Wal-Mart officials are looking at security tapes after an announcement was made for “all black people” to leave a store in South Jersey.

A man used the public-address system at the Route 42 store in Washington Township Sunday night and calmly announced: “Attention Wal-Mart customers: All black people leave the store now.”

Patricia Covington and Shelia Ellington were inside the store when it happened and told the Courier Post that customers and store employees looked stuneed when they heard it.

“In 2010, I want to know why such statements are being made because it flies in the face of what we teach them [our kids] at home, and that’s tolerance for people,” said Ellington.

Ellington and other customers let store management and police know they were upset. They asked the store to use the same announcement system to apologize to customers that night, which it did.

A man armed with a high-powered gas pistol tried to break into Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s tomb on Red Square in Moscow, shooting a policeman in the process.

The man, named as Sergey Karpentsov, is quoted as saying he wanted to let loose a volley of bullets at Lenin’s carefully embalmed corpse, one of the Russian capital’s most popular and ghoulish tourist attractions.

“My main demand is the quick bulldozing of the mausoleum which contains the body of the anti-Christ,” he said.

“I wanted to open fire on the tomb with an assault rifle but I was advised not to do that in case the tomb is armour-plated.”

“I have drawn attention to this issue with my actions,” he added.

Lenin’s waxy presence at the heart of the Russian capital 86 years after his death continues to divide Russian society, with many older people believing he should be left where he is.

Game show contestants turn torturers in a new psychological experiment for French television, zapping a man with electricity until he cries for mercy — then zapping him again until he seems to drop dead.

“The Game of Death” has all the trappings of a traditional television quiz show, with a roaring crowd and a glamorous and well-known hostess urging the players on under gaudy studio lights.

But the contestants did not know they were taking part in an experiment to find out whether television could push them to outrageous lengths, and which has prompted comparisons with the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

“We were amazed to find that 81 percent of the participants obeyed” the sadistic orders of the television presenter, said Christophe Nick, the maker of the documentary for the state-owned France 2 channel which airs Wednesday.

“They are not equipped to disobey,” he added. “They don’t want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don’t manage to,” he told AFP.

A £90,000-a-year housing boss leads a sordid secret life – dressing up as a Nazi for sick racist sex games.

By day Gareth Mead works in one of Britain’s most ethnically-diverse communities.Mead, 44, is in charge of social housing and homelessness in Hammersmith and Fulham, where his duties include helping decide who is eligible for a ­council house or emergency homeless shelter.

But at night he poses in front of a swastika in full SS regalia and tells other lovers of the vile fetish: “Gas the Jews and Wogs.”

In a series of shocking photos seen by the Sunday Mirror, the high-ranking council official shows off his array of fascist outfits.

In one shot, Mead reclines on a sofa, wearing jackboots, leather trousers, a khaki shirt with swastika armband and a Nazi officers’ hat.

In another photo, shaven-headed Mead stares menacingly into the camera, dressed in “bovver boy” boots, bomber jacket and swastika T-shirt.

Mead also sent racist texts to men he met on fetish websites. In one he wrote: “Turn on the furnaces for those Jewish boys and let them burn in hell with us 2 Nazis j****** off on their terrified screams.”

David Cameron is caught up in an extraordinary ‘dwarfgate’ row with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The dispute centres on a claim that Mr Cameron made a remark about ‘hidden dwarfs’ while discussing a photograph showing himself with Mr Sarkozy – who is seven inches shorter than the Tory leader.

The French government was reportedly furious about the comment.

And Shadow Chancellor George Osborne allegedly fuelled the Franco-Tory war by describing a box placed beneath a speaker’s lectern as a ‘Sarkozy box’, before bursting into a fit of giggles.

The jibes, made over a period of three days, led to French officials remonstrating with British counterparts, according to BBC2’s Newsnight.

Villagers in a remote Alaska region are blaming the death of a 32-year-old schoolteacher on wolves after her body was found along on isolated road, though an autopsy completed Thursday was inconclusive.

The autopsy concluded that Candice Berner was killed by animals, the Alaska State Troopers said.

The agency’s chief said the autopsy could not determine for sure if wolves were responsible but it ruled out other causes of death.

Col. Audie Holloway said DNA tests might determine whether wolves are responsible.

Berner, who had arrived in Alaska just last August, appeared to have been attacked while jogging and her body pulled off the road, villagers in Chignik Lake told The Anchorage Daily News.

Four people riding snowmachines came across her body about 6:30 p.m. Monday, the newspaper reported.

“There was a blood spot on the road,” Gregory Kalmakoff, 23, told the Daily News by phone Wednesday. “I turned around, looked and there was drag marks going down a little hill.”

Authorities say a man tried to sexually assault a Southern California jogger who escaped by jumping off a cliff and sliding about 100 feet down a steep hillside.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s Sgt. Derek Sabatini says the woman was taken to a hospital Friday with cuts and bruises from the fall in Malibu.

She told deputies she had finished a run at about noon at Point Dume State Beach and was standing at the edge of a cliff when she was grabbed from behind.

She says she and the man struggled for several minutes before she was able to break away.

That’s when the woman ran and jumped off the cliff.

They were 51 young men who met a grisly death far from home, their heads chopped off and their bodies thrown into a mass grave.

Their resting place was unknown until last year, when workers excavating for a road near the London 2012 Olympic sailing venue in Weymouth, England, unearthed the grave.

But questions remained about who the men were, how long they had been there and why they had been decapitated.

On Friday, officials revealed that analysis of the men’s teeth shows they were Vikings, executed with sharp blows to the head around a thousand years ago.

They were killed during the Dark Ages, when Vikings frequently invaded the region.

“To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development,” said David Score, project manager for Oxford Archaeology, which excavated the remains.

“Any mass grave is a relatively rare find, but to find one on this scale, from this period of history, is extremely unusual and presents an incredible opportunity to learn more about what is happening in Dorset at this time.”

A woman dropped her gym bag on the tracks of a crowded Upper East Side subway station yesterday — then made the fatal decision to jump after it as screaming straphangers watched in horror.The 48-year-old victim was crushed by a northbound No. 6 train barreling into the 77th Street Station below Lexington Avenue as she tried desperately to claw her way back to the platform.

“She had one choice to make and seconds to make it,” said Alfonso McGruder, 55, of The Bronx, who witnessed the tragedy. “She didn’t make the one that would have saved her life.

Rose Mankos lost her life trying to retrieve a nylon LeSportsac bag filled with exercise clothes, toiletries and her cellphone, sources said.”She tried to go under the platform because the train was bearing down on her. Then she tried to climb onto the platform, but she couldn’t do that. Then she just froze.”

“People were yelling at the lady on the tracks when they saw the train coming,” said Hakeem Nhl, 53, a vendor on the opposite platform. “People were screaming, ‘Oh, my, God! Oh, my God!’ “

Witnesses reported that the train operator sounded his horn eight times and attempted to brake.

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations.

At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould.

Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit Cursed Bread still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother.

Another man shouted:  “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Time magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.”

Eventually, it was determined that the best-known local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. Another theory was the bread had been poisoned with organic mercury.

The scientists who produced both alternative explanations, he writes, worked for the Swiss-based Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.

However, H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Most pet owners take steps to protect their animals. In Santa Rosa, California, Odessa Gunn worried a car or coyote might one day claim the lives of her dogs, which is why she and her husband, renowned American cyclist Levi Leipheimer, fenced in their property.

But Fox News reported Wednesday that they’re mourning the loss of their beloved Chihuahua, Trooper, and nursing their other dog, Bandit, back to health. The attacker came from an unlikely place — the sky.

Gunn had just let her dogs out into the backyard and was preparing to join them. She recalls, “in the time it took me to put my boots on, I heard what sounded like a really horrendous cat screeching noise. I thought it was a mountain lion or a bobcat or something.”

In fact, it was a pair of Great Horned Owls, birds that typically eat rats and squirrels. On this recent night, the birds set their sites on larger prey. From out of the darkness, the two owls swooped down and attacked Trooper and Bandit, just feet away from where Gunn stood.

After a violent struggle, Bandit escaped, bloody and limping, but Trooper was carried off and hasn’t been seen since. No fur. No blood. Nothing.

Assisted suicide for anyone over 70 who has simply had enough of life is being considered in Holland.

Non-doctors would be trained to administer a lethal potion to elderly people who ‘consider their lives complete’.

The radical move would be a world first and push the boundaries even further in the country that first legalised euthanasia.

The Dutch parliament is to debate the measure after campaigners for assisted suicide collected 112,500 signatures in a month.

Euthanasia has been available for the terminally ill in Holland since 2002 in cases of ‘hopeless and unbearable suffering’ certified by two doctors, but this would be a far bigger step.

At least six women in New Jersey who hoped to plump up their backsides have ended up hospitalized with infections, after a bogus doctor injected their derrieres with a mixture of silicone, petroleum jelly and, perhaps most hazardous, household caulk.

 New Jersey health officials said the dangerous mixture had seriously damaging effects.

“What we’ve been hearing from the hospitals is that these women are presented with deep tissue infections and skin infections,” New Jersey Health Department epidemiologist Dr. Tina Tan told the New York Post.

“Abscesses form in some cases.”

Officials in Pecica, a village town about 13 miles from the Hungarian border in the country’s west, ordered the bright red signs, complete with the phrase “Attention – Drunks”.

The 10 road signs, which also show a person crawling on their knees while clutching a glass in one hand, were erected in popular nightspot areas close to the city’s bars and restaurants.

Peter Antal, the Pecica Mayor, said the idea came after he visited an unnamed town in Germany, which had installed similar signs.

He said officials took action after a “despairing” number of accidents in the town, which has a population of about 13,000, caused by drunken revellers, with some even resulting in fatalities.

He said it was not motorists’ fault but blamed the town’s pedestrians, many of whom were not able to look out for themselves as they walked around the town, which is more than 300 miles west of the Romanian capital Bucharest

True love can take many forms. In this case, it has taken the form of a Korean man falling in love with, and eventually marrying, a large pillow with a picture of a woman on it.

Lee Jin-gyu fell for his ‘dakimakura’ – a kind of large, huggable pillow from Japan, often with a picture of a popular anime character printed on the side.

In Lee’s case, his beloved pillow has an image of Fate Testarossa, from the ‘magical girl’ anime series Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha.

Now the 28-year-old otaku (a Japanese term that roughly translates to somewhere between ‘obsessive’ and ‘nerd’) has wed the pillow in a special ceremony, after fitting it out with a wedding dress for the service in front of a local priest.

Their nuptials were eagerly chronicled by the local media. ‘He is completely obsessed with this pillow and takes it everywhere,’ said one friend.

Rumours that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy are both having affairs are gaining momentum in France.

The suggestion that the couple were both committing adultery first emerged on Twitter, the microblogging website. It was followed by a report in the Sunday newspaper le Journal du Dimanche.

The first ‘tweet’ claimed that Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had become romantically involved with Benjamin Biolay, a musician and a winner at France’s recent Victoires de la Musique awards.

It then claimed that the jilted Mr Sarkozy had swiftly found solace in the arms of his 40-year-old ecology minister Chantal Jouanno, also a French karate champion.

French web magazine suchablog.com alleged that Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had been a close friend of Biolay for many years and was now unofficially living with him at his flat in Paris.

The rumours were given extra weight after being reported in an blog on the website of Le Journal du Dimanche.

Police arrested a man early Sunday after two bottles of corrosive liquid were hurled into a crowd at one of Hong Kong’s famous tourist spots, officials said.

At least 30 people were injured in the city’s latest acid attack. The victims, including children and tourists, were all treated at local hospitals for burns and other injuries and released.

The liquid was thrown on them Saturday night near Temple Street, a densely populated district known for its outdoor shops and restaurants in the city’s Kowloon area.

Hong Kong has seen a series of similar attacks since December 2008 that have injured more than 100 people.

The suspect, described as a Chinese man in his 30s, was arrested after authorities found him on the roof a nearby building along with caps to the bottles believed to have been used in the attack, said police spokeswoman Michelle Mak.

The suspect has not been formally charged, and the investigation is ongoing, Mak said.

She did not say if he was also suspected in other attacks.

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, speaking on the GOP’s expected strategy against Democrats in elections this fall, said Republicans would describe President Obama as “a nice person … very articulate” but an ineffective leader who “couldn’t sell watermelons if you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.”

Rather prefaced the comments, made Sunday on the “Chris Matthews Show,” by saying, “The Republicans will make a case and a lot of independents will buy this argument.”

Rather is known for his homespun anecdotes, though his choice of language in this instance already is raising some eyebrows on media blogs, which note the potential “racial minefield.”

Armed robbers on Saturday struck at Germany’s largest poker tournament, stealing hundreds of thousands of euros in prize money and injuring gamblers, police said.

The masked gang burst into the Grand Hyatt hotel in central Berlin, where the tournament was taking place, threatening security staff and prompting a brief panic, police spokeswoman Heidi Vogt told AFP.

Berlin’s Tageszeitung newspaper reported on its website that six robbers armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades made off with €800,000 ($1.1 million).

“Several masked, armed individuals entered the Grand Hyatt and fled with a haul of money,” Vogt said, without giving details of the sum involved.

She said a number of the tournament’s players were injured in the incident, though none were seriously hurt.

Wildlife officials killed a mountain lion yesterday that invaded a home near Salida, attacking five dogs and trapping a mother and two children.

The mountain lion entered the home nine miles northwest of Salida about 4 p.m. Thursday after it chased a small dog through a pet door. Michelle Bese, 27, and her two children, ages two and five, were inside with four of her five dogs.

Bese said in an interview that her Jack Russell terrier had been outside when it spotted the mountain lion and began barking at it. The mountain lion jumped a 9-foot fence and chased the six-year-old Jack Russell terrier, named Shai, through the pet door.

Bese was sitting at the kitchen table with her five-year-old son Logan, who was coloring.

“At first I thought it was a stray dog, then maybe a coyote because it was not very big,” said Bese. However, she realized it was “a cat” when the dog turned and confronted the mountain lion.

Bese took Logan and ran to the back bedroom where Avery, her two-year-old, was sleeping. She said Logan couldn’t figure why she was dragging him through the house.

“He didn’t see the lion. He thought I was pretty mad at him,” she said. She shut the bedroom door but then realized the phone was in the living room with the cat.

Her husband, Devin, was driving home with their 9-year-old daughter, Mary, and Bese wanted to warn him. She dashed out of the bedroom, got the phone, ran back and called her husband and then 911.

When her husband arrived, he helped her and the two children out a bedroom window. Minutes later, deputies from the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office arrived with Colorado Division of Wildlife officials.

The mountain lion stayed inside, where it had killed one of the dogs, even as a DOW officer pounded on the walls and windows. At that point officers went in and the cat was tranquilized, the DOW said in a news release.

A South Korean couple left their baby daughter to starve to death at home while playing an Internet game which simulated child-rearing, police said Friday.

The man aged 41 and his 25-year-old wife were arrested Thursday, five months after they reported the death of their three-month-old baby, a police investigator in the city of Suweon just south of Seoul told AFP.

The father met his wife in 2008 through the Internet. They had been on the run since their baby died.

“They were formally arrested yesterday,” the investigator said, declining to give details.

The baby was found dead last September 24 and an autopsy showed her death was caused by a long period of malnutrition.

The couple had “raised” an online girl character while neglecting their own prematurely born daughter, feeding her just once a day in between 12-hour stretches at a neighbourhood Internet cafe, Yonhap news agency said.

It quoted police as saying they had become obsessed with raising a virtual girl character called “Anima” in the popular role-playing game “Prius Online”.

“The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life because they didn’t have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby,” Chung Jin-Won, a police officer, told Yonhap.

“They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby.”

Hat tip to Trish!

Police say a bear bit off a woman’s fingers at a Wisconsin zoo after she ignored barriers and warning signs to try to feed the animal.

The Lincoln Park Zoo in Manitowoc closed after the incident Friday morning.

Police say the 47-year-old woman lost a thumb and a forefinger, and two other fingers were partially severed.

The woman’s boyfriend was bitten as he tried to pry the bear’s mouth off her hand, but he didn’t lose any fingers.

Her 3-year-old granddaughter wasn’t injured.

A mayor’s office statement says alcohol played a factor.

Surgeons saved a man’s life after a three week erection nearly killed him, The Sun reported Wednesday.

The businessman, 55, was forced to undergo an emergency operation after his problem persisted for a staggering 21 days.

Doctors at a hospital in Kolkata, India, eventually performed the surgery to put the middle-aged man out of his misery.

But although the hour-long operation was successful, it rendered the man impotent.

Doctor Avishek Mukherjee said: “It was very late when the man sought treatment.

“The treatment has to be sought within six hours, otherwise it could even lead to death, besides the degeneration of the penis.”

TWO Russian men died in a sauna after jumping into a plunge pool that had accidentally been heated to boiling point, investigators and media said.

The two men jumped into the pool to cool down after sweating in a steam room. A third man tried to save the victims but was unable to pull the men out of the boiling water, Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid reported today.

The two men’s bodies were discovered in the sauna in the city of Kirov in central Russia on February 18 and “their death was caused by overheating”, the Kirov regional investigative committee confirmed in a statement.

The water in the pool was “overheated due to an error by one of the victims,” investigators said.

