin of Aphyocharax yekwanae in honor of the Ye'Kwana Indians who live among the Caura River Basin's flooded forests and waterways. "These indigenous people depend on the water," Machado said.

Other new and as yet unclassified species found included a variety of tentacled armored catfish, whose tangle of spiky protuberances on its mouth and forehead -- looking like a punk rocker's hairstyle -- has earned it the name of "punk" fish.

Also discovered was a new piranha, different in size and shape from other known varieties of the South American flesh-eater. It supplemented its meat diet by eating fruit from submerged trees, Machado said.

A new species of freshwater shrimp was also found.


'Biological swat teams'

The 70-meter Salto Pará waterfall divides the Caura River into two biologically distinct zones. In conjunction with Washington-based Conservation International, he presented, after several years of exhaustive study, the definitive findings of a three-week expedition that studied the biology of the Caura River Basin in late 2000.

Explaining the delay in announcing the expedition results, Leeanne Alonso, a director at Conservation International, told Reuters: "These scientific studies are a lengthy process".

The conservation group, which studies and protects the world's natural wildernesses, calls its expeditions Rapid Assessment Programs or RAPs in which "biological SWAT teams" of scientists swoop into often unexplored regions by plane, helicopter or boat to assess their ecological value.

Machado said it was essential to preserve intact the free-flowing watercourse of the 420-mile Caura River, which is one of the tributaries of the mighty Orinoco.

He said any attempt to divert or dam the river for hydro-power development -- like the huge power dams on the eastern Caroni River that generate more than 70 percent of Venezuela's electricity -- would reduce water levels and dry up waterfalls. This would threaten hundreds of varieties of freshwater fish, shrimps, crabs and aquatic plants.

"They can do what they like on the Caroni, but they must leave the Caura alone," Machado said.

[Jolie Rouge]

Swimsuit issue stars Albert Einstein
Magazine of fun facts branches out ... a little

By Todd Leopold ~~ CNN
Wednesday, August 27, 2003 Posted: 11:46 AM EDT



The swimsuit issue of Mental Floss. www.mentalfloss.com


(CNN) -- Let Sports Illustrated have Vendela and Tyra Banks. Mental Floss will take Eleanor Roosevelt and Salvador Dali.

The magazine, devoted to providing facts and information in an entertaining setting, is putting out its first swimsuit issue.

"Our goal from the beginning has been to blur the line between education and entertainment," said Will Pearson, publisher and co-founder of the magazine. With swimsuit issues so popular among periodicals, Pearson and his crew decided "why not have one with our goal of education?"

So Mental Floss' swimsuit issue is a little different. The magazine features a dozen figures from the arts, culture, science and politics -- from the Beatles to Albert Einstein to Mao Zedong -- and accompanies photos of them in swimwear with a variety of fascinating facts about their lives and influences.

For example, surrealist artist Dali -- pictured in plaid shorts and a long-sleeved shirt with black and white splotches -- used to wear a homemade scent of fish glue and cow manure. And Mao liked to drive a van with "Ambulance: Donated by the New York Chinese Laundrymen" written on the side.

These sorts of tidbits and stories have earned a growing circulation for Mental Floss. Pearson says the magazine, which originated out of conversations and bull sessions at Duke University, has 10,000 subscribers and distributes 70,000 copies to newsstands -- not bad for a publication that's not even two years old. The magazine has a regular segment on CNN Headline News.

Of course, a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt in swim clothes -- she's wearing a kind of shift -- may not be everyone's cup of tea. Then again, says Pearson, he hopes Mental Floss lives up to its name. Let the other publications have the eye candy: "We wanted facts as bold as the images," he says.

[gemini26]

Rim Shot, Please

"Bill Clinton is out in California helping Governor Gray Davis. Well what
makes more sense than an impeached President helping out a recalled
Governor?"

[gemini26]

Grand Prix 'priest' has no regrets

A former Catholic priest who ran on to the track during the British Grand Prix said he has no regrets about the stunt as he walked free from jail.

Cornelius "Neil" Horan left court after being given a two month jail sentence for aggravated trespass at the Silverstone circuit.

He served more than two thirds of the sentence on remand.

The 56-year-old said outside Northampton Magistrates' Court he believed the hand of God had protected him and the drivers as he raced on to the track to promote the bible.

Horan, from Nunhead, south-east London, said he would not have carried out the protest at the Northamptonshire circuit on July 20 but a gate leading to the track had been left open and it represented a signal to him from God.

Horan pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to the single charge of aggravated trespass during the British Grand Prix, which was won by the Ferrari driver Rubens Barrichello.

A television audience of millions world-wide watched as Horan breached security and faced down cars wearing a Tam O'Shanter and kilt and carrying religious themed placards.

The protest took place on the fastest part of the course, the Hangar Straight, where speeds can reach up to 200mph.

Several drivers had to swerve to avoid him and the safety car had to be deployed to protect participants.

Horan, who is originally from County Kerry in the Irish Republic, was eventually wrestled to the ground by a race marshal, arrested and taken for questioning.

Prosecutor Suraj Minocha told magistrates it was "very clear" his actions were deliberate; he bought his ticket in advance, was carrying a change of clothing and placards and was fully aware of F1 racing.


Story filed: 15:25 Monday 1st September 2003

[gemini26]

Scientists make disgusting coffee mug appeal

Scientists have launched a search for Britain's most stomach-churning unwashed coffee mug.
The Royal Society of Chemistry wants to inspect the most spectacular growth of green gunge to be found in a forgotten mug at work.

To qualify, the mould floating on the top of the left over coffee must be clearly discernible.

It organised the contest to mark the discovery of penicillin 75 years ago.

Although coffee cup cultures are often green, any disgusting colour is allowed.

Staff in offices, factories and other workplaces are being asked to submit photos - but not to have the rank mugs delivered.

The most impressive entry will win 'an evening of culture' at a location near the sender's address.

Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin at St Mary's Hospital in London on September 3, 1928, after leaving a dish in his laboratory while he went on holiday.

The mould that had grown in the dish paved the way to the antibiotics revolution which has saved millions of lives around the world.

Royal Society of Chemistry spokesman James McNish said: "The culture that developed on Fleming's laboratory dish has much in common with those ageing, ownerless coffee cups languishing on shelves and workstations in British offices and factories. Mould spores float through the air and are always on the lookout for a favourite place to grow.

"The competition is a way of illustrating the point that science sometimes involves some luck and happenstance."

Photograph entries should be emailed to emsleyb@rsc.org, or posted to Culture Shock, Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House, London S1J OBA.

Just in case anyone is tempted to cheat by patiently waiting for their coffee mug to bloom, the closing date is September 10.

[gemini26]

Ancient menstrual treatment can cure baldness - claim

German researchers claim a plant used by American Indian medicine-men to help menstrual problems can also cure baldness.

Scientists at Ruhr University in Bochum say black cohosh was the first known herbal agent that could stop hormone-related hair loss and even thicken growth.

The oestrogen-like substance has been used for generations by the Indians and is a big-selling herbal remedy in the US for rheumatism, back pain and menstrual stress.

Black cohosh is native to eastern North America and grows about three metres high.

The university said it used a new, kinder testing system on its human guinea pigs.

[gemini26]

Pubic hair transplants are big business in South Korea

Transplanted pubic hair is the latest trend in South Korea, where it is regarded as a sign of fertility.

Surgeon Afschin Fatemi, from Unna in Germany, said: "In the West, women try to reduce their genital hair as much as possible, but in Korea the trend is for forestation."

He said a mass of pubic hair was considered a sign of fertility, which was why many women were paying as much as £1,700 to have hair transplanted from their heads.

Fatemi added: "The structure of head and pubic hair on Asians is quite similar. The implanted hair isn't long and rarely falls out."

The operation is conducted under local anaesthetic and bandaging can be removed after just one day.

[gemini26]

Woman gets divorce because husband dreams of first wife

A Romanian woman is asking for a divorce because her husband keeps calling out his first wife's name while he is asleep.

The woman, from Focsani, says she could not live with a man who kept thinking about his ex-wife every night almost three months after she married him.

She told National Newspaper: "It was like that woman, with whom he has a child, still obsesses him.

"I asked my husband to go see a shrink but said I was the crazy one. So how could I live with a man who sleeps besides me but has sex with the ex-wife in his dreams."

[gemini26]

Spanish mayor bans men from going out on Thursdays

Men in a small Spanish town are to be banned from going out on Thursday nights to give women a chance to let their hair down.

Javier Checa, mayor of Torredonjimeno in southern Spain, said: "In future Thursday will be a day for women.

"Then women can go out and enjoy themselves and the men will stay at home."

The 47-year-old mayor said men should clean the house and look after the children at least once a week "instead of going out drinking beer with friends".

The mayor said he would deploy teams of women to patrol the streets and anyone caught out will be fined £3.50.

The new regulation will come into effect in October and the ban will cover the period between 9pm and 2am.

Over 14,000 people live in Torredonjimeno with 52 per cent of the population being made up of women.

[gemini26]

Man started fire to get out of sex

A man has been arrested in Croatia after allegedly starting a fire near his house to avoid having sex with his wife.

Svetin Gulisija, 26, from Seget, told police he had started the fire in woods behind his house because he was too tired to have sex with Oleandra, after working on a building site all day.

The couple had to be evacuated from the house as firefighters battled to bring the blaze under control, local media reported.

Gulisija is being held in custody pending further enquiries.

[gemini26]

Couple enjoy married bliss - in silence

A Chinese couple believe they have found the recipe to married bliss - by not talking to each other five years.

The middle-aged husband and wife from Leiqing, Zhejiang province, last exchanged words in 1998, even though they live under the same roof and sleep in the same bed.

The couple, who used to argue ferociously every day, say they have saved their marriage by refusing even to acknowledge each other's existence.

"We haven't had an argument in five years," the husband told the East Day newspaper.

[gemini26]

'Smelly fart' wins man £60,000

A Swedish man has been awarded nearly £60,000 compensation after he was sacked for telling off a colleague for breaking wind.

Computer technician Goran Andervass took the Swedish Bank, at Riksbanken, to industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal.

He said he rebuked his un-named colleague because he believed he had deliberately broken wind in his office.

"My colleague was absolutely aware of the awful smell. It was pure provocation," he told Aftonbladet.

"I felt provoked by the fart at 7.30am and it made me terribly angry."

The colleague complained to management who suspended Mr Andervass and later made him redundant. He took legal action and was recently awarded the equivalent of £58,000.

Krister Skoglund, of the Swedish Work Environment Authority, commented: "If a fart is done on purpose when going into somebody's office it is important that management takes the matter seriously."

[gemini26]

Stripper accused of squirting breast milk won't be charged

US authorities have decided against charging a stripper with assault after she allegedly squirted breast milk in a customer's face.

The 20-year-old denied the man's claim she squeezed her breasts and squirted him with milk during a lap dance at a club in Jackson, Michigan.

She claimed that he had grabbed her breast as she performed the dance at the city's School House club.

"We looked at the report and, based on the evidence, we don't believe we could obtain a guilty verdict beyond a reasonable doubt," Julius Giglio, city attorney, told the Jackson Citizen Patriot.

The dancer, who told police she had recently had a child, said milk never squirted from her breast or struck the man in the face.

But she told police that milk may have dripped during the dance or when he grabbed her breast.

The man complained to a club manager, who offered free soft drinks and passes to the club. The man declined the offers, left the club and filed a police report a short time later.

The dancer, who still works at the club, never filed a complaint with police, but her claims were included in a report to the city attorney, Deputy Police Chief Matt Heins said.

[Widgetsx3]

BERLIN (Reuters) - A drunken German thief botched his escape from a robbery in the western city of Cologne when he trapped his little finger in a wooden rack and had to wait for police to free him.
Cologne police spokesman Juergen Laggies said the inebriated 42-year-old was unable to free his jammed digit during a smash-and-grab at a city convenience store. Firefighters eventually had to be called to release him.

[Widgetsx3]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A quick-witted nine-year-old boy thwarted robbers who made it out of his home with $164,000 in cash before they were nabbed by police alerted to the caper by his covert cell phone call.
Shidal Hossain used a blanket to hide a cell phone when the unidentified robbers came to rob his home and then slipped into his bedroom to call his father for help.

Shidal was watching cartoons with his four brothers -- one of them just nine days old -- when the trio of robbers knocked on the door of the family's Brooklyn home on Thursday morning.

Pretending to be building maintenance workers, they persuaded Shidal's 3-year-old brother to open the door before charging in and threatening Shidal's mother and brothers with what turned out to be a pellet gun.

Police nabbed them on the street nearby and recovered the $164,000 in cash, which the family was hoping to send back to relatives in Bangladesh.

Shidal remembers being "a little" scared when his mother spoke to him in Bangladeshi, telling him to sneak away with the family's cell phone to call his father. "My mom gave me the telephone. I hid it under the blanket," he said on Friday.

"I was in Pennsylvania when he called me," the elder Hossain said. So, he called relatives, neighbors and the police. "He did a good job," he said of Shidal, who is going into the fourth grade this autumn.

Kevin Munoz, 19, Abab Villanueva, 22 and Arelin Cales, 22, were being held by police on charges including robbery, burglary and grand larceny.

[Widgetsx3]

BRAZZAVILLE (Reuters) - Pygmies from deep within Congo's jungles launched their debut compact disc Sunday, singing of the hardships -- and attractions -- of forest life.
The disc, produced with funding from United Nations cultural body UNESCO, includes 10 tracks by pygmy band Ndima from the Congo Republic, one of a few countries in central Africa where tribes of pygmies cling on to their traditional way of life.

"This disc aims to promote the culture of a people threatened with extinction," said Sorel Eta, who coordinated recording on behalf of the Association for Respect for Pygmies.

The group uses traditional instruments such as animal horns, stretched jungle creepers, wooden hide drums and pipes made from bamboo and tree trunks.

They sing about the difficulties of day-to-day life in the jungle, but also the pleasures of hunting and fishing and their desire to preserve their ancient way of life.

Pygmies often face discrimination and have seen the forests where they live dwindle as logging companies push ever deeper into the Equatorial jungles in search of valuable hardwoods. The trade in "bushmeat" has also reduced stocks of hunting animals.

Pygmies are among the shortest race, averaging four to five feet in height, although not all are noticeably smaller than surrounding populations.

They are believed to be the original inhabitants of the equatorial forests where they tend to live in small groups.

[Widgetsx3]

ROME (Reuters) - Rash-reddened cheeks, puffy eyes and tears of despair -- not quite the look contestants at the Miss Italy semi-finals might have hoped for on their big night, but exactly what many of them got.
Decorative metallic patterns stuck onto the girls' skin combined with heat and sweat may have triggered the nasty skin reaction in 40 of the 100 contestants at the weekend event, Italian media reported Monday.

"It will last 72 hours at the most. Of course it depends on the individual reaction of each person but with treatment it should be gone fairly soon," Rome-based daily Il Messaggero quoted dermatologist Benedetto Marinangeli as saying.

But while the cheeks might soon recover, damaged pride may take longer to heal and Il Messaggero said some of the contestants were considering legal action.

Organizers of the event were quick to say that the make-up misfortune had no effect on the end results as finalists had already been chosen before the rashes flared

[Widgetsx3]

BERLIN (Reuters) - From next week, a German women's soccer team will take to the field sporting jerseys recommending that their fans visit a local brothel.
"X-Carree: Always Worth a Visit," will be emblazoned across the women's chests after the brothel, owned by a real estate firm in the eastern city of Halle, agreed to pay for the Teutschenthal women's new gray and red kits.

"The women have no problem with it," Andreas Dittmann, coach to the 23-strong team of amateurs, said on Friday.

[Widgetsx3]

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - John Bothe was unemployed with time to spare - so he paid a radio station about $1,000 for air time to showcase his talents as host of a Saturday sports show.

Now he's finding the price of that show may be much higher.

The state Labor Department determined that Bothe's unpaid radio gig qualified as work and disqualified him from receiving unemployment benefits.

Not only has the state put a halt on future benefits, it wants Bothe to return $605 he already collected.


"My definition of work is doing a job and getting paid for it, not paying them," said Bothe, who lost his first appeal. He'll make his case again at an administrative hearing Sept. 8.

A Labor Department spokesman, Robert Lillpopp, told the Daily News of Batavia last week he could not comment on specific cases but that being available to work is important when collecting benefits.

"In order to get (benefits) you have to be ready, willing and available to work," he said.

Bothe explained to the department he had not been paid for the work but was told he had not read the state handbook outlining conditions for receiving benefits.

The handbook states that a person receiving benefits must report "any activity that brings in or may bring in income at any time."

Bothe, track announcer at Batavia Downs, said he was trying to improve his chances of staying off unemployment in the future, when he initiated the radio show after the season had ended at the harness race track.

"I thought if I get on the radio maybe somebody will hear me and I'll pick up some work," he said.

[Widgetsx3]

TRUCKEE, California (AP) - Ron Hunt's friends and family have been calling him the "Miracle Man" ever since an 18-inch-long drill bit poked through his eye and out the back of his skull.

"It didn't seem possible for him to be alive, seeing him with a drill bit through his head," his nephew Ben Hunt said.

The construction worker from Truckee, California, lost an eye but survived the freak accident Aug. 15 with no brain damage after falling from a ladder and onto the drill.

The 1.5-inch diameter chip auger drill bit was still in his head when his brother, Chris Hunt, and nephew, Ben, met him in a hospital emergency room in Reno, Nevada.


"The nurses braced us for it before we saw him," Ben Hunt told the Sierra Sun newspaper of Truckee. "It didn't seem real - it seemed like a movie. I wasn't sure what to feel."

Doctors explained that the drill bit pushed his brain aside rather than pushing into it, which likely would have caused serious brain damage or death, Ben Hunt said.

While drilling above his head on Aug. 15, the six-foot ladder Ron Hunt was standing on started to wobble so he tossed the drill aside - as construction workers are trained to do. He then fell off the ladder face-first and onto the drill.

"By the time I was falling, and I let the drill go down, I was already on top of it," Ron Hunt told ABC's "Good Morning America" TV show on Tuesday.

"I ran my hands up the drill bit, up to my eye, and put my other hand in the back of my head and felt it coming through the back of my head," he said. "And that's where pretty much the shock set in."

He was taken by helicopter to Washoe Medical Center in Reno. After weighing their options, doctors essentially unscrewed the bit to remove it.

"We would have cut it off, but after a few minutes of drilling, we noticed that it was loose. And so we just put down our blade and twisted the bit," said Dr. Paul Ludlow, the surgeon who performed the operation.

His nephew thinks he'll be able to laugh about it some day.

"It's just going to be one of those stories," Ben Hunt told the Sierra Sun. "He'll joke around with his glass eye and pop it out."

[Widgetsx3]

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - A worm a day keeps the doctor away - at least for a firefighter in central Thailand.

Paisit Chanta, 39, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he has been eating a live worm every day for nearly three decades, and that it's been the secret of his health.

His story was featured Tuesday in a major newspaper, Thai Rath.

Paisit's unusual habit started when he was fishing in his native village in Nakhon Nayok province, 60 miles northeast of Bangkok.


"One day, I was sitting there waiting for a fish to eat my bait for hours and was starving. Suddenly, I realized fish don't die from eating worms so I shouldn't either. I ate them until I was full," Paisit said in a telephone interview.

He now loves worms, and has become accustomed to chew them instead of swallowing them whole.

The father of two credited his good health to this dietary supplement, saying a mild flu was the worst illness he's had.

His co-worker Thepnakorn Kongwien, 28, said Paisit often digs for worms in the area near the fire station.

"We're used to that. But we still think it's strange and disgusting," he said.

Paisit said eating worms was like "eating mushy sticky rice." He was referring to chewy glutinous rice, eaten as a snack and sometimes a staple food in parts of Southeast Asia.

[Jolie Rouge]

BorowitzReport Archives


ASHCROFT AGREES TO ‘QUEER EYE’ MAKEOVER
Hopes Softer Image Will Help Sell Patriot Act

Attorney General John Ashcroft, on a nationwide tour to promote the controversial Patriot Act, has turned to the stars of the hit TV show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” to give him what has been called a “radical makeover” to help soften his image.

Karl Rove, the White House's top political advisor, was reportedly behind the decision to unleash the so-called “Queer Eye” makeover on the Attorney General.

“After it became clear that Ashcroft was just scaring everybody on the Patriot Act tour, Karl had to sit him down and say, ‘John, it's time to fluff you up,’” one White House aide said.

While the Attorney General was stumping for the Patriot Act in Lansing, Michigan, the makeover team rolled up their sleeves and started redoing Mr. Ashcroft's Washington, D.C. apartment, pulling up ‘70’s-era shag carpeting that Queer Eye spokesman Carson Kressley called “strictly Mr. Roper.”

Then the team descended on Mr. Ashcroft himself, throwing out his entire wardrobe, deemed by Mr. Kressley to be “beyond Bob Barker.”

They also took the Attorney General on a trip to the hair salon, giving Mr. Ashcroft a spiky, gelled coiffure – “very Harrison Ford, post-Callista,” as Mr. Kressley described it.

Washington observers were surprised that Mr. Ashcroft would collaborate with the “Queer Eye” team to remake his appearance, but the Attorney General's dedication to the Patriot Act apparently overrode any initial resistance on his part.

“If it'll help me get 24-hour surveillance of every man, woman and child in this country, I'll shave my chest and dress like fricking RuPaul,” Mr. Ashcroft told reporters.

[Widgetsx3]

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - Around 2,000 baboon noses were found packed in an abandoned suitcase at Amsterdam airport when they started to stink, officials said Wednesday.

Dutch customs police made the gruesome discovery last week and turned the case over to the Agriculture Ministry's Inspection Service, which said it had several leads that may help it track down the culprits.

Baboons are protected under international law.

"We assume these animals were killed, and we have to prevent something like this from happening again," spokesman Louis Steens said. He said the noses had been destroyed.

The noses - around 66 pounds worth - were en route from Lagos, Nigeria, to the United States and are believed to have been meant to be eaten or used in traditional medicine by immigrants.

"It is known that many inhabitants of Asian and African countries ascribe beneficial properties to these medicines and use them for that reason," the Inspection Service said in a statement.

[Jolie Rouge]

Johnny Depp: U.S. is like a stupid puppy[size=1]
Wednesday, September 3, 2003 Posted: 10:17 AM EDT [size]

www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/03/depp.us.reax.reut/index.html


BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Hollywood star Johnny Depp said on Wednesday the United States was a stupid, aggressive puppy and he would not live there until the political climate changed.

The 40-year-old actor, who stars in the "Pirates of the Caribbean," told the German news magazine Stern he was happier staying in the south of France with his wife, the French actress and singer Vanessa Paradis, and their two children.

"America is dumb, it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive," he said.

"My daughter is four, my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out," said the star of the off-beat films "Edward Scissorhands" and "Dead Man."

Depp slammed George W. Bush's administration for its criticism of French opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

"I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots," he told Stern.



{{{I guess I will be keeping my "stupid, aggressive" American dollars in my pockets, rather than see him ...}}

[Jolie Rouge]

www.cnn.com/2003/TRAVEL/09/01/experimental.tourism.reut/index.html


Experimental tourism catches on

Monday, September 1, 2003 Posted: 9:14 AM EDT


ytourism -- a roll of the dice may determine if Paris' Basilique du Sacré Coeur is visited.

PARIS, France (Reuters) -- Sick of sightseeing? Tired of tour guides? Then why not try experimental tourism, a novel approach to travel that starts with a quirky concept and can lead anywhere from Bora Bora to a bus stop.

Take monopolytourism. Participants armed with the local version of a Monopoly game board explore a city at the whim of a dice roll, shuttling between elegant shopping areas and the local water plant -- with the occasional visit to jail.

Or countertourism, which requires you to take snapshots with your back turned to landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben.

Joel Henry, the French founder of the Laboratory of Experimental Tourism (Latourex), has developed dozens of similar ideas since coming up with the concept in 1990.

"You increase your receptiveness," the 48-year-old writer said by telephone from his home in Strasbourg in eastern France. "You work out a set of constraints and you stick to it, and that is your sole purpose for the period you decide to devote to the experience. You are open to all the surprises that will pop up along the way," he explained.

Despite its name, there is nothing scientific about Latourex. Potographs and souvenirs collected along the way are usually "analyzed" over a glass of wine. It functions along the lines of the Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle or Workshop of Potential Literature, a group founded by authors and mathematicians in 1960 which places arbitrary constraints on the writing process.

In the same spirit as Georges Perec wrote a novel without ever using the letter "e," the hardy experimental traveller might walk in a straight line from a city's first street in alphabetical order to the last, a concept known as alphatourism.

In London, that makes for a 19-km (12-mile) trek from Abbess Close south of the Thames to Zoffany Street in the north. Alternatively, you could restrict yourself to destinations with double names, like Bora Bora or Walla Walla.

Devotees make it a point of honor to stick to the parameters of the game. "Some people are tempted to try it precisely because it's a challenge to fulfill all the requirements. I would even say there is a certain amount of rivalry between participants over who sticks to the rules closest," said Francois Burgard, a regular.


'Erotourism'

Traditional 'not-to-be-missed' sites are often not quite so important in some experimental tourism rules. Henry said his most unusual invention was erotourism, where a couple heads to the same town but travels there separately. The challenge is to find one another abroad.

He and his wife of 30 years have engaged in the erotic pursuit in five cities and have managed to hook up every time. "Each time we were convinced that this time, we wouldn't find each other, and each time we did," he said.

Some of his ideas are legally dubious, like kleptotourism, the theft of fragments of monuments like Rome's Colosseum or the Great Wall of China. Others sound plain boring, although Henry maintains there is no such thing as an inferior destination. "A fundamental condition for taking part in Latourex is to refute the idea of banality itself, because we consider that nothing is mundane," he explained.

The father-of-three is equally happy roaming the bridges of Venice searching for his wife as he is playing croquet on a busy traffic roundabout. "There are some very entertaining and beautiful roundabouts. They can be quite interesting," he said earnestly.


Burgard takes a similar view. He said his most exotic outing with Latourex was a weekend in the suburbs of Strasbourg, best known for their grimy council estates, during which participants were barred from setting foot in the city center. "It's slightly destabilizing, maybe more so than elsewhere where you are in an abnormal setting anyway, whereas here we were a stone's throw away from home," he said.

If roundabouts and parking lots do not sound like a promising sales pitch for a holiday, it is because Henry has nothing to sell. He does not make a penny from Latourex, which functions as a gathering point rather than a travel agency, with participants paying their own costs. The group now has some 200 informal members, more than half of whom live outside Strasbourg.

Henry does admit to taking the odd "normal" holiday. Just don't expect to run into him at Club Med, the chain of French holiday resorts famed for its eat-all-you-can buffets and round-the-clock activities. "Although having said that, I would almost consider that going away with Club Med is on the verge of experimental tourism," he said with a mischievous chuckle.

[Jolie Rouge]

Milk with bubbles reaches market
Sunday, August 31, 2003 Posted: 8:42 PM EDT



"Refreshing Power Milk"


MILFORD, New York (AP) -- Adding bubbles to milk is tricky. Pump in too many, and it foams over. Add too few and why bother.

George and Mary Ann Clark, husband-and-wife entrepreneurs, have spent the past seven years trying to find the balance. Last week, they started production on a carbonated milk-based drink called Refreshing Power Milk -- RPM -- and they already have orders coming in from school districts.

Mary Ann Clark, a registered nurse, said she was pained to see children drinking cola and shunning milk when she worked in schools so she decided to do something about it.

