Cuba has ordered jailed punk rocker Gorki Aguila, an outspoken critic of Fidel Castro and the communist government, to stand trial on Friday for “social dangerousness,” a charge that could carry up to four years in prison. Authorities arrested the 39-year-old lead singer of Porno para Ricardo at his Havana home on Monday, shortly after the band had completed work on a new album. Cuban law defines “social dangerousness” as behavior contrary to “communist morality,” and police use it to detain offenders before they have a chance to commit a crime. Performing songs with angry lyrics that poke fun at or openly insult Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, who became Cuba’s president in February, Porno para Ricardo is banned from official Cuban airwaves.

Italians have been left shocked by a ferocious assault on Franciscan monks by hooded thugs at a monastery in the foothills of the Alps, which has been compared to incidents seen in the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

Father Sergio Baldini, 48, the guardian of the San Colombano Belmonte monastery near Turin, and three elderly monks from the Franciscan order of Friars Minor, were having their evening meal when they were attacked by three hooded men who gagged and bound them before punching, kicking and beating them with clubs.

Father Baldini suffered severe head injuries but also has “serious respiratory problems” because he choked on his food while being assaulted, doctors say. He has had brain surgery and was in a coma.

THE faces over at the Wine Spectator are redder than a bottle of fine Bordeaux this week, after the highly respected magazine gave a prestigious award to a restaurant that never existed.

Wine connoisseur and watchdog Robin Goldstein, curious as to how the mag selected the world’s best wine restaurants, submitted an application for an “Award of Excellence” for a phony eatery he called “Osteria L’Intrepido” with a Milan address.

He set up a fake Web site, created a menu of “somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes,” and invented a high-priced wine list that included “some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades” - among them, a 1982 Brunello di Montalcino that “smells barnyardy and tastes decayed.” Still, the imaginary eatery was honored in this month’s issue.

A Connecticut youth baseball team with a phenomenal 9-year-old pitcher has been disqualified because its team is too good.

The team, Will Power Fitness, has an 8-0 record thanks in large part to pitcher Jericho Scott, the New Haven Register reports. His pitching is so fast and accurate, the Liga Juvenil De Baseball De New Haven asked the team’s coach, Wilfred Vidro, to replace him so he wouldn’t frighten other players.

“The spirit of the league was community, family, well-being, nurturing,” Peter Noble, the league’s attorney, told the Register. “It’s an extended family and it’s been disrupted.”

A federal judge Tuesday lifted a gag order on three MIT students who were barred from talking publicly about security flaws they discovered in the state’s automated mass transit fare system, even as a lawyer for the agency acknowledged the system was “compromised.”

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. rejected a request by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to impose a five-month injunction blocking the students from revealing anything about the security system. O’Toole also dissolved a temporary restraining order that had prohibited the students from speaking about their findings this month at DefCon, an annual computer hackers’ convention in Las Vegas.

The transit agency sued after learning of a preconference Web advertisement for the presentation by the students — Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa — that said “Want free subway rides for life?”

Several major news organizations, including The Associated Press, prematurely reported the death Wednesday of U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio, who had suffered a brain hemorrhage while driving in suburban Cleveland.

The reports were corrected after a doctor said at an afternoon news conference that Tubbs Jones was in critical condition with limited brain function. The Cleveland Clinic announced later that the 58-year-old Democrat died about 6 p.m. Wednesday.

Various Democratic officials who spoke on condition of anonymity provided the basis for most of the erroneous reports. They were out for anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour on CNN, CBS, Fox and Web sites for The Washington Post and The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer as well as the AP.

The AP moved its one-sentence, Washington-dated NewsAlert reporting the death at 2:30 p.m., attributing the information to a Democratic Party official. After the hospital news conference, the AP moved out a corrected alert at 2:44 p.m.

According to AP Washington News Editor Matt Yancey, the AP had spoken earlier to Democratic and Republican officials about Tubbs Jones’ condition and they declined to speak on the record or on background. One of the Democratic officials later called back and, willing to speak on condition of anonymity, said Tubbs Jones had died.

The Italian edition of Vanity Fair said that it had found George Hussein Onyango Obama living in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Mr Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate’s half-brothers, spoke for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic contender.