As authorities nationwide warn motorists of the dangers of driving while texting, Florida Keys law enforcement officers add a new caution: Don’t try to shave your privates, either.

Florida Highway Patrol troopers say a two-vehicle crash Tuesday at Mile Marker 21 on Cudjoe Key was caused by a 37-year-old woman driver who was shaving her bikini area while her ex-husband took the wheel from the passenger seat.

“She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit,” Trooper Gary Dunick said.

“If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have believed it. About 10 years ago I stopped a guy in the exact same spot … who had three or four syringes sticking out of his arm. It was just surreal and I thought, ‘Nothing will ever beat this.’ Well, this takes it.”

Greece should consider selling some of its uninhabited islands to cut its debt, according to political allies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Josef Schlarmann and Frank Schaeffler told Germany’s Bild daily that the Greek state should sell stakes in all its assets to raise more cash.

Greek PM George Papandreou is due to meet Mrs Merkel in Berlin later this week for talks about the crisis.

Mr Papandreou has already announced a strict austerity programme.

Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks – and the Acropolis too!” says the headline in the Bild newspaper.

It sounds like the sort of daydream induced by too much ouzo, but the idea comes from two senior politicians in Europe’s biggest economy.

Mr Schlarmann is a senior member of Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Mr Schaeffler is an MP for the Free Democrats – the junior partner in the centre-right coalition.

AN alleged pervert was caught with a picture of a man having sex with a dead SQUID, a court heard today.

Andrew Dymond, 46, was netted when cops apparently found a haul of grossly offensive porn on his home computer.

JPs heard the sea creature was clearly dead in the picture and a man was having sexual intercourse with it.

Dymond is charged with possessing an image of someone  “performing an act of intercourse with a dead animal, namely an octopus/squid, which was grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character”.

He faces a total of 25 porn charges and entered no pleas when he appeared before magistrates.

Prosecutors claim Dymond also made 14 indecent photos of children and possessed an additional 57 child porn images.

He is also alleged to have had photos of a person performing sex acts with horses and dogs.

Hat tip to Kara!

An Australian woman walking to work was killed during a freak accident after she was struck in the head by flying metal thrown up by a grass cutter, which left her decapitated.

The 42 year-old woman, who has not been named, is believed to have been struck by a 60cm piece of steel pipe, in what witnesses described as a “freak accident”.

Workplace safety officials have launched an investigation into the accident, which occurred on Wednesday morning in the north Queensland town of Townsville.

The Daily Telegraph understands the woman was decapitated and died instantly at the scene after walking past an empty block of land just after 8am.

Police said a tractor pulling a grass cutter ran over a steel pipe that had been lying in the long grass, which was then sent flying through the air at great speed.

Hat tip to Jonathan!

Three teachers at a South Los Angeles elementary school have been suspended for allegedly encouraging students to celebrate O.J. Simpson, Dennis Rodman and RuPaul for Black History Month, officials said Wednesday.

Children at Wadsworth Avenue Elementary School were carrying pictures of the men at a parade Friday on the school playground, said Los Angeles Unified School District spokeswoman Gayle Pollard-Terry.

She said Supt. Ramon C. Cortines learned about the incident Tuesday and had the teachers, who are white, pulled from their classrooms pending an investigation.

The suspension is without pay for the first three days.

“The superintendent believes there are better choices,” she said.

Millions of dollars in Western aid for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 was siphoned off by rebels to buy weapons, a BBC investigation finds.

Former rebel leaders told the BBC that they posed as merchants in meetings with charity workers to get aid money.

They used the cash to fund attempts to overthrow the government of the time.

One rebel leader estimated $95m (£63m) – from Western governments and charities including Band Aid – was channelled into the rebel fight.

The CIA, in a 1985 assessment entitled Ethiopia: Political and Security Impact of the Drought, also alleged aid money was being misused.

Its report concluded: “Some funds that insurgent organisations are raising for relief operations, as a result of increased world publicity, are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes.”

Patients of a northern Kentucky psychiatrist jailed on a charge he stabbed a woman with a sword have tried to keep appointments with him in jail.

Kenton County jail Chief Deputy Scott Colvin said deputies have had to turn away several patients of Douglas Rank, charged last month with first-degree assault in an attack on 32-year-old woman.

Colvin told the Kentucky Enquirer that some patients have asked if they could drop off Rank’s prescription pad at the jail so he could write their prescriptions.

Colvin said the requests have been denied, as prisoners are not allowed to practice their trade in jail.

An investigation is underway after a child was heard giving instructions to a pilot from the air-traffic control tower at one of America’s busiest airports.

In a recording that has been confirmed as genuine by the Federal Aviation Administration, the child makes five transmissions from John F Kennedy International Airport — with the pilots in each case all responding enthusiastically to him.

One conversation between the tower at JFK Airport in New York and a pilot goes as follows:

JFK TOWER: Jet Blue 171 contact departure.

PILOT: Over to departure jet blue 171, awesome job.

The child appears to be supervised, with a controller explaining the reason for the young voice to the pilot.

JFK TOWER: That’s what you get guys when the kids are out of school. (laugh)

A firestorm over racially and ethnically charged incidents at several University of California campuses spread Tuesday as UC San Diego announced a KKK-style hood was found on campus and students in Los Angeles and Irvine demonstrated against intolerance.

“What kind of campus promotes an environment that allows people to think it’s acceptable to target people for their ethnicity, gender or sexuality?” said Corey Matthews, one of about 200 mostly minority UCLA students who held a lunchtime rally.

“It’s something about the tone of the environment that allows this.” At UC Irvine, about 250 people gathered for a “student solidarity speakout” to condemn the recent spate of racist incidents at UC San Diego that targeted black students and another incident last month at UC Davis, which targeted a Jewish student with a swastika carved on her door, said Marya Bangee, an event organizer.

The protests came on the same day UC San Diego announced the discovery of a white pillowcase fashioned into a KKK-style hood—the third racist incident around the campus in as many weeks—and a day after UC Santa Cruz officials found an image of a noose scribbled on the inside of a bathroom door.

Officials found the hood, which bore a hand-drawn circle and cross, on a statue of children’s book author Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, outside the main campus library late Monday. A rose had been inserted between the statue’s fingers.

Tired of that old Bible or Koran?

Members of the Atheist Agenda, a student organization at the University of Texas at San Antonio, are encouraging students to trade in religious texts for pornography this week with their “Smut for Smut” campaign.

In the view of club members, religious texts are as smutty as pornography because they contain violence and torture and spark religious wars. But mostly, it’s a public relations stunt meant to ignite debate and attract new members to the club.

As in past years, the campaign did not disappoint, drawing hundreds to UTSA’s Sombrilla Plaza Monday to either cheer, protest or inquire about the event, and to debate the role of religion in society.“It’s a First Amendment right,” said Bradley Lewis, 18-year-old freshman from Pearland who said he plans to join the Atheist Agenda.

“If religious groups can put out missionaries and go knock on my door and wake me up at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I can put a table outside of the college.”

Robin Lorkovic, an 18-year-old freshman from Houston, disagreed. Lorkovic stood near the “Smut for Smut” table holding a cardboard sign that said “God Loves You! Keep your Bible and learn from it!”

Gov. David A. Paterson personally directed two state employees to contact the woman who had accused his close aide of assaulting her, according to two people with direct knowledge of the governor’s actions.

Mr. Paterson instructed his press secretary, Marissa Shorenstein, to ask the woman to publicly describe the episode as nonviolent, according to a third person, who was briefed on the matter.

That description would contradict the woman’s accounts to the police and in court. Mr. Paterson also enlisted another state employee, Deneane Brown, a friend of both the governor and the accuser, to make contact with the woman before she was due in court to finalize an order of protection against the aide, David W. Johnson, the two people with direct knowledge said.

Ms. Brown, an employee of the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, reached out to the woman on more than one occasion over a period of several days and arranged a phone call between the governor and the woman, Mr. Johnson’s companion.

An Elma man was killed by accidentally urinating on a downed power line after a one-car crash near Montesano.

Grays Harbor County sheriff’s Deputy Dave Pimentel said Monday that 50-year-old Roy Messenger was not seriously hurt after he collided with a power pole Friday night and called a relative to pull his car out of the ditch.

When family members arrived they found Messenger electrocuted.

Pimentel says Messenger apparently urinated into a roadside ditch but didn’t see the live wire.

A CAMERAPHONE application that finds names and addresses of total STRANGERS was blasted as a “stalker’s dream” last night.

The facial recognition “app” instantly identifies snaps by matching them to photos on websites like Facebook and Twitter, where personal info is accessed.

 Horrified security experts claim BURGLARS taking secret snaps of revellers could find out their addresses. Unsuspecting strangers fooling around on nights out could also fall prey to BLACKMAIL.

And women could be stalked by PERVERTS. Simon Davies, of Privacy International, slammed the “Recognizr” gizmo as an “atrocious invasion”.

He warned: “It takes the dangers that already exist and increases them infinitely.”

Dr Ian Brown, of the Oxford Internet Institute, said: “A guy could take a picture of a girl in a bar and find out all sorts of information.”

Hat tip to Jonathan!

Citing what he described as the “the persecution of a great hero who rid their land of Godless communists” as a possible cause, prominent TV evangelist and amateur seismologist Pat Robertson today argued that the 8.8 magnitude of the earthquake that struck Chile early this morning should serve as a warning to the population that “God is even angrier with them than he is with the people of Haiti.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it must have to do with Chile’s persecution and attempted prosecution of their great former leader, and a personal hero of mine, Augusto Pinochet – who, it should be noted, had never been convicted of a crime when the Lord called him home three years ago.”

The popular host of ‘The 700 Club’ and longtime bingo circuit icon also added, “General Pinochet not only assisted the CIA in the overthrow of Chile’s Marxist government, but is widely credited with personally arranging the meetings of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his countrymen with Jesus.”

General Pinochet, who spent the last eight years of his life fighting prosecution on human rights and other charges before succumbing to congestive heart failure in December 2006, could not be reached for comment, even by Robertson.

The General–turned-Dictator has long been considered a transformative figure in the field of Crimes Against Humanity as a result of his landmark policy of ‘Forced Disappearance’, and was even honored in 1998 with the first-ever arrest warrant for a former head of state under the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’ by Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who is currently investigating former Bush Administration officials for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.

Hat tip to Kara!

Investigators for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s Office spent four hours Friday questioning Sherr-una Booker as it kicked off its probe into whether State Police — and possibly Gov. Paterson himself — intervened to quash her domestic-violence case against an administration official.

They asked about the incident last Halloween between Paterson’s top aide, David Johnson, and Booker in the Bronx apartment they shared, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

Booker had previously told cops that Johnson choked her, ripped off her clothes and pushed her into a mirror.

Later on Friday, investigators turned the heat on Maj. Charles Day, head of the governor’s security detail, who reportedly contacted Booker the day after the altercation and the day before she complained of State Police pressure in a Bronx Family Court appearance, the source said.

…

The Post revealed yesterday that the inquiry will also look at Booker’s purchase of a $40,000 Lexus shortly before she dropped her case.

WHILE the Top End and Central Australia have been battered by torrential rains, a Territory town has reportedly had fish falling from the sky.

The freak phenomena happened not once, but twice, on Thursday and Friday afternoon about 6pm at Lajamanu, about 550km southwest of Katherine, The Northern Territory News reports.

Christine Balmer, who took the photos of the fish on the ground and in a bucket, said she had to pinch herself when she was told “hundreds and hundreds” of small white fish had fallen from the sky.

“It rained fish in Lajamanu on Thursday and Friday night,” she said, “They fell from the sky everywhere.”

“Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere. “

“These fish were alive when they hit the ground.”

News broke this week that a Blackwater subsidiary was arming violent drug users in Afghanistan. They took hundreds of weapons intended for the Afghan National Police and at least one of them (probably more) signed for the shipments with the name “Eric Cartman.”

When I asked “South Parks”’s creators what they thought of these men co-opting their character they were completely unfazed.

“It makes perfect sense. It’s the name I would use,” Trey Parker said.

“Our first reaction to any story is ‘How do we put this into the show?’ and the second reaction is ‘Did Cartman do that?’ because he’s so real to us it’s like ‘I bet Cartman did that.’”

“I saw that and thought, ‘Wow, Cartman did that? That’s pretty cool. Sounds like something he would do,’” Matt Stone agreed.

Environmental activists have blasted Harrison Ford for making “unnecessary” trips by air, following revelations he once made a jet journey to buy a cheeseburger.

The “Indiana Jones” star began flying when he was 52. After receiving his license, he went on to purchase several aircraft, which he keeps at Santa Monica Airport in California.

He recently revealed in an interview the extent of his love for piloting, telling Britain’s Live magazine, “Learning to fly was a work of art. I’m so passionate about flying I often fly up the coast for a cheeseburger.

Flying is like good music; it elevates the spirit and it’s an exhilarating freedom.” But the 67-year-old has come under fire from experts at Carbonfootprint.com over the comments, who are outraged he would make an airplane journey for such an “unnecessary” trip.

A court has allowed a group of protesters dressed as zombies to continue with a lawsuit against police who arrested them for disorderly conduct.

The appeal court overturned a previous finding that the group had correctly been arrested over a 2006 protest in a shopping centre.

The group had been wearing makeup designed to make them look like and extra in a horror flick, with white faces, fake blood and black circles round their eyes.

They then proceeded to stagger round the shops, urging consumers to “get your brains here”.

They also carried audio equipment, which police described as “simulated weapons of mass destruction”, even though they were mobile phones.

Rowdy curling crowds; spontaneous street parties; public drunkeness.

You don’t have to look far for evidence that the crowds at Winter Games in Vancouver know how to have a good time.

And, as if anymore proof is needed that a wild Olympic atmosphere permeates B.C.’s largest city, now there’s an apparent condom shortage.

That’s right. As you read this, an emergency shipment of condoms is desperately making its way across Canada to the West Coast city.

Health officials in Vancouver have already provided 100,000 free condoms to the roughly 7,000 ahtletes and officials at the Games. That’s about 14 condoms per person.

But as of Wednesday, those supplies started running dangerously low.

Last fall, a woman went to court in the Bronx to testify that she had been violently assaulted by a top aide to Gov. David A. Paterson, and to seek a protective order against the man.

In the ensuing months, she returned to court twice to press her case, complaining that the State Police had been harassing her to drop it.

The State Police, which had no jurisdiction in the matter, confirmed that the woman was visited by a member of the governor’s personal security detail.

Then, just before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer.

She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.

Many details of the governor’s role in this episode are unclear, but the accounts presented in court and police records and interviews with the woman’s lawyer and others portray a brutal encounter, a frightened woman and an effort to make a potential political embarrassment go away.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is holding a hearing today on Paravant, a previously little-known subsidiary of Xe Services (aka Blackwater). It caps a six-month investigation by the committee, and it promises to be a doozy.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chair of the committee, met with reporters yesterday to give a sneak preview. According to a statement released last night by Levin, the investigation revealed “failures in U.S. government oversight” that allowed employees of Blackwater — sorry, Paravant (Levin said he saw “no meaningful distinction between the two”) — to go buck wild in Afghanistan.

Paravant employees were supposed to be helping train Afghan security forces. But according to the committee investigation, Paravant employees were also indulging in extracurricular activities like joyriding with automatic weapons, and treating an Afghan National Police arsenal like their own personal weapons stash.

The company first garnered headlines after two former Paravant contractors were arrested on murder charges in the shootings of two Afghans in a May 2009 traffic accident in Kabul. They were charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. According to the Senate investigation, Paravant employees were involved in a second, previously undisclosed shooting that happened in December 2008.

Paravant program manager Johnnie Walker told committee staff the incident happened after an employee decided to get on the back of a moving car with a loaded AK-47 and “ride it like a stagecoach.” The employee accidentally discharged the rifle when the vehicle hit a bump. The round struck another Paravant team member, who was seriously injured.

Hat tip to Larvae!

A SeaWorld employee died this afternoon during an incident at SeaWorld’s Shamu Stadium, an Orange County Sheriff’s Office official confirmed.

SeaWorld, rescue personnel and the Sheriff’s Office are not revealing the identity of the victim, although a local TV station is reporting that it was a female employee who was killed after she was grabbed by one of the theme park’s whales at the start of a public show.

Park guest Victoria Biniak told Local 6 that the trainer was a veteran of SeaWorld and had just finished explaining to the audience what they would see during the performance.At that point, Biniak said, the whale came up from the water and grabbed the woman.

An Indonesian park ranger escaped an attack by a Komodo dragon, the worlds largest lizard species, when his colleagues heard his cries for help and drove the reptile away.

Marcelinus Subanghadir was outside his hut on Komodo Island late Monday when a nearly 7-foot-long more than 2-meter-long dragon grabbed hold of his right foot, Komodo National Park chief Tamen Sitorus said.

The dragon had Subanghadirs foot clamped in its shark-like, serrated teeth until fellow rangers heard his screams and drove it off with wooden clubs, Sitorus said.

ySubanghadir, 34, suffered deep lacerations and was recovering at a hospital on nearby Bali.

After decades of digging into the Church of Scientology, reporters and editors at the St. Petersburg Times are accustomed to being denounced by its leaders. But they find it unsettling that three veteran journalists — a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former “60 Minutes” producer, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors — are taking the church’s money to examine the paper’s conduct.