"If you take water and add carbon dioxide to make soda, why can't you do that with milk?" she asked. She and her biochemist husband started work on a carbonated milk drink in 1996 and founded Mac Farms Inc. in 1998. The company already sells eMoo, another carbonated milk drink. On Wednesday, in a factory with a barn-red roof and purple-and-yellow cow out front, the first batch of RPM was bottled.

The Clarks combined water and powdered milk to create a slightly fizzy, mildly milky-tasting drink with the nutritional value of skim milk and 40 percent of the recommended daily amount of calcium.

Each 12-ounce serving contains 90 calories and 12 grams of sugar, compared to 150 calories and 40 grams of sugar in a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola. RPM contains 9 grams of protein compared to none in a can of Coca-Cola, but is higher in sodium: 115 grams to 52 grams per 12-ounce serving.

The flavors: vanilla cappuccino, Brazilian chocolate and chocolate raspberry.

Researchers at Cornell University had been looking for ways to extend the shelf life of dairy products using carbonation when the researchers teamed up with the Clarks several years ago.

Joe Hotchkiss, chairman of the Department of Food Science at Cornell University, said the drink was designed to attract people who like soda. "People consume food based on their sensory properties, taste, what kind of emotional feelings it gives them," said Hotchkiss. "Our role is to provide that similar kind of satisfaction in foods, but also couple that to foods that are more nutritionally sound."

[Jolie Rouge]

Schwarzenegger vows 'people's takeover' of Sacramento
Actor skipping first debate of recall campaign
Wednesday, September 3, 2003 Posted: 9:46 PM EDT



Hit on the shoulder by an egg during a campaign appearance, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger asks for bacon to go with it


LONG BEACH, California (CNN) -- Gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, shaking off being the target of an egg-thrower, vowed Wednesday to lead a "people's takeover" of California's government, saying career politicians have left the state in a shambles.

Speaking in advance of a candidates' debate he has decided to skip, Schwarzenegger, a Republican, described his candidacy as a "movement for change."

"Help me send a message to Sacramento -- game is over," Schwarzenegger told the enthusiastic crowd at California State University in Long Beach. California voters will decide October 7 whether to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and who should replace him if he is ousted. The ballot will includes 135 names for voters to pick from.

As he arrived on campus, Schwarzenegger was greeted by a crowd of young supporters, but one apparent opponent pelted the actor with an egg. Schwarzenegger was not harmed. He later joked about the incident, saying he needed bacon to go with the egg and he dismissed the incident as part of "free speech."

The Austrian-born immigrant noted that he has made a fortune as an actor in the movies, and he credited California with providing him with that opportunity.

"Now, I want other people's dreams to come true," he said.

Schwarzenegger's speech was rich in one-liners and scarce in specifics. He promised to fix the state's economy without saying how and he vowed to improve the state's education system without providing any details.

He brushed aside criticism of the recall, saying it was not a "right-wing takeover" but an expression of the people's will. And he promised to work with Democrats if elected.

Waving his finger for emphasis, he described Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante -- the top Democrat in the recall race -- as cut from the same mold as the unpopular Davis.

"They are the twin terminators of Sacramento," Schwarzenegger, making a reference to his popular Terminator movies.

"I'm not afraid of the Democrats," he said. "Remember, I'm married to one." Schwarzenegger is married to television journalist Maria Shriver, a niece of President Kennedy.

Earlier, aides to Schwarzenegger announced they were seeking a change in the format of the September 24 debate -- the one debate that Schwarzenegger has said he will participate in. The aides proposed that the questions for that forum not be released in advance, but sponsors of the debate said the format was not open to negotiation.

Schwarzenegger has been under fire for limiting his appearances and not participating in Wednesday night's planned debate of five top candidates in Walnut Creek, California. Davis will address that forum.

Critics said Schwarzenegger only agreed to the September 24 debate because he would have the questions in advance, a charge his campaign has denied.

At a news conference following his speech, Schwarzenegger also returned to a controversial 1977 interview with an adult magazine in which he talked in graphic terms about group sex and drugs.

Asked about the interview, Schwarzenegger said he had no memory of the interview or of the incidents described in it.

He described the 1970s as "an outrageous decade" and suggested he said some of the things just for shock value. "I have the utmost respect for women," he said.

--Written by CNN.com Producer Sean Loughlin in Washington.

[Jolie Rouge]

Freshmen know 'bling bling,' not Paul Newman
List bridges cultural gap between students, professors
Wednesday, September 3, 2003 Posted: 12:01 PM EDT


MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) -- For this year's college freshmen, computers have always fit in a backpack and Paul Newman has always made salad dressing. Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie are old enough to be their parents. Those are just a few of the cultural reference rifts between the students and their professors this year, according to Beloit College's sixth annual Mindset List.

The list aims to bridge the gap so professors can communicate better with students. But who, some University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee freshmen asked Tuesday, is this Paul Newman? Or Pete Rose, who the list points out has always been a gambler in their lifetime?

"I've never heard of those people," said Pamela Westmoreland, 18.

By the time Westmoreland was born, the list informs us, Russian leaders had already taken to looking like leaders everywhere else and a test could screen for AIDS.

"We're really just trying to illustrate the generation gap," said Beloit College humanities professor Tom McBride, one of two who developed the list.

"Professors will teach by referring to cultural information for purposes of analogy or illustration. But the kind of information they're using may simply not be relevant to 18-year-old minds."

Rapid change

He said it's not surprising that even those in their 20s feel old reading the list, since the pace of cultural change is swift these days. Marketers target students in such a specific age range that even people just a few years out of college have different references.

"Adults today really look upon 18-year-olds as if they're from Borneo or outer Mongolia," McBride said.


"Oh my God, Bert and Ernie are old enough to be my parents!"
-- Sarah Hugill, 19


But it's up to the professors to teach the next generation.

For this year's class, "Ctrl+Alt+Del" is as basic as ABC, and the Osmonds have never been more than talk show hosts. Sarah Hugill, 19, said she doesn't agree with the list's assertion that to her generation: "An automatic is a weapon, not a transmission."

"The only access to guns I've ever experienced is hunting rifles," said Hugill, who comes from a farm in Livingston, Wisconsin. But she laughed while reading other entries: "Oh my God, Bert and Ernie are old enough to be my parents!"

The list also highlights expressions that have grown up along with the freshmen: "bling bling" (flashy jewelry) and "dissing" (treating with disrespect). Hugill's high school graduating class voted to add "bling bling" tassles of fake crystals to their graduation caps -- for an added fee of $7, she said.

Adults may not understand college freshmen, but McBride cautioned them not to dismiss the younger generation just because they have their own references. The point of a liberal arts education, after all, is to teach some history and context, he said. "I think it's also important that we try to understand something about the way they look at the world, not just what they don't know," he said.

[Jolie Rouge]

Man Charged in Fatal Crash Into Lake

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/crime/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030904%2F092012404.htm&sc=1110


CLINTON, Ill. (AP) - A man who was behind the wheel of a car that sunk in Clinton Lake and killed three children inside has been charged with driving under the influence of drugs, authorities said.

Maurice Lagrone Jr., 28, of Clinton also is charged with driving with a suspended license, DeWitt County State's Attorney Jerry Johnson said.

Lagrone and his girlfriend, Amanda Hamm, 28, of Clinton, escaped the car after it went off a boat ramp Tuesday evening, DeWitt County Sheriff Roger Massey said. Hamm's children died.

On Wednesday the community grieved at the restaurant where Hamm worked. The school attended by two of the children offered counseling to students.

``We have a small community here dealing with some big tragedy,'' Massey said.

Hamm called 911 from a pay phone and emergency workers were at the scene in about five minutes, according to police reports. Massey said the children were in the water 10 to 15 minutes.

Brothers Christopher Hamm, 6, and Austin Brown, 3, were pronounced dead within minutes of their arrival at Dr. John Warner Hospital in Clinton. Kyleigh Hamm, 23 months, was flown to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, where she died after 2 p.m. Wednesday, the Peoria County coroner's office said.

Authorities said a special prosecutor will be assigned because Hamm's mother works for the state's attorney.

The children were frequent visitors to the restaurant where Hamm works, and customers and staff members there spent Wednesday talking about the accident. Hamm's co-workers said they would solicit donations to help the family with expenses.

Restaurant manager Brenda Fouts said it was difficult reporting to work. ``I'm doing OK, if you consider crying in spurts to be OK,'' she said.

Clinton schools Superintendent Roger Little said it is important to comfort students at Douglas Elementary School, where Christopher was a first-grader and Austin attended early childhood classes. ``All we can do is help the children who may need to talk about it,'' Little said.



09/04/03 09:20



{{{Am I the only one who finds this odd ?

Why did she let him drive if he had a suspended license ?

How did they "escape" the car after it went off a boat ramp but let the kids behind ( I assume in car seats ? ) If it were my children, I would be down there trying to free them - by any means nessassary }} The water would be ten to fifteen feet - deep but not impossiably so ...


Hamm called 911 from a pay phone and emergency workers were at the scene in about five minutes, according to police reports. Massey said the children were in the water 10 to 15 minutes

something "hinky" about this time frame ...}}}

[Jolie Rouge]

Sad News For Cyclist Lance Armstrong

Five-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, 31, and his wife, Kristin, 32, have separated and are planning to divorce, The Associated Press reports. The couple, who have been married for five years and have three children, separated two weeks ago soon after they moved to Austin, Texas from their European home in Girona, Spain. They are now living in two separate homes while using mediation to seek a divorce settlement.

"It's an unfortunate situation," Kristin Armstrong told the Austin American-Statesman. "We are making the best of it for the sake of our kids." The couple first separated in late January, but reunited. They underwent counseling in an attempt to save their marriage. "We both have (legal) representation, and we're doing this peacefully," Armstrong told AP. "The craziest thing is, we're closer now and better friends than ever before. We're truly committed to maintaining a good relationship, but not a marriage." The entire family--Kristin along with 3-year-old Luke and 22-month-old twins Isabelle and Grace--were on hand to cheer Lance's Tour victory on July 27.

Lance and Kristin met in January 1997, soon after he finished intense chemotherapy for advanced testicular cancer. They started dating in June of that year and were married in May 1998. "The kids are our first priority," Lance told AP. "We're also going to be respectful of each other. Neither of us wants to get in the situation where when we drop off the kids, we can't look at each other."

[Jolie Rouge]

Top 10 Dumbest CEO Decisions
By Motley Fool Staff
August 26, 2003


It usually takes just a few minutes for guests on our radio show to relax and let their hair down (probably something to do with the drinks we serve them). Some of the most revealing moments come when the chief executives of multimillion-dollar companies talk about their biggest mistakes. Here, then, are the:


Jim Keyes, 7-Eleven (NYSE: SE) convenience stores

We packaged a more convenient pantyhose for ladies and it has helped us to bring more female shoppers into the store, but we were a little bit out there when we introduced fishnet hose at 7-Eleven Stores. I would say that was one of the dumber decisions.



Dick Kinzel, Cedar Fair (NYSE: FUN) amusement parks

We put a $4 million building around this dog ride and named it "Disaster Transport." I still remember on opening day a gentleman walked out of the ride and came over to me and said, "You named that one right -- that's a disaster." And you know what, he was right. That was by far the dumbest thing I ever did.



Bob Wright, ConAgra Foods (NYSE: CAG) Butterball Turkey unit

We had a promotional event a couple of years ago where we were trying to convince people to use turkey in the "off season." We created an event called "Thanks Grilling" and we invited the public to celebrate with us. But, quite frankly, we way underdelivered the amount of food and drinks that we needed and wound up sending a whole lot of people home with coupons.



Steve Sanger, General Mills (NYSE: GIS)

One of the dumber ones was at the time we announced the Pillsbury acquisition. I boldly told the market that I thought we could get through the regulatory review and close the deal in six months or less. That may have been what I thought, but given that we were dealing with the United States government, it was not within my control. So 18 months later when we closed the deal, I found myself having to apologize for the fact that my prediction was so far off.



Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN)

The biggest mistake we made was our investment strategy during sort of the land rush phase of the Internet. We invested in companies like Living.com and Pets.com. Those investments didn't work out well and we wasted a bunch of money.



Jim Sinegal, Costco (Nasdaq: COST) food warehouse

I suppose it was exiting the Midwest, which we did about 15 years ago. We opened up in the Midwest and we were not immediately successful and we exited, and I think it took us a long time to get up the courage to go back into that market. Had we stayed the course at that point in time we might have been much more successful in the Midwest today.



Bob Davies, Arm & Hammer maker Church & Dwight (NYSE: CHD)

In the middle '70s, we went zooming into the personal deodorant and antiperspirant business with an aerosolized can of baking soda. We had two huge problems. Many of the cans clogged, and those that didn't clog did worse -- they massively stung people's underarms. We lost around $6 million in that venture and that was back when we were a tiny little company. I almost lost my job.



Fred Smith, FedEx (NYSE: FDX)

My dumbest idea was probably to appear as myself in the Tom Hanks film Castaway, which proved that my acting ability was worth the 18 seconds they gave me in the movie.



Jack Soden, Elvis Enterprises, the business entity created by the estate of Elvis Presley

We licensed a company that made bedroom slippers. They were big, furry slippers and they had this rubber image of Elvis' head on the toes. It was one of those things that when you saw them in the store, it was like, "What were we thinking?" We pulled the license and got them off the market as fast as we could.


[]
Ron Sargent, Staples (Nasdaq: SPLS) office products stores[/b]

April 22, 1996. Obviously, it's burned in my mind. That was the day we flipped on a new computer system. That decision brought us to our knees in the business and it probably took us a year to dig ourselves out. If there's a lesson for me, it's to be maybe less date-driven and more event-driven. It's a lesson I've used very well since then, that there's no substitute for extensive testing when it comes to IT systems.

[jaybird]

Roger Freeman, an Encino, Calif., dentist and lecturer on infectious diseases, wants to start an epidemic. Well, not really: his new company is pushing a line of neckties with magnified pictures of diseases from microscope slides. "The gonorrhea tie is the best looking tie in the whole lot," Freeman says, allowing that "The syphilis tie is gorgeous. The plague tie is pretty, [but] it's sold out." In addition, patterns showing tuberculosis, herpes, staphylococcus, AIDS, chlamydia, ebola, influenza and several other pathogens are available. Don't want to wear your favorite disease around your neck? Matching underwear is also available. (Reuters) ...Next year, he hopes to debut a new line of condoms.

[jaybird]

With This Ring I Me Wed
Janet Downes thinks she has found the secret for a happy marriage: she's marrying herself on her fortieth birthday. The Bellevue, Neb., woman says the wedding ceremony celebrates that she is "happy with herself," and plans to exchange vows with herself in the mirror. The ceremony will include a wedding gown, flowers, a traditional cake, and a choir.

((wonder if she has a hand in planning her wedding night?))
:D
:eek:

[Jolie Rouge]

Why doesn't she just throw a Birthday Party like everyone else ?? :rolleyes:

[Jolie Rouge]

Chicago-Bound Airliner Grounded by Geese


NEW YORK (AP) - An American Airlines flight bound for Chicago was forced to land within minutes of takeoff Thursday morning when several geese were caught in its engine, authorities said.

The two-engine F-100 was leaving LaGuardia Airport when it apparently struck the geese, damaging the plane and the right-side engine, said American spokesman Todd Burke.

The pilot reported an engine failure and landed at nearby Kennedy International Airport about 20 minutes after takeoff, said Port Authority spokesman Dan Maynard.

The crew of four and the 34 passengers were uninjured, Burke said.


The flight was headed for Midway Airport in Chicago when the incident occurred. Passengers were bused back to LaGuardia and directed to other flights, Burke said.


Also Thursday, the nose gear of a Delta Connection flight collapsed shortly after the jet landed at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.


Officials were investigating the cause of the malfunction on the flight, which originated in Colorado Springs, Colo.


All the 21 passengers and three crew exited safely.



09/04/03 21:17

[Jolie Rouge]

Mormon Church OKs Firing Squad Change


SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Hoping to clear the way for eliminating the firing squad as a means of execution, a Utah commission asked for and received a statement from the Mormon church saying it does not oppose the change.

In a one-sentence statement provided Wednesday to the Utah Sentencing Commission, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said it ``has no objection to the elimination of the firing squad in Utah.''

The clarification was needed, according to one commission member, because of a purported church doctrine that held that justice was not done unless a murderer's blood was shed.

The Mormon statement removes a significant obstacle in Utah's effort to do away with firing-squad executions.


Commission member Paul Boyden said recent letters to the editor to newspapers indicate some in Mormon-dominated Utah still believe the firing squad is necessary for religious reasons. Commission members feared that belief could hurt the chances of the proposed change in the Legislature.


``If we hadn't (asked for the church's position), this probably would have been a question among some legislators and it may have not made it out of committee,'' Boyden said.


The commission is studying the issue and plans to formally recommend eliminating the firing squad, leaving injection as Utah's only method of execution. Commission members want to make the change quickly to stop the ``media circus'' that surrounds firing squad executions, Boyden said.


Utah is the only state that uses the firing squad method, although Idaho and Oklahoma retain it as an option if other methods are not viable.


Utah's last execution by firing squad took place in 1996. Two death row inmates who had chosen that method had been scheduled to die in June, but those executions were delayed.



09/04/03 23:37

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GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP) - Deryl Miles is accused of cat nabbing.

Miles, 55, allegedly kidnapped his neighbor's cat and held it hostage for $50 after the animal wandered into his yard.

He was arrested Tuesday on misdemeanor larceny charges for allegedly trapping the cat, named Brunswick, in a wooden shed behind his mobile home, according to court documents.

Surrounded by police, Miles called a local newspaper from his trailer and said "I've taken (the cat) legally because it was trespassing on my property."

Miles refused to release the cat, and was arrested after leading police on a brief chase around his yard, court documents stated.

The cat's owner, Leah Vader, said she called police after hearing her pet howling from the shed next door.

"You have the right to call animal control if you have an unwanted animal in your yard," she said. "You don't have the right to hold him for ransom."

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CADDO VALLEY, Ark. (AP) - A man's skimpy swimsuit was too much - or too little - for Taco Bell workers.

Employees at Taco Bell called police Sunday when the man walked into the restaurant wearing only a tiny black Speedo swimsuit and a cut-off T-shirt during the Labor Day weekend.

Caddo Valley Police Chief Hiram Latin said his attire, or lack thereof, was a little too revealing.

"He was inappropriately dressed for a restaurant," said Latin. He said the man had left his clothes at a lake.

The man faces a $750 fine and possible jail time if convicted of indecent exposure.

According to Arkansas law, a person can be charged with indecent exposure if "he knows his conduct is likely to cause affront or alarm."

Police ticketed the man and took photos of him in the Speedo, for use in court.

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BERLIN (Reuters) - Staff at a popular teenage disco were stunned to find an 80-year-old having a celebratory drink and strutting her stuff on the dance floor among thousands of young people, German police say.
"The disco told police there was an old lady drinking cola and schnapps at the bar who seemed a bit confused," said a spokesman in the western town of Oberhausen. "She was apparently shaking her hips and rocking out a bit on the dance floor too."

Officers visited the 7,000 capacity disco in the early hours and made sure she was okay.

"She was dressed up smart, celebrating her birthday by herself and everyone thought she was very friendly," the spokesman said Wednesday. "There's no upper age limit there. You don't have to show identification when you're 80."

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SEOUL (Reuters) - Two South Koreans have been detained on suspicion of digging a tunnel to smuggle more than $1.5 million worth of beer and wine out of a U.S. military base in central Seoul, customs officials said on Thursday.
They said the two men opened a cafe -- called the "U-Turn Espresso Coffee Shop" -- as a front. A tunnel led from there to a cargo container inside the base 20 yards away.

"An anonymous caller notified police of the smuggling ring operations two months ago, and the two leaders were detained on Monday," customs spokesman Cho Min-ho told Reuters.

He said the suspects removed 58,000 boxes of beer and 4,000 cases of wine worth about $1.7 million. The alcohol was sold on the black market.

"No American soldiers were found to be involved in the operations yet," said Ji Gwang-ho, an official at the South Korean Customs Service, by telephone.

Cho said the tunnel had been built with a slight incline and equipped with rollers so the boxes of drink could be easily removed.

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ROME (Reuters) - When in Rome, watch where you step. The streets of the Italian capital are a minefield of dog droppings and the mayor, Walter Veltroni, has had enough.
Accompanied by city officials he descended on the capital to nab dog walkers who turn a blind eye to their pet's bathroom habits, Italian media reported Wednesday.

The penalty: a hefty $108 fine for those who fail to carry the necessary poop scooping kit when walking their dog -- and 100 should they forget to use it.

"Having a dog automatically means having a spade and rubbish bags too...Hopefully, the more we insist on this the more Romans will start to get the message," daily La Repubblica quoted Veltroni as saying.

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ROME (Reuters) - A 67-year-old Capuchin monk was a prisoner of his own parishioners on Thursday after faithful in a small central Italian town bricked him up inside his monastery to protest at plans to close it.
When locals heard Franciscan leaders wanted to close the monastery because of a shortage of priests, they rebelled, bricking up one entrance and barricading the others.

"I consider myself a prisoner of love," Father Emilio Cucciella told Reuters by telephone from inside the monastery in the small down of Trasacco, in the mountains about 60 miles east of Rome.

"I can see outside but I can't go outside. There's some loud talk outside about what the future should hold for me and for this church," he said.

Cucciella's church, known as the Madonna of Perpetual Succor, is one of only two parishes serving the town of 6,000 residents.

Parishioners began their protests three days ago, and although some of the bricks were removed on Thursday morning, locals remained on guard outside.

"We Capuchins have been here since at least 1570. St Francis himself passed through here in the early 13th century. I have to obey orders but I can understand why they are upset," he said.

Cucciella said he has enough food for a while but was ready to go on a "hunger strike" in solidarity with the townspeople.

He said he was passing the time praying and reading.

"And luckily I don't suffer from claustrophobia."

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BERLIN (Reuters) - A German businessman sent 100,000 euros ($109,000) blowing across a highway, forgetting he had left the banknotes on the car roof before speeding off, police said on Thursday.
"The money was in a leather case, and when he hit the slip road, the case fell off the roof and the cash dispersed all over the motorway," said a police spokesman in the western city of Bochum.

Police closed the motorway temporarily and recovered scattered notes worth 3,000 euros. Two days later a man handed in some 29,500 euros to police he said he had picked up himself. The briefcase and remaining cash are still missing.

Press reports said the man had put down the briefcase to answer a phone call as he was setting off.

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SHELBYVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Stymied by mysterious sights and sounds in their own headquarters, cops in Shelbyville called in the ghostbusters.

In the still of night, doors rattled and stairwells creaked in the city's police department. In the light of day, a secretary's desk drawer opened on its own. A city worker who toured the building late one night even reported feeling something grab her leg.

So the police took the probe to another dimension.

"The way I treat it is not that there is a ghost, there's just things that I can't explain," said Officer John Wilson, who contacted the Scientific Investigative Ghost Hunting Team, based in Louisville.

The team of professional paranormal investigators gave the brick building a preliminary review and will return this fall for a thorough probe. The group will set up cameras and tape recorders as well as infrared thermometers to capture any temperature variations.

The goal is to try to prove the strange occurrences aren't caused by paranormal forces, said Kay Owen, vice president of the nonprofit ghost hunting team, which doesn't charge for its services.

"We'll go in and try to recreate everything that they are experiencing," she said. "If they can recreate it, it's not paranormal. It can be explained. It's a process of elimination."

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A Putnam County sheriff's deputy's house has become a crime scene.

But the deputy's not to blame. Authorities are looking for a man they say constructed a methamphetamine lab at the deputy's house while the officer was on vacation. The declined to identify the deputy.

Chief Deputy John Dailey said Wednesday that officers learned that the deputy's relative staying in the house was producing the drug. The deputy, vacationing out of state, allowed authorities to search the house.

"I guess the relative thought 'What better place than this to have a meth lab?'" Dailey said. "He made a victim out of one of our officers."

Dailey declined to release the relative's name but said no arrests have been made.

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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.

:p

[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

www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/09/05/disco.turtles.reut/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

www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/09/08/snowtown.murders/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.

[Jolie Rouge]

Muslim Soccer Fans Told to Watch Their Mouths


ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey's religious leaders urged Muslims on Friday to refrain from using foul language when supporting their teams at soccer stadiums.

Imams nationwide called on the devout instead to use phrases like "Maasallah" ("May Allah preserve you") and "Barek Allah" ("Blessed Allah") to cheer on their favorite clubs, the private NTV television station said.

Turkey's passion for soccer has been marred by outbreaks of violence, and police search fans entering stadiums to seize weapons ranging from pocket change to kebab cleavers.

In August, one man was killed and 50 wounded when supporters clashed during a local derby in the western city of Izmir.


"It's certainly nice for fans and spectators at sporting matches to express their excitement, but it needs to be done in a legitimate way. Applause and praising Allah are suitable," NTV quoted Istanbul's top cleric Bayram Erdogan as saying.


He was speaking ahead of the Friday sermon, which contained the call for moderate language.


In Turkey the weekly sermon is drawn up by the Department of Religious Affairs and delivered at tens of thousands of mosques around the country.



09/05/03 10:38

[Jolie Rouge]

Anti-War Marine Convicted
Reservist Found Guilty of Leaving Unit
By DOUG SIMPSON

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030907%2F154400505.htm&sc=1110

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A Marine reservist convicted of leaving his unit for 47 days without permission before the war in Iraq will formally request that his six-month prison sentence be reduced, his lawyer said Sunday.

A jury of four Marines on Saturday found Lance Cpl. Stephen Funk, 21, guilty of unauthorized absence but innocent of a more serious charge, desertion with intent to shirk important duty.

The jury recommended that Funk, who argued he was a conscientious objector, be demoted to private, the Marines' lowest rank, and that his pay be docked by two-thirds during his incarceration. It also recommended a bad conduct discharge, which means Funk would lose his military benefits, a punishment his attorney Steve Collier said is too severe.

Collier said he will request that Funk receive a normal discharge and a prison term of 47 days instead. Lt. Gen. Dennis M. McCarthy, commander of the Marine reserves, has authority to accept or reduce the sentence.


``It would not be unheard of for that to be the punishment,'' Collier said Sunday.


Funk was held in the New Orleans jail Sunday and would likely be transported to an undetermined military prison on Monday, Collier said. He would receive his discharge after his release from prison.


Marine prosecutors accused Funk, 21, of being absent while his San Jose, Calif.-based unit was mobilized Feb. 13 to load ships and cargo planes in San Diego bound for the Middle East.


Funk said he became a conscientious objector after several months of being trained to kill. Funk, who attended anti-war rallies while absent and later announced he was gay, has said that the Marines were trying to make an example of him.


There were 27 other Marines who declared themselves conscientious objectors to the Iraq war. Like Funk, all were transferred to New Orleans for processing but none of the others was prosecuted because they reported for duty on time, the Marines said.


Of the 27, 16 were granted conscientious objector status, said Capt. Jeffrey Pool, a Marine spokesman. Five were denied and the other cases are pending.



09/07/03 15:44

[Jolie Rouge]

It's Good to Be the King


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.



09/05/03 14:38

[Jolie Rouge]

Family Maintains Chain Letter 87 Years
By RUSS BYNUM

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030907%2F130945573.htm&sc=1110

SAVANNAH, Georgia (AP) - The fat manila envelope arrives in Doug Pletcher's mailbox every year, stuffed with letters and photographs from uncles and cousins of some 24 branches of his family tree scattered from Florida to California.