“No-one knows who I am,” he told the magazine, before claiming: “I live here on less than a dollar a month.”

The Democratic National Convention Committee has hired a disgraced former Denver police lieutenant to coordinate security at the Colorado Convention Center during the convention.

But the committee isn’t talking about why they hired Gary Lauricella or if they knew about his background when they hired him.

Lauricella was hired as a “security consultant,” according to the DNCC. One convention center employee said he has been managing security at the convention center since mid-July. The Democrats are holding numerous convention-related events at the Colorado Convention Center next week.

Several current Denver police officers who spoke on the condition their names not be used expressed surprise that the DNCC would hire Lauricella as a top security consultant, given his spotty background.

n 2003, a CBS4 investigation named Lauricella, a 29-year police veteran, as one of three top commanders in the Denver Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons Bureau who were routinely leaving their posts in the middle of the afternoon to work an outside job as a $30 an hour crossing guard for a private school.

They’re the government… and remember, they’re here to help. A bumbling inspector with the Transportation Safety Administration apparently has some explaining to do, after nine American Eagle regional jets were grounded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday.

Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage… reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes’ noses as handholds.

“The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers,” one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. “They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder.”

Officials with American Eagle confirmed to ANN the problem was discovered by maintenance personnel, who inspected the planes Tuesday morning… and questioned why the TAT probes all gave similar error indications.

One Eagle pilot says had the pilots not been so attentive, the damaged probes could have caused problems inflight. TSA agents “are now doing things to our aircraft that may put our lives, and the lives of our passengers at risk,” the pilot wrote on the forum.

The City of Denver has been working to make sure everything is in tip-top shape for all the visitors coming to town for the Democratic National Convention, and now a local salon is helping in that effort.

It seems to be a first — don’t move the homeless, clean them up. That was the work of one salon and the recipients didn’t even seem to care if the Democrats were coming to town. Sly’s Salon at 17th and Grant was offering free haircuts to the homeless Monday.

“To give them haircuts and make them all spiffed up for the Democratic National Convention, because they are part of our community as well,” said Ghandia Gohnson, co-owner of Sly’s Salon.

Turns out Bigfoot was just a rubber suit.

Two researchers on a quest to prove the existence of Bigfoot say that the carcass encased in a block of ice - handed over to them for an undisclosed sum by two men who claimed to have found it - was slowly thawed out, and discovered to be a rubber gorilla outfit.

The revelation comes just days after a much ballyhooed news conference was held in California to proclaim that the remains of the creature found in the North Georgia mountains was the legendary man-ape.

Steve Kulls, executive director of squatchdetective.com and host of Squatchdetective Radio, says in a posting on a Web site run by Bigfoot researcher Tom Biscardi that as the “evidence” was thawed, the claim began to unravel as a giant hoax.

First, the hair sample was burned and “melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair,” Kulls said in the posting.

Kevin Kearney, 26, is in a critical condition in hospital after ignoring appeals to take shelter as Tropical Storm Fay hit Fort Lauderdale beach in Florida.

The kite surfer was whipped into the sky by a sudden gust of wind, thrown down on the sand and then picked up again by a second gust which carried him over the heads of a local camera crew. Their footage can be seen here.

The wind hurled him across the street and into the side of a building, where eyewitnesses rushed to his aid. He is now being treated at Broward General Medical Center in the town.

“The wind was whipping around, picking him up and dragging him around,” said Lois Bowman of the Fort Lauderdale fire service.

“Is there a lesson here? Whenever there’s a storm warning, use common sense.”

THE Palestinian protesters massed at the fence expected tear gas and rubber bullets; what they got instead was a putrid yellow wind, Israel’s newest weapon against West Bank demonstrators.

The noxious mist, which Israeli police refer to as “skunk,” was used for the first time earlier this month, when a truck-mounted cannon sprayed it over the heads of protesters, sending them racing down the hillside, retching and tearing off their shirts to try to escape the stench.

Following an undercover operation, Colorado police this month broke up a prostitution operation running out of a massage parlor known as Tokyo Sauna. Broomfield Police Department officers arrested a 54-year-old woman on a prostitution charge and a 65-year-old male customer for patronizing a hooker. But the big catch was the 48-year-old woman who allegedly ran the prostitution operation. She was charged with pimping, pandering, and keeping a place of prostitution. Mi Sook You is her name

A premature baby who was pronounced dead was “brought back to life” Sunday after five hours in Nahariya Hospital.