While the journalists have promised an independent review, the Times has refused to cooperate, saying their work will be used to fuel the church’s ongoing campaign against the Florida paper. “I ultimately couldn’t take this request very seriously because it’s a study bought and paid for by the Church of Scientology,” says Executive Editor Neil Brown.

“Candidly,” he adds, “I was surprised and disappointed that journalists who I understand to have an extensive background in investigative reporting would think it’s appropriate to ask me or our news organization to talk about that reporting while (a) it’s ongoing, and (b) while they’re being paid to ask these questions by the very subjects of our reporting.” 

Lord Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen, said the existence of extra terrestrial life may be beyond human understanding. He made the remarks shortly after hosting the national science academy’s first conference on the possibility of alien life.

“They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognise them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology,” he said.

“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

The European Union has shown its righteous wrath by stripping Greece of its vote at a crucial meeting next month, the worst humiliation ever suffered by an EU member state.

The council of EU finance ministers said Athens must comply with austerity demands by March 16 or lose control over its own tax and spend policies altogether. It if fails to do so, the EU will itself impose cuts under the draconian Article 126.9 of the Lisbon Treaty in what would amount to economic suzerainty.

While the symbolic move to suspend Greece of its voting rights at one meeting makes no practical difference, it marks a constitutional watershed and represents a crushing loss of sovereignty.

“We certainly won’t let them off the hook,” said Austria’s finance minister, Josef Proll, echoing views shared by colleagues in Northern Europe.

Some German officials have called for Greece to be denied a vote in all EU matter until it emerges from “receivership”.

Minority students at the University of California San Diego declared a racial state of emergency yesterday, presenting administrators with a list of 32 demands — many of which the school accepted on the spot.

Students, already upset by an off-campus party Monday that mocked Black History Month, reacted with tears, outrage and a march across campus after a second racially charged episode.

In the latest incident, members of an irreverent student organization aired a live segment on closed-circuit television Thursday night supporting the party.

Campus officials have been unable to locate a tape of the broadcast. According to the Black Student Union, hosts of the show called critics of the party ungrateful and used a derogatory term for African-Americans.
…
In years past, Koala TV has been temporarily unplugged at least once for airing pornographic material. The Koala publication has poked fun at Muslims, Latinos and Asians for years, and has been repeatedly criticized by the administration. The editor of the publication, Kris Gregorian, declined to comment unless offered beer.

A 44-year-old man made quite an accomplishment — he swallowed a metal marijuana pipe.

And Talmadge Edward Mchenry’s feat was confirmed by an X-ray after an Indian River County Sheriff’s deputy took him to the emergency room, according to a recently-released arrest affidavit.

Mchenry, of the 3100 block of Sussex Way, disclosed his cannabis pipe consumption at the jail Wednesday after a breath test showed his blood alcohol content was above the legal limit.

…

 After the breath test, Mchenry said he swallowed the metal pot pipe. He was taken to the emergency room, and an X-ray “showed he had a metal pipe inside of his body.”

A controversial Scottish brewery has said it has reclaimed the title of the world’s strongest beer from German rivals – with Sink the Bismarck at 41%.

BrewDog, of Fraserburgh, made headlines last year when it unveiled a 32% beer called Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

However, Schorschbrau released the 40% strength Schorschbock.

BrewDog said its newly released 41%, Sink the Bismarck, would cost £40 for a 330ml bottle and would only be sold online.

A Ugandan pastor who screened same-sex pornography in a church to try to bolster support for proposed anti-homosexuality legislation has been condemned by gay rights groups.

Martin Ssempa, one of the main backers of a bill that would impose the death penalty for some offenders, aired the explicit slideshow to several hundred people during a church service in Kampala yesterday.

Explaining his decision to display the images, the evangelical preacher said it was necessary to educate people “about what homosexuals do”.

He told the BBC’s Network Africa programme: “In Africa, what you do in your bedroom affects our clan, it affects our tribe, it affects our nation.”

While Ssempa represents the extreme end of widely held homophobic views in Uganda, he does carry strong influence.

On his website he describes himself as “consultant to the government of Uganda”, and his congregants yesterday included David Bahati, the MP who submitted the private member’s bill to parliament last year.

Breckenridge authorities said a Texas Christian University student who suffered burns when his peers branded his buttocks participated in the act willingly and no charges will be filed.

Authorities said Thursday they made the decision not to pursue charges after reviewing statements from Amon Carter IV and a dozen TCU students.

The Summit Daily News reported that Carter had Greek symbols from his fraternity and a sorority branded on his buttocks Jan. 8 during a trip to Breckenridge and needed surgery after suffering second-and third-degree burns.

Seen on a recent Citibank (C) statement: “Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change.”

Last month, on the night of January 19, Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh arrived in Dubai, oddly without his bodyguards. He checked into the five-star Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel. He was allegedly on a weapons-buying trip.

A little after midnight that same night, eleven European tourists arrived at the Dubai airport carrying tennis rackets and various kinds of sporting equipment, apparently on vacation. Images of the group were captured on CCTV cameras at the airport.

The following afternoon, one of the eleven European tourists checked into the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel, specifically into room 237 located directly across the hall from where al-Mabhouh was staying in room 230. Throughout the day, all eleven Europeans roamed around the luxury hotel.

CCTV camera footage released by the Dubai police shows one of the tourists entering a bathroom. When he emerges, he’s wearing a false beard and a baseball cap. The group was not made up of tourists; rather, they were an assassination team on a mission to kill the commander from Hamas. One member of the hit squad, a female, roams around the hotel in a dark wig, a floppy hat, and sunglasses.

That evening, a little after 8:00 p.m., Mabhouh arrived back at the hotel and immediately went to his room. According to Dubai’s chief of police Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, forensic tests indicate that within the hour, Mabhouh was dead, having been suffocated to death. Two hours after the attack, the assassins left Dubai. They were in the country for only 19 hours.

Marine Lance Corporal Andrew Koenig is living proof Taliban snipers have been getting more accurate in Afghanistan.

World In a gunbattle this week, the 21-year-old from Casper, Wyoming, took a sniper’s bullet square in his forehead as he fought from the roof of a compound seized by U.S. Marines taking part in an offensive targeting the Taliban hotbed of Marjah.

Knocked back by the blow, he felt for blood from what he was sure was a head wound. Nothing.

“(It was) the craziest experience. I don’t think you could get any luckier than that. Total shock. The gear works, this proves it,” Koenig told Reuters, pointing to his dented helmet.

The bullet struck just above the rim of his helmet, dead center. Without the helmet, the shot was sure to have been fatal.

Administrators at the University of California, San Diego are condemning a weekend ghetto-themed party thrown off-campus by fraternity students to mock Black History Month, but they aren’t likely to discipline anyone, it was reported Wednesday.

The so-called “Compton Cookout” event urged all participants to wear chains, don cheap clothes and speak very loudly, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Female participants were encouraged to be “ghetto chicks.”

“It’s insulting, it’s derogatory, we’re being made fun of, we’re being made a mockery of and we’re not being taken seriously,” said UCSD student Elize Diop, who is black.

The invitation read, “For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks — Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes …,” the Union-Tribune reported.

Children in the German capital Berlin are to be exempt from strict laws on noise pollution.

An amendment to the city’s law now makes it “fundamentally and socially tolerable” for members of the younger generation to make a racket.

Berlin has become the first of Germany’s 16 federal states to adopt such legislation. But all Berliners – children included – must continue to respect the official quiet time at night and all day Sunday.

Until now, only church bells, emergency sirens, snow ploughs and tractors have fallen outside the stringent rules on excessive noise in Germany.

Some day-care facilities have even been forced to close after local residents have gone to court in search of a quiet life.

Now Berlin’s local government, the senate, has passed a law giving children the right to be noisy, the first law of its kind in Germany.

She survived the Holocaust, but a tenacious life story wasn’t enough for 92-year old Eta Eckstein to keep her Brooklyn landlord at bay.

While out of her apartment in a rehab facility, the grandmother got evicted.

“It’s unspeakable,” says Eta’s grandson, Idan. “They just threw her belongings onto the street.” Eta’s family got no explanation from the landlord

“Family heirlooms, photographs, my dad’s birth certificate, diplomas. It’s all gone. Everything,” Eckstein told NBCNewYork.com.

South Carolina Rep. Mike Pitts has introduced legislation that would mandate that gold and silver coins replace federal currency as legal tender in his state.

As the Palmetto Scoop first reported, Pitts, a Republican, introduced legislation this month banning “the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin” in South Carolina.

In an interview, Pitts told Hotsheet that he believes that “if the federal government continues to spend money at the rate it’s spending money, and if it continues to print money at the rate it’s printing money, our economic system is going to collapse.”

“The Germans felt their system wouldn’t collapse, but it took a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread in the 1930s,” he said.

“The Soviet Union didn’t think their system would collapse, but it did. Ours is capable of collapsing also.”

Star Trek fans, prepare to be disappointed. Kirk, Spock and the rest of the crew would die within a second of the USS Enterprise approaching the speed of light.

The problem lies with Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

It transforms the thin wisp of hydrogen gas that permeates interstellar space into an intense radiation beam that would kill humans within seconds and destroy the spacecraft’s electronic instruments.

Interstellar space is an empty place. For every cubic centimetre, there are fewer than two hydrogen atoms, on average, compared with 30 billion billion atoms of air here on Earth.

But according to William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, that sparse interstellar gas should worry the crew of a spaceship travelling close to the speed of light even more than Romulans decloaking off the starboard bow.

Russian police said on Tuesday they had arrested a prankster who hacked into a computer system to show a pornographic movie on a giant advertising screen, causing havoc on a busy Moscow thoroughfare.

The two-minute clip, displayed on a video screen above a main road south of the Kremlin, caused midnight traffic jams and a frenzy of excitement across the Russian blogosphere.

Police said the hacker gained control of the screen by breaking into an online company’s server in the volatile southern region of Chechnya as “he didn’t think the police would go looking for him there.”

“(The hacker) is a highly-educated, temporarily unemployed and extremely advanced Internet user,” police said.

“The scandalous film was the talk of the town.”

The 40-year-old man said he wanted to “give people a laugh,” the popular daily Kommersant reported.

Rossiya-24 television said an elderly motorist suffered a heart attack at the wheel after seeing the scenes.

A teenager who stuck his head out of a car window died when the teen driver crashed into a parked vehicle in Porter Ranch, a Los Angeles police sergeant said today.

Adir Vered, 17, of Woodland Hills, was killed about 9:25 p.m. Friday in the 10400 block of Wystone Avenue, according to the coroner and Sgt. Charles Swanson of the Valley Traffic Division.

A 16-year-old was driving the car when it hit a parked car, Swanson said.

Vered, who was not wearing a seat belt and had stuck his head out the window, was killed when his head hit the parked car and he was ejected, Swanson said.

A loosely organized group of “thugs” from central Canada promoting anarchy were among 200 anti-Olympic protesters who marched through downtown Vancouver Saturday, smashing plate glass windows at Hudson’s Bay and TD bank, overturning newspaper boxes and assaulting bystanders, police say.

They used spray paint on cars and transit buses, tore down signs and threw about road construction barricades as they marched down the street.

The protest through the heart of downtown Vancouver marked the second consecutive day of anti-Olympic protests that organizers say will continue until the Winter Games end on Feb. 28.

The protests have drawn a wide array of groups who are trying to use the Olympics to attract media attention to their causes that range from stopping the tar sands to increasing health-care spending.

A march in memory of missing and murdered aboriginal women, slated for Sunday is expected to once again draw many anti-Olympic protesters.

Seven people were arrested Saturday and could face charges of assault, damage to property and possession of a dangerous weapon, Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu told reporters. Police recovered a bag with a hammer.

One protester had a bicycle chain wrapped around his fist when he was arrested. Vinegar-soaked rags were found in bags of some protesters.

The Olympic Resistance Network, an umbrella group that speaks for some of the protesters, said 13 people were arrested. ORN organizer Alissa Westergard-Thorpev refused to apologize for the vandalism, arguing that protesters have merely damaged property while police were armed with guns, batons and canisters of pepper spray. “Property damage is not the same as physical violence,” said Ms. Westergard-Thorpe.

Two huge waves swept away spectators watching a Northern California surfing contest Saturday morning, causing broken bones and other injuries to people standing on a seawall.

Fifteen people had significant injuries, including broken legs and hands, authorities said. At least three of them were transported to area hospitals.

Others were treated at the beach for injuries such as scrapes and bruises. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Battalion Chief Scott Jalbert estimated “a couple hundred” people were on the seawall at the southern tip of Mavericks Beach when the waves struck, upstaging the surfing competition that draws some of the world’s top surfers.

First, a disclaimer: Selling your organs is illegal in the United States. It’s also very dangerous. Handing off an organ is risky enough when done in a top hospital, even more so if you’re doing it for cash in a back alley.

There are many organs one can theoretically do without, or for which there’s a backup. Most folks can spare a kidney, a portion of their liver, a lung, some intestines, and an eyeball, and still live a long life.

That said, donating a lung, a piece of liver or a section of intestines is a very complicated surgery, so it’s not done frequently on the black market. And no one’s going to make much cash on an eyeball.

“In the U.S., there’s a fairly steady supply of donated corneas from corpses,” says Sean Fitzpatrick, director of public affairs at the New England Organ Bank. “There’s pretty much no market demand for eyes.”

Giving up a kidney, though, is a relatively simple surgery that has netted desperate people a few bucks.

Now, black-market organ dealers don’t do a great job of filing taxes, but here are some prices based on rumored deals and reports from the World Heath Organization.

In India, a kidney fetches around $20,000. In China, buyers will pay $40,000 or more. A good, healthy kidney from Israel goes for $160,000. Don’t expect to pocket all that dough, though.

“The person giving up the organ only gets a fraction of the fee,” says Sally Satel, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank who studies the prices paid by legal and illegal organ-donor operations.

After the organ broker—the guy who sets up your kidney-for-cash transaction—takes his cut, he needs to pay for travel, the surgeon, medical supplies and a few “look-the-other-way” payoffs. Most people get $1,000 to $10,000 for their kidney (probably much less than you were hoping for).

Thousands of protesters formed a human chain in Dresden on Saturday, determined to stop neo-Nazis from exploiting the German city’s painful history on the 65th anniversary of its deadly Allied bombing in World War II.

Heavy security including riot police was in place to prevent clashes between the two groups, and five police helicopters flew overhead to monitor the crowds.

Neo-Nazis have caused outrage in the past by comparing the 1945 bombing of Dresden to the Holocaust and far-right organizers of Saturday’s protest characterized it as a “mourning march.”

Some 5,000 far-right supporters poured into the city, according to police, who limited them to a rally rather than a march for security reasons.

Chanting “We ain’t got no tickets!” and “Homes Not Games,” more than 1,000 protesters swept through downtown Vancouver toward the Olympic opening ceremony Friday but were held back by police before they could block spectators from entering the celebration.

Billed as an action “against capitalism and colonization,” the first of two major street rallies mobilized demonstrators ranging from aboriginal rights groups to advocates for the homeless, all aiming to mount one of the biggest-ever organized protests against the Olympic Games.

“There’s never been an Olympic protest like this. This is a first,” said Chris Shaw, spokesman for 2010 Watch, which claims Canadian citizens are bearing the brunt of the multibillion-dollar cost of a sporting event they say will benefit land developers and corporate sponsors.

“It was one of the largest rallies in Vancouver history, and the protest led right up to the door of the [International Olympic Committee],” Shaw said.

An extra fibula and jawbone have investigators wondering who else was burned in the fire pit where Andrew and Elizabeth Hawes are believed to have taken their brother’s body after he was brutally murdered at his Andover home.

The bones, including the partial remains of Edwin Hawes, were discovered more than a year ago when police officers checked out an illegally burning bonfire on Andrew Hawes’ farm in Cottonwood County, nearly 200 miles from the Twin Cities.

When the medical examiner and a forensic anthropologist reconstructed Edwin Hawes’ remains, they discovered three extra human bones.

Mixed in the fire pit were a left eye orbit, a fibula and part of a lower jaw.

It wasn’t until three months ago that the Cottonwood County sheriff’s office was notified about them, which triggered a fresh search of the fire pit.

Deputies found several small bone fragments, according to the search warrant filed in Cottonwood County in November.

A small town in Czech Republic is welcoming sex-tourist Germans across the border with a sign warning them that death awaits.

A grinning skull superimposed on to the outline of a sexy female figure is posted alongside the words; ‘Achtung! Syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, Aids.’

A dozen such signs now greet the men who pour into the town of Chomutov for cheap, and dangerous, encounters with prostitutes.

Ever since the fall of Communism, the towns on the Czech side of the German frontier have been a magnet for sex workers, many of whom are diseased and unregulated by the state.

Czech authorities have tried in vain for years to stem the trade, fuelled by low costs – sex sometimes costs less than five pounds – and lax border controls.

The road into Chomutov is known across Europe as the ‘Mile of Lust.’ Mother-of-three Simona Kmonickova, 41, has been instrumental in trying the clean up the town.

“I really started this because I want to protect my daughters who must daily pass a parade of prostitutes to get into school,” she said. “It is disgusting and I knew that something had to be done.”

Becoming a vegetarian can do more harm to the environment than continuing to eat red meat, according to a study of the impacts of meat substitutes such as tofu.

The findings undermine claims by vegetarians that giving up meat automatically results in lower emissions and that less land is needed to produce food.