Pletcher, of Riverside, Illinois, reads through the pile, removes his old letter and writes a new one to bring his relatives up to speed on his marketing work, his two grown children and his softball league.

Then he mails the whole package to the next person in the chain - a tradition three generations of Pletchers have maintained for 87 years.

``It is a kick to get it,'' Pletcher says. ``Lots of the letters aren't all that riveting - how the garden's growing and all that. But it's very warm and nice. We're all over the country, and you don't see them very often.''


But last month, members of the Pletcher clan got together for a reunion in Savannah, where family members got to tour the city's oak-shaded squares, take in a Minor League baseball game and some in the youngest generation got to meet for the first time.


The jaunt was Doug Pletcher's prize for winning a $25,000 reunion trip, sponsored by hot dog maker Hebrew National, by writing an essay about his family's long-lived chain letter swapping.


The tradition started in 1916 when Erno Pletcher, his four brothers and three sisters began leaving the family dairy farm in Goshen, Indiana, to attend college and start families of their own. The siblings would send letters home to their parents, who bundled them for mailing to each of their grown children in turn.


``They were a close-knit family and they wanted to keep in touch, so they started this letter that had a regular pattern,'' said 83-year-old Jim Pletcher, of Green Valley, Arizona, one of Erno Pletcher's sons and Doug Pletcher's uncle. ``As the families grew, that meant the offspring started to get into the act.''


The original eight have all since died. The last of the siblings, their sister Opha Pickett, wrote letters for the chain until 1988, when she died at age 100.


For their children, picking up the correspondence habit came easily. The letters were a constant in their lives, said Jim Pletcher, who can recall the bundles arriving as early as 1925, when he was 5.


His cousin, David Pletcher, of Bloomington, Indiana, also remembers his parents discussing the letters at an early age.


``My mother said she knew the contents of the closets of all her sisters-in-law because that's all they had to write about - cleaning the house and all the family doings,'' he said.


But as the family grew the letters began to form a larger chronicle of the Pletchers' family history through most of the 20th century - births, graduations and deaths as well as travels, careers and household pets.


Unfortunately, nobody kept the early letters, said David Pletcher, a retired history professor.


``We should have saved them, of course, if we had any historical idea of the value of a family history,'' he said. ``You would have to sift through a great deal of material to winnow out all the interesting parts. But it would be something a social historian would take great pleasure in.''


Doug Pletcher won the contest, which he entered earlier this year after seeing a newspaper advertisement.


He said the prize money covered travel, lodging and other expenses for 22 people. His two children, aged 22 and 23, were able to meet his uncles Jim Pletcher and Richard Pletcher and their families.


Though none of the family lives in Georgia, he picked Savannah because his daughter became enchanted with the city's Victorian homes and oak-shaded squares while visiting one St. Patrick's Day.


``There have been family reunions,'' the last being in 1997, Doug Pletcher said. ``But not this exotic and in such a cool place.''



09/07/03 13:09

[Jolie Rouge]

Web Site to Help Find Art Stolen by Nazis
By CARL HARTMAN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030907%2F114243536.htm&sc=1110

WASHINGTON (AP) - People searching for art that was stolen by the Nazis have a new tool: a Web site that allows U.S. museum collections to be checked for long-lost pieces.

The Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal - http://www.nepip.org - is a searchable registry for people looking for items that disappeared in Europe between 1932 and 1946. It goes online Monday.

So far 66 museums have signed up to participate in the program overseen by the American Association of Museums. They include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Chicago Institute of Art. The Web site has indexed 5,761 of their objects and an additional 1,663 are in process.

Similar sites in Europe will be reachable through a link with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.


The Nazis and their allies may have stolen as many as 1.5 million objects by the end of World War II.


Estimates of the number still missing run as high as 100,000 works of museum quality. Some have found their way to the United States.


The association's president, Edward H. Able Jr., counted 17 claims settled for paintings, sculptures, textiles and pieces of armor found in American museums since 1997. Among them are a pastel by Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist painter, that had been bought by a trustee for the Art Institute of Chicago, and a painting by Henri Matisse that had been at the Seattle Art Museum.


The Nazis not only confiscated property but also forced dealers and agents to sell, at artificially low prices, art owned by Jews and the Nazis' political enemies. Confiscations and forced sales included books, religious objects, stamp and coin collections, furniture and other antiques and rarities.


Able said for that reason the Web site initiative includes more than just art museums. ``We have museums of all kinds - an item could have seeped into a history museum, for example,'' he said.


On the Net:


U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: www.ushmm.org


American Association of Museums: www.aam-us.org



09/07/03 11:42

[Jolie Rouge]

Telepathy Gets Academic Seal of Approval

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-RTO-reodd&idq=/ff/story/0002%2F20030908%2F103779376.htm&sc=reodd

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden's Lund University, one of the oldest seats of learning in Scandinavia, will take a leap into the unknown by appointing northern Europe's first professor of parapsychology, hypnology and clairvoyance.

Almost 30 candidates, including a self-professed Indian medium and an American named Heaven Lord, applied for the post, financed by a donation, whose holder the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has joked will be a "Ghost Professor."

The first professor, to be appointed by Lund University Dean Goran Bexell, is expected to start work in 2004, faculty secretary Kerstin Johansson told Reuters.

Hypnology is the science of the phenomena of sleep and hypnosis.


Despite decades of experimental research and television performances by people such as spoonbending psychic Uri Geller, there is still no proof that gifts such as telepathy and the ability to see the future exist, mainstream scientists say.


"Verifying the existence of paranormal phenomena does not seem to be a promising field of science," said Sven Ove Hansson, professor of philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.


Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Scotland's Edinburgh University also have chairs in parapsychology.



09/08/03 10:36

[Jolie Rouge]

Feel a ghost? Perhaps it's "infrasound"
Monday, September 8, 2003 Posted: 11:35 AM EDT

www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/09/08...reut/index.html


MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) -- Mysteriously snuffed out candles, weird sensations and shivers down the spine may not be due to the presence of ghosts in haunted houses but to very low frequency sound that is inaudible to humans.

British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment that the extreme bass sound known as infrasound produces a range of bizarre effects in people including anxiety, extreme sorrow and chills -- supporting popular suggestions of a link between infrasound and strange sensations.

"Normally you can't hear it," Dr Richard Lord, an acoustic scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in England who worked on the project, said on Monday.

Lord and his colleagues, who produced infrasound with a seven meter (yard) pipe and tested its impact on 750 people at a concert, said infrasound is also generated by natural phenomena.

"Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost -- our findings support these ideas," said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England.

In the first controlled experiment of infrasound, Lord and Wiseman played four contemporary pieces of live music, including some laced with infrasound, at a London concert hall and asked the audience to describe their reactions to the music.

The audience did not know which pieces included infrasound but 22 percent reported more unusual experiences when it was present in the music.

Their unusual experiences included feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting chills down the spine or nervous feelings of revulsion or fear.

"These results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound," said Wiseman, who presented his findings to the British Association science conference.

Infrasound is also produced by storms, seasonal winds and weather patterns and some types of earthquakes. Animals such as elephants also use infrasound to communicate over long distances or as weapons to repel foes.

"So much has been said about infrasound -- it's been associated with just about everything from beam weapons to bad driving. It's wonderful to be able to examine the evidence," said Sarah Angliss, a composer and engineer who worked on the project.

[Jolie Rouge]

Turning Off Smokers with Rotting Lung Pictures

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-RTO-reodd&idq=/ff/story/0002%2F20030908%2F103479282.htm&sc=reodd

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission has started the hunt for images of rotting lungs and dying cancer patients to be printed on cigarette packets across the European Union, a spokesman said on Monday.

Next month cigarettes sold in the EU must show even larger health warnings than now, and from mid-2004 member states will have the option of adding pictures to the packs showing the hazards of smoking, the EU's executive body said.

The European Commission announced a tender on Monday for organizations to come up with images and test their impact on different European audiences.

"Research and experience in countries which have introduced health warnings illustrated with color pictures have proven that they speak more than a thousand words," Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner David Byrne said in a statement.


Brazil and Canada compel tobacco companies to print pictures of premature babies and brain hemorrhages on their products.


Commission health spokesman Thorsten Muench said Europe would follow their lead but there would also be a lighter touch.


"We will have rotten lungs and we will also have more humorous images. It's not just dead bodies lying around," he said at a news conference.


For each of the current 14 health warnings, there will be a choice of five or six pictures so that member states can choose the ones that best fit local tastes.


"There will be research into how every image works in every country," Muench said.


He accepted the images might not put off hard-core smokers but said he hoped they would stop people starting smoking.



09/08/03 10:34

[Jolie Rouge]

Live TV Political Debate Ends in Brawl


BAKU (Reuters) - A live television debate in the run-up to Azerbaijan's October presidential election ended in a brawl, and police in the oil-producing country opened a criminal case on Sunday against an opposition politician.

The opposition Popular Front accused the government in the former Soviet republic of trying to discredit it over the incident.

The debate on Saturday became so heated it was taken off the air.

Fuad Mustafayev, speaking for the Popular Front's presidential candidate, called pro-government contender Hafiz Hadjiyev dishonest. Hadjiyev responded by describing Mustafayev as a "puppy."


The brawl began after the two hurled water at each other.


"We have received a complaint from Hadjiyev concerning yesterday's incident and consider it necessary to open a criminal case," said a police spokesman, adding Mustafayev had not been arrested.


A Popular Front spokesman said: "The government is using illegal methods in its election campaign."


President Haydar Aliyev is overwhelming favorite to win the election, but the 80-year-old strongman who has dominated Azerbaijan for three decades is in a U.S. hospital receiving treatment for heart and kidney problems.


A dozen candidates are standing for president. Six are pro-government, while six are campaigning on behalf of opposition parties.


Aliyev's opponents accuse the government of trying to oversee a dynastic succession. The president became KGB chief and Communist Party leader in the 1960s in Soviet times.


His son Ilham, 41, who serves as prime minister and is being groomed as successor, is also standing -- although he has said he supports his father's re-election bid.


Washington views Azerbaijan, which became independent with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as a potential alternative to the Gulf for oil supplies.



09/08/03 10:29

[Widgetsx3]

BERLIN (Reuters) - More than 3,000 dogs were paraded through central Berlin on Saturday in a demonstration by owners for more rights and public tolerance.
A number of the dogs in the parade that snarled traffic throughout the center of the German capital were wearing costumes. One German shepherd was wearing a bumblebee outfit and two others were dressed as nuns.

Accompanied by police escort, the dogs and their owners marched some three miles from the Victory Column to the posh west Berlin shopping district through the Schoeneberg district before returning to the starting point for a rally.

Speakers at the second annual "Fiffi Parade" called on the local government to set aside larger areas where dogs can roam free without leashes. "We need pro-dog rules and not anti-dog laws," said Gisela Duellberg, one of the organizers.

[Widgetsx3]

CLEWISTON, Fla. (AP) - Turning 90 made Guy Glinski want to jump out of a plane. So he took the plunge.

The nonagenarian gave himself a memorable birthday present Saturday, getting into a propeller plane and jumping out at 13,000 feet, tethered to an instructor.

"I've always wanted to do this," said Glinski, a retired carpenter and widower of three years. "I'll be back next year."

Glinski's daughter, Elizabeth Biersdorfer, 61, hugged him and wished him luck moments before the jump. She didn't seem surprised - or bothered - by her father's decision to pick up a new hobby.

"He's pretty sound of mind and he's in good shape," she said.

Glinski says he was inspired after reading a newspaper article about an 86-year-old woman who made a tandem skydive.

After a minute in free-fall and six minutes gliding under the open chute, Glinski could only muster a few words as he sat on the ground Saturday.

"Pretty cool, pretty cool," he said.

[Widgetsx3]

OSLO, Norway (AP) - They met via a cell phone text message, courted and fell in love on the telephone and picked out their wedding rings while talking to each long-distance from jewelry shops in two cities.

So what could be more natural than Grete Irene Myrslett, 35, and Frode Tangedahl Stroemsoe, 31, getting married in a phone booth?

That's what they did this weekend in a wedding - and honeymoon cruise - sponsored by Norway's state-run telecom, Telenor ASA (TELN), to mark the 70th anniversary of its landmark red phone booths that dot the Nordic country of 4.5 million residents.

Last year, Myrslett, of Oslo, and Stroemsoe, who lives on the other side of country, met through SMS Flirt, a mobile telephone messaging service for singles, Norwegian news media reported this weekend.

Within a month, they'd run up $1,481 in cell phone bills. So to save money, Stroemsoe, with no regular telephone, waited outside a phone booth each night at 11 p.m. to talk to Myrslett. Cell phone calls are more expensive in Norway than those made via land lines.

They decided to get married and even picked out their wedding rings before they ever met in person.

Finally, Myrslett flew to Haugesund, about 200 miles west of the capital, Oslo, to meet her fiance.

Wedding invitations were via short messaging service, or SMS, and drew about 100 guests to Saturday's wedding.

[Widgetsx3]

AUSTIN, Minn. (AP) - Two teens accused of searching for a marijuana dealer dialed the ultimate wrong number - they called the Mower County Sheriff's cell phone.

Sheriff Terese Amazi's cell phone rang around noon on Friday. The caller said she wanted a bag of marijuana. After Amazi said she was the sheriff, the caller said, "I'm sorry," and hung up.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. This time, Amazi let a deputy answer.

The caller again asked for a bag of marijuana, and the deputy - who called himself "Dupe" on the phone - arranged for a meeting at a convenience store an hour later.

"Apparently, they didn't know the meaning of 'Dupe' as in 'duped' either," Amazi said. "It's incredible."

The girls, ages 15 and 17, were arrested at the scene. Police said they found cash for the marijuana and drug paraphernalia on both girls. One was released to her parent and the other was turned over to a probation officer.

"Not only did they do something wrong, but they should have been in school," Amazi said.

[Widgetsx3]

HOUSTON (AP) - Arlene SoRelle-Tharpe's dogged determination and her curious canine's persistent pawing got Bob Connor reunited with his college class ring after more than 30 years.

SoRelle-Tharpe's husband was in their backyard two years ago when he noticed their boxer Spike scratching at something on the ground. It turned out to be a man's University of Houston class ring embossed with the year "67," the degree "BS" and the initials "RJC."

On Friday, she found Connor, whose family had owned the home directly behind SoRelle-Tharpe's.

"I feel so great we found him," she said. "I feel like I've accomplished something."

Connor lost the ring more than 30 years ago while playing fetch with his dog Spot in his parents' back yard. He tried finding it, even using a metal detector. "I gave up on it," he said.

SoRelle-Tharpe first tried locating the owner through its manufacturer and the university. She then renewed her efforts, and found Conner with help from the university's alumni association.

"I was pretty surprised, because I never thought I'd see it again," Connor said.

[Widgetsx3]

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A dog trainer was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison Monday for providing defective bomb-sniffing dogs to the government after the Sept. 11 attacks and lying about their credentials.

Russell Lee Ebersole, convicted in June on 27 counts of fraud, insisted his dogs were competent and blamed his conviction on jealous competitors.

"I believe in my employees. I believe in my dogs. They are heroes," Ebersole, of Hagerstown, Md., said at sentencing.

Ebersole's Detector Dogs Against Drugs and Explosives, of Stephenson, Va., provided bomb-sniffing dogs to several federal agencies in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. The agencies paid Ebersole $700,000 from September 2001 to May 2002.

Ebersole's contracts were canceled after his dogs failed independent tests on five different occasions. On one test, dogs were unable to detect 50 pounds of dynamite and 15 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives hidden at the Federal Reserve parking garage in Washington.

"There is something sickeningly wrong about a man who would steal from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) when that agency was stretched to the limit coordinating relief efforts" after the Sept. 11 attacks, prosecutor Thomas McQuillan said.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema imposed the maximum sentence and ordered Ebersole to pay about $700,000 restitution upon his release.

[Widgetsx3]

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) - President Lucio Gutierrez will set a national example and start showing up on time for meetings and appointments in an effort to combat a national lack of punctuality, a government spokesman said Monday.

"The president has made the decision that punctuality will be the government's rule," spokesman Marcelo Cevallos said in an interview with Teleamazonas television.

It was unclear when the initiative would begin, however, as Cevallos apologized to the audience for showing up late for the interview.

Gutierrez, who took office in January, has frequently been criticized by the media and political opponents for his habitual tardiness - arriving as much as three hours late for appointments.

The presidential pledge comes after local private group Citizen Participation launched a national campaign to promote punctuality earlier this month.

Locally referred to as keeping "Ecuadorean Time," the nation is known for showing up late to sporting, media and government events - which rarely start on time.

[Jolie Rouge]

Elderly Man Stored Wife's Body for Years In Freezer
By ANABELLE GARAY

PHOENIX (AP) - A 75-year-old man stored his wife's body for nearly six years in his backyard, twisted and upside down in an old freezer, because he hoped she could someday be brought back to life, authorities said.

When police went to Edwin Rowlette's home after receiving a tip from his daughter, they found dozens of cats along with feces and urine inside the house. The backyard, where one of the daughter's friends discovered the body, was cluttered with garbage, debris, insulation and furniture.

Authorities found Marcia Lynn Rowlette's body packed in dry ice and insulation and stored along with the bodies of ten dead cats. Rowlette told police he used the cats for research.

Rowlette was arrested last week on a felony charge of crimes against the dead. Investigators are trying to determine if he legally acquired his wife's body from a funeral home and whether he submitted the proper documents.


``One of the areas that we're looking at is if he had committed a fraud in obtaining the body,'' said Prescott police Sgt. Michael Kabbel.


Prescott, a pine-studded town of about 33,000, is located 90 miles north of Phoenix.


Rowlette told police he was keeping his wife's body frozen in hopes that someday science could bring her back to life.


Marcia Rowlette was wheelchair-bound and lived in a nursing home before she died Dec. 15, 1997, of respiratory failure. The 38-year-old woman had a history of rheumatoid arthritis and musculoskeletal problems.


``She had a lot of congenital anomalies that made it difficult to do anything,'' said Karen Gere, medical investigator with the Yavapai County medical examiner's office.


After her death, Marcia Rowlette's body was transferred to a funeral home. The body was released to the McCandless Research and Development Foundation after Rowlette submitted documents showing his wife's body was being donated for scientific research.


Rowlette said he created the foundation in 1985 and bills it as an organization that supports scientific research and humanitarian causes. Police are investigating whether the foundation is legitimate.


The president of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based cryonics facility said to be storing the body of baseball great Ted Williams said he was unfamiliar with Rowlette's organization.


Alcor Life Extension Foundation president Jerry B. Lemler also noted that cryonics is generally performed with liquid nitrogen, not dry ice, because liquid nitrogen is colder.


``I hate to be the one to burst the bubble on this man's dream,'' Lemler said. ``He had a dream that we share here at Alcor. But I don't think his methodology was very thought out.''



09/12/03 03:55
Elderly Man Stored Wife's Body for Years In Freezer
By ANABELLE GARAY

PHOENIX (AP) - A 75-year-old man stored his wife's body for nearly six years in his backyard, twisted and upside down in an old freezer, because he hoped she could someday be brought back to life, authorities said.

When police went to Edwin Rowlette's home after receiving a tip from his daughter, they found dozens of cats along with feces and urine inside the house. The backyard, where one of the daughter's friends discovered the body, was cluttered with garbage, debris, insulation and furniture.

Authorities found Marcia Lynn Rowlette's body packed in dry ice and insulation and stored along with the bodies of ten dead cats. Rowlette told police he used the cats for research.

Rowlette was arrested last week on a felony charge of crimes against the dead. Investigators are trying to determine if he legally acquired his wife's body from a funeral home and whether he submitted the proper documents.


``One of the areas that we're looking at is if he had committed a fraud in obtaining the body,'' said Prescott police Sgt. Michael Kabbel.


Prescott, a pine-studded town of about 33,000, is located 90 miles north of Phoenix.


Rowlette told police he was keeping his wife's body frozen in hopes that someday science could bring her back to life.


Marcia Rowlette was wheelchair-bound and lived in a nursing home before she died Dec. 15, 1997, of respiratory failure. The 38-year-old woman had a history of rheumatoid arthritis and musculoskeletal problems.


``She had a lot of congenital anomalies that made it difficult to do anything,'' said Karen Gere, medical investigator with the Yavapai County medical examiner's office.


After her death, Marcia Rowlette's body was transferred to a funeral home. The body was released to the McCandless Research and Development Foundation after Rowlette submitted documents showing his wife's body was being donated for scientific research.


Rowlette said he created the foundation in 1985 and bills it as an organization that supports scientific research and humanitarian causes. Police are investigating whether the foundation is legitimate.


The president of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based cryonics facility said to be storing the body of baseball great Ted Williams said he was unfamiliar with Rowlette's organization.


Alcor Life Extension Foundation president Jerry B. Lemler also noted that cryonics is generally performed with liquid nitrogen, not dry ice, because liquid nitrogen is colder.


``I hate to be the one to burst the bubble on this man's dream,'' Lemler said. ``He had a dream that we share here at Alcor. But I don't think his methodology was very thought out.''



09/12/03 03:55

[gemini26]

SM sex in the woods sparks murder hunt

A hiker sparked a massive police hunt after he mistook a sadomasochistic sex scene for a murder attempt.

Dusseldorf police followed up a phone call from the hiker who told them he had seen a man thumping a half-naked woman with a stick in a remote forest area in west Germany.

But after more than 40 policemen searched the area with a helicopter unsuccessfully, they managed to trace the owner of the car.

The 31-year-old car owner, who was not named, said all he had done was meet up with a female friend who shared his secret passion for sadomasochistic sex.

His female friend, whom he had met on the internet, confirmed the incident, saying all they had done was "indulged in a bit of fun".

[gemini26]

Assault suspect says he's an independent country

An Illinois resident facing charges of assaulting a police officer, says he shouldn't go on trial because he's an independent country.

Curtis Johnson, from Cary, faces four charges in relation to an incident in July.

It's alleged he scratched and pushed a police officer after a traffic stop.

Johnson claims he's not a US citizen - but a separate country.

He says the state's attorney doesn't have the jurisdiction to prosecute because he has diplomatic immunity.

Johnson is currently free on bail and is due in court on October 7.

[gemini26]

Prisoner sues jail over spiders

A female prisoner in the US state of Georgia is suing the jail because she says it's infested with spiders.

Marcia Wall is serving 10-years for burglary and aggravated assault at the Washington State Prison in Davisboro.

Her lawsuit says she and other inmates at the prison have been bitten repeatedly by spiders and claim medical officials have denied them proper treatment.

"They live here with us. We've got to share this place with them. But it's getting crazy," said Wall.

Although the Department of Corrections wouldn't comment on the case, it said the 1,000-bed prison is fumigated once a month by a pest control company.

Wall's lawyer, McNeill Stokes, said inmates have sent him envelopes filled with dead spiders as proof of the infestation.

Wall and other inmates want prison officials to seal faulty window screens, clean up webs around the prison grounds and take their medical claims seriously.

[gemini26]

Dog trainer jailed over 'duff sniffer dogs'

A dog trainer has been jailed for providing defective bomb-sniffing dogs to the US government after the September 11 attacks and lying about their credentials.

Russell Lee Ebersole was sentenced to six-and-a-half years following his conviction in June on 27 counts of fraud.

Ebersole insisted his dogs were competent and blamed his conviction on jealous competitors. At the sentencing he said: "I believe in my employees. I believe in my dogs. They are heroes."

His Detector Dogs Against Drugs and Explosives, of Stephenson, Virginia, provided bomb-sniffing dogs to several federal agencies in the months after the terrorist attacks.

The agencies paid him the equivalent of £525,000 from September 2001 to May 2002. But Ebersole's contracts were cancelled after his dogs failed independent tests on five different occasions.

On one test, dogs were unable to detect 50lbs of dynamite and nearly 15lbs of C-4 plastic explosives hidden at the Federal Reserve parking garage in Washington.

Prosecutor Thomas McQuillan said: "There is something sickeningly wrong about a man who would steal from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, when that agency was stretched to the limit coordinating relief efforts."

US District Judge Leonie Brinkema imposed the maximum sentence and ordered Ebersole to pay £525,000 restitution upon his release.

[gemini26]

Man shocked to discover he died in 1980

An Argentinian man has been refused treatment for toothache because his medical records say he's been dead for more than 20 years.

Rafael Lanizante, 52, was told by a nurse at the Regional Hospital in Comodoro that he had died in 1980.

He told Clarin newspaper: "I was so shocked, she even showed me my death certificate, I thought it was a joke until I saw the document.

"The only explanation I can come up with is that in 1979 I got my truck stolen along with my ID and driver's license. Maybe the criminal was using my documents and died a year later."

The police are investigating how the mix-up happened.

Mr Lanizante said: "The only good thing is that with all this confusion my toothache went away, because I am not going to get any treatment until this mess is sorted and they realise I am alive."

[gemini26]

Man dies at his own wake

Doctors in Argentina say a 94-year-old man died at his own wake.

They say Carlos Gonzales Valencia was wrongly certified dead at a clinic in Ramos Majia.

His daughter, a nurse, noticed he still had a pulse after his 'body' was taken home for his wake.

But by the time emergency services arrived, Mr Valencia had died for real, reports Terra Noticias Populares.

An emergency doctor said: "This man died while at his own wake. He was seen by a doctor and the funeral people but no one realised he was still alive, that is really incredible."

Now the family is suing the clinic.

[gemini26]

Inquiry launched after human faeces found in prison chili

A US prison governor has launched an investigation after human faeces was found in chili being served to inmates.

Prisoners at the Cumberland County Jail in Maine complained about the smell when the meal was served, but many still tried the dish and suffered vomiting and nausea as a result.

Sheriff Mark Dion ordered the entire batch seized, along with the "ghost meal" preserved from every feeding "just in case something like this happens".

"Some people are sick," he told the Portland Press Herald. "We've had a few cases of nausea, vomiting. It could be as much psychological as physical.

"It's created a lot of chaos throughout this entire facility. Eating is an integral part of the daily routine here."

The sheriff has suspended all 14 of the inmate "trustees" who work in the kitchen under the supervision of three civilian cooks.

And he took DNA swabs from everyone in the kitchen in the hope that one will match the tainted chili samples already at state health labs.

Authorities are examining a security video showing the preparation of the meal. Of particular interest is a freeze frame showing one kitchen worker in the immediate vicinity of the large vat of chili.

Dion, while confident the culprit will be found, said it could be days or even weeks before the necessary scientific evidence is compiled.

He also must determine the appropriate criminal charge: "The problem is we're having trouble finding an appropriate law to hold someone accountable," he said.

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ROME (Reuters) - A church in central Italy may need reconsecrating after police discovered it had been the location for a pornographic film, Italian media reported Thursday.
The church of San Vicenzo's seedy past came to light when a local -- watching "Il Confessionale" ("The Confessional Box") -- recognized the spot. He called in the police who, on closer study of the movie, confirmed his suspicions.

The local priest said the film crew told him they were shooting a wedding scene in the church. But actually, a man dressed as a priest was filmed having sex with a woman playing the bride. The priest of nearby Gioia dei Marsi said that under canon (church) law the Bishop of Marsi, Lucio Renna, would have to re-bless all services held in San Vicenzo, east of Rome, since the film was shot in 1998.

Italian news agency ANSA quoted Renna as saying: "First we have to find out exactly what happened ... I have to speak with those involved and find out what went on and why."

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LONDON (Reuters) - Police chiefs urged their officers Friday to take a more relaxed approach to cannabis in line with a new policy that will effectively leave Britons free to enjoy the drug in private.