The baby girl, who was in a cooler at the hospital, suddenly showed signs of life and was being treated in the premature baby ward.

Doctors estimated that the cooler brought the fetus “back to life.”

The mother, 26, from a Western Galilee village, was in the fifth month of her pregnancy when she underwent a series of tests, during which it was discovered that she was suffering from internal bleeding and that the embryo had ceased to show signs of life.

The woman underwent an abortion and the baby, weighing 610 grams, was extracted from her womb without a pulse, hospital officials said.

A senior doctor pronounced the baby dead and she was transferred to the cooler.

Five hours later, the woman’s husband came to the hospital to take what he thought was his dead baby girl for burial.

When the baby was taken out of the cooler, she began to breath. The premature baby was then taken to the intensive care ward, where doctors were attempting to save her life.

A sidewalk in Times Square turned risky when an entire window pane from a building under renovation simply gave way, shattered into shards and fell more than 40 stories onto scaffolding.

It happened at 1 Times Square near 42nd Street and Broadway at about 2 p.m. Sunday.

The Emergency Unit endeavored to remove a dangling chunk of glass poking from a high-rise window that remained after the pane fell.

No one was hurt, but police closed Broadway from 42nd to 43rd streets for a short time as a precaution.

This is the third time in a week that glass has plummeted from a skyscraper.

The tie that binds John and Rebecca Jackson is about 4 feet by 14 feet, woven of herringbone twill linen. It once led to their romance; years later, it still dominates their thoughts and fills their conversations.

It brought Rebecca, an Orthodox Jew, to the Catholic Church; it led John to suspend himself from an 8-foot-tall cross to study how blood might have stained the cloth. Together, the two have committed to memory every crease, scorch mark and unexplained stain in their years-long pursuit of the mystery

Beijing’s ruthless demand for perfection was highlighted when Tan Zongliang was made to squirm on China Central Television after missing out in the men’s 50m pistol competition.

Even though it was his first ever Olympic medal, he was harried until he bowed his head and admitted he had “let his country down” for not getting gold.

His grilling goes against the central belief of International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin, who stated: “The important thing is not to win, but to take part.”

And it has angered some residents Sky News spoke to in Beijing, who said they felt uncomfortable watching it, and a bronze medal was something to be proud of.

A second group of Spanish Olympic athletes has been photographed making “slit-eyed” gestures, threatening to overshadow the Beijing Games with a row over racial stereotyping.

The latest photo to emerge shows Spanish women tennis players pulling the pose, apparently in anticipation of their Federation Cup match against China in April.

Pictures of the Spanish men’s and women’s basketball teams making the gesture, a crude impersonation of Chinese people, were published in adverts in Spanish newspapers earlier this week.

A drunk fan of Olympic competitors from Belgium has been identified as the country’s sports minister.

A loud Belgian fan had been shouting out during a doubles match between Argentinian and Belgian players.

Eventually Argentine tennis ace David Nalbandian lost his temper and told him to be quiet.

But other Belgian supporters recognised the “very drunk” man as sports minister Michel Daerden, media in the country have reported.

Is the defendant’s dock at the International Criminal Court reserved for leaders of small and poor countries that defy the West? Not if Rwanda has its way. It wants to charge some of France’s most celebrated leaders of the 1990s as collaborators in genocide.

Last week the government of Rwanda issued a damning 500-page report documenting France’s participation in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This marks a remarkable turnaround in the deeply politicized world of human rights reporting. Usually, such reporting takes the form of governments or human rights groups based in the West condemning poor countries for having political or social systems that do not meet Western standards.

Now a wretched African country has turned the table.

All who study the Rwandan genocide, as I did while researching a book about that ill-fated country, come away stunned by what they learn about French support of mass murder. France was so eager to defend a client regime against English-speaking rebels that, as the new report asserts, it gave that regime “political, military, diplomatic and logistic support” and “directly assisted” its genocidal campaign.

The report names 33 present and former French politicians and military officers as conspirators, among them the late President François Mitterrand and other well-known figures like former foreign minister Alan Juppé and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin.