The study by Cranfield University, commissioned by the environmental group WWF, found that many meat substitutes were produced from soy, chickpeas and lentils that were grown overseas and imported into Britain.

It found that switching from beef and lamb reared in Britain to meat substitutes would result in more foreign land being cultivated and raise the risk of forests being destroyed to create farmland.

Meat substitutes also tended to be highly processed and involved energy-intensive production methods.

THIS is the heart-stopping moment three snowboarders were engulfed by a massive avalanche. The thrill-seekers are seen zig-zagging across fresh snow on this amazing video — but their carefree attitude quickly changes when tons of the white stuff starts roaring down the mountain towards them.

Eight people have died in similar incidents in just 48 hours across Italy, where the dramatic footage was caught by a walker on another slope. The three boarders, whose aggressive moves are not recommended on new snow, are seen frantically trying to escape — but one by one they are picked off.

The walker immediately alerted police and mountain rescue teams, who raced to the 7,100ft Mt Cimone in the Apennines, close to Modena. But despite searching for more than four hours with dogs, heat-seeking equipment and a helicopter, no trace of the three was found.

An internet protest group has launched an attack on Government websites in a protest against the proposed internet filter and censorship of some pornography.

The attack, dubbed Operation Titstorm by the group known as Anonymous, brought down a number of Government websites this morning, with the Parliament House site remaining offline well into the afternoon.

Anonymous claimed the attack was to highlight moves by the Government to ban the import of films featuring female ejaculation (which was classified as urination) as well as films featuring small-breasted women, over fears such films were simulating child pornography.

“More importantly, Anonymous does not approve of the steps already undertaken by the Australian Government to control what their populous [sic] sees,” the statement said

“Claiming to be cracking down on ’simulated child pornography,’ many depictions of women with small breasts in pornography have been banned,” the group said in a statement.

The Red Bull Stratos team has kept itself under wraps until today’s press conference at the New York Academy of Sciences in NYC. The ambitious project marks the first major attempt at breaking an old but daunting skydiving record, one that starts at the edge of space.

In 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger stepped out of a capsule at 102,800 feet above the Earth’s surface and, in just minutes returned to the surface by simply falling. The falling part was easy. The surviving part was not—his first jump, from the Excelsior I module nearly ended in disaster when a parachute cord wrapped around his neck. His main chute, attached to a timer, deployed and saved him.

In Excelsior III, he failed to report a malfunctioning glove and nearly lost his hand to depressurization. But his record-breaking jump was successful, and having fulfilled its mission, the Air Force stopped jumping from record heights. His would-be successor is cut from the same mold, but has traveled a far different road.

Felix Baumgartner wears two tattoos—one, on his arm that says “Born to Fly” and another on his back, 502, that marks his BASE-jumping code—and has built a career out of from skydiving with frightening regularity and launching himself from architectural landmarks like the Gold Gate Bridge and Taipei 101 with a parachute on his back.

He is a daredevil, but according to Kittinger and the rest of the Red Bull Stratos team, he is a calculating one that has survived thousands of skydives by knowing how to prepare and when to back away from a jump.

So then, is this jump a stunt? In a way, it is. This is sponsored by Red Bull, after all, which has associated itself with extreme, entertaining, and daring sporting endeavors for the last decade or so, from the Dakar Rally to snowboard racing.

Governor David Paterson’s spokespeople are denying any possible-career ending scandal that will push him out of office as a result of a bombshell story The New York Times is said to have on him. Unconfirmed rumors relating to sex, drugs, and women appear to be the most brought up topics surrounding the story.

However, Mr. Paterson seems intent on running for office, as reports say he plans to announce his campaign for governor next week. Serving as Eliot Spitzer’s Lieutenant Governor, Mr. Paterson came to New York’s Governor’s mansion after Mr. Spitzer resigned in disgrace amid a sex scandal involving a prostitute.

“I think its going to have to be something really bad for him to resign. He admitted to past drug use. I don’t think anybody would be surprised or necessarily all that shocked if he and his wife had an understanding. It would have to be something beyond the pale for him to resign,” a long time Albany insider with GOP ties said to The Washington Times Water Cooler.

The Washington Times learned from our Albany source that at least fourteen of Mr. Paterson’s security detail were transferred to other areas of New York’s State Police this past weekend.

“I’ve been around Albany a long time and this is as strange as it gets,” he said after pointing out that he recognized a number of the names on the detail roster who were part of this transfer as long time government employees, who served previous New York Governors as security detail.

The French flag will be hoisted at every school in France and the national anthem sung by students at least once a year as part of government efforts to instill in citizens a sense of pride in being French, Prime Minister François Fillon announced Tuesday.

Language training and instruction on gender equality are foreseen for newly arrived immigrants, while new citizens will attend a solemn ceremony and sign a pact listing the duties that go with being French once a law is adjusted to make that possible.

Many of the measures are more symbolic than concrete, but all are the fruit of an often noisy government-sponsored countrywide debate on the French identity that on occasion plunged into racial slurs, often directed at France’s estimated five million Muslims.

The debates in 350 locations around the country aimed at bolstering France’s national identity in a globalized world and in an increasingly diverse nation that is proud by nature but afraid of losing its bearings.

France has long fought to preserve its language, but while previous governments focused on protecting French from the onslaught of English, the current government wants newly arrived immigrants to be able to communicate.

Italy’s agriculture minister defended his sponsorship of McDonald’s new all-Italian burger Monday amid criticism that he is selling out to a multinational corporation and sacrificing Italy’s culinary reputation in the process.

Minister Luca Zaia has argued that McDonald’s new McItaly burger — using all Italian beef, Asiago cheese and artichoke spread — will pump €3.5 million ($4.8 million) more a month into the pockets of Italian farmers grappling with tough economic times.

But for a country that gave birth to the Slow Food movement a quarter-century ago and prides itself on its varied, delicious and healthy cuisine, Zaia’s enthusiastic support of McDonald’s has been hard to swallow.

It didn’t help that Zaia and McDonald’s executives launched the new burger last month at McDonald’s flagship restaurant in Rome’s historic center near the Spanish Steps, the chain’s first Italian outpost.

The opening of those Golden Arches in 1986 famously inspired a relatively unknown Turin foodie, Carlo Petrini, to launch what became Slow Food — the international movement that embraces local, organic food and home cooking over fast food and the industrialized food chain.

After a day of barbering, Rodolfo Gregorio went to his neighborhood karaoke bar still smelling of talcum powder. Putting aside his glass of Red Horse Extra Strong beer, he grasped a microphone with a habitué’s self-assuredness and briefly stilled the room with the Platters’ “My Prayer.”

Next, he belted out crowd-pleasers by Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. But Mr. Gregorio, 63, a witness to countless fistfights and occasional stabbings erupting from disputes over karaoke singing, did not dare choose one beloved classic: Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Way.”

“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

The ex-mayor of a Lancashire village who got “sexual kicks” from breaking into women’s homes to steal underwear has been jailed for two years.

Ian Stafford, 59, who admitted three counts of burglary, resigned his post in Preesall after his arrest last year.

Preston Crown Court heard how he would creep into their bedrooms and search drawers for the underwear, before carrying out a sex act.

He was caught after one victim set up a hidden camera, catching him in the act. The burglaries took place at buildings in Poulton-le-Fylde and Stalmine between 1 January and 26 June last year.

While past Olympics have been magnets for protests over issues such as aboriginal rights in Australia and oppression in Tibet, the Vancouver Winter Games are preparing to host one of the biggest displays ever of organized opposition to the Olympics themselves.

Building on years of disgruntlement over the increasingly corporate nature of the Games — and widespread alarm over a projected $5.6-billion price tag — a resistance network has vowed to post thousands of protesters outside venues, some of whom aim to disrupt the events.

Security analysts have warned that such domestic protesting is as great a threat to the seamless unfolding of the Games as the possibility of a terrorist attack. Canadian officials, however, have promised to give the demonstrators as much leeway as possible, backing off plans to ban signs, cordon off protesters and use high-tech sonic weapons to disperse unruly crowds.

That open door reflects not only British Columbia’s tradition of tolerance and commitment to free speech, but also an acknowledgment of Vancouver residents’ reservations about hosting the Games, the infrastructure for which will probably take years to pay off.

In recent weeks, politicians and small-business owners have been among those raising questions about whether the two-week event, which begins Friday, can possibly be worth the large public expenditures, traffic disruptions and environmental damage.

The “fight club” scrap at a Queens elementary school was uncovered only after the father of one of the combatants heard his son whining that he didn’t have enough fans in his corner.

Tomas Rivera said that he overheard his son complaining to his sparring partner — as the pint-sized pugilists played video games Thursday evening — that he wasn’t getting enough applause during their bout at PS 65 in Ozone Park.

“I heard him go, ‘Oh, they were cheering you more than they were cheering me,’ ” the father told The Post.

Rivera then quizzed his son, also named Tomas, and the 10-year-old spilled the beans about the clash, which was allegedly set up by Joseph Gullotta, the kids’ fourth-grade teacher.

 Rivera said his son initially had a beef with another student when Gullotta told the boy, “Don’t fight with him because I like you guys too much.”

Instead, the teacher allegedly told his son to take out his aggression on longtime pal Justin Stokel, 9.

Swordfish punctured part of an oil loading pipe in Angola, causing a three-day delay to tanker shipments of Girassol crude, traders said on Tuesday.

French oil company Total TOTF.PA, which operates the crude stream declared force majeure on shipments, but lifted it on Monday.

In general, force majeure frees an operator from supply obligations due to extraordinary circumstances.

“It was caused because of swordfish. Now the swordfish have passed, so the force majeure has been lifted,” said one trader, who buys the crude on a regular basis.

Slight delays to cargo loadings scheduled in February and March were likely, traders said. Total later said that a swordfish had damaged a flexible loading pipe.

“Total confirms that a force majeure was declared that was lifted on Monday” a company spokeswoman said.

More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers.

The work computer of one regional supervisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed more than 1,800 attempts to look up pornography in a 17-day span: “It was kind of distraction per se,” he later told investigators. But he wasn’t alone. More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers, according to records obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act and other public documents.

The activities of porn-surfing SEC workers, a small fraction of the overall work force, have been serious enough to warrant a mention in each of the past four semiannual reports sent to Congress by the SEC’s office of inspector general.

In response to the open records request by The Washington Times, the inspector general’s office provided more than 150 pages of records and transcripts on the investigations, but declined to identify the employees involved. The office noted that disclosure of the employees’ names “could conceivably subject them to harassment and annoyance in the conduct of their official duties and private lives.”

Allan Bachman, education manager for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, said such problems are hardly unique to the SEC. He also said the findings are troubling aside from “the egregious nature of what they’re doing.”

A MICHIGAN man who rigged an explosive backpack for a backyard sledding stunt suffered burns to 18 per cent of his body when it blew up.

The Detroit Free Press reported the 62-year-old man from Independence Township had been hosting an outdoor winter party in his backyard and was reportedly drinking before the Sunday night mishap.

“Apparently, he has this sledding party every year, and he always does outrageous things at it, but he’s never blown himself up before,” Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe told the paper.

The man, whose name was not released, was believed to have constructed the backpack from an old car muffler, which he filled with gasoline and gunpowder, “trying to get a rocket-launch effect”, Mr McCabe said.

“He asked another person to light a wick and then began to sled down a hill.

“At some point during the ride, the device exploded.”

So much for the “hippy chimp”. Bonobos, known for their peaceable ways and casual sex, have been caught in the act of cannibalism.

An account of a group of wild bonobos consuming a dead infant, published last month, is the first report of cannibalism in these animals – making the species the last of the great apes to reveal a taste for the flesh of their own kind.

The account comes from a group of primatologists led by Gottfried Hohmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The team has studied bonobos in the wild at a site in Salonga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on hundreds of days since 2002. Few were more eventful than 9 and 10 July, 2008. Early on the morning of 9 July, Andrew Fowler spotted an ape known as Olga with her two daughters: 5 or 6-year-old Ophelia, and Olivia, who was three years her junior.

“By 8 o’clock Olivia was dead,” says Fowler. She showed no obvious traces of blood or bruises, so it seems unlikely she had been killed by other members of her group.

Fowler’s team lost sight of the apes not long afterwards, but early the following day he saw Olga join them carrying Olivia’s body, which had already begun to decompose. “It was smelling, limp and wet,” he recalls. Olga and seven others spent the rest of the day devouring the corpse.

Bees need not recognize human faces when going about their pollination business. Yet scientists have now found that they can train bees to recognize the arrangement of human facial features, by rewarding the classy striped insects with sugar. That could inspire new facial recognition systems, given that bees manage this feat with brains the size of a microdot.

The bee ability to distinguish between human faces was first noticed by Adrian Dyer, a vision scientist from Monash University in Australia. But biologist Martin Giurfa from the Université de Toulouse in France wanted to better understand how bees managed to learn facial features, and so he teamed up with Dyer to carry out a more systematic test.

It turns out that bees don’t consciously recognize individual people, so much as the relative pattern that makes up a face. Researchers tested this by first training the bees to recognize simple faces made of dots and slashes, and then seeing if the bees could distinguish between two different faces. The bees passed the test.

Next, the research team gave the bees a choice between new faces and a random assort of dots and slashes. The bees still ended up homing in on the face-like patterns. Equally as impressive, the bees learned to recognize stick-and-dot faces against face-shaped photographs, and still identified the correct faces without the photo backgrounds.

THE number of people killed in human sacrifice is on the rise.

According to a report obtained from the Police, the number of people killed in human sacrifice increased from three in 2007 to 25 in 2008 and 29 in 2009.

In addition, a total of 123 people were still missing by the end of 2009, the majority of them, or 90, were children. Most of them are suspected to having become victims of human sacrifice.

To date, 125 suspects have been arrested and 54 were taken to court. They were charged with criminal offences such as murder, abductions, kidnap, causing harm and attempting to sell children. However, nobody has been convicted so far.

Altogether 1,213 people went missing in the course of last year but the majority of them were traced.

Kampala district emerged as the most dangerous place, with 956 people gone missing for at least a few days during 2009. This was followed by Wakiso district with 98 missing people, Mityana with 19 and Kayunga with 16 missing people. Masaka, Mukono and Jinja each had 14 cases.

Of the 29 confirmed ritual murders last year, three were in Kampala while Jinja, Mukono and Mityana each had two.

A collection of speeches by Benito Mussolini has become an unlikely and controversial hit on the internet.

The speeches, the last of which was delivered in 1938 when Italy introduced laws which discriminated against Jews, are the second-most downloaded application on the Italian version of Apple’s iTunes website.

The popularity of the application, called iMussolini, caused outrage among some Italians in the week that the country commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day – the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces.

The website was inundated with comments condemning the continuing fascination with Mussolini and a member of the Italian Communist Party called the application “disgraceful”.

It contains 100 of Il Duce’s speeches and can be bought for 79 euro cents, or 68 pence. It was downloaded more than a video game based on the blockbuster science fiction film Avatar.

The world’s first Swiss Army knife’ has been revealed – made 1,800 years before its modern counterpart.

An intricately designed Roman implement, which dates back to 200AD, it is made from silver but has an iron blade. It features a spoon, fork as well as a retractable spike, spatula and small tooth-pick.

Experts believe the spike may have been used by the Romans to extract meat from snails.

The 3in x 6in (8cm x 15cm) knife was excavated from the Mediterranean area more than 20 years ago and was obtained by the museum in 1991.

The unique item is among dozens of artefacts exhibited in a newly refurbished Greek and Roman antiquities gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge.

Experts believe it may have been carried by a wealthy traveller, who will have had the item custom made.

A spokesman said: ‘This was probably made between AD 200 and AD 300, when the Roman empire was a great imperial power.

It’s a scene out of the Bible.

Not a lion lying down with a lamb, but three powerful cheetahs becoming friends with a baby impala antelope.

They met in Kenya’s Masai Mara, a world-famous game preserve known for its habitat of big cats, like these adult male cheetahs.

Photographer Michel Denis-Huot was on safari last October when he snapped these amazing shots in a grassy savanna.

“These three brothers have been living together since they left their mother at about 18 months old,” he said. “On the morning we saw them, they seemed not to be hungry, walking quickly but stopping sometimes to play together.”

The preferred diet of cheetahs begins with small antelope. But these cats weren’t hungry because they normally hunt in the daytime, either in the early morning or late afternoon.

A man set himself on fire after pouring gasoline on himself outside Nicholas Ungar Furs at 12th and Yamhill Wednesday morning before police used a fire extinguisher to put out the flames.

He later died from his injuries at the hospital, police said.

The man was identified as 26-year-old Daniel Shaull from Kansas, according to the Multnomah County medical examiner.

It was not immediately clear whether Shaull was protesting against the store, which has had problem with animal rights activists in the past, but witnesses said he was screaming about the treatment of animals.

“There are animals dying! Animals dying!” witnesses said Shaull was screaming as flames engulfed his body and shot above his head.

Twitter users responded snarkily Wednesday to the name of Apple’s latest innovation the iPad, pushing the phrase “iTampon” to a number two “trending” topic on the microblogging site.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the new gadget amid high expectations, and Twitter users followed his announcement online, with both “Steve Jobs” and “Official Apple iPad” scoring high on the site’s trending topics.