The guidance came as Home Secretary David Blunkett handed Parliament a draft order to downgrade the drug from Class B to the low-risk Class C to allow police to focus resources on hard drugs like heroin.

The shift in policy is likely to take effect in January.

"There will be a presumption against arrest, except where public order is at risk, or where children are vulnerable," said Blunkett.

"After reclassification, most offences of cannabis possession by adults will result in a police warning and confiscation of the drug," he added.

Officers on the street would be left to decide the maximum weight at which cannabis smokers could claim their supplies were for personal use and not dealing, said Andy Hayman, drugs spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers.

"If we start making statements about weights... those who deal in drugs will just make sure they've got possession of a drug just below the weight," he told BBC radio.

Seizures of hard drugs have reached a record high, government figures show, with heroin up 16 percent year-on-year in 2001. But cannabis still accounted for more than seven out of 10 drug seizures.

Hayman said the rationale for existing drug laws -- that people who tried cannabis were often led on to harder drugs -- had been disproved.

"The theory of 'gateway' drugs doesn't stand up," he said. "The evidence does not support that."

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - A three-judge panel upheld the conviction of a woman who sent a holiday-wrapped package filled with rotten oranges, banana peels and hairballs to the owner of a neighboring apartment building.

Robin Troy "recklessly created a risk of public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm" by exposing Postal Service workers to the trash, the Superior Court panel ruled Thursday.

According to the decision, Troy mailed the package to Connie and Brian Striegel's home after complaining several times to Striegel about a tenant who kept putting trash at the curb days before it was due to be picked up, giving stray animals extra time to scatter it.

In December 2001, the Pittsburgh woman collected some of the garbage, packed it up and mailed it to the Striegels. A note placed inside said her children deserved a clean, safe place to live and warned that she would "take any and all legal means to stop you."

Troy was convicted of disorderly conduct in 2002 and fined $300 by a district justice. She appealed to the Butler County Court of Common Pleas, where Judge John H. Brydon upheld her conviction but lowered the fine to $25.

Connie Striegel, who said she owns the apartment building, said she was glad that Troy's conviction had been upheld.

"We're not the tenants' mothers, and we are not slumlords, either - we've put about $20,000 into the property since we purchased it," Striegel said.

Troy, 41, a hotel housekeeping supervisor, said Friday she now believes she was wrong to send trash through the mail. These days, when she has a problem with trash from a neighborhood property, she said she delivers it to the landlord in person.

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PITTSBURGH (AP) - A man who thought he had hatched a perfect alibi to charges that he murdered a man in a barroom shooting two years ago had his scheme foiled when a letter asking a friend to lie for him was returned and was read by jail guards.

Demetrius Murrell, 24, of Pittsburgh, pleaded guilty Thursday to a charge of third-degree murder after prosecutors read the letter in court.

In the letter, Murrell asked his friend for "a little alibi" during his upcoming trial on charges that he shot and killed a 19-year-old man in a Pittsburgh bar on March 24, 2001.

"Really, I'm home free. Or almost. I need you to come and say you were there and that you know it wasn't me," Murrell wrote in the letter.

Murrell also sought testimony that the shooter was "a lil' bit taller than me and he was darker."

But his friend never got the letter. Murrell apparently had an incorrect address and not enough postage, so the letter was returned to the Allegheny County Jail - where it was read by jail guards.

In exchange for his plea, Murrell could be sentenced to as much as eight years in prison.

Robert Mielnicki, Murrell's attorney, seemed resigned about the result.

"This was a case with many, many issues, and I think sometimes this is the way cases have to be resolved," he said.

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MISHAWAKA, Ind. (AP) - Two would-be robbers left an Indiana convenience store empty-handed after getting into an argument about the contents of a note they handed to the clerk.

The two men entered the 7-Eleven store in Mishawaka, just east of South Bend, early Tuesday morning.

They left the store and came back a few minutes later. One of them handed the clerk a note saying, in part, "put it in the bag."

When the clerk said she didn't understand what that meant, the man who handed her the note said he didn't know either because his buddy wrote it.

The two men began to argue and left the store. They are still at large.

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IDER, Ala. (AP) - A fire truck that had just returned from the scene of a blaze caught fire itself at its station, destroying the building and the vehicle.

The engine of the truck had been turned off, but some malfunction, possibly a gasoline leak, caused a fire under the hood, firefighter Brad Hannah said.

Ider, a town of about 670 people in the rural northeast corner of Alabama, has two other fire trucks. Assistant Fire Chief Ronnie Cloud said Wednesday. Those trucks were out on calls during the fire.

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FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) - A man was evicted from a cave he had lived in for 11 years after pleading guilty to using a national forest for residential purposes.

Thomas J. Crawford had a bed, books and clothes arranged on hangers, along with pots and cutlery for cooking in his cave in the Coconino National Forest in northern Arizona.

He was arrested Friday after a Flagstaff resident reported a suspicious camp.

Crawford pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court on Monday and was sentenced to one year of probation and banned from the forest.

He told Forest Service officials he would come to Flagstaff every week or so to get supplies and water. Sometimes, he would work here.

Crawford, accompanied by Forest Service officials and a reporter from the Arizona Daily Sun, was allowed to remove his possessions after he was released from jail Tuesday.

"As you can see, I don't have a TV or anything," he said. "I've got the sky, the wind, the rain, the canyon wrens. ... This is a beautiful mountain. You could explore it a lifetime."

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PHILADELPHIA (AP) - The crew of the freighter Ahmetbey had one of the best seats in town for Fourth of July fireworks on the Delaware River. Two months later, the postcard view of the city skyline is getting old.

With the Turkish vessel tied up in a legal dispute with a German bank, the eight sailors left on board can't step ashore for so much as dinner or a movie.

Local groups have stepped in to relieve the monotony, sending volunteers for soccer games the Turkish sailors always win, and a salsa dancing party, but time still weighs heavily pending a Sept. 23 trial on the ship owners' alleged debts.

"They're dealing with it, but it's frustrating to be basically 20 feet from shore and not be able to get out of there and do their shopping and go out to eat," said Jack Mudge, chief operating officer of the Seamen's Church Institute, who visits the sailors daily.

The Ahmetbey is owned by Odin Denizcilik A.S. and based in Istanbul. The HSH Nordbank in Hamburg claims the Turkish company owes more than $1 million in principal and interest after defaulting on mortgage payments on the ship, and claims the same family of companies owes the bank more than $19 million.

The bank is asking U.S. District Judge John R. Padova in Philadelphia to order the 499-ft. ship sold. The shipping company has denied the allegations.

The Ahmetbey sailed from Egypt on May 12 with a crew of 21 and a cargo of steel, and unloaded at Delaware River terminal in Bucks County, 30 miles north of Philadelphia.

But instead of sailing to Montreal as planned for its next cargo, the ship was ordered "arrested" by Padova and is being detained at the Tioga Marine Terminal in Philadelphia. Padova allowed 13 crew members to return to Turkey, retaining eight with the skills needed to maintain the ship at the pier.

Ann-Michele Higgins, an attorney for the company, declined to allow interviews with the crew, citing the pending legal action. The eight men, in their 20s and 30s, signed on to sail on the ship and aren't aboard against their will, she pointed out.

"They have their food and supplies on board, and they continue to be paid by the owner, so they are still earning a wage," Higgins said. If the ship were allowed to depart, more crew members would be flown in from Turkey, she said.

If the sailors could go ashore, Mudge said: "They'd probably go to the mall. They'd get some dinner. They'd probably come to the Seamen's center and play some pool."

Instead, the Seamen's Church Institute, which offers comforts like a chapel, basketball court, books, Internet access and international phone cards for about 15,000 seafarers passing through Delaware River ports each year, has taken pingpong and foosball tables, cell phones and phone cards to the Ahmetbey.

The Turkish community has pitched in, with volunteers from the Turkish-American Society bringing the sailors hamburgers, books and videos.

"They're hard working people. I think standing still looking at the same thing every day not knowing what's going to happen, they're mainly bored," volunteer Hande Teoman said. "We sing songs. We play games. I give them English lessons."

The crew has painted lines and rigged up a soccer court in a cargo hold, where matches can be played under an open hatch.

"It's one of the nicer indoor fields I've ever played on, other than it's pure steel," Mudge said.

"They've beaten every team who's come on board to play them so far," including a team of Brazilian sailors, Higgins said. The sailors were delighted when she brought her 6- and 8-year-old daughters aboard to watch a game.

Wednesday night, a dozen volunteers went aboard for a salsa dance party.

"They set flags around the deck and made a little dance area, with a boom box, under the moon," Mudge said. "It was a beautiful night."

[Jolie Rouge]

Barbie Deemed Threat to Saudi Morality
Tue Sep 9, 3:57 PM ET


RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia's religious police have declared Barbie dolls a threat to morality, complaining that the revealing clothes of the "Jewish" toy — already banned in the kingdom — are offensive to Islam.

The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as the religious police are officially known, lists the dolls on a section of its Web site devoted to items deemed offensive to the conservative Saudi interpretation of Islam.


"Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful," said a poster on the site. The poster, plastered with pictures of Barbie in short dresses and tight pants, and with a few of her accessories, reads: "A strange request. A little girl asks her mother: Mother, I want jeans, a low-cut shirt, and a swimsuit like Barbie." Such posters are distributed to schools and hung in the streets by the religious police, or muttawa, an independent body affiliated with the office of the Prime Minister.


Vice police officials were not available for comment Monday.


Sheik Abdulla al-Merdas, a preacher in a Riyadh mosque, said the muttawa take their anti-Barbie campaign to the shops, confiscating dolls from sellers and imposing a fine.
Although illegal, Barbies, the creation of California-based Mattel Inc., are found on the black market, where a contraband doll could cost $27 or more.


"It is no problem that little girls play with dolls. But these dolls should not have the developed body of a woman, and wear revealing clothes," al-Merdas said. "These revealing clothes will be imprinted in their minds and they will refuse to wear the clothes we are used to as Muslims," the sheik said. Women in Saudi Arabia must cover themselves from head to toe with a black cloak in public. They are not allowed to drive and cannot go out in public unaccompanied by a male family member.


Other items listed as violations on the site included Valentine's Day gifts, perfume bottles in the shape of women's bodies, clothing with logos that include a cross, and decorative copies of religious items — offensive because they could be damaged and thus insult Islam. An exhibition of all the violating items is found in the holy city of Medina, and mobile tours go around to schools and other public areas in the kingdom.


The muttawa act as a monitoring and punishing agency, propagating conservative Islamic beliefs according to the teachings of the puritan Wahhabi sect, adhered to the kingdom since the 18th century, and enforcing strict moral code. The muttawa patrol the streets of the kingdom, preventing men from mingling with women, enforcing strict Islamic dress for women, chasing worshippers late for prayers, and punishing shop keepers who stay open during prayer hours. They sometimes work with a police officer who can enforce legal punishments on people deemed violators.


___


On the Net:


www.hesbah.gov.sa

[Jolie Rouge]

New twist for ex-inmate in Maryland
Man learns he was imprisoned with real perpetrator

Kirk Bloodsworth, who was convicted of rape and murder by a Maryland court in 1984, stands inside Northwestern University Law School, in this Nov. 13, 1998, file photo. He was cleared of the crimes in 1993, becoming the first American freed from prison because of DNA evidence.

By Susan Levine
THE WASHINGTON POST

http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/962587.asp?cp1=1


WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — At a Burger King on Maryland’s Eastern Shore yesterday, Kirk Bloodsworth sat down with the prosecutor who helped send him to death row for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl. Nearly two decades later, Ann Brobst told him, DNA had identified the man who had really done it.

“WE GOT a hit on a guy,” he remembers hearing, in the immeasurable fraction of a moment before he began weeping, realizing the words’ import, realizing that the state at last considered him a completely innocent man. Beside him, his wife, Brenda, broke down and wept, too.
“You know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that?” Bloodsworth asked Brobst, who twice persuaded a jury to convict him of Dawn Hamilton’s brutal death — and who yesterday apologized for how that had shattered his life.
But there was more. The suspect, Brobst went on, is already in prison in Maryland, halfway through a 45-year sentence for burglary, attempted rape and assault with intent to murder. His name: Kimberly Shay Ruffner.
“My God,” Bloodsworth said, “I know him.”
In a plot twist few involved could have imagined, the Baltimore County state’s attorney’s office now believes the killer in the 1984 slaying has been hiding behind bars since a month after the crime. Prosecutors announced yesterday that Ruffner, 45, had been identified by a stain of semen analyzed for the first time this spring and then entered into state and federal DNA databases. It was the same kind of evidence that in 1993 led to Bloodsworth’s exoneration after almost nine years of incarceration.





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During several of those years, he and Ruffner lived only one floor and a couple of cells apart in the state’s maximum security prison in Jessup. “He lifted weights with us,” Bloodsworth said. “I spotted weights for him.”
The two never talked about why Bloodsworth was in prison, but the former Marine and Eastern Shore waterman is sure Ruffner knew.

BLOODSWORTH’S ORDEAL
From the day of his arrest, Bloodsworth maintained loudly and vigorously that he had no involvement, that he had been nowhere near the woods, just east of the Baltimore line, where the girl disappeared in July 1984. Two boys fishing in the area that morning told police they had seen her walking with a strange man. After a suspect’s composite was publicized, a hotline tipster suggested that police check out Bloodsworth, who recently had moved up from Cambridge to try to save a failing marriage.
He was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. His sentence was overturned in 1987, but he was convicted again and given life without parole. After his pardon and release — his was the first DNA exoneration in this country of someone who had been on death row — a growing cadre of supporters urged Baltimore County prosecutors to use the same scientific technology to try to identify the true killer.
The delay in doing so, coupled with prosecutors’ repeated hedging on Bloodsworth’s innocence, infuriated many.
Yesterday, those supporters exulted with him.
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“It must be a huge burden lifted,” said Peter Loge of the Washington-based Criminal Justice Reform Education Fund, a group Bloodsworth has worked with as an outspoken death penalty opponent.
At the same time, Loge focused on the “troubling questions” the case continues to raise. “The data was there,” he said. “Why wasn’t it run before? What if it had already been destroyed? ... This speaks to the broader reform that is needed, laws requiring DNA evidence [to be taken] and requiring its preservation and testing.”
Although Maryland State Police in 1994 began entering genetic samples into the state database, which links with a national system, a spokesman said he could not discuss when Ruffner’s DNA became part of that. Regardless, Baltimore County police did not begin working with the system until 2002.
State’s Attorney Sandra A. O’Connor said yesterday that her office had first asked police to try for a DNA hit in the Hamilton case early last year. It never was done, she said.
Police spokesman Bill Toohey acknowledged the lapse but blamed staffing and funding shortages and the reality that an old case always would get lower priority than cases about to go to trial. “We were balancing a lot of needs,” he said.
In May, a forensic biologist did pick up the evidence and almost immediately identified new semen stains for analysis. Police requested additional funds to send such evidence to a private lab for further testing. By mid-August, Toohey said, the results were submitted to state police.

‘THEY GOT HIM, DAD’

[Jolie Rouge]

Ideal Birth Spacing Between Kids Is...

...three to five years.

Why? Wa

iting to have another baby three to five years after the last birth is better for the health of the mother and infant, according to a study published in Population Reports, a publication of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.

"Child spacing is a matter of choice, but decisions need to be informed," study author Vidya Setty-Venugopal told Reuters. "Spacing births three to five years is healthier for children as well as mothers and has social and economic benefits for the family as a whole." This research is based on two surveys--one of 430,000 pregnancies among women in 18 countries and another of more than 450,000 women in 19 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Reuters reports that children who are born three to four years after their mother's last child are more than twice as likely to live to age five than children who are spaced less than two years apart. In addition, women who space their babies 27 to 32 months apart--compared with those who spaced them just 9 to 14 months apart--are less likely to develop anemia or third-trimester bleeding and are more than twice as likely to survive childbirth. A psychological advantage of greater spacing is more time for each child.

[Jolie Rouge]

Really Weird Way to Stop Your Cravings

British scientists think they have found a way for smokers and others with intense cravings and addictions to beat the habit. It involves flickering dots and a Palm Pilot. Really. Reuters reports that Dr. Jon May, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield in northern England, has developed a computer program using blinking dots. He and his team are working to develop a smaller version of the program that smokers could load into a Palm Pilot and then call it up when they crave a cigarette. May says that cravings involve mental and biological components that can be affected by images. For example, he claims that visualizing a tennis match can reduce the urge to smoke. Apparently, watching flickering dots will do the same thing. "If our hypothesis is right, then watching that little flickery dots program should be as good as our mental imagery task and might help the craving go away," he May told Reuters.


The "flickery dot program" is a grid of black and white squares that randomly flicker on and off about 1,000 times a second. May says watching it interferes with certain parts of working memory that are used in building up mental pictures that enforce the craving. He told Reuters, "It makes it harder to see (the cigarette) in your mind." Studies of cigarette-deprived smokers have shown that the flickering dots do reduce the strength of the craving. "The time course of a craving episode can go on for quite a long time," May told Reuters. "If you can get it early--within 15 seconds--you may have broken the cycle."

The big question: Will reducing the craving really help people smoke less or even stop smoking altogether? If so, the flickering dots could be an inexpensive and drug-free method to stop smoking. May and his team will soon begin testing this.

[Jolie Rouge]

New Theory: THIS Killed the Dinosaurs

It wasn't the impact of an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It was a "mantle plume," a huge volcanic eruption from deep with the Earth's mantle--the area between the crust the core of the Earth--that did in the dinos, reports Science Daily of new research from Cardiff University in Wales.

The new theory, which is already supported by a large group of geologists and paleontologists, is based on an analysis of microfossil assemblages found inside the cores that were drilled deep into sediments on the ocean floor, notes Science Daily. Quite possibly, there were two such volcanic eruptions and mantle plumes with one occurring several million years before the second. It would have been the second mantle plume that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

A mantle plume is caused by rising and mushrooming hot mantle from deep within the Earth. The eruptions, which spread magma over the Earth's surface in a diameter of 620 miles, last between 1 million and 2 million years. There are seven huge remnants of such mantle plumes. "It is likely that were it not for mantle plumes, mammals would not have become predominant, and humankind would not be here today," said Dr. Andrew Kerr of Cardiff University's School of Earth, Ocean and Planetary Sciences in a news release announcing the study.

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BERLIN (Reuters) - A German court convicted two men of staging a chainsaw accident in which one of them cut off the other's thumb and forefinger to claim 40,000 euros ($44,780) in insurance money, authorities said on Friday.
"One man held onto a cutting board and the other sawed his fingers off," presiding judge Juergen Treu said at the court in the southern town of Wuerzburg.

The 58-year-old landscape gardener then threw away the fingers and claimed money from two different insurers.

Police later uncovered the ruse after receiving an anonymous tip-off. "One of the men had been blabbing about it," Treu said.

The court gave the eight-fingered gardener a probationary sentence of one-and-a-half-years, while his chainsaw-wielding accomplice, a 28-year-old trucker, received a jail sentence of the same length because of a previous criminal record.

[Jolie Rouge]

The Top 25 Worst TV Characters Ever

Ross on "Friends," Frasier on "Frasier," Diane Chambers on "Cheers," Andy Rooney on "60 Minutes" and the entire cast of "Full House," including the Olsen twins, are among the top 50 most hated TV characters of all time, according to FHM magazine. List writer Tom Conlon, says the No. 1 spot goes to the entire Tanner family because "it's impossible to single out Bob Saget, Dave Coulier, or the Olsen Twins as the most obnoxious." Ouch.

The top 25 worst TV characters are:
1. The Tanner Family, "Full House"
2. Diane Chambers, "Cheers"
3. Andy Rooney, "60 Minutes"
4. Steve Urkel, "Family Matters"
5. Jan Brady, "The Brady Bunch"
6. Kathie Lee Gifford, "Regis and Kathie Lee"
7. Dawson Leery, "Dawson's Creek"
8. Elvin, "The Cosby Show"
9. Carrie, "Sex and the City"
10. Harry Solomon, "Third Rock From the Sun"
11. Thelma Harper, "Mama's Family"
12. Buddy Lembeck, "Charles In Charge"
13. Jimmy Fallon, "Saturday Night Live"
14. Bryant Gumbel, various news shows
15. Joey, "Blossom"
16. Ernestine, "Laugh-In"
17. Bobby Donnell, "The Practice"
18. Dr. Phil, "Dr. Phil"
19. Ben Seaver, "Growing Pains"
20. Jesse Camp, "MTV"
21. Janice Lazarotto, "Head of the Class"
22. Face, "The A Team"
23. Jonathan, "Growing Pains"
24. Fran, "The Nanny"
25. Wesley, "Mr. Belvidere"
*
*
*
*
*
*
And coming in at No. 50 is Ross from "Friends."

[Jolie Rouge]

Surprise! The Most Common Dream of All

The most common dream of all isn't the one where you're naked in the middle of a crowd. And it's not the one about missing the final exam after you forgot to attend class the entire semester. The most common dream of all is about being chased, according to Veronica Tonay, a clinical psychologist and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz who has spent years studying other people's dreams.


"Sometimes people will have lots of dreams about being chased, and they will think that means something terrible about them," Tonay told ABC News columnist Lee Dye. "Typically, people have a dream where someone or something is coming after them, and they don't know what it is," she says. "Later, they will have a dream in which they see who it is, and still later they recognize it as someone they know."



The meaning of the dream:

Very often in "the chase" dream, there is a scene that has nothing to do with reliving the past or the approach of some dreadful encounter. The dream might be repeated during the night, changing slightly each time. And as the dream evolves, Tonay says it can lead to us to dream about ourselves acting in a way we don't ordinarily act. That is, it's not a dream about someone trying to get us. It's a dream about ourselves. "There's some part of themselves that they are not in touch with, or they are trying to deny, and it's coming after them," she told ABC News. It's a message from within.

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BEIJING (AP) - With a look of intense concentration on his face, 21-month-old Zhang Xueyang explores the playground, ducking under swings and slides as fast as his legs can carry him.

His head is shaved. His red-and-yellow T-shirt proclaims "Cute Girl!" His loose, white-cotton shorts are grimy with dirt. Suddenly, he stops in mid-stride and squats, the seam of his pants parting smoothly to allow a stream of urine to pool onto the concrete.

"Good boy!" his 25-year-old mother, Wu Chunhua, shouts encouragingly as he speeds back to play.

The startlingly revealing "kaidangku" (literally "open-crotch pants") have made such posterior peek-a-boo a common sight in China for decades - rain, shine or, in a specially padded form, snow.

The principle is clear: no-fuss waste disposal. They're split down the middle - in front and back - and provide what many parents say is maximum convenience with minimum coverage.

But in recent years, with China's experiment in capitalism creating a growing middle class, rising incomes and more sophisticated lifestyles have pushed many parents, particularly those in big cities, toward disposable diapers.

While the origins of the slit pants are murky, they have been around at least since the establishment of communist China in 1949. In the late 1970s, when Mao-suit grays and dark blues were the norm for adults, children's vividly hued kaidangku were the only splashes of color on Beijing's drab streets.

But in Beijing these days, bare baby bottoms are an increasingly rare sight - even on sultry summer afternoons, when kaidangku used to be almost a uniform for toddlers.

"They're so uncivilized," says Su Shaojuan, a cashier from the southern city of Guangzhou who has a 2 1/2-year-old son. "People nowadays have more money, so they use diapers. It's more convenient and healthier for the child and parents."


Part of it is undoubtedly purely hygienic, a byproduct of the Chinese government's yearslong effort to spruce up its urban areas and, it says, steer people away from unclean practices.

Many cities have outlawed indiscriminate garbage dumping, public urination by adults and street spitting. And a country that's inviting the world in for the Olympics in 2008 hardly wants visitors to see public spaces used as toilets.

Zhao Zhongxin, a professor at Beijing Normal University's Education Science Research Institute, goes even further: The split pants, he says, have become a social indicator of sorts.

"Children in the cities do not wear kaidangku anymore. But children in the countryside still do," Zhao says. "This is the difference between the minds and living conditions of rural people and urban people."

"In the past, people did not have a strong sense of hygiene," he says. "Now parents are usually very busy and do not have time to help the children to relieve themselves."

Diaper sales have risen sharply in China in recent years, says Yvonne Pei, a Guangzhou-based spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble.

Pei says sales of Pampers have grown by 50 percent every year since 1999. The two main reasons she cites: "Economic development and education level."

At a branch of the Jingkelong supermarket chain in Beijing, hundreds of multihued diaper packages are piled atop each other in one aisle and brightly patterned samples are on display. Prices range from about $1.80 for a package of 20, to $12 for 60.

"They're more popular in winter because it's too hot in summer," says a sales assistant who would give only her family name, Li. "They may not be as comfortable as kaidangku, but the standard of life is rising and sales are rising with it."

Yu Min, who has a 2-month-old daughter, sees the benefits of both - convenience vs. cost. "But I use mostly diapers for convenience," says the 32-year-old from the southern coastal city of Xiamen.

At the New Mommy Post-Delivery Care Center in Beijing, new mothers are advised to use diapers regardless of cost, says Zhang Yue, head nurse of the facility.

"They're cleaner, healthier and disposable," Zhang says. More than 90 percent of the mothers use diapers, she said.

But Wu, whose son was playing at the Beijing park, remains unconvinced.

"Even if people don't think it looks good, that's a minority opinion," she says. "This is a Chinese tradition."

[Widgetsx3]

MONTREAL (AP) - Blitz, the Montreal Alouettes' mascot, received a reprieve - and a stern reprimand - after being given a penalty for pecking an official during a Canadian Football League game.

Alouettes head coach Don Matthews wanted the bird mascot cut after drawing a 15-yard penalty for knocking an official on the head during Montreal's 30-10 victory over the Ottawa Renegades on Sunday.

Team spokesman Louis-Philippe Dorais said Monday the mascot will keep his job, but will be confined to the sidelines. He didn't reveal the identity of the person in the costume.

"He's been given a warning, but he's not going to be released," Dorais said. "Everybody deserves a second chance. We'll make sure it doesn't happen again. You don't want something like that to affect the outcome of a game."

Blitz, a giant lark who likes to bounce up and down on his inflatable head, had taken to joining the Alouettes' celebrations in the end zone after they scored a touchdown.

While celebrating Kwame Cavil's 28-yard TD reception in the third quarter, Blitz tapped an official with his head, apparently while trying to peck the ref on the cheek.

The official responded by throwing a flag.

Dorais said that in the future, Blitz will be confined to the sideline.

"He will continue to provide entertainment, but not on the field," he said.

The penalty was applied to the ensuing kickoff and the improved field position helped the Renegades kick a field goal, although it hardly mattered in the Alouettes' one-sided win.

Matthews led his post-game comments with a tirade against the mascot, saying that "if I can, I guarantee he will be cut."

General manager Jim Popp jokingly suggested that Blitz be plucked.

[Widgetsx3]

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - A woman in southeastern Thailand is returning to the hospital where her uterus was taken out nearly six years ago - this time for surgery to remove the forceps that doctors left behind.

Lamphan Yinsuth, 46, has had stomach pains since her hysterectomy at Chanthaburi province's Prapoklao Hospital in November 1997. X-rays in April revealed that the pains were caused by the 2-inch-by-11-inch forceps lodged in her abdomen.

After filing a complaint to the Medical Council, a national association of doctors, the hospital agreed to compensate Yinsuth $9,520 for the operation and perform a second surgery to remove the instrument, hospital officials said Monday.