A holiday flight between to Crete had to be diverted after a brawl erupted among drunken passengers, it has been revealed.

An eye-witness told how one man began smashing overhead luggage bins before the captain decided to land the plane in Venice.

Aoife O’Reilly, 18, a student from Dublin, said the men involved were all over 30 years of age and had obviously been drinking.
Futura Gael

She said: ‘We were up in the air and two guys - who were surprisingly a lot older than us - started fights.

‘Then we had to be redirected to Venice for a couple of hours. The police came on and had to get them off.

‘They had a couple of drinks on them, they were extremely aggressive.

A gifted 15-year-old student from India had to be rushed to the hospital after drinking liquid nitrogen during a science class at Princeton University.

The class was part of a program run by the Connecticut-based Summer Institute for the Gifted. It isn’t affiliated with the university.

The students were performing a popular experiment in which liquid nitrogen is used to make ice cream.

Cinderella, Snow White, Tinkerbell and other fictional fixtures of modern-day childhood were handcuffed, frisked and loaded into police vans Thursday at the culmination of a labor protest that brought a touch of reality to the Happiest Place on Earth.

The arrest of the 32 protesters, many of whom wore costumes representing famous Disney characters, came at the end of an hour-long march to Disneyland’s gates from one of three Disney-owned hotels at the center of a labor dispute.

Those who were arrested sat in a circle on a busy intersection outside the park holding hands until they were placed in plastic handcuffs and led to two police vans while hundreds of hotel workers cheered and chanted.

Hat tip to Trish!

“High School Musical” underwear for young girls have sparked outrage — because they have the words “Dive in” on them.

A British woman bought a packet of five pairs, with a “Disney-approved” design promoting the hit movie, for her seven-year-old granddaughter.

“When she put them on, myself and my daughter thought, ‘Oh my goodness.’ It is inappropriate because it is sexually suggestive,” Sue Ralph, a 57-year-old civil servant, said. “You just never know who could see that and think it was a bit too enticing for a young child to be wearing.”

One was a historian and assistant to John Kennedy, another was the chef who first introduced French cuisine to American households, and a third was the father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.

In their every day lives they had nothing in common but Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Julia Childs and Miles Copeland shared a secret life - serving in an international spy ring at a time when Hitler was threatening the world.

Their work and that of thousands of other members of the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA, will be revealed today when previously classified files are opened by the National Archives in the USA. For the first time, the files identifiying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralised intelligence agency will be released and the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives exposed.

Members of the OSS, which was created by President Franklin Roosevelt in World War II to help fight Nazism, included historians, actors, lawyers and athletes. They created propoganda, infiltrated enemy ranks and encouraged resistance amongst foreign troops.

This is the moment Hungarian weightlifter Janos Baranyai’s first Olympics ended in agony when he dislocated his right elbow in the ugliest moment yet of the Olympic weightlifting competition.

Baranyai was trying to snatch 148kg in his third lift in the men’s 77kg division, when his elbow popped out of its socket.

No longer able to support the weight of the barbell, his right forearm bent backward. The 24-year-old Hungarian fell to the floor in shock, shaking and crying out in pain.

Hungary’s coaching staff and competition officials rushed to Baranyai’s aid as he lay trembling on the floor, his arm limp and twisted out of position.

It’s more than 7-feet tall. Weighs over 500 pounds and walked upright — three “Bigfoot” seekers, including a Redwood City man, Wednesday claimed they have proof that they have found the body of the elusive creature in the wilds of Georgia.

And on Friday, at a news conference in Palo Alto, they say they will present DNA evidence to prove the carcass of “Rickmat” is that of a bigfoot.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, Georgia residents who lead Bigfoot-tracking expeditions, say they found the body of what appears to be a Bigfoot in the woods of northern Georgia and will join local Bigfoot researcher Tom Biscardi at the news conference, according to Robert Barrows, who is publicizing the event.

Among the creatures’s other physical characteristics of the body — according to the hunters website — http://www.searchingforbigfoot.com/ — were flat feet similar to human feet. Its footprint is 16 ¾ inches long and the length from palm to tip of the middle finger is 11 ½ inches long.

“I think you’ll find that this is the real deal,” Barrows said of the alleged discovery.

Hat tip to Kara!