But by late afternoon, joking messages drawing attention to the connotations many associated with the name iPad were being uploaded by Twitter users all over the world, in a variety of languages.

Travellers trapped at Machu Picchu complained of a lack of food and shelter today as they spent a fourth day stranded at the site in Peru.

About 1,600 are in villages near the Inca citadel, with more arriving, after mudslides cut off the railway.

Rain is hampering helicopter rescues and the railway could take three days to fix.

Officials had hoped to reopen the railway and rescue tourists by Tuesday, but now say they will need two or three more days.

Choppers have flown out more than 1,000 tourists over the last two days, but 250 more arrived yesterday and more were expected today.

Authorities closed the Inca trail, the track that finishes at Machu Picchu, on Tuesday after a mudslide killed two people, but many who started the four-day trek before that will arrive in the coming days.

“It’s worrisome. We didn’t think it would take this long,” said tourism minister Martin Perezy. “We can evacuate 120 tourists per hour, now the only thing we need is for the climate to help us out a little bit.”

North and South Korea on Wednesday exchanged what appeared to be artillery fire near a disputed sea border with the South off the west coast of the peninsula, Yonhap news agency reported government officials as saying.

South Korea’s presidential Blue House said both sides were firing into the air and there were no casualties, according to Yonhap.

It has called a meeting of top national security officials.

The rare exchange of fire rattled markets, with Seoul’s main stock exchange extending losses and the won wiping out early gains against the dollar.

A California man sold his 14-year-old daughter to an 18-year-old man for cash, beer and meat — then called police when the prospective bridegroom didn’t live up to his end of the deal, authorities said Tuesday.

Marcelino de Jesus Martinez, 36, of Greenfield, California, was arrested Monday and booked into the Monterey County Jail, Greenfield police said in a statement.

He faces felony charges of receiving money for causing a person to cohabitate, police said.

Martinez had arranged through a third party to have his daughter marry the older teenager, identified by authorities as Margarito de Jesus Galindo, of Gonzales, California.

In exchange, Galindo was to pay Martinez $16,000 and provide him with 160 cases of beer, 100 cases of soda, 50 cases of Gatorade, two cases of wine, and six cases of meat, Greenfield Police Chief Joe Grebmeier told CNN.

When things looked their darkest for Gov. Mark Sandford — when he was in danger of being impeached for running off to Argentina to see his mistress — his best insurance policy may well have been South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer.

Lawmakers knew if they removed Sanford, they would end up with Bauer, a fiercely ambitious Republican with a reputation for reckless and immature behavior.

Now Bauer has folks shaking their heads again, after he likened government assistance to the poor to feeding stray animals.

At a town hall meeting Thursday, Bauer, who is running for governor in his own right now that Sanford is term-limited, said: “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

The mayor of Moscow, known for his overtly homophobic statements, said Monday that he would never allow a gay pride parade in the city, calling it “Satanic” and saying marchers should be punished.

“A gay parade… cannot be called anything but a Satanic act,” Yury Luzhkov told an education conference, quoted by Interfax news agency.

“We haven’t permitted such a parade and we won’t permit it in the future.” Luzhkov called for gay marchers to be punished.

“It’s high time that we stop propagating nonsense discussions about human rights, and bring to bear on them the full force and justice of the law,” he said.

Gay rights campaigner Nikolai Alexeyev reaffirmed that plans for this year’s gay pride parade will go ahead despite the ban.

“We don’t plan to make any changes. We still plan to hold a gay parade on May 29,” Alexeyev told AFP.

Personal friends of employees at Google, Adobe and other companies were targeted by hackers in a string of recently disclosed cyberattacks, raising privacy concerns and pointing to a highly sophisticated operation, security experts said.

Cybersecurity experts analysing the attacks said the hackers spied on individuals and used other sophisticated techniques, making them extremely difficult to stop. The disclosures come amid renewed alarm over cybersecurity after Google said it had been the target of a series of cyberattacks from China.

The most significant discovery is that the attackers had selected employees at the companies with access to proprietary data, then learnt who their friends were. The hackers compromised the social network accounts of those friends, hoping to enhance the probability that their final targets would click on the links they sent.

It’s a small sign igniting a big debate.

An official state of Colorado Adopt-a-Highway placard announcing that a one-mile long stretch of US Highway 85 is sponsored not by the Boy Scouts or the Lions Club, but by the Nazi Party of Colorado.

Members call themselves the National Socialist Movement. They are inspired by teachings of Hitler, believe interracial relationships and homosexuality should be crimes, and they want to start a separate all-white country.

The Adopt-a-Highway program, they say, is a good PR move for them and a recruiting tool.

“We want to let them know that we’re here and we do good things,” Unit leader Neal Land told FOX 31 News.

“We’re upstanding citizens, try to be good people, and try to portray ourselves that way.”

It is a basketball town, after all.

Raucous Jets fans took over Indiana’s sleepy capital city this weekend, turning bars and hotel lobbies green with envy in preparation for a playoff showdown to keep their Super Bowl dreams alive.

Despite the home field advantage, Indianapolis Colts fans were outnumbered – and shouted down – in more than a few local venues including a downtown hotel where public computers were adorned with Jets screensavers.

“I can’t stand Jets fans,” said one barfly in a Peyton Manning jersey. “They’re so obnoxious.”

What he obviously didn’t realize is that it was a compliment.

I joined a Facebook group called “Who is Ellie Light?” This morning I was invited to join a new group: “Who is Mark Spivey?”

Who is Mark Spivey? I know only this: that he is the author of this pro-Obama letter that has appeared in numerous publications:

A recent Associated Press article stated that President Barack Obama’s hesitancy on the Afghan war buildup implies weakness. I wish world leaders had more of that kind of weakness.

Clearly, Obama does not want to send soldiers into harm’s way without a clear goal, a solid plan and an exit strategy, three aspects sorely missing from former President George W. Bush’s military ventures. I know that we Americans are used to presidents who play cowboy, who say things like “bring ’em on” and “mission accomplished” without a second thought; presidents who send Americans into battle on falsified weapons reports.

But it seems our current president understands that you don’t send soldiers into battle without first nailing down what they’re supposed to be doing, and why. So hats off to Obama’s “hesitation.” Soldiers are human beings, not chess pieces. It’s about time we get a president who understands that.
— Mark Spivey

The letter has appeared — at a minimum! — at The Minnesota Daily, at the Baltimore Chronicle (on the same page as Ellie Light’s letter!), at the San Diego Union-Tribune (where he claims to be from San Diego), at the Naples News (where he claims to be from Naples, Florida), and at Buzzflash.com. And there are more. You know what to do.
…
Also: Ed Morrissey forwarded me an e-mail he received from Ellie Light several days ago. The mail appears to have been routed through the IP address 212.24.236.50, which comes back to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia??

Tiger Woods allegedly paid a British woman almost half a million pounds to keep quiet about their affair.

According to a newspaper report today, the golfer gave mother of two Emma Rotherham $500,000 (£310,000) in cash after she promised never to speak about their 18-month fling.

Blonde Emma, 42, is said to be 34-year-old Tiger’s 19th conquest and his most recent mistress, was reportedly handed a bag by a member of the sportsman’s security team, which was stuffed with $100 bills.

And according to source close to Tiger, Emma had to sign a confidentiality agreement upon taking the money which bought her silence.

They said: ‘She’s very happy and walking round with a big grin on her face – like the cat that’s got the cream.’

An Ohio man is in jail after police arrested him on charges of urinating on a meat counter at a Wal-Mart store, Cleveland’s Fox8.com reported.

Robert T. Jenkins, 21, of Canton, Ohio, was arrested at 1:30 a.m. local time on Friday morning, Lt. Linda Brown of the Canton Police Department told Fox8.com.

Jenkins was charged with felony vandalism and disorderly conduct.

Jenkins was arrested after police responded to a call from an employee at the Wal-Mart store telling authorities that a man walked up to the meat counter and began urinating on the steaks, police told Fox8.com.

The disorderly conduct destroyed more than $600 dollars in meat.

Two of Russia’s champion ice skaters have caused outrage after dressing as Aborigines for a competition.

The couple, who are favored to win gold at next month’s winter Olympics, wear skin-toned suits with red loin cloths, white body paint and eucalyptus leaves.

But experts in Australia say Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin’s movements and body decorations bear no resemblance to that of the Aborigines’ 60,000 year old culture.

“They have got the whole thing wrong,” said Stephen Page, artistic director of the respected indigenous group, the Bangarra Dance Company.

Page said the two and half minute routine’s didgeridoo music sounded more like it came from India or Africa.

Austrian-born Felix Baumgartner will plummet 125,000 feet in a fall that will see him break the sound barrier.

His jump, which is being assisted by former Nasa and US Air Force engineers, will feature in a documentary to be shown on BBC

It is 50 years since American Joe Kittinger made history by leaping from a balloon at 102,800ft.

Mr Baumgartner, who is known for stunts such as jumping off the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, will travel up to 125,000ft in a specially designed capsule suspended beneath a helium balloon.

His freefall will last for more than five minutes and he will have to wear a specially made pressure suit and helmet to protect his body in the extreme cold and thin air.

It is hoped that the jump will answer a number of important scientific questions.

Reaching speeds of over 690mph (Mach 1) in just 35 seconds his body will experience some of the most arduous conditions ever experienced in freefall.

His team also hope to use the “space dive” to gather data about the stratosphere and how the body copes with the extreme conditions.

Ellie Light sure gets around. In recent weeks, Light has published virtually identical “Letters to the Editor” in support of President Barack Obama in more than a dozen newspapers.

Every letter claimed a different residence for Light that happened to be in the newspaper’s circulation area.

“It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” said a letter from alleged Philadelphian Ellie Light, that was published in the Jan. 19 edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.

A letter from Light in the Jan. 20 edition of the San Francisco Examiner concluded with an identical sentence, but with an address for Light all the way across the country in Daly City, California.

Variations of Light’s letter ran in Ohio’s Mansfield News Journal on Jan. 13, with Light claiming an address in Mansfield; in New Mexico’s Ruidoso News on Jan. 12, claiming an address in Three Rivers; in South Carolina’s The Sun News on Jan. 18, claiming an address in Myrtle Beach; and in the Daily News Leader of Staunton, Virginia on Jan. 15, claiming an address in Waynesboro.

Her publications list includes other papers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and California, all claiming separate addresses.

Two Bronx men were locked up and left to rot in a filthy jail cell for nearly a week after a pair of cops mistook their candy for a bag of crack.

The “drugs” were finally tested five days later and determined to be popular Coco (coconut) Candy. The charges were dropped.

The trouble began the night of Jan. 15, as José Pena, a 48-year-old plumber, and his longtime pal and colleague Cesar Rodriguez, 33, were headed to a party, and decided to stop at a bodega on 181st Street and the Grand Concourse.

When they came out, cops were waiting and asked to search their Ford minivan.

“I said ‘Go search.’ I even opened the door,” Rodriguez told The Post. An officer rummaged around, came out holding a “Hello Kitty” sandwich bag, and shouted “Bingo!” the men said.

“It’s only candy!” Rodriguez said, as the cops handcuffed him and Pena, and several other police cars rushed to the scene.

Rodriguez said he buys a 50-cent bag of Coco Candy, a hard coconut-based treat, almost every day. Because it easily crumbles, he puts it in a sandwich bag.

“Can you test it? Can you taste it?” Rodriguez asked the cops.

“Shut up!” they replied.

State police in New York say an upstate dairy farmer shot and killed 51 of his milk cows in his barn before turning the rifle on himself.

State police found the body of 59-year-old Dean Pierson in his Copake barn on Thursday.

A visitor found a note Pierson had left on the barn door that said not to come in and to call police.

State police would only say that Pierson was having personal issues.

The Columbia County hamlet of Copake is about 115 miles north of New York City.

Local farmers buried the cows outside the barn Friday.

They would not discuss Pierson or what had happened, but one of the men said these are hard times to be a farmer.

Hardcore bowlers don’t just call their main alley their lanes — it’s their house.

A beloved house burned down last week after 50 years on the edge of Vineland, a city in a part of New Jersey far from the historical home of the mob and the teeming chaos of the shore, a place where the state nickname, the Garden State, seems apt.

Sadness turned to anger Wednesday, when authorities announced that the manager of a rival bowling alley, the only other one in Cumberland County, had been charged with arson in the destruction of Loyle Lanes.

 Steven Smink, the lessee-manager of Pike Lanes Family Fun Center in Deerfield, hired another man, Felix Manzano, 21, and a teenager to torch Loyle Lanes, police said.

A MAN has been banned for life from a public city park after he allegedly dropped his pants and tried to have sex with a tree.

William Shaw, 21, has been ordered by a court not to enter Central Park in Airdrie, Scotland after claims he attempted to have intercourse with the plant.

It is alleged he dropped his trousers and underpants while in the visitor attraction in September last year.

It is claimed he then tried to have simulated sex with the tree while his trousers were around his ankles.

Shaw, of Airdrie, pleaded not guilty to an act of public indecency at the town’s sheriff court.

This was the amazing sight that greeted Italian immigration police during routine spot check – a teenage boy hidden in a suitcase as he tried to illegally enter the country.

The 15-year-old Afghan boy was discovered curled into foetal position inside the case while his 17-year-old brother was hidden in the foot well covered with blankets.

Officers immediately arrested the Greek driver of the car, Alexandros Lepesiotis, 42, and charged him with illegally smuggling people into the country. This Afghan illegal immigrant, 15, was discovered hiding in a zipped suitcase in the boot of a Peugeot 207 by Italian border guards

The discovery was made at the Adriatic port of Bari, a well known entry point for people smugglers, on a ferry which had just arrived from Greece, the Sea Trade.

Officers pulled over Lepesiotis for a spot check in his Peugeot 207 and became suspicious of him as he reacted nervously when they began examining the car.

A mass rescue was continuing yesterday for more than 2,000 endangered sea turtles that were shocked into a coma by freezing weather in Florida.

Temperatures may be rising after the rare cold weather but scores of turtles are still being found unconscious on beaches and in lagoons.

A phenomenon known as “cold stun” sets in when water temperatures drop below 50F (10C) because the turtles cannot regulate their metabolism.

More than 750 were taken to the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, at the Nasa Kennedy Space Centre. “We’ve seen cold-stun events before but never on this scale. This is ten times the normal magnitude,” said Terry Norton, the director and veterinary surgeon at the Georgia Sea Turtle Centre in Jekyll Island.

A sheep gave birth to a dead lamb with a human-like face. The calf was born in a village not far from the city of Izmir, Turkey.

Erhan Elibol, a vet, performed Cesarean section on the animal to take the calf out, but was horrified to see that the features of the calf’s snout bore a striking resemblance to a human face.

“I’ve seen mutations with cows and sheep before. I’ve seen a one-eyed calf, a two-headed calf, a five-legged calf. But when I saw this youngster I could not believe my eyes. His mother could not deliver him so I had to help the animal,” the 29-year-old veterinary said.

Google said Tuesday that it may pull out of China because of a sophisticated computer network attack originating in China and targeting its e-mail service.

The company said it had evidence to suggest that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts” of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was discovered in December. Based on its investigation to date, Google said it does not believe the cyber attack succeeded.

“Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves,” the company said in a blog posting.

But David Drummond, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer, added that the attacks “have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.”

Google has further decided it is no longer willing to continue censoring its search results in Chinese Google sites, Drummond said, and over the next few weeks it will discuss with the Beijing government how it may operate “an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” he said.

Game over: The Clintons stand alone 

A new book is out with a highly critical but unsourced portrait of Hillary Clinton. This familiar occurrence — it’s happened too many times to count over the years — has usually been greeted with an equally familiar response: A fast and furious counterattack from the Clinton inner circle.

What’s notable about the highly publicized release of “Game Change,” however, is the virtual silence from the Clinton camp. The lack of public outrage seems to mark the sputtering end of what was once known as the Clinton political machine and underlines a fact that onetime Clinton loyalists acknowledge: The book’s primary sources about the former candidate and current secretary of state are her own former staffers and intimates.

As a result, there is no campaign of veteran Clintonites spinning the press corps and trying to pre-emptively discredit the book’s scathing depiction of Hillary Clinton as a rudderless candidate and a cheerleader for vicious tactics against eventual winner Barack Obama. There is no team of Clinton proxies going on cable television to denounce authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann as scurrilous and unworthy of belief.

This time, Bill and Hillary Clinton are virtually alone.

While the low-key response to a brutal portrayal of Clinton in part reflected a decision to keep a prominent face of the Obama administration’s foreign policy above the fray, it was also a recognition of reality: The same senior aides who had leaked damaging gossip could hardly be expected to rebut it.

Oh, Harry, Harry. Have you lost another submarine?

Harry Reid, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader and the national government’s highest-ranking Mormon, has admitted now remarking apparently with some amazement on the nation’s highest-ranking black Democrat as being notably “light-skinned” and having “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.”

The stunning quotation, which occurred during the 2008 presidential campaign, was noted/acquired by Mark Halperin of Time and John Heilemann of New York magazine. But for some reason not reported at the time or subsequently.

Instead, it was saved for their upcoming book, “Game Change.” Let’s see how their news magazine bosses are with that decision in coming days.

Although the radioactive quotation was apparently not included in the book’s promotional materials, it appeared on the Atlantic online on an obscure winter Saturday and was picked up in a Washington Post story.