"The hospital acknowledged the mistake and apologized for unwittingly making the mistake," said Dr. Daoreuk Sinthuwanich.

A hospital spokesman said doctors were ready "to re-operate once she comes in for the operation, and I expect that to be in a couple of days."

Chanthaburi province is about 130 miles east of Bangkok.

[Jolie Rouge]

You Won't Believe What Yoko Ono Did

:confused:

To get all of us to imagine world peace, Yoko Ono took to the stage in a small Paris theater on Monday night, sat in a chair all by herself for one hour, and invited the 200 audience members to approach her with scissors and cut off her clothing--a long black silk skirt with a matching long-sleeved top. The audience was instructed to mail the cut piece of clothing to a loved one. At the end of the hour, she was clad only in her undergarments. Can you feel the peace and love?

The appearance was a reprise of her legendary 1964 performance "Cut Piece" when she did the same thing in Japan. But in 1964, Yoko was 31. Now she is 70. Among the scissors-wielding audience on Monday night was 27-year-old Sean Lennon, the son of Yoko and John Lennon. Sean participated in the event by cutting off a piece of his mother's skirt. "I was just here to say imagine world peace, and to say I love you," Ono told Associated Press Television News in an exclusive interview after the show. "Let's create a peaceful world. I'm hoping these things will help."

She said that by allowing strangers to approach her with scissors, she was sending a message of trust. One audience member told AP, "Scissors usually have a violent connotation, but she turns it around to make it peaceful. I think that's what she's saying--you can make peace out of violence."



--------


"Scissors usually have a violent connotation..."
[/i]
hhhhmmmm, funny when I think of scissors I think of quiet little old ladies in a sewing circle or quilting bee.[/i]

[Jolie Rouge]

Look What They're Doing to David Blaine

Poor David Blaine.

All the 30-year-old magician wanted to do was reside in a 7 foot-by-7 foot-by-3 foot Plexiglas box suspended 40 feet above the ground beside London's Tower Bridge for 44 days with nothing but water for sustenance. He thought his greatest problem would be boredom. So much for that. The view from that box must be entertaining as onlookers jeer him, pelt him with eggs, tomatoes, and even french fries, and awaken him with the beating of drums, reports The Associated Press. A topless woman even taunted him. A London tabloid teased him by grilling hamburgers right under his box. A toy helicopter rose above the box dangling a cheeseburger before his eyes. One newspaper dubbed Blaine-baiting "the new national sport," notes AP.

And there Blaine sits, unshaven and shirtless for all the world to see. Sometimes he writes in his journal. Sometimes he waves to the crowd. "He looks really bored," one young man told AP. "I feel sorry for him now," said a female companion. What IS he doing up there? Before he entered the box, Blaine said the endurance test would give him an opportunity to search for "truths," adding, "This is worth it for my art, even if I drop dead." He has two pipes into the box--one incoming for water and one outgoing for urine. On Tuesday, a man was arrested when he was caught trying to sabotage the water pipes and power cables by cutting through them.

With all the food hurling incidents, security has been stepped up. Now two rings of fences encircle an enclosure beneath the box. Observers must be searched by security guards before they are allowed in. Not everyone is ridiculing him. Some wave and give him a thumbs-up sign. Someone even hung a homemade banner on the fence that says "Keep the Faith." This isn't the first crazy stunt. He was once buried alive for a week and encased in a block of ice for three days.


Find out *why* David Blaine is doing this stunt.

www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/08/30/cnna.david.blaine/index.html

[Jolie Rouge]

Rumor Has It: Why Ben & Jen Split Up

So why DID Ben and Jen (that would be Affleck and Lopez for the five people on Earth who don't know) break up? MSNBC's The Scoop gossip column has done serious investigative reporting to find out. The reason? It could all come down to a milkshake.

But this isn't just any old milkshake. This is a $100 milkshake.

Rumor has it that the two lovebirds were recently dining at a posh restaurant in Los Angeles when J.Lo threw a fit because the waiter wouldn't make her a milkshake. Ben offered the restaurant's manager $100 to make the milkshake for his beloved. The restaurant complied with his wishes. J.Lo was happy. But that has The Scoop wondering this: Did the thought of buying $100 milkshakes for Jennifer the rest of his natural life give Benjamin the wedding jitters?

Someone only identified as a "friend of Ben's" told The Scoop that Affleck really didn't want to get married, but he felt powerless to stop the wedding. "This behavior is classic Ben," the source told The Scoop. "He has been looking for a way out for some time. He thought he had one with the strippers, but it was not enough. I spoke to someone close in Ben's camp yesterday and they are popping bottles of champagne over there because they never wanted to see him marry her."

[Jolie Rouge]

Cancer-Stricken Pop Singer Speaks Up

Pop singer Anastacia, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last January at just 29 years old, has become an activist for breast cancer research. In addition to teaming up with Evelyn Lauder of the Estee Lauder Companies to form the Anastacia Fund at the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, she will be the spokeswoman for the cable network Lifetime's annual Stop Breast Cancer for Life awareness campaign, reports Billboard. "I established the Anastacia Fund because I believe that women need to have choices when it comes to managing their health," she said.

She's not stopping there. Anastacia will also join Mandy Moore, Celine Dion, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Mya, Dolly Parton, and Kenny Loggins at the fourth annual Women Rock! benefit for breast cancer research on September 30 at Hollywood's Kodak Theater. The show will be broadcast on October 23 on the Lifetime cable channel.

When Anastacia was diagnosed with breast cancer last January, she told her fans she planned to fight it, issuing this bold statement to the media, "I appreciate all who are concerned, but please don't worry. Either way I have no intention of letting this news get me down. I'm a fighter by nature and nothing will ever change that." Anastacia also has Crohn's disease, which is a chronic disorder of the gastro-intestinal tract. She is best known for her debut album, "Not That Kind," which became an international hit. The single "I'm Outta Love" became a dance hit in the United States. Anastacia's second album, "Freak of Nature," was released in June 2002. She also appears on the soundtrack to the big-screen musical "Chicago," singing "Love is a Crime."

[Jolie Rouge]

Worst Snacks You Can Give Your Kids

The food police (a.k.a. The Center for Science in the Public Interest) are at it again. They're the folks who forever ruined for us movie theater popcorn and ice cream parlor treats. Now they've targeted specific brands of snack foods by name that you should never ever let your kids eat.


The bad stuff:

Chips Ahoy! cookies

Oreo cookies

Pepsi and Coca-Cola

Artificial fruit juices

Hostess snack cakes

Keebler Club & Cheddar Sandwich Crackers

Kit Kat Big Kat

Snickers

Starburst Fruit Chews

Chocolate-flavored whole milk


The good stuff:

Unsweetened applesauce

Fruit cups

Nestle Nesquik fat-free chocolate milk

Lowfat and fat-free milk

Bottled water

100 percent orange juice

Traditional Chex Mix

Nature Valley crunchy granola bars

Raisins

A spokeswoman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America countered by saying there's room in everyone's diet for all foods, including sweets. "There are no good foods and bad foods," Stephanie Childs told The Associated Press.

[Jolie Rouge]

Pastor Arrested; Had Girl in Trunk

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030917%2F165320081.htm&sc=1110

BELLINGHAM, Wash. (AP) - An Illinois youth pastor faces sex and pornography charges after customs agents found a 16-year-old girl in the trunk of his car as he tried to cross into Canada.

Michael Quillman of Thompsonville, Ill., was arrested at a border crossing over the weekend and charged Tuesday.

Police found videotapes showing the man and girl engaged in sex acts, said prosecutor Royce Buckingham. The girl told police they were headed for Alaska through Canada and had a dating relationship, said John Brand, interim deputy police chief in Blaine.

Quillman, 30, was charged with sexual misconduct and possession of child pornography. He was in jail Wednesday in lieu of bail and was scheduled for a court appearance Friday.


The girl was turned over to state Child Protective Services workers.



09/17/03 16:52

[Jolie Rouge]

'Will & Grace': WHO Is Will's Boyfriend?

Dylan McDermott, newly fired from "The Practice," will become the new love interest for Will Truman, who is played by actor Eric McCormack, on NBC's hit sitcom "Will & Grace," reports TV Guide. Look for McDermott's first appearance on October 30.


Now the big question: Will he get to stay? No word from the show's producers if this is a guest star arc or a permanent role for McDermott. Even McDermott says the final decision hasn't yet been made because the idea of a fulltime lover for Will scares people. He told TV Guide, "It scares middle America. So we have to be careful. And I think to do it with the right person--somebody they already know, an actor they're already comfortable with--might help. This is maybe one that makes them comfortable." If the lead character of "Will & Grace" is known for anything, it's his failed love life. But that's exactly why he and the show are a non-threat to mainstream viewers.

When PEOPLE magazine asked McCormack about the possibility of a wedding for Will, he quipped, "Does Will get married? Yes, that's our big sweeps episode. He will marry Verne Troyer (Mini Me from 'Austin Powers'). Seriously, there should be some action coming up for Will."

[Jolie Rouge]

244 Dogs Rescued From House in London


LONDON (AP) - A British animal protection group said Thursday it had rescued 244 dogs, 16 parrots, seven cats, a rabbit and a chinchilla from a three-bedroom house in what it described as the biggest seizure in its 181-year history.

The animals were removed from the house in Carnforth, Lancashire, in northern England on Sept. 10, said Sari Eldridge, a spokeswoman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

She refused to go into further details on Thursday, saying the rescue was subject to an investigation that could result in legal action.

British media quoted locals as saying the house was owned by a middle-aged couple and was filthy.


The rescued dogs included Shih Tzus, Dachshunds, Lhasa Apsos, Bearded Collies, Corgis, Chihuahuas, Poodles, Pekinese and Yorkshire Terriers. The birds included Macaws, Amazonian parrots and African Grays.



09/18/03 12:55



http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1103&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030918%2F125658772.htm&sc=1103

[Jolie Rouge]

Fossil Shows Rodent Was Size of Buffalo
By PAUL RECER


http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1501&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030918%2F144863471.htm&sc=1501&photoid=20030912NYET159


WASHINGTON (AP) - A rodent the size of a buffalo? Researchers say they have found fossils for a 1,545-pound giant that thrived millions of years ago in a swampy South American forest.

``Imagine a weird guinea pig, but huge, with a long tail for balancing on its hind legs and continuously growing teeth,'' said Marcelo R. Sanchez-Villagra of the University of Tubingen in Germany, the first author of a study appearing this week in Science.

The formal name of the rodent is Phoberomys pattersoni. The last term is in honor of Brian Patterson, a Harvard professor who led a fossil-collection expedition to Venezuela in the 1970s. Informally, the skeleton is called Goya.

Researchers found the fossils in a semidesert area of Venezuela, about 250 miles west of Caracas.


When Goya lived there, some 6 million to 8 million years ago, the area was a lush paradise for a large plant eater.


``At the time it was forested and swampy with a big river and a lot of vegetation,'' said Sanchez-Villagra.


The giant rodent grazed on grasses, which he must have eaten in large amounts to support his great size. Goya had fur, a smooth head with small ears and eyes, and a large tail that enabled it to balance on two hind legs to watch for predators, said Sanchez-Villagra.


And there were a lot predators to worry about, he said.


``We know that there were crocodiles in the same location where we found this animal,'' said Sanchez-Villagra. ``They were some of the largest crocs ever - more than 10 meters (33 feet) long.''


Goya also had to worry about a large carnivore called the marsupial cat, and huge flesh-eating birds called phorracoids, he said.


Phoberomys pattersoni lived during a time when South America was isolated from the rest of the world. The isthmus of Panama had not linked the two Americas, and the southern animals evolved independently of those on the other continents.


That changed about 3 million years ago. The shifting land masses became joined at what is now Panama and animals from the two Americas began to mix. That may have spelled the demise of Goya, although it remains a mystery exactly why the animal went extinct, Sanchez-Villagra said.


``Many animals from North America made it to South America and many from the south went north,'' he said. ``When that happened, many of the animals from South America became extinct because of competition.''


In an analysis of the Sanchez-Villagra study, R. McNeill Alexander of the University of Leeds, England, wrote in Science that the large rodent may have died out because it simply couldn't escape predators.


Alexander said most rodents are small enough to hide in the ground when threatened, but Phoberomys pattersoni was too large to burrow. As do most large animals, it would have to depend on running to escape a predator. Alexander said that suggests this question: ``Would large rodents generally be too slow to be successful?''


Sanchez-Villagra said Goya's skeleton, particularly the leg bones, suggests that it walked differently from most modern rodents, such as its close cousin the guinea pig. Mice, rats and guinea pigs scamper along in a crouched position, with legs bent at the knee and elbow.


Because of Goya's mass, however, it had to stand straight, more like a sheep than a mouse.


As a result, Alexander wrote in Science, ``Seen from a distance, it would have looked much more like a buffalo than like a scaled-up guinea pig.''


An analysis of Goya's teeth show they were ideally adapted for eating grasses. Sanchez-Villagra said chewing tough grasses can eventually wear out the teeth. But in Goya, the teeth were constantly growing so they remained at the length needed to grind up grass.


Sanchez-Villagra said the closest living relative to Phoberomys pattersoni is probably the pacarana, a slow-moving rodent that can grow to 33 pounds and lives in the tropical forest of the western Amazon River basin. It is considered rare.


The largest living rodent is another South American animal, the capybara, which can weigh up to 110 pounds. The most common rodents are mice, which weigh one to two ounces, and rats, which can weigh up to 10 ounces or more. The rodent clan also includes squirrels, beavers and prairie dogs.




On the Net:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org



09/18/03 14:48

[Jolie Rouge]

Woman Says She Found Tooth in Can of Soup

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1120&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030918%2F143062725.htm&sc=1120

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A woman who says she found a human tooth in a can of Campbell's soup has filed a lawsuit against the company.

Tina Keeney, of West Jordan, had just heated up a can of chicken noodle soup and given some of it to her 13-month-old son.

While she was cleaning up, she noticed the boy had a hard, white object in his hand.

``It's gross enough as it is to find something in your food anyway, but to have it be a human tooth that was in someone else's mouth is just sickening,'' Keeney said.


She called Campbell Soup Co. headquarters in Camden, New Jersey to complain. Keeney said the person she spoke to was polite, if a little skeptical, asking if the object could actually be a chicken bone.


``I said, 'I'm not a dentist, but it looks like a molar to me,' `` she said.


Campbell Soup Co. offered to cover the cost of the soup - plus a little extra. They also wanted her to mail in the tooth.


Keeney went to a lawyer instead.


Since that July afternoon last year, attorney Daniel Irvin has had the object tested by a pathologist, who confirmed it is indeed a human molar, likely from a 13-year-old mouth. The expert noted the tooth, actually half a tooth, appeared to have been cut in some kind of manufacturing process, Irvin said.


Additional tests ruled out that the tooth belonged to anyone in the Keeney family, including her older daughters.


Irvin said he has spoken numerous times to officials at Campbell Soup Co. about settling the matter. They were unable to reach an agreement, and Irvin this week filed a civil lawsuit against the company in Utah's 3rd District Court.


The suit asks for unspecified damages on behalf of Keeney and her son.


``Here's a woman who can't eat soup, her family can't eat soup. And to be honest with you, I haven't eaten soup since this happened,'' Irvin said.


A message left for a company spokesman was not immediately returned on Thursday.



09/18/03 14:30

[Jolie Rouge]

Galileo Probe to Collide with Jupiter


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After eight years orbiting Jupiter, NASA's Galileo space probe will end its long mission Sunday by plunging through the Jovian cloud tops and smashing into the giant planet -- collecting data as it goes.

Low on propellant and six years past its original end date, Galileo has set a collision course with Jupiter to eliminate any unwanted crash into the Jovian moon Europa, officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement.

The spacecraft is so low on fuel it will not be able to point its antenna toward Earth or adjust its trajectory, but scientists believe it will be able to send back a few hours of information on its last descent.

"It has been a fabulous mission for planetary science, and it is hard to see it come to an end," Galileo project manager Claudia Alexander said. "... We're keeping our fingers crossed that, even in its final hour, Galileo will still give us new information about Jupiter's environment."


The Galileo team will gather at the laboratory's Pasadena, California, headquarters Sunday to bid the little craft farewell, scientist Rosaly Lopes said by telephone.

09/19/03 13:31

[Jolie Rouge]

Crocodile Sightings Baffle the Experts


SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A rare sighting of four crocodiles in densely-populated Singapore, including one near a commercial bank, since early August has baffled wildlife experts who say they may have swam from neighboring Malaysia.

"It's very unusual. We're not sure where they came from," said Lye Fong Keng, head of the Wildlife Regulatory Branch at the Singapore government's Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority.

They may have been kept illegally as pets and escaped, or swam a narrow causeway from Malaysia's southern state of Johor or crawled from Singapore's tropical mangrove swamps where they are known to live but are rarely seen, she said.

"It's a bit of a mystery. They are able to float across the ocean for long distances, so they may have come from southern Malaysia," she added.


One was found behind a block of flats, another was caught near the Standard Chartered Bank building; one was lounging in a public park and another was found near a canal. All were turned over to the Singapore Zoo.



09/18/03 09:04

[Jolie Rouge]

USOC Nixes 'Rat Olympics' in Nebraska


LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - For 29 years, furry white athletes competed in the Rat Olympics: the long jump, rope climb, tightrope walk, five-yard hurdles and weightlifting.

Now, the U.S. Olympic Committee says the name for Nebraska Wesleyan University's annual behavioral learning rat competition must be changed because it infringes on its name, which is protected by federal law. The few authorized exceptions include the Special Olympics.

So the United Methodist-affiliated school is holding a competition to change the name of the rat runoff.

``While we're disappointed about changing the name, we hope others will enjoy the opportunity to participate in this tongue-in-cheek competition,'' Wesleyan spokeswoman Sara Olson said.


The deadline for offering names and rating submissions is Oct. 31.


The new name will be announced Dec. 4, the same day that Gidget, Sniffles, Arwen, Frances E. Garfunkle and the rest of this year's rats compete for grub and glory.


And the prize for the winning entry on the name?


``We haven't established the grand prize yet,'' Olson said. ``It's not going to be a free T-shirt. It'll be something bigger.''



09/19/03 07:53

[Jolie Rouge]

Galileo Ends 14-Year Mission in Jupiter
By ANDREW BRIDGES

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - NASA's aging Galileo spacecraft concluded its 14-year, $1.5 billion exploration of Jupiter and its moons on Sunday with a streaking suicide plunge into the planet's turbulent atmosphere.

The spacecraft passed into the shadow of the solar system's largest planet and several minutes later entered its atmosphere at 2:57 p.m. EDT. The unmanned spacecraft, traveling at nearly 108,000 mph, was torn apart and vaporized by the heat and friction of its fall through the clouds.

The last word from the spacecraft, including some final scientific measurements, was to arrive on earth 52 minutes later, after crossing half a billion miles of space.

Hundreds of scientists, engineers and their families at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory counted down the last seconds before the spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere.


``We haven't lost a spacecraft, we've gained a new stepping stone in exploration,'' said Torrence Johnson, the mission's project scientist.


Rosaly Lopes, another scientist on the mission, called Galileo's plunge ``a spectacular end to a spectacular mission.''


``Personally, I am a little sad. I had the time of my life on Galileo and I'm a little sad to say goodbye to an old friend,'' Lopes added.


Despite the glitches that plagued Galileo since its 1989 launch aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, it was one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's most fruitful missions.


During its thrice-extended mission, Galileo discovered the first moon of an asteroid, witnessed the impact of a comet into Jupiter and provided firm evidence of salty oceans on three of the planet's moons. It returned more than 14,000 images.


``It had more surprises, better stuff waiting to be discovered than we ever could have imagined. Jupiter and its moons came through,'' said Andy Ingersol, a Jupiter scientist at the California Institute of Technology.


NASA opted to crash the 3,000-pound spacecraft into Jupiter to eliminate the possibility it could smack into Europa, one of Jupiter's watery moons, and contaminate it with any microbes on board.


Galileo had nearly depleted the onboard store of fuel that NASA used to steer it during its 35 orbits of Jupiter.


Galileo is the first planetary spacecraft NASA has intentionally destroyed since it steered the Lunar Prospector into the earth's moon in 1999.


It is not the first to dive into Jupiter: A probe released by the spacecraft did so in 1995, collecting data about the planet's atmosphere for about an hour before it was destroyed.


NASA intends to return to Jupiter in a decade with another unmanned spacecraft called the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter.


On the Net: www.jpl.nasa.gov



09/21/03 16:39

[Jolie Rouge]

Cool! THIS Counts as Exercise?

Sweeping. Tossing a Frisbee. Waiting tables. Playing with the kids. Raking the lawn. Playing in a marching band. Making photocopies. All of these activities that fill a typical American day now officially count as exercise. Who says so? None other than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.

But here's the pathetic news:

Even when such commonplace activities as sweeping the floor and playing with the kids are counted as exercise, fully 55 percent of American adults still do not get the recommended minimum amount, which is 30 minutes a day, four times a week.


The CDC decided to count everyday activities as fitness activities because it was believed that only counting intense exercise--jogging, lifting weights, swimming--was not an accurate measure. Under the old measurement, 74 percent of adults didn't get enough exercise. When we count tossing that Frisbee or sweeping the crumbs off the kitchen floor, the number drops to 55 percent who don't exercise enough. But still! That's more than half of us. The problem isn't with the measurement. The problem is with us. We love to sit on our couches. "It's surprising," Harold Kohl of the CDC admitted AP. "There's still more than one out of two Americans who are not active at a level we think promotes health. From an overall health standpoint, we've really got to move the needle substantially from where it is right now." The CDC determined that 26 percent of adults do no significant exercise--ever. Kentucky has the lowest percentage of people who exercise 30 minutes a day, four times a week, while Wyoming has the most.



These activities count as moderate exercise:

Walking at a brisk pace

Ballroom dancing

Playing in a marching band

Shoveling snow

Scrubbing floors

Washing windows

Vacuuming

Tossing a Frisbee

Playing with the kids

Raking the lawn

Waiting tables



These activities count as light exercise:

Making photocopies

Playing video games

**Coloring**

Sitting in a whirlpool bath

Floating

Purposeless wandering

Shooting a pistol

Yachting

Fishing while seated

Light office work

[the fugative]

Chuck Shepherd: News of The Weird




Tensions are brewing in the family of Zell Kravinsky, 48, and his psychiatrist-wife, Emily, over what she says is his excessive altruism, according to an August profile in the New York Times. Kravinsky is not just a passionate philanthropist (from his fortune in commercial real estate), but such a strict utilitarian that he says he would sacrifice his one good kidney (he's already donated the other one) if it were needed by someone doing more social good than he. "No one should have two kidneys," he says, "until everyone has one." He said he cannot value his own kids more than anyone else's, a point that has angered his parents and caused Emily to threaten divorce and two friends to abandon him.

• A 31-year-old Philadelphia government employee's surgery is just a radical example of how determined some women are to wear excruciatingly painful, but fashionable, shoes, according to an August Wall Street Journal report. For about $10,000, the woman had one toe shortened and another straightened so that now she can wear today's ever-pointier, open-toed pumps. Among podiatrists' other remedies: narrowing of the nails; collagen injections to pad the soles of the feet; and a $225 "foot facial" scrub. But when a woman in Moline, Ill., told her more traditional podiatrist that she needed corrective toe surgery, the doctor said, "No, you need different shoes."

• The New York Times reported that activists working to encourage organ donations deplored the recent shortage of superior young organs for transplant, in large part because murder and traffic fatality rates have come down (August). Texas public schools raided the budget to buy state flags for every classroom in order to comply with this month's inauguration of required student pledges of allegiance to Texas (August). And one of the apparently most pressing needs in Varallo, Italy, was addressed when the city council began subsidizing half the cost of Viagra for its residents (August).

Oops!

• Broward County, which was one of the "ground zeros" during Florida's 2000 presidential vote-counting problems, mistakenly failed 6,559 public middle-school students in June because of what it later called a computer error.

• Michael Grumbine flew a motorized glider over La Serna High School in Whittier, Calif., in May to drop antiabortion leaflets to students. But he accidentally stuck his hand into the propeller's blades, severing two fingers and sending the craft into a fall, where it crash-landed, injuring Grumbine.

• Authorities in Phoenix decided to hold the city's loudest July 4th fireworks show this year adjacent to the complex that houses a Veterans Administration medical center and the state's military retirement home, even though some residents of the facilities still suffer battlefield-acquired post-traumatic stress disorders. (The facilities reported no adverse incidents.)

• Sewage-treatment officials in Pittsburgh, wanting to lure crowds to a June showing of their new facilities, thought the best way to attract people was to offer them a picnic of free hamburgers and hot dogs to accompany the demonstration of state-of-the-art raw sewage disposal. (About 300 people attended.)

• In March, the double life of wealthy Tampa construction magnate Douglas Cone, 74, began to surface when, after the death of his socialite wife, Jean Ann (with whom he lived Thursdays through Sundays and had three kids), he quickly married his socialite paramour Hillary Carlson (with whom he lived in a second mansion 20 miles away as Donald Carlson, Mondays through Wednesdays, and had two kids). Cone's money (donated in both his names, though "Mr. Carlson" never appeared in public) and the women's tireless community service made the "four" of them prominent figures in Tampa. (The consensus among families' members is that Hillary knew; Jean Ann might not have; and friends and associates did not.)

Least competent criminals

• An inmate tried to escape in August from the parking garage of a jail in St. Charles County, Mo., by dashing through a fire exit door; he seemed unaware that immediately beyond the door was a brick wall, and after the collision, he was taken to a hospital with head injuries. And in Tampa, Fla., in August, one man was arrested and several others sought in a labor-intensive burglary of a Sports Authority store; police estimate that the crew spent a week digging an elaborate 40-foot tunnel beneath the store, and once they finally surfaced inside, they apparently got only about $3,500 in clothing before an early-arriving employee called police.

Update

• Tony Martin is one of Britain's most prominent criminals, sentenced to six years in prison for defending his property by shooting one burglar to death and wounding another. He was turned down for early parole in 2002, and also for a trial home visit in July, on the official ground that he continued to pose a threat to burglars. However, he was granted parole by statute in August and now must prepare to defend against a lawsuit by the surviving, limping burglar, Brendon Fearon, who claims the gunshot permanently disabled him. In August, London's Sun newspaper surreptitiously videotaped Fearon walking without a limp and effortlessly bicycling and climbing stairs.

• And in the past month: A judge in North Platte, Neb., willingly accepted the defense of a 45-year-old inmate on work-release that the reason he had alcohol on his breath was that he had eaten a homemade burrito whose ingredients had been dipped in beer. And Jeremy Bamber, convicted years ago of killing five family members, sued four surviving relatives for conspiring to deprive him of "his share" of the family estate (Wix, Essex, England). And the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board turned down the petition for asylum by a Venezuelan woman, who claimed she needed to stay in Canada because back home, she would be persecuted for being too fat.
:p

[Jolie Rouge]

Part of the Old Testament Proven True

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/package.jsp?name=fte/biblicaltunnel/biblicaltunnel

Read 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:30 in the Old Testament and you'll find a reference to a tunnel that was built in 700 B.C. by order of King Hezekiah to protect Jerusalem's water supply against an Assyrian siege. Long considered an engineering feat for that day and age, the serpentine tunnel ran 1,750 feet long and moved water from the Gihon spring across the entire city of ancient Jerusalem to the pool of Siloam.