A black bear repeatedly mauled an 8-year-old boy Monday evening near a popular motor trail on the outskirts of Gatlinburg, and an animal matching its description was later killed by park rangers.

The boy’s father also was injured while successfully defending his son from the animal, said officials with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but none of their injuries were believed to be life-threatening.

The dead bear was described as a “55-pound male yearling” that was probably born in the spring of 2007, according to park spokesman Bob Miller. Rangers were confident they’d bagged the right animal but won’t know for sure until a necropsy is performed at the University of Tennessee, he said.

A GIANT inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before it landed again.

The art work, titled Complex Shit, is the size of a house.

The wind carried it 200m from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children’s home, said museum director Juri Steiner.

The inflatable turd broke the window at the children’s home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Mr Steiner said.

A youth camp run by a neo-Nazi group has been broken up by police near Rostock in northern Germany.

Thirty-nine teenagers and children who were attending the camp have been returned to their homes, police said.

The neo-Nazi group that ran the camp had described it as a youth adventure holiday. The police raid uncovered racist propaganda and Nazi material.

The head of Germany’s equivalent of the FBI told a newspaper neo-Nazis were adopting increasingly violent tactics.

In an interview with Der Tagesspiegel, Joerg Ziercke said neo-Nazis were “attacking left-wingers and police officers with an aggression that can be seen as a change in strategy”.

At least 38 Warao Indians have died in remote villages in Venezuela, and medical experts suspect an outbreak of rabies spread by bites from vampire bats.

Laboratory investigations have yet to confirm the cause, but the symptoms point to rabies, according to two researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and other medical experts.

The two UC Berkeley researchers — the husband-and-wife team of anthropologist Charles Briggs and public health specialist Dr. Clara Mantini-Briggs — said the symptoms include fever, body pains, tingling in the feet followed by progressive paralysis, and an extreme fear of water. Victims tend to have convulsions and grow rigid before death.

Hackers brought down the website for Russia’s state-sponsored news agency, RIA Novosti, today with a series of cyber attacks. This in the wake of three days of fighting between Russia and Georgia. “‘The DNS-servers and the site itself have been coming under severe attack,’ said Maxim Kuznetsov, head of the RIA Novosti IT department.” It’s hard to imagine why in the world anyone would want to cripple good ol’ RIA Novosti’s news-spreading capabilities.

INVISIBILITY devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.

The breakthrough could lead to systems for rendering anything from people to large objects, such as tanks and ships, invisible to the eye – although this is still years off.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light’s direction of travel. The world’s two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week.

It follows earlier work at Imperial College London that achieved similar results with microwaves. Like light, these are a form of electromagnetic radiation but their longer wave-length makes them far easier to manipulate. Achieving the same effect with visible light is a big advance.

Underlying the work is the idea that bending visible light around an object will hide it.

Former President Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI’s conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas, according to newly released records from Ford’s FBI files.

Ford, still a congressman at the time, also told a senior FBI official about internal panel disputes over hiring staff, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s timetable for completing the final report on the assassination and what panel members said about the FBI.

British teenagers partying on the ledge of a cliff were left to sober up overnight after rescue crews decided they were too drunk to be rescued, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The teens called the Coast Guard when a friend suffered an epileptic fit near Long Quarry Point, outside Torquay, Devon. Rescuers were not able to airlift all eight boys and girls to safety, due to rainfall and rough terrain.

In the end it was decided to winch the ill teen off the cliff, and leave the rest, whom the Coast Guard described as “under the influence,” where they were.

In a grim attempt at revenge against his estranged wife, a British businessman committed suicide by decapitation in his Aston Martin sports car, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported Friday.

According to the Mail, Gerald Mellin, 54, had been consumed with dark thoughts surrounding his 34-year-old wife’s decision to leave him.

The day before his death, a court had granted Mirielle Mellin additional alimony, the Mail reported.

Following the decision, in the last contact with his wife, Mellin sent a text message reading, “Congratulations, XXX.”

Hat tip to Kara!

After months of flat-out lying to the public, former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards finally copped to having a sleazy extramarital fling while his wife was battling breast cancer - but coldly denied ever loving the woman or fathering her daughter.

Edwards, 55, admitted in an interview that aired last night on ABC’s “Nightline” that he bedded Rielle Hunter, 44.