Shouting “buy, buy, the world is going to die,” Venezuelans went on a frantic shopping spree on Saturday following a sharp currency devaluation that is expected to drive up prices.

President Hugo Chavez announced a dual system for the fixed rate bolivar Friday night while much of the country was watching a baseball game.

But Saturday, word spread quickly as people read the morning papers and listened to the radio in Caracas cafes.

Shoppers crammed into electronics stores, eager to snap up imported televisions and computers ahead of the anticipated price hikes.

“I’ve been lining up for two hours outside to buy a television and two speakers because by Monday everything is bound to be double the current price,” said Miguel Gonzalez, a 56-year-old engineer standing in the tropical sun outside a popular store.

In a new incident of grisly drug war violence, a man’s face was skinned and stitched onto a soccer ball as a threat to members of Mexico’s Juarez drug cartel.

The unknown assailants cut up the body of Hugo Hernandez into seven pieces and left him on a street in the northern city of Los Mochis, a spokesman for Sinaloa prosecutors, Martin Robles, told the Associated Press.

Hernandez’s torso was found in a plastic container in a separate location from another box that contained his arms, legs and skull.

The macabre soccer ball was discovered a plastic bag near Los Mochis’ City Hall in Sinaloa.

They may look like winter’s answer to crop circles, but these mysterious snow rolls are in fact a rare natural phenomenon usually found only in the world’s most remote and frozen regions.

Also known as snowrollers, snow bales and snow doughnuts, they form mostly in unusual conditions created by a precise combination of snow, ice, wind, temperature and moisture on the prairies of North America.

But this week’s frozen weather has allowed the snow cylinders to make a freak appearance in the UK.

Ron Trevett, 55, and his wife Aileen, 54, readers of The Daily Telegraph, were stunned when they stumbled across the mysterious formations as they walked their dogs in a field near their home in Yeovil, Somerset.

“We saw them from a distance on the ridge of the field, and we thought some kids had been playing up there and making giant snowballs,” said Mr Trevett.

“But when we got up there we saw there were no footprints and there were hundreds of them – too many for children to have done it. We realised it must have been the wind.”

France’s highest administrative body has ruled that double-hyphenated, double-barrelled surnames such as Bruni–Sarkozy must be abolished after imposing the unwieldy spelling on tens of thousands of children in the past four years.

In 2005, the French state – famous for laying down rigid language rules – declared that all new double-barrelled surnames must be spelt with two hyphens: the offspring of Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy, would in theory take the surname Bruni–Sarkozy.

The idea was supposed to distinguish, for administrative reasons, between old double-barrelled names, like Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa – the French president’s full surname – and new, so-called “composed” names.

These cropped up from 2002, when it became possible in France to simply create a “family name” by sticking together the mother’s and father’s surnames.

But parents horrified at the ugly double hyphen launched a crusade to overturn the decision.

The Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative watchdog, has now sided with the single dash camp in a definitive ruling, saying the state had exceeded its legal powers and butchered the French language into the bargain with the double hyphen

The Slovakian government has insisted the authorities in Ireland were aware a passenger was carrying plastic explosives in his bag on a flight to Dublin last Saturday morning before the plane even took off for Ireland.

A strongly worded statement has been issued by the Slovakian Ministry of the Interior defending its handling of the debacle and criticising the actions of the Garda.

The statement also criticised what it claimed was the inaccurate reporting of the case by the media in Ireland.

It pointed out that contrary to media reports in Ireland, plastic explosives had been planted in the luggage of just one passenger, and not eight as has widely been reported.

It said the explosives were planted in the luggage of a passenger, without his consent, at Poprad-Tatry airport in eastern Slovakia on Saturday morning as part of an airport security exercise.

Hat tip to Una!

TWO bank robbers who blew themselves up trying to make a sizable withdrawal from an ATM have been declared the 2009 winners of the Darwin Awards.

Organisers say the annual “prize” is given to “those doing the most to improve the human gene pool … by removing themselves from it”.

They both were killed when the blast demolished the entire building the ATM was housed in.

Police only found the body of the second robber some twelve hours after digging through the debris.

They had initially assumed he had made a getaway.

The bankrobbers just edged ahead of Florida man Shawn Motero, who was stuck in a traffic jam when nature called.

He got out of his car and jumped over a concrete wall to find a more secluded spot.

Unfortunately, the 30-year-old had not realized he was on a bridge and fell 65ft (19.8m) to his death.

A Memphis man went to jail New Year’s Day on a rash of charges after police found him drinking a 40-ounce beer while driving backward down a city street with a marijuana plant on the front seat.

At about 9 a.m. Friday, officers responded to a complaint that Tyrone Buckley, 51, was driving drunk around a parking lot in the 1000 block of Court in the Medical Center area.

According to an affidavit, officers spotted Buckley driving backward on nearby Waldran Boulevard.

According to police, Buckley smelled of alcohol and had a box on the passenger’s seat holding a marijuana plant.

Citizens of Shanghai are aghast at the collapse of a major new bridge, pictured, which was revealed to be constructed partially out of rubbish instead of concrete.

The bridge, spanning the Wusong River in central Shanghai, was completed in 2009 and replaced a century old bridge with a more modern design.

However, after only a short period in operation the bridge began to collapse, with investigators finding such sturdy construction materials as bags of rubbish, Styrofoam, scrap wood and waste plastic used in the structure in place of reinforced concrete.

Children who are smacked by parents often turn out more successful than those who have not, research has found.

The study concluded that children who had been physically disciplined when they were young, between the ages of 2 and 6, were performing better as teenagers on almost every measure that was taken into consideration than those who had never been smacked.

It was only in cases where it continued beyond the age of 12 that the children were found to be affected negatively, resulting in a dip on performance indicators.

The results of the US-based study undermines the efforts of various campaigners who have been trying to have physical punishment outlawed in the UK, who have claimed that it causes long-term damage to the children.

A Sturgis woman had a blood-alcohol level of .708 percent, possibly a state record, when she was found earlier this month behind the wheel of a stolen vehicle parked on Interstate 90, according to Meade County State’s Attorney Jesse Sondreal.

A South Dakota Highway Patrol trooper discovered Marguerite Engle, 45, on Dec. 1 passed out behind the wheel of a delivery truck reported stolen in Rapid City.

Her blood-alcohol level was almost nine times South Dakota’s legal limit of .08 percent.

Checks with local and state labs where blood-alcohol levels are tested suggest Engle’s reading may be the highest ever recorded in South Dakota, Sondreal said.

Sondreal said a state chemist recalled a sample that tested .53, but nothing higher, in his more than 30 years on the job.

Albay Governor Joey S. Salceda on Tuesday issued a strong warning against a local official who is reportedly escorting tourists within the designated danger zone around Mayon Volcano.

Disaster officials were also furious after receiving reports that City Councilor Celoy Chan has been allegedly renting his all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) to foreign tourists.

“It’s stupidity,” said Salceda. “We have been spending a lot of money and exerting all our efforts to clear the danger zones and there he is, disregarding what was agreed upon.”

“If he does not stop, we will take action against him,” the governor warned.

A man who allegedly took a plane from a Brooksville airport was forced down by a military aircraft Wednesday afternoon.

According to Wendell Stephens, a supervisor at American Aviation in the Hernando County Airport, the owner and pilot of the plane was a French citizen who was licensed to fly the plane.

A Federal Aviation Administration-certified instructor who flew with the man recommended that he not fly the plane because he could not communicate in English with anyone on the ground or in the air.

This was explained to the pilot through an interpreter, and the pilot became indignant and took off in the plane anyway, Stephens said.
…
Salac said she wasn’t sure who called authorities at the North American Aerospace Defense Command — the military agency that handles airspace threats — but jets responded quickly to pursue the small plane. Two F-15s forced the plane down at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Collier County.

It sounds like the plot of a Steig Larsson thriller: a band of eastern European criminals is contracted to steal an iconic piece of Nazi memorabilia, which is then sold to a mysterious collector to finance a neofascist bomb attack on the Swedish parliament.

But today it emerged that Swedish investigators are helping Polish detectives investigate the theft of the sign from Auschwitz, amid reports that the robbery was linked to a rightwing terror plot.

The wrought iron plaque reading Arbeit Macht Frei (work sets you free) which spanned the entrance at the former Nazi death camp was wrenched from the gate on 18 December, and recovered three days later, cut into three pieces, in a forest in northern Poland.

The robbery prompted Poland to declare a state of emergency, and provoked impassioned calls for the sign’s return from concentration camp survivors and the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

The five men being held in police custody in Krakow in connection with the theft have been described by Polish prosecutors as common criminals who had apparently acted for financial gain.

But according to the Danish daily Aftonbladet, the men were contracted by a neo-Nazi group which planned to sell it on to a third party, a foreign rightwing extremist or collector of Nazi memorabilia, with the aim of using the funds to finance a string of attacks in Stockholm.

As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.

TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them.

The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.

Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer.

Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.

“It literally showed up in my box,” Frischling told The Associated Press.

“I do not know who it came from.” He said he provided the agents a signed statement to that effect.

Computer hackers this week said they had cracked and published the secret code that protects 80 per cent of the world’s mobile phones. The move will leave more than 3bn people vulnerable to having their calls intercepted, and could force mobile phone operators into a costly upgrade of their networks.

Karsten Nohl, a German encryption expert, said he had organised the hack to demonstrate the weaknesses of the security measures protecting the global system for mobile communication (GSM) and to push mobile operators to improve their systems.

“This shows that existing GSM security is inadequate,” Mr Nohl told an audience of about 600 people at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a four-day conference of computer hackers.

“We have given up hope that network operators will move to improve security on their own, but we are hoping that with this added attention, there will be increased demand from customers for them to do this,” he told the Financial Times.

President Barack Obama has apparently issued a long-awaited executive order on classification that fulfills one of his campaign promises by setting up a National Declassification Center to oversee the release of historical documents.

But the announcement, ironically, is shrouded in secrecy and confusion.

“While the Government must be able to prevent the public disclosure of information that would compromise the national security, a democratic government accountable to the people must be as transparent as possible and must not withhold information for self-serving reasons or simply to avoid embarrassment,” National Security Council official William Leary wrote in a blog post announcing the order.

Oddly, that blog post was dated and time stamped at 4:44 p.m. Monday but does not appear to have shown up on the White House website until a little before noon Tuesday.

Adding to the mystery, the link to the executive order was dead at that time. Then, shortly after this reporter inquired about that dead link, the entire blog post disappeared.

The order reportedly sets deadlines for declassification of information exempted from automatic 25-year declassification requirements and eliminates a veto the intelligence community held over declassification orders from an interagency panel that hears appeals of such cases.

A city correction officer took a cell phone photo of his co-worker sleeping on duty, leading to disciplinary action against both of them.

The photo shows guard Nadja Green, in uniform, leaning back in a chair with her arms folded on her chest, eyes closed and mouth open. An inmate is standing next to her, making a “peace” sign.

The photo, published in the New York Post on Tuesday, came to the attention of Department of Correction officials last week, said Deputy Commissioner Stephen Morello. Once it was authenticated, Green was transferred from her post at the Rikers Island infirmary and removed from supervising inmates.

The department also did the same to Claudel Barrau, the officer who took the photo. Phone numbers for Green and Barrau could not be found. Green has been in the department for 4 1/2 years; Barrau for 18 years.

Poland will formally seek Sweden’s help in investigating the theft of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign from the Auschwitz memorial, confirming that Polish authorities suspect a Swedish link in the crime.

Boguslawa Marcinkowska, a spokeswoman for Krakow prosecutors, says her office will send a formal request for help Wednesday to the Swedish Justice Ministry in Stockholm.

Polish media have been reporting that the theft was commissioned by a collector living in Sweden, but investigators have not confirmed that.

A four-foot pile of ash and charred debris is all that remains of the Rodriguez family’s two-story garage, which had been stuffed with tools, machinery, couches and appliances when a mysterious fire ripped through it earlier this month.

It was the 22nd arson that has taken place since August in a historic Houston neighborhood called the Heights, known more for its comforting small-town feel in the midst of big city sprawl than for being the center of criminal activity.

Most of the fires have taken place in the middle of the night and nearly always in abandoned structures, though flames have leapt to some adjacent occupied homes, frightening residents like the Rodriguez family.

“I just don’t know when they are going to catch this guy,” a dejected Jesus Rodriguez said as he stood over his truck’s pickup bed, dirtied by ash and scorched pieces of wood after it had been used to haul away the debris.

Authorities charged a suspect last month for starting one of the blazes. But he has not been charged with any of the other arsons and the fires continued even after his arrest.

Residents of the Heights, which sits on one of Houston’s rare hills overlooking nearby downtown, have taken some comfort no one has been hurt. But they worry their property could be next.

The investigation into the so-called Warmergate emails – the leaked data from the University of East Anglia’s climate change department – took a new twist last night when The Mail on Sunday tracked the stolen messages to a suspect computer which provides internet access to China.

The address used to post the emails is also on an international ‘black list’ which highlights suspicious behaviour on the internet. The revelation comes after the Russian security service, the FSB – the former KGB – authorised the release of confidential information that allowed us to retrace the route taken by the email traffic.

A computer company in Siberia was ultimately used to post the controversial messages – which cast doubt on the reliability of scientists’ global warming claims – on the internet. The revelation led to claims that the Russians were behind the release of the information.

But, anxious to distance themselves from the leak, the FSB revealed how the data had been sent to Siberia from a computer in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The evidence passed to The Mail on Sunday now raises questions about whether Chinese hackers, backed by the communist regime, are the source of the emails.

The 86-year-old governor of a southern Indian state resigned, a day after a television news channel broadcast a tape allegedly showing him in bed with three women.

Pressure mounted on Gov. Narain Dutt Tiwari to quit after the tape allegedly showing him in bed with three women was broadcast Friday, prompting the opposition and women’s right groups to hold street protests in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh’s state capital, demanding his resignation.

Tiwari’s office denied the allegation, denouncing the tape as fabricated. Tiwari, a veteran governing Congress party leader at the national level, sent his resignation letter to the Indian president on Saturday, citing health reasons, a state official said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

”The news channel report is fabricated, false and malicious to tarnish the image of the governor,” said a statement issued by Aryendra Sharma, an aide to the governor.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico accidentally blew up a building on December 16 with a Civil War-style cannon. According to an occurrence report, which was first reported by the Project on Government Oversight, the lab’s Shock and Detonation Physics team was testing a large-bore powder gun when they heard a “loud unusual noise.”

About 20 minutes later, the researchers ventured out of their bunker to see what had happened. Upon further investigation of the facility’s Technical Area 15, the team discovered that Building 562 had been blown apart.

Two doors were “propelled off the structure” and concrete shielding blocks were blasted off the walls. Parts of the cannon were also found lying on the asphalt nearby. The Facility Operations Director declared a “management concern” regarding the explosion.

No-one was hurt, but sources told POGO that damages could cost $3 million. The lab reported that it has conducted a “critique” of the incident.

A woman has been arrested after jumping over barriers and knocking down the Pope at Christmas Eve Mass.

Pope Benedict Pope Benedict XVI was attacked as he walked down the main aisle to begin service at St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.

Vatican spokesman Ciro Benedettini said the 82-year-old quickly got to his feet and was unhurt.

Mr Benedettini said the woman appeared to be mentally unstable and was being questioned by Vatican police.

He said she also knocked down Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, who was taken to hospital for a check-up.

Authorities say Robert Holt, 25, wanted to get back at his old girlfriend by throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window of her home.

But he got the wrong house. He is being held today without bond, charged with throwing the firebomb through the window of a Dell Drive house on Sunday night.

Mr. Holt was taken into custody shortly after the incident by officers with the Thomson Police Department.

He has been arrested on a number of charges in recent months, authorities say, and is now facing charges of arson in the first-degree, four counts of aggravated assault and possession of an explosive device, according to police records.

Each charge is a felony.

A Pakistani court has ordered that two men have their ears and noses cut off, as punishment for doing the same to a woman who refused to marry one of them.

The two brothers were found guilty of kidnapping 20-year-old Fazeelat Bibi, one of their cousins, in September.

The judge in Lahore also sentenced them to life in prison. Sentence was passed on Monday under a rarely invoked Islamic law dating from the 1980s.

In the past similar sentences have been revoked on appeal.

Government prosecutor Ehtisham Qadir said the punishment had been awarded in accordance with the Islamic principle of “an eye for an eye”.

Sher Mohammad and Amanat abducted Fazeelat Bibi as she returned home from work at a brick kiln in the Raiwind area of Lahore, the court heard.

“They put a noose around her neck, and then cut off her ears and nose,” Mr Qadir told the BBC.

The “Arbeit macht frei” sign stolen from Auschwitz in southern Poland has been found in the north and five men are being questioned by police.

The five suspects, aged in their 20s and 30s, were not members of a neo-Nazi group, Krakow police said. The metal sign from the main gate, which symbolises for many the atrocities of Nazi Germany, had been cut into three pieces, they added.

A major search was launched after the sign was stolen before dawn on Friday. Andrzej Rokita, the local police chief in Krakow – where the men were being questioned – said the theft had been financially motivated, and it remained unclear whether it was carried out to order.

“From the information we have, none of the five belong to a neo-Nazi group nor hold such ideas,” Andrzej Rokita said of the suspects.