Fast forward to modern-day Jerusalem. The Siloam Tunnel in that city matches the biblical description of King Hezekiah's tunnel. But is it really the same one? That question has stumped scholars for years, many of whom insisted the Siloam Tunnel was built centuries later than the Bible suggested in Kings and Chronicles. The only clue that survived for more than 2,700 years is an inscription discovered in 1880 on a tunnel wall that supported the link to King Hezekiah, although it did not name him specifically, reports The Associated Press.

Now geologists from the Cave Research Center at Hebrew University in Jerusalem think they have solved the mystery. By using radiocarbon testing to analyze the age of stalactite samples from the ceiling of the Siloam Tunnel and plant material recovered from its plaster floor, the biblical record and the tunnel's age have been confirmed, the researchers wrote in the journal Nature. The Siloam Tunnel is the one built by King Hezekiah.

This is also significant because it is the first time that a well-identified biblical structure has been subjected to extensive radiocarbon dating.

Even with all our modern-day technology and scientific knowledge, very little testing of biblical structures has been done to prove or disprove their age or authenticity. Why? The experts told AP such testing is difficult because it's often hard to identify such structures, they may be poorly preserved, or they may be restricted for various political or religious reasons.

The Siloam Tunnel is different. It's long been a tourist attraction. Anyone can wander in it and see the pick marks the original builders made in the walls to adjust their course so the tunnel would meet with a second team of workers who were heading toward them from the opposite end of the city. AP notes that those pick marks tell us how difficult it was to connect the two ends of the tunnel. "The tunnel is extraordinary, but these guys didn't know where they were going a lot of the time," Hershel Shanks, an expert on the history of Jerusalem who writes for the Biblical Archaeology Review, told AP. Still, he added, "It's nice to have scientific confirmation for what the vast majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists believe."

[Jolie Rouge]

5 Young ATV Riders Die in Ga. Collision


DOUGLAS, Ga. (AP) - A car collided head-on with an all-terrain vehicle on a rural road, killing five children on the ATV and critically injuring a sixth, officials said.

Charges were pending Monday against the car's driver, Amanda Michelle Troupe, 29, said Gordy Wright, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Public Safety.

The children were on the ATV when the Lincoln sedan crossed the centerline and hit the four-wheeler, said Joann Lacey, a radio operator in the Douglas state patrol post.

Wright said the state patrol's Specialized Collision Reconstruction team would investigate and present evidence, including the results of a blood test on Troupe, to the district attorney.


One of the children killed, 14-year-old Coranne Megan Nelson, was driving the off-road vehicle, which is not permitted on a public street, without a driver's license.


The other victims were Dustin Varnedore, 11, and his 13-year-old sister, Kayla, of Wray; Lindsay Joiner, 13, of Douglas and Courtney Arsenault, 10, of Alma.


Heather Bass, 13, of Ambrose, was flown by helicopter to Memorial Medical Center in Savannah, where she was listed Monday in critical condition.


Coffee County Sheriff Rob Smith had to hold back tears when he talked with reporters about the accident in south-central Georgia.


``These young people were just beginning their life and some of them are my neighbors,'' he said.


The accident happened after 9 p.m. on Smith Cemetery Road, which separates Coffee and Irwin counties, about 10 miles northwest of Douglas, officials said.


Donna Reynolds, a farm safety specialist with the Georgia Farm Bureau, said she often sees children and adults riding ATVs on roads.
``People are riding ATVs everywhere and people look at them as a toy,'' she said. ``They are not toys. Period.''



09/22/03 13:11

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?oldflok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030922%2F131116173.htm&sc=1110&floc=NW_5-L1
---JMHO - but the driver is not entirely at fault ( although if the bllod tests positive for substances they should throw the book at her ) Why ? ATV's are not supposed to be driven on roads. They are not designed to be riden by SIX kids ( ages 10 - 14 ) at one time. And I am willing to bet, not one of them had on a helmet. How mant of the deaths will be attributed to head trauma ? Seems like there will be enough blame to go around on this one .... Tragic all the way around.

[Jolie Rouge]

Report: Giant Arctic ice shelf breaks up
Monday, September 22, 2003 Posted: 4:04 PM EDT (2004 GMT)


WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The largest ice shelf in the Arctic, a solid feature for 3,000 years, has broken up, scientists in the United States and Canada said on Monday.

They said the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea, the researchers reported.

Large ice islands also calved off from the shelf and some are large enough to be dangerous to shipping and to drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea.

Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said -- adding that they did not have the evidence needed to link the melting ice to the steady, planet-wide climate change known as global warming.

Warwick Vincent and Derek Mueller of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, and Martin Jeffries of the University of Alaska Fairbanks lived at the site, flew over it and used radar satellite imaging for their study.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Vincent's team said all of the fresh water poured out of the 20 mile (30 km) long Disraeli Fjord.

This in turn has affected communities of freshwater and marine species of plankton and algae, said Mueller, a graduate student who has studied the tiny creatures.


Only 100 years ago the whole northern coast of Ellesmere Island, which is the northernmost land mass of North America, was edged by a continuous ice shelf. About 90 percent of it is now gone, Vincent's team wrote.

The area has been getting warmer, they said. A similar trend in the Antarctic has caused the break-up of huge ice shelves there.

"There's a regional trend in warming that cycles back 150 years," Mueller said in a telephone interview. "I am not comfortable linking it to global warming. It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming."

Records indicate an increase of four-tenths of a degree centigrade every 10 years since 1967. The average July temperature has been 1.3 degrees Celsius or 34 degrees F -- just above the freezing point -- since 1967.

Climate change has affected ocean temperature, salinity and flow patterns, which also influence the break-up of ice shelves in the Antarctic. "It's not just as simple as it gets x degrees warmer and the ice melts this much," Mueller said.

Warmer temperatures weaken the ice, leaving it vulnerable to changed currents and other forces.


www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/09/22/arctic.ice.reut/index.html

[Jolie Rouge]

Satellite for sale is lost in space
Tuesday, September 23, 2003 Posted: 9:45 AM EDT

www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/09/23/satellite.loss.ap/index.html


NEW YORK (AP) -- After failing to re-establish contact with an orbiting telecommunications satellite over the weekend, Loral Space & Communications declared it a total loss this week.

Telstar 4, which was insured for $141 million, was one of six satellites -- three currently in orbit and two under construction -- that privately held Intelsat had agreed to acquire for up to $1.1 billion.

New York-based Loral lost contact with the satellite Friday morning when a short circuit disrupted operations.

Despite the failure, Intelsat and Loral still expect the acquisition to occur on schedule, but the incident could reduce the purchase price by $141 million -- the insured amount.

Susan Gordon, a spokeswoman for Intelsat, said that the purchase price could be reduced by any insurance payment minus any service reduction payments that Loral might make to customers.

The final purchase price could be further reduced if Loral fails to meet certain goals.

Loral filed for bankruptcy on July 15 as part of its deal to sell its assets to Intelsat, listing $2.65 billion in assets and $3.06 billion in debt. Though Intelsat is the lead bidder, the bankruptcy court is accepting bids for Loral's assets until October 15. An auction is scheduled for October 20.

Telstar 4, which covered all 50 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands and southern Canada, was launched in 1995 and was scheduled to be to be replaced by Telstar 8 in mid-2004. "Nearly all" customers using Telstar 4 have been shifted to neighboring Telstar 5, 6 and 7 satellites, Loral said.

Like many other out-of-service satellites, Telstar 4, which orbits at 22,000 miles (35,400 kilometers) above Earth, will now be left to drift in space.

Companies are usually required to leave just enough fuel in their satellites allowing them to rocket into deep space at the end of service. But given that Loral has not been able to re-establish contact with its satellite, that is probably not an option.


{{{ I guess our favorite M*I*B has been hard at work, eh ? }}}

[Jolie Rouge]

Bizarre Medical Benefit of Tai Chi

Do your tai chi exercises regularly and you may ward off the excruciatingly painful disease shingles, Reuters reports of new research from the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California Los Angeles. If you've ever had chickenpox, then you can get shingles as the herpes virus that causes chickenpox, called varicella, lingers in the body and can infect nerve cells. Shingles causes painful blisters on the skin. In some cases, the pain can linger for years.


The study: The UCLA researchers, led by Dr. Michael Irwin, conducted tests on 36 older men and women who all had chickenpox when they were younger but never contracted shingles. Half the group took tai chi chih courses for 45 minutes, three days a week for 15 weeks. The others did nothing extra. At the end of the study, the researchers tested their immune systems and general physical condition. Tai chi chih is a westernized version of the ancient Chinese practice of tai chi chuan that involves slow and precise movements with coordinated breathing.



The results: The combination of relaxation and movement used in tai chi increases immunity by up to 50 percent to the virus that causes shingles. It's when immunity to the virus wanes--something that is common as we grow older--that shingles can be triggered. It's important to note that tai chi boosts the immunity to shingles, but it's not yet known if practitioners of this exercise are less likely to ever develop the disease. Tai chi may just delay its onset.

Still, Irwin is excited about the study conclusions. "Our findings offer a unique and exciting example of mind over matter," Irwin told Reuters. "A large body of research shows how behavior can negatively affect the immune system and health, but ours is the first randomized, controlled study to demonstrate that behavior can have a positive effect on immunity that protects against shingles."

The study was published in the September edition of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

[Jolie Rouge]

Big Plot Change In Store For 'West Wing'

Hot on the heels of its fourth Emmy award for best drama, the executive producer of "The West Wing" has let slip a major plot change: The show is going bipartisan. For starters, the famously liberal President Josiah Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, is out of the Oval Office after he temporarily relinquished power in the midst of an international crisis involving his kidnapped daughter. Sitting behind the world's most powerful desk is the Republican Speaker of the House, played by John Goodman. But Reuters reports that executive producer John Wells says Sheen will get his job back--before too long.


This is just one way "The West Wing" will become more politically balanced this season. "You will see the new speaker of the House, the majority leadership (in Congress), which is Republican, and those views much more represented on the show, and the conflicts between them in trying to get fiscal and international policy done," Wells told Reuters. He plans to use the show, which critics contend hasn't been as creative or interesting as it once was, to explore economic and security issues that divide Washington and the nation in real life. "We want to have conversations about international intervention, not to take pot shots in any way at what the Bush administration's been doing, but to just discuss how complex the issues are and how there aren't easy choices," he explained to Reuters.


To make sure the Republican point of view is fairly represented, the producers have hired right wing political consultants, including former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein and John Podhoretz, a conservative columnist who wrote speeches for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior. Clinton White House aides Dee Dee Myers and Gene Sperling, who have long been a part of the behind-the-scenes work on "The West Wing" will remain.

[Jolie Rouge]

All members of NASA safety panel resign
Tuesday, September 23, 2003 Posted: 5:26 PM EDT

www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/09/23/nasa.resignations.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nine experts on a NASA space safety advisory panel have resigned in the wake of sharp criticism from the Columbia accident investigation board and by Congress, the space agency said Tuesday.

The members of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel and two staff members of the panel sent letters of resignation to Sean O'Keefe, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Glen Mahone, a NASA spokesman, said the ASAP chairman, Shirley McCarty, said in a cover letter to O'Keefe that the resignations "will give you and the Congress the freedom to revitalize the panel and reshape its charter and mission."

Mahone said the resignations were accepted and NASA is now in the process of evaluating the structure of the safety panel.

The ASAP was established after the 1967 Apollo 1 fire, which took the lives of three astronauts. That was the first major accident in the U.S. space program. Members include space engineers, scientists, former aerospace industry executives and military officers.



In the wake of the Columbia accident, which killed seven astronauts on February 1, the safety panel was criticized by members of Congress as being ineffective.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board said in its report that the ASAP lacked influence. Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee said the ASAP failed to spot potential danger signs in the operation of the space shuttle and that NASA should reconstitute the panel.

[Jolie Rouge]

www.cnn.com/2003/US/09/23/airforce.detainee/index.html

Airman charged with espionage at Guantanamo
Possible link to detained Muslim chaplain sought
From Barbara Starr CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, September 23, 2003 Posted: 5:08 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An Air Force enlisted man who was a translator at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been charged with espionage and aiding the enemy, Pentagon officials told CNN on Tuesday.

Officials said Senior Airman Ahmad al Halabi was arrested July 23 because he allegedly had classified information about suspected al Qaeda detainees and facilities at the Guantanamo Bay base on his laptop computer.

He is being held at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Al Halabi was charged with 11 counts of failing to obey a lawful general order or regulation, three counts of aiding the enemy, four counts of espionage, nine counts of making a false statement and five counts that include violations of the Federal Espionage Act.

He is also being charged with a single count of bank fraud.

Al Halabi's home base was Travis Air Force Base in California, but he had served nine months at Guantanamo Bay as a translator between the detainees and investigators.

His arrest occurred about six weeks before Army Islamic chaplain Capt. James Yee was taken into custody on similar suspicions.

Officials said that when Al Halabi was questioned he had no reasonable explanation for possessing the classified material.

The investigation now centers on whether there was a connection between the two detained men. Officials said they have no proof of a connection.

Officials also told CNN that additional arrests of other members of the U.S. military are possible shortly.

Yee, who has not been charged, is being held in the brig in Charleston, South Carolina, on suspicion of espionage and treason.

Military authorities took him into custody September 10 at the naval air station in Jacksonville, Florida, while he was in possession of classified documents "that a chaplain shouldn't have," said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official said the documents included "diagrams of the cells and the facilities at Guantanamo," where the military is holding about 600 suspected al Qaeda members and others termed enemy combatants.

Yee also allegedly was carrying lists of the detainees as well as their interrogators, the official said.

In addition, Yee is suspected of having ties to radical Muslims in the United States who are under investigation, the official said, adding that he couldn't elaborate.

He appeared September 15 before a military magistrate, who ruled there was sufficient reason to hold him in pretrial confinement.

Army officials with the U.S. Southern Command, which controls the Guantanamo Bay facility, said that they could not comment on the status of the investigation.

The U.S. military began sending suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members detained in Afghanistan to the Guantanamo Bay base in January 2002. A number have since been released after interrogation cleared them, and several have arrived from other locations.

The naval base at Guantanamo Bay on the southwest coast, called "Gitmo" by sailors, was established by treaty with Cuba in 1903, following the Spanish-American War in 1898 that liberated the country from Spain.

[Jolie Rouge]

Woman Bites Two Librarians in Robbery


CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - A woman bit two librarians after they tried to stop her from stealing about $70 from the public library's cash drawer.

One of the librarians, Debbie Barry, said that a man tried to distract her Saturday while a woman grabbed the money and fled.

Barry and fellow librarian Christina Crouch chased the woman outside and wrestled with her while library patrons called police. The woman bit Crouch on the chest and Barry's thumb before the man pulled her free and they ran off. ``When I grabbed her it was kind of stupid,'' Barry told the Journal Review newspaper. ``What I should have done was yanked her hair and sat on her, but I didn't think of it at the time.''


Anna M. Davis, 24, and her live-in boyfriend, Kevin T. Kamradt, 25, were caught a few minutes later, police Officer Bob Rivers said. An officer at the Montgomery County Jail reported finding $71 in Davis' underwear. Davis and Kamradt were both jailed Monday on robbery and battery charges, a jail officer said.


Crouch and Barry were treated for their injuries and returned to work Monday.


Larry Hathaway, director of the Crawfordsville District Public Library, said the library's cash drawer had been moved from a desk in the main foyer after three thefts in recent months. ``I tell the librarians not to try to argue with robbers,'' Hathaway said.


Barry said the weekend robbery was the first time she had seen anyone stealing money from the library in the city about 40 miles west of Indianapolis. ``If she'd have just dropped the money I would have been happy,'' Barry said. ``But she wouldn't do it, and that made me mad because it's happened before and we're tired of it.''



09/23/03 08:43

[Jolie Rouge]

Are Ben & Jen Really Together Again?

The latest in the soap opera that is Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez: They've been spotted holding hands walking into the Liberty County, Georgia courthouse with Affleck's brother Casey in tow, reports CNN, The Associated Press, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and other serious news outlets that love to watch the antics of this hot on-again, off-again couple. And why was Casey Affleck with them? After all, he was supposed to be a groomsman in his brother's wedding that wasn't.



The big question: What were they doing in the courthouse?

AP: "Affleck wanted to know where he could apply for a gun permit," said Liberty County Sheriff Don Martin. (Just so you know, court officials denied this report to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

CNN: "Whether Lopez and Affleck were applying for a marriage or a gun license or simply completing some other paperwork was unknown despite rumors about the first two possibilities."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "There was some business conducted, but I am not at liberty to say what it was. "What they were doing was their business," said Gretta Logan, senior deputy clerk of the probate court.


The media are all in a tizzy because Ben and Jen were supposed to get married on September 12 and they had their reporters and photographers in place at the "secret" wedding site in Santa Barbara only to have the wedding called off. Then Jen went to Miami, while Ben hightailed it to Vegas...or was it Georgia? It's hard to keep up with these two. So are they back together? No one knows for sure, but Brooke Moran, a deputy registrar at the courthouse, did offer this opinion to the Journal-Constitution: They "looked totally together, smiling and happy."

[Jolie Rouge]

[b]Men Control This In 56% of Households

When it comes to the television remote control, men control it in 56 percent of American households, compared to only 35 percent of households where women get to push the buttons, reports Wireless Flash of a new survey conducted by DirecTV.


When it comes to our TV habits, DirecTV uncovered some weird facts that may ring true to you:

--The average American says he or she can go a full 33 days without television, but 37 percent admit the reality: They can barely manage two days without watching TV.

--Within 15 minutes of getting home, 36 percent of Americans turn on the TV.

--Seven percent of us watch TV for as much as 11 hours at a time.

--52 percent leave the room when a commercial comes on. And of those who stay in the room while the commercial is on, fully 53 percent change the channel.

--We're not very fashionable when we watch TV. Twelve percent of Americans watch in their work clothes, 7 percent get comfortable in a bathrobe, and 1 percent actually watch TV naked.

[Jolie Rouge]

Trouble Brewing For 'Queer Eye' Guys?

Life should be thrilling for the so-called Fab Five--those "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" break-out stars of the summer. But it seems they aren't as happy as they should be.

New York Post Page Six gossip columnist Richard Johnson reports that Kyan Douglas, Ted Allen, Carson Kressley, Jai Rodriguez, and Thom Filicia showed up at Entertainment Weekly's pre-Emmy bash Friday night at White Lotus in Hollywood and "proceeded to grumble all night about how they are being ripped off." Those are the words of a Page Six spy whose name was not revealed. The source also dished, "They drank and were really gloomy." Well, think about it. They ARE only being paid a paltry $3,000 a show. That book deal they signed for $1.2 million has to be split five ways--and that's after the agents get their take. And can you believe this indignity? The Fab Five have to fly coach! Coach! Can you imagine?

"It was poor form to be that openly complaining at an industry party," the Page Six spy opined. "Ashton Kutcher brought Demi Moore over to them and left within seconds because they had such pusses on their faces."

[Jolie Rouge]

Barbra Streisand Makes Odd Confession

The real reason Barbra Streisand gave up public performances three years ago is that she says she finds listening to her own songs to be too boring! The 61-year-old diva told Reader's Digest magazine that by the time she has completed the recording for an album, she is so sick of the music that she never again listens to it "for maybe 10 years."

"Really, I just get sick of it. That's why I gave up concerts--in addition to having stage fright and the exertion of singing 30 songs a night. It's boring to sing your own songs," she told the monthly mag for its October issue. It was in September 2000 that Streisand held one last concert, if you don't count the one time she emerged in 2002 to sing at a Hollywood fundraiser for the Democratic Party.

Look for Streisand's latest, "The Movie Album," in stores next month. This is her 58th recording, and even though most artists spend much time promoting their new CDs in concerts, Babs says no way to that. In fact, she told Readers' Digest that she doubts she'll ever do another public concert. "It's fun to create a show and direct it and conceive it--except that you have to do it, you have to perform it. I never think of that until it's too late," she said.

[Jolie Rouge]

N.J. Teen Bank Robbers Tell Their Story
By JOHN CURRAN

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030924%2F213935238.htm&sc=1110

TOMS RIVER, N.J. (AP) - Twin 15-year-old bank robbers testified against their stepfather Wednesday, offering their first public comments about a heist that was supposed to save a house but instead ruined a family.

Chelsea and Elysia Wortman, who are serving four-year terms in a juvenile facility after pleading guilty to armed robbery, said their family's financial problems drove them to commit the October 2002 crime.

``I saw that my family was upset,'' Chelsea said. ``The money was needed, so I decided to rob a bank.''

The fraternal twins were 14 when they used masks and their little brother's BB gun to rob $3,550 from a Sun National Bank branch, with their mother acting as getaway driver. Kathleen Wortman Jones, 34, has pleaded guilty in the case.


The girls' stepfather, Kevin Jones, 37, did not know about the robbery until it was over, but is accused of destroying evidence and laundering money. Elysia testified that he told her to throw away her clothing from the robbery to destroy evidence, and Jones also is accused of laundering some of the proceeds in an Atlantic City casino.


Chelsea said her mother thought she was joking when she first talked about robbing a bank.


``She was like, `You're not going to do that. You're going to get in trouble.' I was determined. I let her know, 'If you're not coming, I'm still doing it,''' Chelsea said.


Chelsea said she and her sister put on their masks and prayed before entering the bank. She held a trash bag and Elysia held the BB gun, pointing it at the face of teller Carol Clark and ordering her to put the money in the bag.


The twins gave much the same testimony, but in dramatically different tones.


Chelsea was calm, and even smiled when prosecutor Michel Paulhus pointed to her masked image from the bank's surveillance video. Elysia was more emotional, snapping at defense attorney Philip Pagano when he asked if she was angry at him.


Looking briefly at her stepfather, she said, ``I'm mad at HIM and my Mom for getting me into this situation.''


Elysia also said her mother asked her to lie to thwart the prosecutions of her parents, but would not say whether Jones had done the same.


Wortman Jones, who is facing a possible 30-year prison term for armed robbery and using a juvenile to commit a criminal offense, was expected to take the stand Thursday.



09/24/03 21:38

[Jolie Rouge]

[b]Really Bad News For Sagittarius

Call it cosmic cannibalism. The Milky Way galaxy is, well, eating the dwarf Sagittarius. Reuters reports that astronomers from the University of Virginia and the University of Massachusetts have mapped the Sagittarius galaxy in a way that shows how its debris wraps around and then passes through the Milky Way. To put it bluntly, Sagittarius is on its way to oblivion. It's getting stretched, torn apart, and ultimately it will be eaten. Bye-bye.


"It's clear who's the bully in the interaction," lead researcher Steven Majewski of the University of Virginia said in a statement. The Milky Way's cannibalistic acts were largely obscured by stars and cosmic dust, but astronomers have seen through this veil by looking for infrared radiation coming from M giant stars that are common in Sagittarius, but rare elsewhere in the Milky Way.


Reuters reports, "By focusing on these stars, the scientists said they were able to capture the totality of the Milky Way's meal, in a vision that makes it appear that our galaxy is slurping the stars of Sagittarius as if they were a stellar strand of spaghetti." The study will be published in the December 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

[Jolie Rouge]

The No. 1 City Name People Can't Spell

So how do YOU spell "Pittsburgh"? Yes, it has an "h." But because so many people don't realize that, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has the honor of being the No. 1 U.S. city that people misspell, according to a recent study by ePodunk.

Why Pittsburgh has an "h": If you spell Pittsburg like this, just tell people you're following the 1890 ruling by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. That should impress them enough that they won't even notice your incorrect spelling! ePodunk reports that it was in 1890 that this federal board ruled that the final "h" should be dropped from the names of all U.S. cities and towns ending in "burgh." The good people of Pittsburgh would have nothing to do with that, so they mounted a campaign to keep the name as is with the "h" intact. It took them until 1911, but the board finally relented and restored the "h." Nearly 100 years later, people are still confused as to how to spell it.



Pittsburgh isn't alone.

The top 15 most frequently misspelled American cities are:

1. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

2. Tucson, Arizona

3. Cincinnati, Ohio

4. Albuquerque, New Mexico

5. Culpeper, Virginia

6. Asheville, North Carolina

7. Worcester, Massachusetts

8. Manhattan, New York

9. Phoenix, Arizona

10. Niagara Falls, New York

11. Fredericksburg, Virginia

12. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

13. Detroit, Michigan

14. Chattanooga, Tennessee

15. Gloucester, Massachusetts


Sweetlips to Toad Suck: You won't believe the names of these all-American towns--and how they got them.

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/atplay/package.jsp?name=atplay/pm/oddesttownnames/oddesttownnames&floc=wn-nn

[Jolie Rouge]

David Letterman's Very Scary Weekend

The streets of New York City must seem like a safe haven for "Late Show" host David Letterman after his getaway to the wilds of Montana. The Associated Press reports that Letterman awoke in his Great Falls, Montana cabin last weekend to find an unwanted guest: "The hugest bear I've ever seen" as Dave described it on his show Monday night. And who came to his rescue? A high school kid.

This is what happened: The sound of something rummaging about in the cabin's kitchen awoke Letterman at the crack of dawn. "I think to myself, 'probably the wind,' and in Montana that's always a pretty good bet," he told his TV audience. So he rolled over and went back to sleep. An hour later he decided to check out the noise. "And there, standing in my kitchen, is the largest bear I've ever seen in my entire life," he said. "I don't know how big, but he was the hugest bear I've ever seen in my kitchen. So I closed the door."

Letterman did what any city boy would do in a situation like this. He called in the locals for help. First one in was his friend and ranch manager Chip Kearns. As Letterman put it, "He's the guy you want to call when you've got a bear in your kitchen." Maybe not. He chased the bear for several hours and never did get it out of the cabin. So Kearns called in help: A 17-year-old named Brandon Lightner. The high school senior dropped M-80 firecrackers into the kitchen to chase out the sleeping bear. It worked. "If you ever are in that situation, call a high school kid," Letterman told his viewers. "Get those M-80s and your problems are over, ladies and gentlemen."

[Jolie Rouge]

Why Do Teenagers Pick Their Noses?

You might laugh at that headline, but several serious scientists have seriously pondered this as a serious question. And for that serious work, they've been given an award. No, it's not serious, it's an Ig Nobel Prize. Reuters reports that Ig Nobels are like the other Nobels, recognizing the world's greatest minds who make the world a better place. But the Igs, awarded by Marc Abrahams, recognize achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced. And one of those goes to a group of Indian scientists working at a government institute for their ground-breaking research that answers the question: Why do teenagers pick their noses?



The answer we know you want to know: Nose-picking is common across all social classes. (Translation: If your kid does this, relax! They all do it.) About half do it just to unclog their nose, while 11 percent do it for cosmetic reasons and another 11 percent do it just for fun. About 80 percent of teenagers use only their fingers to do the deed, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly split between tweezers and pencils.



Reuters notes that one of the first winners of the Ig Nobel in 1991 was former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle for "demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education." He was recognized with an Ig after he said this: "It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." And then there was this one: "Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite."

[Jolie Rouge]

Oceanographer Drowns While Fishing


GOLD BEACH, Ore. (AP) - Jack R. Dymond, an oceanographer who helped discover exotic life forms subsisting in the cold, sunless depths at the bottom of the sea, drowned while fishing, a colleague said. He was 64.

The retired Oregon State University professor slipped Friday in the Rogue River and was pulled under, said Robert Collier, an oceanographer at the university.

In 1977, Dymond was a lead investigator on a research cruise at the Galapagos Rift west of Ecuador when he and other scientists spotted hydrothermal vents spewing warm, mineral-rich fluids from under the sea floor. To the scientists' amazement, they also found a community of tube worms, clams and other organisms living off the vents in the harsh, dark environment.