The well-coiffed cad said he told his wife and family long ago about the affair, but “had hoped that it would never become public.”

Parts of Russia’s 58th Army — including 150 tanks and armored vehicles — reportedly were moving Friday on the capital of South Ossetia after Georgian troops entered the city in an attempt to crush separatist forces seeking to control the breakaway province.

Kakha Lamaia, a member of Georgia’s National Security Council, told Reuters the two countries are “very close” to war, if not already at war.

“If it’s not war, then we are very close to it,” Lamaia said. “The Russians have invaded Georgia and we are under attack.”

There are some who think that the new particle accelerator built outside of Geneva in Switzerland might create tiny black holes — which could grow big enough to suck up the Earth. Balderdash, say physicists.

The video looks a bit like a scene from a low-budget sci-fi horror film. A tiny hole slowly begins sucking in bits of the Earth in Switzerland with mountains, lakes and cities quickly falling into the growing gap. And it just keeps on growing — and growing. By the end of the 38 second movie, the entire planet has been swallowed up — and all that’s left is a shimmering ring in the inky blackness of outer space.

Absurd, perhaps. But a brief look around Internet blogs, and especially YouTube, makes it clear that there are a number of people out there who believe it is a very real possibility. The gigantic particle accelerator just now being completed outside Geneva at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — known as CERN — is set to be switched on soon. And some are concerned that, once the research facility begins bashing subatomic particles together at 99.999991 percent of the speed of light, dangerous black holes could be created and spread out of control.

The fear has spread fast and far in cyberspace. In addition, a scientist at the University of Tübingen, Dr. Otto E. Rössler, has lent a certain amount of academic weight to the skepticism. So much so that a group of German physicists has now published an open letter carrying assurances that the particle accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is in fact safe.

“There is no way that the LHC will produce black holes capable of swallowing up the Earth,” reads the letter from the Committee for Elementary Particle Physics (KET), a group of leading quantum physicists in Germany. “This claim is based on extremely well tested theories of physics and on observations of the cosmos.”

The head of KET, Dr. Peter Mättig, a particle physicist with the University of Wuppertal, concedes that disaster theories have not made much headway in the general public. “I don’t think there are many who believe it,” he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “But it is notable how often we have been asked about the problem. And we especially want to refute those, like Dr. Rössler, who try to use science to back up their claims.”

Police and firefighters were called to the University of Texas’ Jester Hall to free 26 cheerleaders who had crammed themselves into an elevator.

A group of 14- to 17-year-olds attending Texas Cheer Camp in Austin decided to see how many girls they could squeeze into the elevator around 6 p.m. Tuesday, campus police said.

The elevator successfully descended from the fourth floor to the first, but the doors refused to open.

The panicked girls managed to wiggle a few cell phones free to call for help. But it took about 25 minutes before a repairman was able to fix the door, police said.

“It’s dangerous actually,” said Rhonda Weldon, director of communications for the UT Police Department. “They’re lucky that that’s all that happened.”

A privately held rocket company on Wednesday blamed a design error for its latest failure to reach orbit, which caused the loss of three government satellites and human ashes, including the remains of astronaut Gordon Cooper and “Star Trek” actor James Doohan.

The two-stage Falcon 1 rocket, which blasted off from a Central Pacific atoll Saturday night, separated as planned on its way to space, but leftover thrust after engine cutoff caused the first stage to fall back and hit the second stage, according to Hawthorne-based SpaceX.

The rocket, containing the remains of 208 people, dropped in the Pacific and was not recovered.

The family of Doohan, who played Scotty on the television show “Star Trek,” could not be reached Wednesday night.

Greyhound has scrapped an ad campaign that extolled the relaxing upside of bus travel after one of its passengers was accused of beheading and cannibalizing another traveler.

The ad’s tag line was “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage.’”

Greyhound spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh said Wednesday a billboard and some tunnel posters near a bus terminal in Toronto are still up and would be removed later in the day.

“Greyhound knows how important it is to get these removed and we are doing everything possible,” Wambaugh said. “This is something that we immediately asked to be done last week, realizing that these could be offensive.”