ISRAEL has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without their families’ permission.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute, Jehuda Hiss.

The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians to harvest their organs.

Israel hotly denied the charge. Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 TV over the weekend.

In it, Hiss said: “We started to harvest corneas … Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”

The Channel 2 report said in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed the practice took place. “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer,” the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

A Greek man dressed in animal hide was mistakenly shot dead while out hunting wild boar for a Christmas dinner.

Police said members of a shooting party made up of families opened fire when Christos Constantinou, 49, moved through the undergrowth.

They are thought to have been confused by the fact the victim was disguised in dark goat skins, which are used to camouflage and to mislead their prey.

The groups had fanned out in pairs of two to track down an animal for the traditional festive dinner when the accident happened.

An argument between two men in wheelchairs ended in deadly violence early Saturday when one stabbed the other after being gashed on the head, police and witnesses said.

A resident of Barrier-Free Living, an assisted-living facility in the East Village, said the killer managed to corner the victim because he was using a motorized wheelchair. The battle started in the early morning hours when a 24-year-old resident smashed a 51-year-old with the footrest of his wheelchair, said resident Norbert Toledo.

“There was an argument over nothing,” said Toledo, who is the victim’s roommate. The older man was enraged and some time later zoomed over to his victim – who was using a manually operated wheelchair – and repeatedly stabbed him with a homemade knife.

“[He] sped up to him and began stabbing him over and over again,” Toledo, who said he watched the murder with guards on a security monitor. “We couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”

The victim was taken to Beth Israel Hospital, where he died. Cops recovered the knife at the scene and arrested the 51-year-old man. Charges were pending.

A Muslim chef who lost a claim of religious discrimination against Scotland Yard after complaining he was forced to cook sausages and bacon faces a legal bill of more than £75,000.

Hasanali Khoja accused the Metropolitan Police of failing to consider his Islamic beliefs when he was asked to handle pork products as a catering manager at a police station.

The £23,000-a-year chef claimed suggestions by his bosses that he should wear gloves and use tongs left him ’stressed and humiliated’.

Muslims are banned from eating pork under Islamic law. But Mr Khoja, 62, lost his claim in May after a police employee told an employment tribunal how she saw Mr Khoja eat bacon rolls and sausages.

The Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) has now won a ruling ordering Mr Khoja to pay its costs, which total at least £76,200. In its costs claim, the Met said Mr Khoja ‘knew that he had asked for a bacon roll two or three times for personal consumption before bringing his claim and throughout the conduct of his claim’.

‘The fact that he had knowingly come into contact with pork products before bringing the claim shows that the claim had no reasonable prospect of success from the outset.’ Judge Michael Southam agreed and ruled Mr Khoja should pay costs, though these would be determined at a later date at a county court.

The NFL is partnering with Boston University brain researchers who have been critical of the league’s stance on concussions, The Associated Press has learned.

The league is going to encourage current and former NFL players to agree to donate their brains to the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello confirmed the league also is committed to giving $1 million or more to the center.

Aiello said the league has held discussions with the NFL Alumni Association about suggesting retired players look into participating in BU’s work.

A geologist has gone on trial in Switzerland for allegedly causing earthquakes while drilling for hot rocks to produce clean energy.

Markus Haering, who designed the geothermal project, rejected allegations that he deliberately damaged properties and said local people knew the risks. The deep drilling underground caused a series of earthquakes in 2006, including one of 3.4 magnitude, rattling residents of the north-western city of Basel.

Geopower Basel, the project leader, has already paid around 9 million Swiss francs (£5.3 million) in compensation for cracked walls and other damage on properties near the experiment.

The project was suspended at the time and shut down last week after a risk analysis concluded that more quakes could follow if the drilling continued.

The experiment aimed to be the world’s first to generate power commercially by boiling water on naturally occurring rocks 3 miles underground.

The Swiss efforts are being closely watched in the United States, where the energy department is sponsoring more than 120 geothermal energy projects in several states.

A leading US company, AltaRock Energy, in September stopped drilling at one key development site north of San Francisco, citing drilling difficulties, but said quake fears were not a factor.

“We had very little knowledge of seismicity” before starting to drill, Mr Haering testified. He called the resulting quakes “a learning process for everyone involved”.

It’s not the lifestyle of a typical federal judge: Five or six vodka cocktails during lunch; gambling with borrowed money; bankruptcy under a phony name; cash, trips or home repairs from lawyers; and a bail bondsman with business before his court.

Witnesses in the congressional impeachment case against U.S. District Court Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. paint a jarring portrait of the former Louisiana state judge appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by President Clinton.

As Congress wrapped up several weeks of evidence-gathering hearings this week, legal experts who testified before a House task force suggested Judge Porteous is a clear candidate to become just the eighth federal judge in U.S. history to be impeached and convicted by Congress.

Lawmakers appear poised to take their advice and bring charges early next year, setting up a historic trial in the Senate.

Three Eurostar trains travelling from Paris to London were stuck in the undersea Channel Tunnel linking France and Britain early on Saturday because of snowy weather, a Eurostar spokesman said.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 passengers were on the trains but were safe and efforts were being made to get them to London, he said. A fourth train travelling to London returned to Paris before reaching the tunnel.

“It’s a technical failure and the trains are stuck at the moment,” the spokesman told BBC television. A rescue locomotive and a shuttle train were being used to move passengers out of the tunnel.

The temperature difference between inside the tunnel and outside had caused “technical problems,” the spokesman said.

“It is snowing in northern France, its very cold, conditions are very bad. Everyone is suffering from the bad weather, the airports are suffering, people on the roads are suffering, and so are our Eurostar trains,” he said.

A giant pyramid which appears to be a UFO hovering over the Kremlin has caused frenzied speculation in Russia that it is an alien spacecraft.

The shots, one taken at night from a car and one during the day, were both filmed by amateurs.

The ‘craft’ was said to have hovered for hours over Red Square in the Russian capital.

The clips of the ‘invasion’ have gone to the top of the country’s version of YouTube. The identity of the shape has not been confirmed.

Russian reports ruled out a UFO but police refused to comment. Nick Pope, a former Ministry of Defence UFO analyst, said it was “one of the most extraordinary UFO clips I’ve ever seen”.

A drunken Santa Claus prompts a mom to call 911 after he stumbles into her yard apparently looking for his reindeer and scaring her kids.

 Officers ticketed 55-year-old Thomas Arnold of Sparta for having an open beer in a car. The man driving that car, 47-year-old Kevin Arnold, was arrested for OWI. But, the kids say they knew right away this Santa was a hoax.

“He smelled like alcohol. So I knew it wasn’t the real Santa because Santa doesn’t drink alcohol,” says 9-year-old Katie Dockerty.

Katie says the Santa that ended up in her lawn was loud and had really dirty hands. She says he tried to put his hat on her little sister.

Six-year-old Zoe describes him in one word: “Drunk.”

Polish police say the infamous iron sign over the gate to the Auschwitz memorial site with the cynical phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” — German for “Work Sets You Free” — has been stolen.

Police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo said police believe it was stolen between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. Friday, when museum guards noticed that it was missing and alerted police.

Padlo says the iron sign, which spanned a gate at the main entrance to the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland, was removed by being unscrewed on one side and pulled off on the other.

A string of lawn gnome disappearances in Washington state was solved when winds blew down a fence around the yard where they were being kept, authorities said.

Lisa Soneda of Mount Vernon said her daughter told her this month that the fence separating her back yard from that of her next-door neighbor had blown down to reveal an unusual sight, Seattle’s KOMO-TV reported Thursday.

“I looked over the fence and I think the first thing I said was: ‘Holy crap!’” she said. “Lots and lots of gnomes,” Soneda said of the spectacle.

“I counted like 46.” Skagit County sheriff’s deputies said the total was closer to 60, and many of the gnomes, as well as other garden accessories, were found to have been taken from the yards of neighbors.

Deputies said about a dozen gnomes have been returned to their rightful owners thus far and the woman living next door to Soneda could face misdemeanor theft charges.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems.

Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America’s enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas. They also point to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington’s growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Politicians are criticizing the BBC for inviting debate on whether homosexuals should face execution in Uganda.

The broadcaster launched an on-line debate over a proposed Ugandan law that would punish some homosexual acts by life imprisonment or death.

BBC’s “Africa Have Your Say” Web site asked for people’s views on whether Uganda has gone too far and whether there should be any laws against gays.

But several British politicians said Wednesday that the BBC should not treat the execution of gays as a legitimate topic for discussion.

A troop of performing monkeys instructed in the martial art of taekwondo has taken revenge on their trainer.

Lo Wung, 42, taught the monkeys so they could entertain crowds outside a shopping centre in Nshi, in eastern China’s Hubei province. But the money-spinning primates turned the tables on their trainer when he slipped during a show, with one quick-thinking monkey flooring him with a kick to the head.

Hu Luang, 32, a bystander who photographed the incident, said: “I saw one punch him in the eye – he grabbed another by the ear and it responded by grabbing his nose. They were leaping and jumping all over the place. It was better than a Bruce Lee film.”

At one point the monkey trainer grabbed a staff to hit the monkeys, only to find himself facing a stick-brandishing monkey that cracked him over the head.

A website based in India has reported researchers with the Chandrayaan-1 mission may have found “signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.” DNAIndia.com quoted Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre as saying that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. “The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,” Pal said.

At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea but said, “It is an intriguing suggestion, and we are certainly very interested in learning more of their results.”

Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Impact Probe, or MIP impacted the within the Shackleton Crater on the Moon’s south pole on Nov. 14, 2008. An anonymous Chandrayaan-1 scientist said MIP’s mass spectrometer detected chemical signatures of organic matter in the soil kicked up by the impact.

“Certain atomic numbers were observed that indicated the presence of carbon components. This indicates the possibility of the presence of organic matter (on the Moon),” a senior scientist told DNAIndia.

It wasn’t a state dinner, and they didn’t crash it on purpose. Still, a Georgia couple who showed up at the White House a day early for a tour somehow wound up at an invitation-only breakfast with President Barack Obama and the first lady.

It left the White House once again explaining how people who were not on an event guest list wound up being ushered into the presidential mansion anyway.

The improbable adventure of Harvey and Paula Darden, Obama supporters from Hogansville, Ga., took place on Veterans Day, two weeks before Virginia socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi infamously crashed the Obamas’ state dinner for the prime minister of India.

The Dardens mistakenly showed up a day early for a tour scheduled through their congressman. The White House and Secret Service both said the Dardens went through the appropriate security screenings and were allowed into the breakfast as a courtesy because there were no public tours the day they arrived.

That explanation was news to Harvey Darden, 67, a retired pharmacist, who said he and his wife never were told about the breakfast. They thought they were simply starting their tour until they were ushered into the East Room, offered a buffet spread and told they’d be meeting the president.

“The further we got into the White House, the more surprised we were,” Darden told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

“My wife looked at me and I looked at her, and I said, ‘You know, I don’t know if we’re in the right place.’”

Dropping Tiger Woods is not as easy as taking down a few billboards or canceling a media campaign.

For Accenture, the corporate consultancy that on Sunday announced it would discontinue its six-year relationship with the celebrity golfer, Woods is so tightly intertwined in every component of its brand – appearing even on company stationery – that it must now essentially start from scratch to redefine itself to the public and its clients.

The enormity of the marketing challenge facing Accenture is leading some in the marketing industry to take a look at the wisdom of resting an entire corporate identity on a single individual.

“No matter how blue chip a stock is, it can always go bad on you,” says Jeremy Mullman, sport marketing reporter for Advertising Age.

LUNCH with a colleague from work should be a time to unwind – the most taxing task being to decide what to eat, drink and choose for dessert. For Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann it has never been that simple. They can’t think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up.

“We went to lunch together at least once a week,” says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. “One of us would bring a notebook, and we’d draw pictures while our food was getting cold.”

The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?

Of course you could estimate the area of each slice, tot them all up and work out each person’s total from that. But these guys are mathematicians, and so that wouldn’t quite do. They wanted to be able to distil the problem down to a few general, provable rules that avoid exact calculations, and that work every time for any circular pizza.

As with many mathematical conundrums, the answer has arrived in stages – each looking at different possible cases of the problem. The easiest example to consider is when at least one cut passes plumb through the centre of the pizza. A quick sketch shows that the pieces then pair up on either side of the cut through the centre, and so can be divided evenly between the two diners, no matter how many cuts there are.

So far so good, but what if none of the cuts passes through the centre? For a pizza cut once, the answer is obvious by inspection: whoever eats the centre eats more. The case of a pizza cut twice, yielding four slices, shows the same result: the person who eats the slice that contains the centre gets the bigger portion. That turns out to be an anomaly to the three general rules that deal with greater numbers of cuts, which would emerge over subsequent years to form the complete pizza theorem.

Manuel A. Sanchez has ruled out every logical explanation for the fate that has befallen the calves on his ranch in southern Colorado.

Over the past month, he’s found four calves dead in a way that he cannot reconcile with anything in his 50 years of raising cattle: eyes and ears missing, tongues and genitals excised in what appeared to be a series of fine cuts.

Mountain lions, bears or coyotes would leave messier marks, he said. And Sanchez found no tire tracks or footprints that would suggest a human invader — nor even bloodstains he’d expect to find around the carcasses if someone had butchered them.

“There’s nothing to go by,” said Sanchez, who estimated his financial loss at $10,000. “I can’t figure it out.”

Costilla County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Chavez agreed: “There’s nothing to follow up on.”

Besides Sanchez’s calves in San Luis, several cases have been reported near Trinidad.

It’s not the first time. In the 1970s, ranchers in eastern and southern Colorado filed more than 200 mutilation reports, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation reports.

The agency investigated, even conducting an undercover operation, but to no avail.

“It was such a bewilderment,” recalled Tillie Bishop, a state senator at the time. Some people suspected satanic cults. Others grew convinced of an otherworldly explanation — space aliens.

The average New Yorker uses one-half to one-third the electricity of other Americans. Our carbon footprints are just 29 percent of people who live outside the five boroughs, and City Hall has practical plans to reduce even that amount by nearly a third over the next two decades.

No wonder that this month, in a talk at the New York Academy of Science, Rohit Aggarwalat, the mayor’s chief adviser on sustainability, said the city was “the most environmentally efficient society in the United States.”

So it makes perfect sense that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is going to Copenhagen on Monday and Tuesday to address the international conference on climate change: his administration is working to head off problems that will not emerge until long after he is gone.

 A strong case can be made that when it comes to energy and climate issues, Mr. Bloomberg is the most visionary public official in the country. And a strong argument can also be made that on a personal level, he ranks among the worst individual polluters ever to hold public office. Mr. Bloomberg owns a helicopter and two jets, both Falcon 900s. He flies everywhere on private jets, by far the least efficient form of transportation on or above the earth. He takes his jet to Bermuda many weekends. He has flown around the globe on it. He uses it to go to Washington. He is planning to get to Copenhagen for the climate conference by private jet, too.

The carbon math works out like this: by taking his Falcon 900 to Denmark, Mr. Bloomberg will be responsible for the release of 37 times the carbon dioxide than if he and his entourage flew on a scheduled commercial flight. The calculations were done at my request by Dimitri Simos, the developer of software used by the airline industry to assess aircraft emission and performance.

Mr. Simos said that a Falcon 900 carrying eight people from Newark to Copenhagen would produce 21.6 tons of carbon dioxide. By adding eight people to the scheduled Scandinavian Airlines flight, the aircraft, usually an Airbus A330-300, would produce an additional 0.58 tons of carbon dioxide. Mr. Bloomberg’s routine trips to Bermuda are even more carbon costly: the private jet produces 130 times more emissions than going commercial. On those jaunts, Mr. Simos said, the Falcon produces 4.3 tons of carbon dioxide; putting another two people on an American Airlines Boeing 757-200 that flies to Bermuda would produce only 66 more pounds.

Global consulting firm Accenture Ltd. is ending its sponsorship of Tiger Woods, saying the golfer is “no longer the right representative” after the “circumstances of the last two weeks.”

Accenture’s announcement Sunday marks the company’s first statement since allegations of Woods’ multiple infidelities surfaced in recent weeks. The move makes Accenture the first sponsor to cut ties altogether with Woods since his marital troubles came to light and since his statement Friday that the 33-year-old is taking an indefinite leave from golf to work on his marriage.

The relationship between Woods and Accenture goes back six years, with the New York-based firm in 2006 crediting its “Go on, be a Tiger” campaign with boosted its image significantly. Accenture has used Woods to personify its claimed attributes of integrity and high performance.

“After careful consideration and analysis, the company has determined that he is no longer the right representative for its advertising,” the company said Sunday, adding that “it wishes only the best for Tiger Woods and his family.” Accenture said it will immediately transition to a new advertising campaign, with a major effort scheduled to launch later in 2010.

PRINCE Philip mocked a hero Army cadet blinded by a terrorist explosion by poking fun at his dress sense.

The Queen asked brave Stephen Menary how much sight he had left, but before he could answer, the gaffe-prone Duke of Edinburgh joked: “Not a lot, judging by the tie he is wearing”.

Prince Philip’s tasteless joke was met with an embarrassed silence all-round and Her Majesty gave her husband a disapproving glare.

Hero Stephen was just 14 when he picked up a torch bomb that was hurled into a Territorial Army barracks in White City, west London, by the Real IRA in 2001.