It was the first and essentially only ecosystem discovered on Earth that did not rely on the sun for energy, spawning a new field of research, Collier said.


Dymond traveled throughout the world in his research, visiting Russia's Lake Baikal, the Arabian Sea and the equatorial Pacific. He wrote nearly 100 scientific papers.


He was the first to explore the bottom of Oregon's Crater Lake, descending in a one-person submersible in 1988 and 1989.


In an article for The Oregonian in 1988 about the experience, Dymond wrote: ``Amidst the topographic grandeur and shockingly blue waters, I began to sense why this site has had such spiritual significance to Native Americans. ... I felt attuned to the significance of life and the uniqueness of our planet.''


Dymond was born in Bellevue, Ohio. He received a bachelor's degree in geology from Miami University in Ohio in 1961, and a doctorate from the University of California-San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1966.


He was a researcher at Columbia University before coming to OSU in 1969. He retired in 1997.



09/25/03 15:19

[the fugative]

Chuck Shepherd: News of The Weird




Women in tribes in Kenya and other African nations are rebelling at the ancient custom of requiring a newly widowed woman to pay to have sex with the village's "cleanser" to purify her soul sufficiently to be allowed to attend her husband's funeral, according to an August Washington Post dispatch. Said one particularly vulgar, besotted cleanser in Gangre, "It's not bad for me since I get to be with the beautiful ladies. The women like it because who else would be with them. They can't stay alone with the spirits. They need me." Cleansers are believed to be major HIV conveyers since a condom would not allow the spirits to pass.

• In Charleston, S.C., in August, graduate student Mohammed Talha Shekhani, 23, was charged with assault and lewd conduct for what he told police was a sincere, though inept, strategy for meeting women. After a friend told him to just walk up to a woman and start touching her, Shekhani said he initiated four public hugging incidents (with two adults and, almost directly in front of their mothers, two teenage girls). His lawyer said Shekhani's poor judgment was caused by the stress of an academic program that will earn him both a Ph.D. and an M.D. at Medical University of South Carolina.

• In June, British Airways came to the rescue of Billy, the homing pigeon belonging to John and Maria Warren of Bootle, England, and flew him home; he was supposed to have flown home on his own from Fougeres, France, but he got sidetracked (probably on a ship) and wound up in New York City. In August, the Shanghai (China) Zoo shipped two dwindling-population Chinese tiger cubs to a preserve in South Africa so that experts can teach them how to survive; the zoo-bred tigers instinctively chase prey but do not know how to kill it.

More to worry about

omen in tribes in Kenya and other African nations are rebelling at the ancient cus

• A car traveling on Interstate Hwy. 77 just north of Charlotte, N.C., was hit by a flying speedboat at 2:20 a.m. on Aug. 21; the boat was dashing across adjacent Lake Norman, became airborne, clipped the car, and landed in the median, but the only casualties were the boaters. Three were hospitalized.

• Outside auditors concluded in May that 16 Houston schools with much-publicized "zero" dropout totals actually had at least 3,000. A whistleblower/principal told the New York Times that principals had been pressured to record their dropouts in some other, benign way. According to him, no one within the school district's culture (created by former superintendent Rod Paige, who is now U.S. secretary of education) realized that people would be suspicious if these schools reported "zero" when every other urban school district in America is plagued by dropouts.

• Mary Ryan-Kusiak, chairwoman of the Longmeadow, Mass., School Committee, abruptly adjourned the Aug. 25 meeting solely because committee member Laura Bertelli refused to sit in her assigned seat. Bertelli said she was tired of Ryan-Kusiak moving her nameplate around, but Ryan-Kusiak said she'd cancel the next meeting, too, if Bertelli didn't sit where she was told.

• On the ballot in Denver in November will be a referendum calling on the city council to research various proposals on how to reduce residents' stress and to prove scientifically which methods might work. "The buildup of society-wide stress is like a new pollution in the environment," said activist Jeff Peckman, who collected the signatures to qualify the issue for the ballot. Said council member Charlie Brown, "What are we supposed to do, hand out incense sticks at Denver International Airport? Is that the image we want for our city?"

• The problem of housing for paroled sex offenders is severe in some states, according to an August report in the Los Angeles Times. Parolee Bruce Scott Erbs, unable to find anyplace to live in Oregon, stays in a government-supplied tent behind the Linn County jail. In Polk County, Ore., five parolees live in a parking garage with the blessing of county commissioners, who like the idea that they can easily monitor the offenders. Wisconsin law requires the government to furnish quarters for released sexual predators if placement service fails, and it is about to purchase a $100,000 home in West Allis to house predator Billy Lee Morford.

Fetishes on parade

• Jason Glen Humphrey, 29, was charged with taking indecent liberties for what prosecutors said was a yearlong spree of leering at mothers as they changed infants' diapers in semi-public places, or questioning women about their toddlers' bowel movements (Hillsborough, N.C., July). Jeffrey Bernard Fuller, 35, a medical technician working for insurance companies, was arrested after allegedly exceeding the scope of his work at least nine times by giving men gratuitous prostate and pelvic exams (Decatur, Ga., March).

• Julio Cesar Cu, 42, and his three diving partners work exclusively by touch because their full-time job is in water so dark that flashlights are useless: to unclog and repair the antiquated Mexico City sewers ("a sea of human waste and industrial chemicals," according to an April Los Angeles Times dispatch). The city is in a valley surrounded by mountains, with frequent flooding and poor drainage in its combined storm water-sewage system. Said one environmentalist, "You walk the streets, smell the stench of raw sewage, and can only imagine what's happening underground."

• Ben Mann (apparently a very good meditator) fell out of a tree while meditating, down a 30-foot ravine, and had to be rescued (Berkeley, Calif., June). Ottawa County, Mich., trying to stem the migration to the area by prissy urbanites, started handing out brochures that earthily describe the atmosphere of farm communities and which contain a scratch-and-sniff section of the odor of manure (August).

Recurring themes

• Latest suspect to try to chew his fingertips off to avoid identification: Nigerian Olugbemiga Olusajo, who initially failed to cooperate with police but finally pleaded guilty in May to identity theft (Philadelphia). Latest person to be buried in a pet cemetery: Jean Birkenstein Washington, in June, who, according to her children, admired animals more than people (Aarrowood Park, Vernon Hills, Ill.). Latest art treasure to be misunderstood by a maintenance man: A $300,000 art object with a flickering bulb (to create a seedy look), which was "repaired" by an earnest electrician in July (at Brunswick Lane in Glasgow, Scotland).

Also, in the past month: Ingrid Nicholls, a black woman, was originally told by her hospital in Reading, England, that the only foot prosthesis she was entitled to from the National Health Service was a white one and that she'd have to pay extra for black (but two days later, NHS changed its mind). Canada's foreign ministry announced that for "security" reasons, it would issue no more passports in which applicants' photos show them smiling.

:p

[Jolie Rouge]

Anti-Spam Web Pages Shut Down by Attacks
By Elinor Mills Abreu


http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-RTO-rittz&idq=/ff/story/0002%2F20030925%2F204775814.htm&sc=rittz

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Three Web sites that provide spam blocking lists have shut down as a result of crippling Internet attacks in what experts on Thursday said is an escalation in the war between spammers and opponents of unsolicited e-mails.

Anti-spam experts said that they think spammers are behind the attacks, although they have no way of proving it.

The technological war comes as Congress considers a federal anti-spam law and California adopts what is widely considered to be the toughest law in the country.

The California law, signed on Tuesday, allows people to sue spammers for $1,000 per unsolicited e-mail and up to $1 million for a spam campaign.


"This definitely marks an escalation in the spam wars," Andrew Barrett, executive director of The Spamcon Foundation, a spam watchdog group, said of the recent Internet attacks on lists used to block spam.


"Before, it was a guerrilla war ... This is the first time we've seen (spammers) employ such brazen tactics," he said.


Anti-spam advocates maintain hundreds of spam block or "black hole" lists, which are Web sites with lists of the numerical Internet protocol addresses of specific computers or e-mail servers that are unsecure or are known sources of spam.


Network administrators and Internet service providers consult the lists and block e-mails coming from those computers as part of their spam filtering techniques.


Two of those spam block lists have shut down after being attacked by denial-of-service attacks, in which compromised computers are used to send so much traffic to a Web site that it is temporarily taken down. The operator of another list shut down fearing a pending attack.


"There seems to be a methodical well-planned attempt to use pre-assembled networks of zombie machines to create sustained denial of service attacks on servers where these block lists run," said Barrett.


'HANDWRITING ON THE WALL'


Monkeys.com shut down on Monday following a three-day denial of service attack over the weekend and an attack last month that lasted 10 days, list operator Ronald Guilmette said in a posting to an anti-spam news group.


"The handwriting is now on the wall," he wrote. "I will simply not be allowed to continue fighting spam."


Spam block list operator Osiriusoft.com also recently shut down its list after a denial of service attack, and on Tuesday the list maintained at Tennessee Internet service provider Compu-Net Enterprises was taken down.


Bill Larson, network administrator at Compu-Net, said in an interview on Thursday that he shut the list down because he was afraid it would be targeted with a denial of service attack.


The company was already being harassed, receiving complaints after attackers sent spam that looked like it was coming from the company's network and legitimate e-mails were getting bounced, he said.


Experts have speculated that spammers are behind a computer worm, Sobig, that surfaced earlier this year that can turn infected computers into spam relay machines.


"The black hole lists were incredibly effective until the Sobig worm started going out," Larson said.


While Guilmette complained that ISPs could do more to stop the attacks by taking the attacking computers offline, Larson said anti-spam advocates were considering other options to keep the lists going.


They are talking about having lists that are distributed across numerous computers like in a peer-to-peer network, he said. "That will make it hard, if not impossible, to take them down," he added.


However, the best solution to the problem is for people to just "not buy the products mentioned in spam" advertisements, Larson added.



09/25/03 20:46

[the fugative]

News of The Weird
Chuck Shepherd



Between June and August, high school dropout Jonathan Harris, 34, acted as his own lawyer in three Philadelphia felony cases and won them all, including a murder trial that could have sent him to death row. At press time, he had scheduled two more for himself, on a 2001 gun charge and at a new trial on several lesser charges related to the murder (although he had taunted a prosecutor in court about taking him on again). The prosecutor blamed the murder verdict on unreliable and no-show witnesses.

• Zachary G. Holloway, 20, and a pal were arrested in Springfield, Ill., in September and charged with breaking into one car (and stealing, among other things, a motorcycle helmet) and attempting to break into another. To try to get into the second car, police said, Holloway put on the helmet, stood back from the car, and charged into it, head-butting a window, unsuccessfully, twice. The two were arrested shortly afterward.

Wimpy Americans

• Jamila Glauber sued the transit system in Juneau, Alaska, because a driver's attempt to enforce the well-known no-eating rule on a bus (it was a Snickers bar) caused her, she says, at least $50,000 worth of emotional distress (July). Kenneth Williams, in jail near San Diego, awaiting trial for raping an underage girl, sued the facility because of the mental stress and anguish and weight-loss caused by finding a fly in his mashed potatoes (June). The post office in Fulton, Mo., removed a tape dispenser that had long been available for customers to seal packages, because a customer had hurt himself using it and had filed a claim against the Postal Service (June).

• A 46-year-old woman was hospitalized in critical condition when she dropped a coin while at a drive-thru window at a McDonald's, then opened her minivan door to retrieve it, taking her foot off the brake, allowing the van to inch forward, trapping her head in the open door, which lodged against a post (Burke, Va., August). The CEO of Diebold Inc., a leading manufacturer of voting machines that register votes through the company's unique technology, committed to support President Bush's re-election and wrote a fund-raising letter for Ohio Republicans (August).

Not my fault

• The police department in Madera, Calif., and its officer Marcy Noriega in July sued the manufacturer of Taser guns (nonlethal guns that fire incapacitating electrical charges), claiming it was the company's fault that Noriega, reaching for her Taser, inadvertently drew her real gun and fatally shot a man resisting arrest. According to Noriega, the Taser looks so much like a real gun that she couldn't help it, and Taser International Inc., should have provided better warnings and training.

• Fund manager Scott R. Sacane of Norwalk, Conn., defending himself in July against charges that he ignored Securities and Exchange Commission rules requiring investors to give notice when they buy large percentages of a publicly traded stock, said the mistakes were not his fault. In a filing with the commission, he said he had no idea that he had acquired 33 percent of one company (far exceeding the reporting threshold) and 78.5 percent of another, blaming the problem on a software failure over a three-week period.

Compelling explanations

• In August, Tom Jennings filed an appeal to his dismissal as public affairs manager for Mobile (Ala.) Area Water and Sewer System, which was caused by his having had pornography on his office computer. Jennings blamed most of the downloading on other people, but took responsibility for a file labeled "buttshot" (an image of his own buttocks), claiming that it was photographed accidentally when he was changing clothes and that the only reason he loaded it onto his computer was "because I wanted to talk to some of my friends about deleting it."

• There was a conflict reported in August in an aggravated assault in Skowhegan, Maine, as to who had stabbed Paul Vienaire, according to police. Jean Lampron, 46, was charged with the stabbing, but she said Vienaire's ex-wife did it. Vienaire, however, said that the ex-wife "ordered" the stabbing but that Lampron actually carried it out. Police attributed both explanations to alcohol, since Vienaire's ex-wife died long before the incident occurred.

People different from us

• According to a June police report in the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, W. Va., a 19-year-old man drove from Greenwich, N.Y., to Huntington to meet for the first time a 17-year-old girl he had been "chatting" with over the Internet, to persuade her to return to New York with him. Her mother refused to let her go. The man walked away, "intentionally banged his head on the door frame of his car and fell to the ground, unconscious." He was taken to Cabell Huntington Hospital.

• Egyptian law scholar Nabel Hilmi told a weekly newspaper in Cairo in August that he and other Switzerland-based expatriates are preparing a suit against "all the Jews in the world" for the "trillions of tons" of gold and jewelry that Jews took during their exodus from Egypt in the time of the Pharoahs. Also in August, a 14th-generation descendant of Montezuma asked the Mexican government to reinstate the long-dormant pensions the king of Spain agreed in 1550 to pay the descendants for the appropriation of Aztecs' land.

• Police in Avon Park, Fla., charged April Marie Brown, 28, with criminal mischief after she allegedly, at the direction of her son, 12, drove him and a pal around town on a Saturday night as the kids vandalized 11 stop signs, doing more than $1,000 damage. In September, according to police in Wichita Falls, Texas, Joann Rubio, 31, drove her pickup truck alongside a truck driven by a 19-year-old man, so that her 16-year-old son in the passenger seat could shoot the man; he was hit once, and mother and son were later arrested.

The legislature in action

• Arizona law treats selling, downloading, trading or buying child pornography as the equivalent of actually molesting a child, with a penalty of 10 to 24 years per count, with multiple counts to run consecutively, and two high school teachers (convicted of photos-only, no child interaction) are now serving 200 and 408 years (the latter for having 17 photos) in prison, respectively. Critics point out, according to a May report in the Arizona Republic, that there are cold-blooded murderers serving less time in the state, and that a life sentence without possibility of parole could be obtained by as few as 12 computer-mouse clicks at a pornography Web site.

• Latest street price for a child: $250 (Judith Ann Garland, 20, was convicted in Baltimore in September of offering a 2-year-old boy because she needed $250 for bail on drug charges). Latest cat to inherit an estate: Tinker, a black stray taken in by Margaret Layne, who died in May at age 89 in London, England (inherited a house worth about $600,000 and a trust fund worth about $175,000).

Also, in the past month: Police decided not to charge Lula Brown for 911 abuse even though she had called the emergency number just to report that a McDonald's tried to charge her for extra barbecue sauce (Avon, Ohio). A fisherman had to be rushed to a hospital by helicopter after the bull shark he had just caught and was posing for photos with bit his arm (Freeport, Texas). With United Nations funding, the pygmy musical group Ndima released a 10-track CD of songs backed by music made by animal horns, rawhide drums and bamboo pipes (Republic of the Congo).

:p

[the fugative]

Texas Conservative Group Sets Cookie Price on Race
Fri Sep 26, 8:20 AM ET

DALLAS (Reuters) - Southern Methodist University said on Thursday it shut down a bake sale on campus by a conservative political group that sold cookies at different prices, based on a customer's race and gender.



The Young Conservatives of Texas, a nonpartisan group that mostly campaigns for Republican-backed policies and candidates, said the bake sale was aimed at bringing attention to what it sees as flaws in affirmative action policies. The university said the group's actions were offensive.


Cookies were priced at $1 for white males, 75 cents for white females, 50 cents for Hispanics and 25 cents for blacks.


"Young Conservatives of Texas strongly opposes different standards for different races," said David Rushing, the chairman of the group at SMU in Dallas said. He said it was wrong for the university to shut down their sale.


"We find it appalling that a university that is supposed to be dedicated to the enlightenment of its own students and the free flow of ideas would stifle the opinions of a group of students based on objections from a handful of other students," Rushing said.


SMU is one of the largest private universities in Dallas. Other groups have launched similar sales at various U.S. universities since about February of this year.


While the bake sale raised eyebrows about its political message, it was a commercial failure. The group only sold about $1.50 worth of cookies.







:p

Russian Newspaper Plays U.S. at Its Own Card Game


MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian newspaper has trumped the U.S. government with playing cards featuring top American figures -- a parody of decks issued to U.S. troops during the Iraq war depicting the most-wanted figures in Saddam Hussein 's ruling elite.



President Bush is the jack of hearts in the new pack, which went on sale ahead of a meeting this week between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin


In the decks, which are selling out in Moscow, Bush's father, former President George Bush, is the ace of hearts, while Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is the ace of spades.


Many figures on the 36 cards, the standard pack for many Russian games, are depicted in traditional Russian medieval dress and headgear, some with staffs or spears.


Hearts in the pack are dubbed "the family," spades are "the careerists," diamonds are "the moderates" and clubs are "the neo-conservatives." The aim is to remind Russians who is who in the White House.


"We want to show our readers the various faces of the current U.S. political elite,...that it is a complex, living organism with varied and vivid personalities," said Azer Mursaliyev, foreign editor of the business daily Kommersant, which designed the cards.


The cards come complete with brief anecdotes about the figures, including "Laura Bush: Wife of President Bush Jr. She made her husband quit drinking."






:eek:

Moscow Times
September 18, 2003
Political Lesson in the Cards
By Anna Dolgov
Special to The Moscow Times

George W. Bush is "convinced that God has a plan for him," in "The United Cards of America," created by the Kommersant newspaper and NTV's "Namedni" news program

A game of cards can now become a quick lesson of who's who in Washington with the release of a new deck that looks an awful lot like the United States' own deck of most-wanted Iraqi leaders.

The creators of "The United Cards of America," the Kommersant newspaper and NTV's "Namedni" news program, acknowledge that they were inspired by the Iraq deck but insist that their set is mostly for educational purposes.

The deck of 36 playing cards -- complete with pictures and brief commentaries of prominent U.S. figures -- is also a lot more amusing.

Among the cards are George W. Bush ("USA President since 2001, convinced that God has a plan for him"); Donald Evans ("commerce secretary, drank with Bush Jr. until July 6, 1986"); and Laura Bush ("the wife of Bush Jr., made husband quit drinking").

Also included are Joshua Bolten ("White House budget director, a stingy guardian of people's money"); Andrew Card ("White House chief of staff, filters the president's interlocutors"); John Snow ("secretary of treasury, the salesman of George Bush's economic ideas"); and Colin Powell ("secretary of state, a living embodiment of the American dream").

"This is a kind of entertaining Americanology," Leonid Parfyonov, the anchor of "Namedni," said in a telephone interview.

While joking about the quirks of their leaders is a national pastime and most Russians can easily name who's who in Moscow, their knowledge of U.S. politicians is generally limited to what they hear on dry newscasts. The cards, along with reports by Kommersant and "Namedni" this month, are aimed at providing background information that news reports usually skip, Kommersant said.

The breakdown into suits follows certain guidelines: The hearts are the "family" (which includes Bush's relatives and close friends), the diamonds are "moderates," the clubs are "careerists," and the spades are "neo-conservatives."

The division is, of course, somewhat arbitrary, said the head of Kommersant's foreign policy department, Azer Mursaliyev, who came up with the idea in the first place. "And the cards themselves are basically arbitrary -- this is not a political science class, after all," he said. "Serious Americanologists may say that this is absolutely wrong, that the key figures are absolutely different.

"But we didn't have the goal of providing material for the Foreign Intelligence Service. Our goal was to educate our readers a little bit."

Each Monday this month Kommersant is publishing profiles of those featured in each of the suits, while "Namedni" is reporting about the figures in its Sunday broadcasts.

The release of the cards, which cost 150 to 180 rubles, was timed to coincide with a peak in interest in U.S. affairs this month. The interest is partly due to the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and President Vladimir Putin's planned meeting with Bush at Camp David.

"Our readers will have a chance to look at the cards and see, 'He [Putin] met with so-and-so, and who is this person? Oh, a seven,'" Mursaliyev said.

The cards also aimed to reflect growing U.S. influence in world affairs, Kommersant wrote in a recent article. Bush "has become the most powerful man on Earth, and his entourage, effectively, has become the world government," it said.

He may be the "most powerful man on Earth," but in the suit of hearts, Bush is only a jack. The ace is his father, former President George Bush, while the king is the Reverend Franklin Graham ("preacher and missionary, the president's holy father"), and the queen is his wife, Laura Bush.

"In the Bush family, Bush Sr. is naturally the senior, and Bush Jr. himself has always said that," Mursaliyev explained. "Then the holy father, who obviously can't come below [the president], and the queen is naturally the wife -- after all we couldn't make President Bush the queen. And therefore, he is the jack."

The diamonds -- "moderates" -- include Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage ("the most undiplomatic diplomat") and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The clubs -- the "careerists" and "the necessary element of any administration," according to Kommersant -- include Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan ("the second most-powerful man in the world"), Karl Rove ("the president's adviser, George Bush Jr.'s political guru") and Karen Hughes ("the president's former adviser, will come back at the next election").

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow is also there -- a seven of clubs, just above FBI Director Robert Mueller. Asked whether he liked his picture on the card, Vershbow said Tuesday, "The one in Kommersant was even worse." Beyond that, the U.S. Embassy would not comment on the cards, spokesman Tom Leary said.

The spades -- or "neo-conservatives" -- include Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ("the face of the struggle with terrorism") and his wife, Lynne Cheney ("an advocate of conservative values").

"We didn't want to depart too far from reality," Parfyonov said.

"Looking from Moscow, the top powers in America do seem to consist of four clearly separable vectors."

The term "family" draws a clear parallel with former President Boris Yeltsin's inner circle, the influential group of relatives and advisers that has been described by the same word.

"Just the fact that it's George Bush the Junior is evidence that in America there's also a 'family,'" Parfyonov said.

In any other way, the deck is just a set of cards. Decks of 36 cards -- without jokers -- are common in Russia.

"In nothing except the illustrations does it differ from an ordinary deck of playing cards," Kommersant wrote. "And it can be used not only for enlightenment and educational purposes but also for its original purpose."

Would-be students or players can buy the cards at the Biblio-Globus bookstore on Lubyanka, Dom Knigi on Novy Arbat or the Moskva bookstore on Tverskaya Ulitsa

;)

http://www.kommersant.ru/announcement1.html

[the fugative]

French card deck names 'most dangerous' U.S. leaders


PARIS, France (AP) -- The ace of spades? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gets the honor in a new French deck of cards. President Bush is the king of diamonds and Osama bin Laden the joker.

The game takes a jab at the famous deck of cards created for U.S. soldiers hunting down ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and other leaders from the deposed regime.

"I found it completely indecent to present a manhunt as a game," said Thierry Meyssan, the man behind the French deck. "We thought this card game would allow us to ... explain why we consider the government of George Bush a threat to international security."

Meyssan is the author of a one-time French best seller, "9-11: The Big Lie," claiming that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, and that the attacks were plotted by a faction within the U.S. military.

Now, Meyssan said in a telephone interview, he wants to expose "the 52 most dangerous American officials."

Meyssan heads the Voltaire Network, a left-wing association that put the cards on its Internet site.

A little over 2,500 decks a la francaise have been sold, at $9.20 each, on the Internet in recent weeks, Meyssan said. There are plans to sell the decks in stores soon and translate them into 10 languages, he said.

Each card carries a photo of the official and a text explaining the choice. Bush, as the king of diamonds, is described as "the president of a baseball club."


;)

[Jolie Rouge]

Look What Was Found Off Britain's Coast

How is this for good luck? A team of archaeologists from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England wanted to become more adept at finding ancient artifacts under water. So they conducted a training session off the coast of Tynemouth to better prepare for dive searches elsewhere. While they were training in the water, they stumbled upon the archaeological find of a lifetime: evidence of two Stone Age settlements in Britain. The underwater sites, which date as far back as 10,000 years, once stood on dry land, but they were gradually submerged as sea levels rose after the end of the last Ice Age, reports Reuters.

The team primarily found flint artifacts, including tools and arrowheads. The items were all lying undisturbed on the sea bed near a built-up area. Even more strange, the lead archaeologist, Dr. Penny Spikins, told Reuters that before the training dive even took place, she applied for funding to search for just this type of Stone Age site--but in Scotland. Instead, she found just what she was looking for in England without even trying.



"It was a totally stunning find really because although we'd prepared ourselves to be looking for these type of sites, we hadn't really started the project when we already came across these types of artifacts," Spikins told Reuters. "These sites are set to provide us with a unique opportunity to begin to understand early Mesolithic coastal occupation." The Mesolithic people were hunters and gatherers who lived in the Middle Stone Age period that began some 10,000 years ago. The site found closer to land dates back 5,000 to 8,500 years ago to the late Mesolithic period, while the other, which was found further out to sea, could date back as far as 10,000 years to the early Mesolithic period.

[Jolie Rouge]

Look What They Found In Antarctica
It's just a tiny fossil of a fly that scientists found some 300 miles from the South Pole. But this fossil will help them:

figure out what life was like millions of years ago in ancient Antarctica and
help explain global changes in today's climate.
One of the biggest surprises of the discovery: No one even knew there were flies in this frozen land where summer temperatures are a bone-chilling 20 degrees below zero. The fly fossil is from the Cyclorrhapha family, the so-called "higher flies" that include the common housefly, reports CNN.

Geologist Allan Ashworth, who found the fossil and is recognized as a pioneer in using insect fossils to research climate changes, speculates that flies could have existed during a short-lived warm spell in Antarctica several million years ago. They could also have been part of the animal life on a mega-continent called Gondwana that later split up and formed Antarctica, South America, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa.

Finding such fossils is "painstaking stuff," Ashworth admitted. But the payoff can be huge because so much can be learned from them. CNN reports that the fossil Ashworth found in Antarctica is 5 to 7.5 millimeters long. The fly is actually in the puparium stage, which is similar to the butterfly's cocoon state--a transition period between the larva and adult insect. Ashworth told CNN he was looking at a rock under the microscope and saw sand, seeds, and the head or leg of a weevil. And then he spotted an unusual circular pattern with what appeared to be the back end of a fly in the pupa stage. The circular pattern was a spiracle, which is the mechanism a fly pupa uses to breathe.

Ashworth's research partner, Christian Thompson at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, said finding the fossil was a "Eureka" moment. Speaking of ancient Antarctica, Thompson told CNN, "It was definitely a lot warmer than it is today, so we have to rethink the rate and ability of these flies to disperse across great land masses. We also have to think more about the climate fluctuations in the last 40 million years."