A mountain lion crept through an open door into a house outside Denver, snatched a Labrador retriever from a bedroom where two people were sleeping and left the dog’s dead body outside, wildlife managers said Tuesday.

No one else was hurt in the home about 14 miles southwest of Denver.

Wildlife officials later trapped the 130-pound male cat using the dog’s body as bait and fatally shot it.

Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Tyler Baskfield said the cat entered the house through open French doors early Monday and fled with the Labrador after the owners woke up.

“The people got up and looked around and saw the mountain lion’s tail leaving the house,” Baskfield said.

Mack and Jacquie Anderson told Denver television stations that their 12-year-old Labrador named Scout was killed by the lion. Another dog sleeping in the room wasn’t harmed.

Another decapitated goat was found early Sunday morning on Christobal Road, across the street from the Mary Esther Library.

It is the fourth goat decapitated and left in a public place this year, and the seventh since September 2007.

Officials arrived at the intersection of Christobal Road and Hollywood Avenue just before 7 a.m. and discovered the body of a male pygmy goat on the southeast side of Christobal Road, said Michele Nicholson, public information officer for the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office.

She added that no blood was at the scene, leading officials to believe the animal was killed elsewhere and transported to the site.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER is releasing the photograph that the world has been waiting for – the first-ever picture of John Edwards and his love child!

The stunning “spy photo” shows the former presidential contender holding his infant daughter Frances Quinn Hunter at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles – where the ENQUIRER caught him visiting the baby’s mother, his mistress Rielle Hunter.

Edwards is holding his love child while standing in front of a distinctive striped curtain.

The same window covering hangs in each one of the hotel’s guest rooms – and is clearly visible in photos of guest rooms on the hotel’s Web site.

“These photos are damning proof,” said a source close to the situation.

“He’s been caught lying about his affair with Rielle and their love child for many months – and now the proof against him is piling up.

“His elaborate coverup is unraveling at the seams.”

Israeli officials say a 17-year-old girl who sneaked into a zoo at night with a friend was attacked by an elephant and hospitalized.

An employee of the Safari nature park near Tel Aviv says the couple entered the park before dawn Friday by climbing over a wall, and then entered the elephants’ enclosure.

Mori Hertzenstein told Army Radio that the girl then approached the pen of one of the male elephants, who grabbed her with his trunk. Hertzenstein said “the elephant, which is a giant animal, hurt her.”

Hat tip to Kara!

The ground is so hot in one part of Southern California it can melt your shoes right off your feet.

An unexplained “thermal anomaly” caused a patch of land in Ventura County to reach a temperature of over 800 degrees on Friday, baffling experts who have been monitoring the area for weeks.

The anomaly was discovered after the land got so hot, it started a brush fire and burned three acres. Firefighters were brought to the scene a month ago after reports of a blaze, but by the time they arrived found only smoldering dirt and brush.

Firefighters took no chances with the smoking ground, clearing brush near the fumes and cutting a fire line around the area to prevent a blaze

It was Katie and Darren’s wedding day and they were in the clouds — strapped to the top of biplanes reciting vows 1,000 feet above the earth.

Katie Hodgson, 23, took to the skies Tuesday in a full bridal gown on the top wing of red-and-white plane operated by Team Guinot, a group of stunt pilots. Groom Darren McWalters, 24, flew by her side on an identical plane, while the Rev. George Bringham — flying ahead of the couple — married them over an airborne communications system.

Sky News television footage of the ceremony showed the bride’s dressed fluttering wildly in foul weather as the three shouted to make themselves heard over the din of the aircraft.

“I ask you therefore, will you love her, honor and keep her and be faithful to her so long as you both shall live?” Bringham yelled.

“I will!” McWalters yelled back.

Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters says a Springfield Township man, accused of running an “underwear con” to get near young children, is a predator who deserves to be locked up for a “very long time because he will continue to prey upon young children unless he is removed from the community”. Prosecutors today released new information in the case against 44 year old Ben Hawkins.

Hawkins allegedly conned parents into thinking their children were participating in an “underwear survey” in order to get close to them for sexual contact. Prosecutors now say Hawkins had “unpermitted contact” with 11 children, boys and girls ages 9 to 16, between March and July of this year.

Today a grand jury indicted Hawkins on 19 counts, including gross sexual imposition, importuning, and kidnapping.