Ashworth, who is a geology professor at North Dakota State University in Fargo, says the landscape of Antarctica then was much like the west coast of Greenland now. "There was a lake, ice sheets that are much smaller than they are today, and some patchy, tundra-like vegetation," he told CNN. What kept that fly company? Beetles, snails, algae, mollusks, and some fish.

So now the big question to be pondered: If a warm spell in Antarctica allowed the fly to live there, what caused the temperatures to rise? Some 15 million years ago, it was not greenhouse gases to blame. So what was it? This ancient clue could help scientists learn more about global warming now.

The findings were published in the British journal Nature.

[Jolie Rouge]

Look Who's On the Bottom of Loch Ness
This is one way to find the Loch Ness monster that no one else has tried. Lloyd Scott, a 41-year-old father of three who is a survivor of chronic myeloid leukemia, has figured out an unusual way to raise one million pounds for the British cancer charity Children with Leukemia. He's running a marathon. But this is a marathon like no other. He is completing the 26-mile trek on the bottom of Scotland's Loch Ness wearing an antique diving suit, reports the BBC News Online. Scott is quite comfortable in the suit, having already set a world record in it: He wore the suit to run the London Marathon and finished with the slowest time ever recorded for the event.

His only concern? Meeting up with the legendary Loch Ness monster. "If I do meet Nessie, I'm not sure who will be more scared, the monster or myself," he revealed to the BBC. "I've been told the big copper helmet could give quite a big head-butt to the monster, so it will be quite nice to make his acquaintance."

To travel 26 miles in the dark and murky waters of Loch Ness, Scott is making his way along the underwater shelves and ledges that run around the banks of the loch. He began the stunt on Sunday and will only do two miles a day as he walks/runs/swims about 30 feet below the surface. An eight-man team will monitor his progress using GPS equipment and feed him air from a specially-designed boat on the loch's surface, notes the BBC.


We're not making this up! See photos of Lloyd Scott in his antique diving suit as he takes the plunge into Loch Ness to begin his 26-mile underwater marathon. http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/photosearch.jsp?cap=loch+ness&x=0&y=0&searchType=photos&floc=wn-nn


Is the Loch Ness monster real or a myth? The British Broadcasting Corp. sent a team of researchers to investigate. This is what they found. http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/package.jsp?name=fte/lochnessmonster/lochnessmonster&floc=wn-nn

[Jolie Rouge]

New law passed to block concert suicide

ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (AP) --The St. Petersburg city council passed a law Monday designed to scuttle a rock group's plans to feature an onstage suicide.

The hard-rock band Hell on Earth had said that a suicide by a terminally ill person would take place during a concert Saturday to raise awareness of right-to-die issues.

In response, the city council met Monday morning to unanimously approve an emergency ordinance making it illegal to conduct a suicide for commercial or entertainment purposes, and to host, promote and sell tickets for such an event.

"While I still think it's a publicity stunt, we still couldn't sit idly by and let somebody lose their life," council member Bill Foster said.

Tampa-based Hell of Earth, known for such outrageous onstage stunts as chocolate syrup wrestling and grinding up live rats in a blender, created the furor by announcing the suicide would happen Saturday at the Palace Theater in downtown St. Petersburg.

But the theater's owner, David Hundley, promptly canceled the band's show, and another venue also turned away the event.

Band leader Billy Tourtelot has vowed that the concert and suicide will still take place at an undisclosed location in the city, broadcast live on the band's Web site.

"This show is far more than a typical Hell On Earth performance," Tourtelot said in an e-mail last week. "This is about standing up for what you believe in, and I am a strong supporter of physician-assisted suicide."

A message left for Tourtelot was not immediately returned Monday.

A Florida law already makes assisting in a suicide manslaughter, a second-degree felony.

Hell on Earth is playing clubs in support of its independently produced album, "All Things Disturbingly Sassy."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.







Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/29/suicide.concert.ap/index.html

[Jolie Rouge]

Pinson man threatens to kill son after Tide loses

A Pinson man was charged with attempted murder for holding a gun to his son's head and pulling the trigger in the midst of a tantrum after Alabama's double overtime loss to Arkansas Saturday, authorities said.

The bullet narrowly missed 20-year-old Seth Logan, who said he picked the wrong time to ask his dad for a car, sheriff's spokesman Deputy Randy Christian said Monday.

Joseph Alan Logan, 46, surrendered to police Saturday and was charged with attempted murder and domestic violence. He was released from the Jefferson County jail Sunday on $7,500 bond.

"I know we take football serious in the South," Christian told The Birmingham News for a Tuesday story, "but that's crossing the line."

The request upset Joseph Logan because his son has already wrecked several vehicles, Logan told investigators.

"He claimed he was just trying to scare his son," Christian said.

According to the police report, Joseph Logan had been drinking alcohol and began slamming doors, tossing boxes and throwing dishes in the sink after the Crimson Tide lost its football game to Arkansas, 34-31 in double overtime, Saturday.

While Joseph Logan was throwing the tantrum, Seth Logan asked for a new car.

Joseph Logan then retrieved a 9 mm pistol from his car, grabbed his son by the collar and pressed the gun to his son's forehead, the report said.

Logan threatened to shoot his son in the head, then pulled the trigger.

Seth Logan moved his head just as his father fired and the bullet whizzed past him, the report said.

Seth Logan fled to a neighbor's house to call police. He told police his ear was numb and his head ringing, but he was OK.

Sheriff's authorities called the SWAT team after discovering the armed father still had a 13-year-old son in the house with him.

Joseph Alan Logan walked out of the house with the other son and turned himself in to police just before the SWAT team arrived, Christian said.

Information from: The Birmingham News

[Jolie Rouge]

Toddler 'doing well' after nearly 3 weeks alone
Tuesday, September 30, 2003 Posted: 11:38 AM EDT

JACKSONVILLE, Florida (CNN) -- After spending nearly three weeks alone and surviving on raw pasta, mustard and ketchup, a 2-year-old Jacksonville, Florida, girl was in good spirits Tuesday morning at a hospital, officials told CNN.

"The child is doing well," said David Foreman, a spokesman for Wolfson Children's Hospital, where the toddler was brought for treatment. "She was sitting up this morning, talking and laughing with the nurses."

Officer Ken Jefferson, spokesman for the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, said the little girl was brought to the hospital Monday, suffering from malnutrition, after an officer responded to a call from the child's father, Ogden Lee. Lee, 33, was at the apartment of his estranged wife, 22-year-old Dakeysha Lee, who has been incarcerated since September 10. He told the responding officer that the apartment manager had let him into the apartment, where he found his daughter.

"The child basically survived on raw pasta, mustard, ketchup," Jefferson said.

Lee told the officer that he had been seeking a divorce from the mother and "had limited contact with his daughter during this process. After having no contact for several weeks, he vigorously tried to make contact," the police report said.

Jefferson said the mother was charged Monday with an intentional act of child abuse for leaving her daughter alone, notifying no one of the circumstances.

She will appear at an arraignment hearing Tuesday morning, he said. According to records from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Dakeysha Lee had a pair of misdemeanor arrests as a juvenile, and was serving time for shoplifting and a bad check, both misdemeanors.

[Jolie Rouge]

Man Sets Record for Eating M&Ms


OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Three minutes after Jim Hager started eating M&Ms with a pair of chopsticks, he was headed for the Guinness Book of World Records.

The 47-year-old Oakland resident gobbled 115 M&Ms in 3 minutes Sunday, breaking a previous record of 112 Smarties consumed by Kathryn Ratcliffe of England in December 2002.

The new record won't become official until event organizers send documentation to the Guinness association, including a videotape, photographs and written declarations from witnesses, but it seems likely he'll have his place in the list.

For his efforts, he received 25 pounds of M&Ms courtesy of a local candy store that sponsored the event.


``His kids were very happy,'' said store owner Wendy Winter.


She said the association gave very specific guidelines: Contestants had to use wooden chopsticks, the M&Ms had to be of the standard variety and they had to be carried to the mouth - one at a time - in the chopsticks.



10/01/03 08:25

[Jolie Rouge]

'Leave It to Beaver' Actor Dies at 53

Stanley Fafara, who played Beaver's friend Whitey Whitney on the 1950s and early 1960s sitcom "Leave It to Beaver," died on Saturday, September 20 of complications from surgery to repair a constricted intestine caused by a hernia, reports Reuters. He had slipped into a coma and was kept alive until life support was removed. Fafara was 53 years old. News of Fafara's death was just now released. Although he played a part on a TV show that came to symbolize an idyllic American family life, Fafara's own life was far from that. Instead, it was filled with drugs, alcohol, and petty crime, notes Reuters. Fafara's health was compromised by a hepatitis C infection he contracted years ago from intravenous drug use.

Fafara grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs. It was his mother who pushed him into acting, first in commercials and later in the plum role of the tow-headed friend to Jerry Mathers' character of Beaver Cleaver. Fafara also appeared in one episode of "The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin." By his own account, he started drinking and doing drugs as a teenager, and by his early 20s he was dealing drugs. In the early 1980s, he was caught breaking into a pharmacy and was sentenced to a year in jail for burglary. It wasn't until 1995 that Fafara sobered up. At the end of his life, he was residing in subsidized housing and living on a Social Security check.


Reuters reports that Fafara recently said in an online interview that it was his character of Whitey who uttered the first line spoken on the show, asking Mathers' character, "What did she do to you, Beaver?" as the Beav emerged from his teacher's classroom with a note to bring home to his parents.

[Jolie Rouge]

Limbaugh Stands by McNabb Race Remarks
By ROB MAADDI

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?oldflok=FF-APO-1401&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20031001%2F160502623.htm&sc=1401&floc=NW_5-L5

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Rush Limbaugh insisted Wednesday he had ``no racist intent whatsoever'' in saying the media have overrated the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb because they want to see a black quarterback succeed.

In fact, the conservative commentator said he must have been right; otherwise, the comments would not have sparked such outrage.

Limbaugh offered no apology, and McNabb said it was too late for one anyway.

``I'm sure he's not the only one that feels that way, but it's somewhat shocking to actually hear that on national TV,'' the NFL star said. ``An apology would do no good because he obviously thought about it before he said it.''


Before McNabb led the Eagles to a 23-13 victory over the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, Limbaugh said on ESPN's pregame show that he did not think McNabb was as good as he was perceived to be.


``I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well,'' Limbaugh said. ``There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team.''


Limbaugh did not back down during his syndicated radio talk show Wednesday.


He reiterated that he does not think McNabb is a bad player, just that he isn't as good as some members of the media think he is.


``This is such a mountain out of a molehill,'' he said. ``There's no racism here, there's no racist intent whatsoever.''


``All this has become the tempest that it is because I must have been right about something,'' he said. ``If I wasn't right there wouldn't be this cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the sports writer community.''


On Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark said Limbaugh should be fired. The retired Army general called the remarks ``hateful and ignorant speech.''


The NFL disclaimed any responsibility for Limbaugh's remarks.


``ESPN knew what it was getting when they hired Rush Limbaugh,'' league vice president Joe Browne said. ``ESPN selects its on-air talent, not the NFL.''


ESPN spokesman Dave Nagle said he did not believe the comments were racially biased. ``He was comparing McNabb's performance on the field to his reputation in the media,'' Nagle said.


Chris Berman, who anchors the ESPN show, said he did not believe Limbaugh's tone or intent was malicious. ``As cut and dry as it seems in print, I didn't think so when it went by my ears,'' he said. ``I probably should have looked to soften it.''


McNabb, who was runner-up for the MVP award in 2000 and has led the Eagles to two straight conference championship games, said he has no quarrel with Limbaugh's comment on his playing ability. ``I know I played badly the first two games,'' he said.


But McNabb said that the comments about his race were out of bounds and added that someone on the show should have taken Limbaugh on. Among the other panelists were former players Michael Irvin and Tom Jackson, both of whom are black.


``I'm not pointing at anyone but someone should have said it,'' McNabb said of the panelists, who also include Berman and Steve Young. ``I wouldn't have cared if it was the cameraman.''


A decade ago, there were few black quarterbacks in the NFL. This season, 10 of the 32 teams will have started black quarterbacks in at least one game.


Limbaugh has helped increase the ratings for ``Sunday NFL Countdown.'' Nagle said ratings are up 10 percent overall. Sunday's show drew its biggest audience in the regular season since 1996.


Limbaugh is the radio host of the politically focused ``Rush Limbaugh Show,'' which is syndicated in more than 650 markets worldwide.



10/01/03 16:04

[Jolie Rouge]

Clark Urges ABC to Fire Rush Limbaugh
By RON FOURNIER

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?oldflok=FF-APO-1131&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20031001%2F162703650.htm&sc=1131&floc=NW_5-L1

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Wednesday urged ABC to fire conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh for saying the media wanted Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb to succeed because he is black.

Clark, a retired Army general who entered the race Sept. 17, called the remarks ``hateful and ignorant speech.''

Before McNabb led the Eagles to a 23-13 victory over the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, Limbaugh said on ESPN's pre-game show that he didn't think McNabb was as good as perceived.

``I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well,'' Limbaugh said. ``There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team.''


ABC is the parent company of ESPN.


McNabb said Wednesday he wasn't looking for an apology, because it's too late for that. But the star quarterback said he was shocked to hear such comments on television.


In a letter to ABC president Alex Wallau, Clark said, ``There can be no excuse for such statements. Mr. Limbaugh has the right to say whatever he wants, but ABC and ESPN have no obligation to sponsor such hateful and ignorant speech. Mr. Limbaugh should be fired immediately.''


Limbaugh said in his syndicated radio show that critics were overreacting to him exercising his free-speech rights in calling McNabb overrated. ``There's no racism here, there's no racist intent whatsoever,'' he said.


Before Clark issued his letter, an ESPN spokesman said he didn't think the comments were racially biased.


``He was comparing McNabb's performance on the field to his reputation in the media,'' spokesman Dave Nagle said. He said Limbaugh doesn't do interviews.


Clark, a supporter of affirmative action, has sought to burnish his credentials as a Democrat since entering the race amid criticism over his past support of GOP administrations.



10/01/03 16:27

[Jolie Rouge]

Mysterious Frog Eggs Found in Connecticut

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1501&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20031002%2F235452674.htm&sc=1501


BERLIN, Conn. (AP) - Hurricane Isabel brought unholy high winds and lashing rain to the East Coast. It also dumped something almost biblical on Connecticut.

Primo D'Agata was startled by what he thought was hail smacking on his porch Sept. 19 as the remnants of Isabel moved through the state. But when he went outside to investigate, D'Agata discovered tiny, gelatinous eggs with dark spots in the middle.

It had apparently been raining frogs.

Since no frogs in Connecticut lay eggs this late in the year, scientists and naturalists speculate they may have come up from North Carolina or another warm location on the winds of Isabel.


D'Agata brought a bowl of his mysterious find to a nearby nature center, after the town's animal control officer couldn't identify what had arrived in his yard.


Nicolas Diaz, a naturalist and teacher at New Britain Youth Museum at Hungerford Park, took a look at D'Agata's bowl and told him it looked like amphibian eggs.


D'Agata is keeping two small, water-filled glass jars of the eggs to see if any of them will hatch. He said a few seem to have sprouted what look like a tail.


``I'm going to let them sit and see what happens,'' D'Agata said Wednesday.



10/02/03 23:54

[Jolie Rouge]

Man Dies After Wife Crushes Testicles


ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - An enraged Ethiopian mother of five will be tried for the murder of her husband who died after she crushed his testicles in a fight, police told the state-run Ethiopian News Agency.

Police said on Friday the man was so embarrassed after the incident that he declined to seek treatment for the injury, and died days later.

"Following a disagreement over the husband's spending habits, his wife refused to give him his dinner and also decided to sleep alone," police in the western region of Wellega said.

"The husband was so angered by this affront by his wife that he tried to beat her. In the melee that followed, the wife grabbed and twisted his testicles causing serious damage."


Police said the unnamed woman, a resident of Wayu-Tuka district in Wellega, had had several arguments with her husband about the amount of money he spent on booze.



10/03/03 08:26




:eek:

[the fugative]

Tiger, alligator kept in apartment


Published October 6, 2003

NEW YORK -- A tiger and an alligator found in a Manhattan apartment were sent to an Ohio wildlife preserve Sunday while their owner recovered from bite wounds inflicted by the cat that weighs 400-plus pounds.

Police said Antoine Yates, 31, would face charges after he gets out of a hospital in Philadelphia, where he fled. He was listed in good condition.

A team of animal control officers, police and Bronx Zoo workers removed the animals from Yates' fifth-floor apartment in a Harlem housing project Saturday.

Wes Artope, director of the city's animal shelters, said the tiger, an orange and white Siberian-Bengal mix, had been kept in the apartment since it was a 6-week-old cub.

Associated Press



:p

[Jolie Rouge]

Performer communicating after tiger mauling
Monday, October 6, 2003 Posted: 10:41 AM EDT


LAS VEGAS, Nevada (CNN) -- Roy Horn of the glitzy Las Vegas duo Siegfried & Roy has been communicating with doctors and friends, his manager told reporters Sunday, two days after he was mauled onstage by one of the tigers in his show.

Horn, 59, remained in critical condition, which has not changed since the incident Friday night. Officials would not say whether he was on a ventilator or give any further details.

"The doctors are cautiously optimistic about his condition," manager Bernie Yuman said outside University Medical Center.

Yuman said the hopes of friends and physicians have been buoyed because Horn's condition has not worsened.

The accident happened Friday night about halfway through Siegfried & Roy's show at the MGM Mirage Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas strip.

As the audience watched, a 7-year-old white tiger named Montecore lunged at Horn's neck and dragged him offstage.

Audience members said Horn looked like a rag doll in the tiger's mouth.

Crew members backstage sprayed a fire extinguisher at the big cat to force him to release his grip, a tactic they are trained to use in such an event, Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman said.

Horn suffered extensive blood loss, and Feldman said hotel employees plan to hold a blood drive next week in Horn's name. "There is no doubt at all that one of the factors in Roy's current condition -- the fact that he's alive -- was the fact that there was the availability of blood in this community," Feldman said.

The show's cast and crew also planned to hold a candlelight vigil outside the hospital Sunday night, Feldman said.

Horn, whose birthday was Friday, is the dark-haired member of Siegfried & Roy. Combining magic tricks with tiger stunts, Horn and Siegfried Fischbacher have performed as a duo on the Las Vegas strip for nearly 30 years.

The tiger was in quarantine Sunday night in accordance with state law, Feldman said, and a decision on what to do with the animal would wait until more was known about Horn's condition.

Yuman said Horn harbors no anger about the mauling.

"His feelings are that this has nothing to do with the tiger," Yuman said. "He's the last one to lay blame. You know, this is an unfortunate accident and after 30,000 live performances, one anomaly is indicative of the fact that his relationship with these animals is extraordinary and unprecedented."

The duo, Yuman said, has 63 exotic cats, none of which has ever displayed aggression.

A number of celebrities showed up at the hospital over the weekend to express their support. Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the founders of the DreamWorks SKG studio, came by Sunday to visit his longtime friend.

Yuman said Katzenberg has just completed a digitally animated series based on Siegfried & Roy's animals, titled "Father of the Pride," which is due out next year.

The 210 crew members of the long-running show were told Saturday that the show was closed indefinitely, and Mirage managers suggested they consider other career options.

"Fortunately we may be able to place many of them at the MGM Grand," Feldman said. He said crew members may be able to find work with upcoming Las Vegas shows or at hotels scheduled to open soon.

Yuman said he was touched that crew members would plan a vigil for Horn despite the uncertainty over their employment and said it was evidence of the family atmosphere behind the scenes.

Those who had tickets for the Siegfried & Roy shows will be issued refunds, Feldman has said.

[gemini26]

'Gladiators' face jail for defacing Colosseum

Four Italian men face up to a year in jail and a £30,000 fine for dressing up as gladiators outside of the Colosseum in Rome.

The men, aged between 30 and 50 years old, have been charged with defacing the world-famous monument.

They dressed as gladiators and posed for photographs with tourists for cash outside the Colosseum.

Officials charged them under a city bylaw which prevents anyone from ''altering and defacing the environment and decor of the Colosseum.''

One of the men said:''We are only trying to make a living. What else are we supposed to do?''

But a Rome council official said:''The law is the law and these men have been accused of breaking it.''


Story filed: 10:43 Monday 6th October 2003

[gemini26]

500,000 cigs found in tins of beans

Nearly half a million smuggled cigarettes have been found hidden inside baked bean tins at Manchester Airport.

Customs officers believe the seizure at the freight terminal has cracked a huge illegal cigarettes racket from Poland.

It follows a tip-off from Trafford environmental health officer Carol Hudson who was investigating the labelling on Polish tins of beans and peas.

Her suspicions led to Customs officers finding 460,800 cigarettes hidden in 1,280 tins on eight pallets. It would have amounted to £80,000 in lost duty.

The officers found two packets of cigarettes in each suspect tin, along with an amount of sand to ensure the correct weight.

Ms Hudson received a £200 reward, which she has given to charity. Customs have taken no action against the importer.

Trafford's head of public protection Paul Harvey told Manchester Evening News: "This is certainly one of the more unusual cases we have come across."


Story filed: 13:01 Monday 6th October 2003

[gemini26]

Estranged mother and daughter meet again in prison

A mother and daughter who hadn't seen each other for 17 years met up when they were put in the same prison cell in Brazil.

Regina Claudia Ribeiro de Souza, 25, ran away from home when she was eight.

She didn't see her mother again until she was arrested for robbery and they ended up in the same cell in Sao Paulo's Pinheiros prison.

But they were separated again after four months when the mother, Marina Souza, who was arrested for drug dealing, was transferred to the state's women's prison.

Regina Claudia told Jornal da Tarde newspaper: "She took care of me in prison. She baked me cakes. We finally had time to get to know each other and we got very close."

Now Regina is campaigning for her mother to be sent back to Pinheiros prison so that they can be together again.

Pinheiros prison's director Maria da Penha said: "I will do my best to keep mother and daughter together."


Story filed: 15:11 Monday 6th October 2003

[gemini26]

Naked rambler remanded

A man attempting to walk naked from Land's End to John O'Groats has been remanded in custody for the next month pending his trial.

Stephen Gough, 44, of Eastleigh in Hampshire, who has become known as the Naked Rambler, was arrested on Friday hours after being admonished during a trial at Dingwall Sheriff Court in Ross-shire, in the Highlands.

After appearing at the same court today Gough, who was arrested on the Cromarty Bridge, will be held at Inverness prison until his trial on November 7.

Gough pleaded not guilty to a charge of breach of the peace as he appeared before Honorary Sheriff Michael Burns wearing only a blue blanket held up by a police belt.

His solicitor David Hingston told the court that Gough was not seeking bail.

Before his trial Gough is due to make an intermediate appearance at the court on October 30.


Story filed: 16:15 Monday 6th October 2003

[gemini26]

Cat saves drowning lamb

A lamb drowning in a swimming pool was saved by a cat who managed to get help.

Black-and-white Puss Puss, emulating the exploits of dog Lassie, frantically miaowed and ran back and forth to the pool to alert her owners to the impending tragedy.

Puss Puss, who has no tail, had accompanied her owners while they worked on a private garden in Icomb, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

Gardeners Adrian Bunton and Karen Lewis knew something was wrong when they found their cat in an agitated state, miaowing and trying to communicate something.

Householder Jill Royle, whose garden they were working in, said: "She was in a very, very agitated state, miaowing and calling and crying and being an utter pest and dashing back and forward between them and the pool.

"They found the lamb in the swimming pool. They got it out and it was OK."

She said she did not know how the lamb had escaped from the small flock of Jacob sheep in a nearby field.

Praising her lifesaving cat, Ms Lewis told the Gloucestershire Echo: "She's a real little superstar."


Story filed: 17:07 Monday 6th October 2003

[gemini26]

Man to question parrot in court

A man from the US state of Virginia says he can prove his lost parrot has been adopted - by questioning it in court.

David DeGroff is convinced his 11-year-old African Grey parrot named Loulou, has been adopted by a woman in Pennsylvania.

He says he can prove Loulou is his because the bird can whistle television theme tunes and say "Daddy's gotta go to work."

The bird flew out of his apartment in Alexandria in April. A month later Nina Weaver, from Newburg, Pennsylvania, adopted an African grey parrot from the DC Animal Shelter.

DeGroff called the shelter in mid-May and was told an African grey had recently been adopted. Mr DeGroff then used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the adoption records. He's seeking $15,000 (£9,000) for pain and suffering if the bird turns out to be his.

DeGroff said he drove to Ms Weaver's home, but no one answered. He said he saw a bird through the window and felt a connection. "She seemed like she tried to communicate with me," Mr DeGroff said.

Ms Weaver said: "We have no comment. We're not going to fight this in the paper."

© Associated Press


Story filed: 14:56 Monday 6th October 2003

[Jolie Rouge]

cool Gemi - I read that one in my local paper but couldn't locate it online

[Jolie Rouge]

Half of All Drivers Disobey This Law

Think about this the next time you're in a hurry: Almost half of all drivers either plow right through stop signs near school zones without even slowing down or only come to a rolling stop. That puts children in potentially grave danger when they cross the street to go to school, according to a national survey of motorist behavior conducted by the National SAFE KIDS Campaign and FedEx Express.


Some of the findings:

--7 percent of motorists did not slow down at all before passing through stop signs at intersections.

--37 percent of motorists rolled through the stop signs.

--24 percent of drivers did not come to a complete stop at the stop sign--even when pedestrians were crossing in front of their cars.

--25 percent of vehicles stopped in or past the crosswalks.

--32 percent of motorists violated the stop signs when only child pedestrians were present.

"The majority of motorists are putting child pedestrians at serious risk because they fail to stop at stop signs or crosswalks," says Dr. Martin Eichelberger, president of SAFE KIDS and director of Emergency Trauma and Burn Services at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Here's a sobering statistic: Pedestrian injury remains a leading cause of unintentional injury-related death among children. Each year, stop sign violations are associated with approximately 200 fatal crashes and 17,000 non-fatal injury crashes.

[Jolie Rouge]

Parents Told About Apparent Suicide Pact
BY AMY LORENTZEN

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Police woke the parents of nine high school students before dawn to warn them of a suspected a suicide pact a week after a 15-year-old classmate hanged himself.

Lincoln High School Principal Al Graziano said a student was overheard talking about suicide at a convenience store Monday night, and later told authorities that others were involved. Officers went to each student's home early Tuesday.

Many involved were freshmen and sophomores, five girls and four boys, police said. They all were friends of William Metzger Jr., a 15-year-old who hanged himself last week following a car crash that killed three of his friends on Sept. 23. The boy's funeral was Monday.

``There are some problems to be dealt with, obviously,'' said Sgt. Tony Steverson, police spokesman.


Five of the students were taken to hospitals ``to get some counseling, some help.'' He said one student ``purportedly had taken an unknown substance'' but was fine after receiving treatment.


Graziano said he didn't know what the substance was but that the girl had told authorities she had taken a sleep aid because she couldn't sleep.


Lincoln High School, just west of downtown Des Moines, has 2,200 students.


Freshman Cierra Jones was among those contacted by police early Tuesday.


``They asked if I had signed a suicide pact saying I was going to kill myself for Billy,'' Jones, 14, told the Des Moines Register. ``I had no idea what was going on. I didn't hear about this or anything until they just showed up at my house this morning. I know I didn't sign anything. It's just really confusing.''


Angellita Jones said she's been keeping close watch on her daughter since the deaths, saying ``She has just been very, very upset about this.''



10/08/03 11:12