He was almost blinded and his left hand was blown off. His mum Carol, 48, said: “Prince Philip is completely out of touch with reality, he is from another world.”

It is a man’s worst nightmare but for Colombian farmer Luis Alfonso Sanchez it seemed the logical thing to do.

The 40-year-old decided to castrate himself to avoid cheating on his wife who refused to have sex with him. Mr Sanchez had performed the act on many of his animals in the past and believed the procedure would be as easy for him saying: “I’ve castrated pigs, cats, dogs and three days later they are healed.

“I thought that’s what it was going to be like with me. I had practice with animals, so I went ahead, put some pressure on it, and cut them to remove them by force!”

“When I saw that I could no longer count on her (his wife), so that I would’t keep bothering her, I made the decision to cut my testicles off because I am a Christian and did not want to go look for another (partner).”

A Times Square bloodbath was narrowly avoided because the machine-pistol-toting thug who fired at a cop flipped the gun on its side like a character out of a rap video, causing the weapon to jam after two shots, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

When scam artist Raymond “Ready” Martinez held the MAC-10-style gun parallel to the ground, it caused the ejecting shells to “stovepipe,” or get caught vertically in the chamber, the sources said. The gun is designed to be fired only in a vertical position.

If he had fired the weapon — which had another 27 rounds in the clip — properly, Martinez, 25, could have killed the hero cop pursuing him and countless others walking through the swarming tourist mecca Thursday morning.

Instead, Sgt. Christopher Newsom was able to return fire — killing Martinez with four shots before anyone was hurt. The fatal gun battle erupted after Martinez bolted from cops who approached him for aggressively peddling his own rap CDs to tourists and shaking them down for cash. Newsom gave chase and shouted for Martinez to put up his hands.

Martinez instead pulled the machine gun from a sling under his coat and turned to fire as he ran into the parking breezeway within the Marriott Marquis Hotel. One of the shots shattered a gift-shop window and a second struck the car of an out-of-town couple coming to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall.

An Iranian scientist who vanished six months ago has revealed secrets of his country’s nuclear programme with international weapons inspectors, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

Shahram Amiri briefed United Nations nuclear monitors in a clandestine meeting at Frankfurt airport just hours before they flew to Iran to inspect a hidden uranium enrichment plant, according to French intelligence sources.

An award-winning atomic physicist, Mr Amiri had worked at the heavily-guarded underground site at Qom. He was attached to a Tehran university named by the EU last year as part of the regime’s nuclear-proliferation operations.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was told of the existence of the Qom facility by the US and its European allies in September. But the meeting with Mr Amiri in October would have provided inspectors with key insider knowledge before they made the sensitive trip.

The scientist is the focus of an extraordinary international row stretching from the Gulf to Washington after Iran last week accused Saudi Arabia and the US of “terrorist behaviour” for allegedly colluding in his abduction.

The nuclear scientist, who is in his 30s, disappeared after arriving in in Saudi Arabia for a pilgrimage in late May, leaving behind his wife and extended family. The Saudi authorities say they do not know where he is.

But contrary to Iranian claims, Mr Amiri actually defected after an elaborate international cloak-and-dagger co-ordinated by the CIA, according to a well-connected French intelligence analysis website.

The Queen is to hand oSver a substantial part of her public duties to Prince William to help him prepare for the day when he becomes King, according to a confidential document obtained by The Mail on Sunday.

ecret papers reveal that plans to ease the strain on the 83-year-old monarch and her 88-year-old husband, Prince Philip, are at an advanced stage.
The disclosures come despite months of denials from the Palace that the Queen was planning to step back from her official work in favour of her 27-year-old grandson.

The information is contained in a briefing note written by Chancellor Alistair Darling’s Treasury officials about new financial arrangements for Prince Charles and his sons.

Key paragraphs, disclosing the reason for the changes, are blacked out. But this newspaper has obtained an uncensored version of the document which confirms that the Queen is grooming William as a ‘Shadow King’.

Leading commentators and diplomats have been pondering for quite some time why the Iranian leader is not prepared to act against the revolution in a major way.

The “China model” could be applied, a brutal, fast, and extremely violent strike against the opposition. According to conventional wisdom, tyrants will use all means to eliminate their opponents.

So why haven’t the mullahs adopted Chinese methods?
…
What did these soldiers write?

The last section of this brief but powerful statement will surely immortalize these brave officers: “The army is a haven for the nation and will never want to suppress the people at the request of politicians. We shall remain true to our promise not to intervene in politics. But we cannot remain silent when our fellow citizens are oppressed by tyranny.”

They go on: “Therefore, we warn the Guards who have betrayed the martyrs (from the war between Iran and Iraq) and who decided to attack the lives, the property and the honor of the citizens. We seriously warn them that if they do not leave their chosen path, they will be confronted with our tough response. The military is a haven for the nation. And we will defend the peace-loving Iranian nation against any aggression.”

Some 300 youths shrouded in black have thrown bricks and smashed windows as at least 30,000 people demonstrated in central Copenhagen to turn up the heat on world leaders debating global warming.

The rioters, whose faces were also covered, went on the rampage in the heart of the city, prompting swift arrests as some 50 policemen in riot gear intervened.

Demonstrators were forced to the ground and then bundled into vans. The rest of the march – the centrepiece of protests planned in 130 cities across the world – remained peaceful although tension was building as protesters condemned the violence.

The heart of the Danish capital was taken over by environmentalists and anti-capitalist demonstrators on a six-kilometre march that would take them to the venue of the ongoing UN conference.

A pet rabbit has had an identity crisis after spending too much time with the family cocker spaniel and now believes he is a dog.

The Giant Poobah rabbit – also named Poobah – has gone barking mad and spends hours cuddled up with spaniel puppy Scout in his dog basket. He has also started rejecting his green food and will only eat treats bought for Scout – including his wet dog food.

The confused rabbit has copied Scout’s behaviour to such an extent that he even gets up on his hind legs and begs for snacks.

But Poobah has asserted himself as top-dog in the house and is piling on the weight from all the dog biscuits he is eating.

Two British women attempting a world record by rowing across the Atlantic say they hope to shave a few days off the trip by completing the feat naked.

Mel King, 37 and Annie Januszewski, 40, of Bristol, England, said they are hoping to row 3,000 miles from Gomera in the Canary Islands to Antigua in the West Indies in only 70 days, to beat the previous 75-day record for a two-woman team, The Sun reported Wednesday.

The women, who planned to start the voyage Wednesday if the weather is favorable, said they originally planned to row for 15 hours a day in their bras and underwear, but decided to strip down completely to reduce chaffing from friction with clothing.

Thieves opened the grave of former Cypriot president Tassos Papadopoulos and stole his corpse during the night, state television has reported, interrupting its normal programming.

The current leader of Mr Papadopoulos’s centre-right DIKO party, Marios Garoyan, has condemned what he called a “heinous and terrible crime”.

Andros Kyprianou, head of the communist AKEL party that leads the Mediterranean island’s government, expressed outrage at the crime, which came the day before a memorial service had to be held to mark the first anniversary of Mr Papadopoulos’s death.

“I don’t know what kind of people would create such a terrible crime and steal a corpse,” he said.

Heart specialists have saved the life of an Israeli man who refused to visit a doctor for 64 years – and learned the terrible secret of his mistrust of the medical profession.

When Yitzchak Ganon, 85, came around from the anaesthetic at the hospital near Tel Aviv he was informed he only had one kidney.

‘I know,’ he replied. ‘The last time I saw the other one it was pulsating in the hand of a man called Josef Mengele. He was a doctor too.’

Mr Ganon revealed to his stunned family why he never visited a doctor since he was freed from the death camp of Auschwitz in January 1945.

None of them knew of his suffering there at the hands of the infamous Mengele.

A sword-wielding man died early this morning hours after being Tased twice by police. Police identified him later Friday as Hatchel Pate Adams III, 36, of the first block of Overlook Court in Hampton.

According to a news release from Hampton Police, officers responded to a complaint involving an emergency custody order in the 1st block of Overlook Court about 11 p.m. Thursday.

Officers tried to make contact with Adams, but he refused to come to the door, police said. They went inside after calling one of the man’s relatives, who came to the scene.

Adams, carrying a Samurai-style sword, swung it at the officers, police said. Officers Tased him. He continued to swing the sword, police said, so officers Tased him a second time and tried to arrest him.

Adams stopped breathing, and officers called medics and performed CPR. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1:15 a.m.

Baloo the bear, Leo the Lion and Shere Khan the tiger have the most unusual and unlikely friendship between them.

Rescued eight years ago during a police drugs raid in Atlanta, Georgia, the three friends were only cubs at the time and barely two months old. They had been kept as status symbol pets by the drug barons.

Delivered to the Noah’s Ark animal rescue centre in Locust Grove, Georgia, the decision was made to keep the youngsters together.

“We could have separated them, but since they came as a kind of family, the zoo decided to keep them together,” said Diane Smith, assistant director of the Noah’s Ark zoo.

“To our knowledge, this is the only place where you’ll find this combination of animals together, they are our BLT, (bear, lion and tiger).

An animal trainer who had raised tigers by hand was attacked and seriously injured by his own big cats on Tuesday night. The man stumbled during a performance and lost control of the animals. The show director said the tigers just wanted to ‘play.’

A circus show ended in a near tragedy on Tuesday after a group of tigers mauled their own trainer. The animal tamer was attacked and seriously injured by his own tigers during a “dinner circus” show in Hamburg’s Hagenbeck Zoo.

Around 150 guests had just started their four-course meal when the 28-year-old Christian W. stumbled and lost control of five Bengali tigers.

Three of the animals then jumped on their trainer. The big cats bit into his head and upper body, and he lost part of his left hand. Some of the circus team managed to push the animals into a corner using water jets and fire extinguishers, and then got them back in their cage within seconds.

Who’s hot for teacher? Looks like the other teacher.

Two female Romance language instructors were tossed out of their Brooklyn high school after being caught “undressed” in an empty classroom, sources told the Daily News Tuesday.

Students at James Madison High School in Midwood were watching a talent show in the auditorium while Alini Brito and Cindy Mauro were speaking the international language of love, sources said.

A janitor stumbled on French teacher Mauro, 33, and Brito, 29, a married Spanish instructor, and tattled to school officials on Nov. 20.

Both tenured teachers were removed from the classroom and sent to Education Department “rubber rooms” while they’re investigated for misconduct, sources said.

Barack Obama’s trip to Oslo to pick up his Nobel peace award is in danger of being overshadowed by a row over the cancellation of a series of events normally attended by the prizewinner.

Norwegians are incensed over what they view as his shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit.

The White House has cancelled many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children’s event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre.

He has also turned down a lunch invitation from the King of Norway.

According to a poll published by the daily tabloid VG, 44% of Norwegians believe it was rude of Obama to cancel his scheduled lunch with King Harald, with only 34% saying they believe it was acceptable.

“Of all the things he is cancelling, I think the worst is cancelling the lunch with the king,” said Siv Jensen, the leader of the largest party in opposition, the populist Progress party.

“This is a central part of our government system. He should respect the monarchy,” she told VG.

SO far, the journey of Michaele and Tareq Salahi from unknown arrivistes to notorious party crashers has focused on the apparent slipups of the Secret Service and the White House social secretary.

But to fully grasp the ongoing conniption inspired by the episode, you need to understand that when Ms. Salahi strutted onto the South Lawn in that bright red lehenga, she and her husband breached far more than a secure perimeter. They also trampled countless protocols that are the social, business and networking bedrock of official Washington.

Essentially, the couple used the mixed martial arts approach to upward mobility in a town that still cherishes the Marquess of Queensberry rules. And it looks like the town will be spluttering about it for quite some time.

“Washington is a small ‘c’ conservative kind of society, in which people are aware of the traditions and boundaries of appropriate behavior,” said Wayne Berman, a Republican lobbyist.

“It’s a city about rules, about conventions and if there’s no keg at the party, it doesn’t get crashed.” Of course, if the Salahis had slipped past the bouncers at, say, P. Diddy’s birthday bash and then posted the evidence online, the feat would never have been noticed. But a magnetometer is not simply a velvet rope that beeps, and just because Washington has long been called Hollywood for ugly people doesn’t mean that what works in Hollywood — or New York, or anywhere else, for that matter — will work in Washington.

A 10-year-old boy in Hammond, Ind. got his tongue stuck to a streetlight pole Wednesday evening during a cold snap he’ll likely never forget.

And yes, his friends dared him, according to a local newspaper report.

The uncomfortable stunt is typically preceded by a triple-dog dare, as in the modern movie “A Christmas Story,” in which Flick tries it as his friend Ralphie watches on with horror.

But many people (presumably including the Hammond boy) aren’t sure it can really happen.

Here’s how it works: The tongue is covered with moisture, so when exposed to temperatures below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, that moisture can freeze. The temperature in Hammond was about 10 degrees Wednesday evening.

Of course, the heart constantly pumps warm blood to the tongue, trying to keep it from freezing. But a frigid metal pole has no heart.

“The metal is a much better conductor than your tongue (up to 400 times more powerful),” explains Frank J. DiSalvo, director of the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future and co-director of the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute. “The metal takes heat faster than your body can replenish it.”

It’s become an annual winter tale: A young boy gets his tongue stuck to a metal pole, perhaps as the result of a dare.

This year, the scene straight out of the movie “A Christmas Story” unfolded Tuesday morning in Boise with a boy of about 10.

Boise firefighters used a glass of warm water to free the unidentified boy from the metal fence pole.

Fire Capt. Bill Tinsley says the boy’s tongue was bleeding a little, but he was OK and allowed to continue walking to school. Firefighters estimate the boy was 10 years old.

Remember that scene in the movie, “A Christmas Story” where the little boy gets his tongue frozen to a metal pole? Well it happened Monday in Spokane Valley.

It was a reminder to every one of what not to do. A 13-year-old girl stuck her tongue on a metal pole at the old Pratt Elementary in ten degree weather and it froze there.

She did it right after her friend stuck her lip on the pole and it came off. When the tongue froze to the pole, her friend called 911 and firefighters had to come out and pour water on it to get it unstuck.

Captain John Lovell from the Spokane Valley fire department told KREM 2 news, “evidently she hadn’t seen Christmas Story and didn’t believe it would happen, even though her friend had done it right before her so hopefully they learned a lesson here.”

The Marin Humane Society has gotten two reports of simian sightings over the past week, and spokeswoman Carrie Harrington said something may really be out there.

It all began at 8:15 a.m. Tuesday, when a school bus driver reported seeing a monkey darting across the road on Captain Nurse Circle near Bolling Drive, Harrington said.

The school bus driver said he was absolutely sure it was monkey, with a foot-and-a-half-long tail, she said. The Humane Society was inclined to laugh it off as a squirrel, or perhaps a cat or small dog.

But then a woman called about 5 p.m. Tuesday to report that her 11-year-old daughter had seen a monkey in the same area Thursday, Harrington said.

The girl said, “Mom, look, there’s a monkey over there,” but the woman didn’t see it, Harrington said. The girl said the monkey was dark brown and the size of a bottle of soda.

Marin animal control officers have been patrolling the area but haven’t seen the animal, Harrington said.

A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing sight to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor or a shock wave – although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet.

The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate.

Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre – lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely.

Wildlife officials are frantically hunting for a wild elephant which they believe is responsible for the deaths of 11 people in Nepal, Sky News reported.

The animal has gone on the rampage across three districts in the south of the country for more than two weeks.

One victim, an 18-year-old male, was killed while attempting to worship the animal as the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh.

According to news site newkerala.com, two women and a seven-year-old girl have also been killed by the male beast.

“We don’t plan to kill the marauding elephant as it is protected under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species),” said Yadav Dhital, District Forest Officer.

The 25-year-old chemistry student, who has not been named by police, was working at his parents’ home in Konotop when relatives heard a “loud pop”.

They rushed to his room and discovered his body. The lower half of his face had been seriously disfigured by the blast.

 The Russian news agency Ria Novosti said forensic tests found the chewing gum was covered with an unidentified chemical substance, thought to be some type of explosive.

Tiger Woods’ list of possible paramours grew to eleven Tuesday with the addition of a second porn star. The New York Post reports that Veronica Siwik-Daniels, aka Joslyn James, was linked to Tiger in a post on the sports website Deadspin.com.

The most recent women to have been linked to Tiger Woods. Here then is the list to date of the women linked to Woods.

TIGER’S RUMORED WOMEN

1.) Rachel Uchitel. The club hostess was the first of the women to be linked to Woods after the National Enquirer reported that she traveled to Australia to be with Woods during a golf tournament there. So far, she has denied the affair.

2.) Jamie Grubbs. The 24-year-old reality show contestant and cocktail waitress claims she carried on a 31-month-long affair with Woods until his crash last month. She offered a Woods voicemail to prove it.

3.) Kalika Moquin. The 27-year-old club manager from Las Vegas is reported to have had a brief sexual relationship with Woods. She would neither confirm nor deny the report.

4.) Cori Rist. The 31-year-old swimsuit model reportedly met Woods at a Manhattan club last year before they began a sexual relationship that led to Woods flying her out to various secret locations for hook-ups, and her introducing the golfer to her 7-year-old son.

5.) Jamie Jungers. The 26-year-old, who sold her story to a British newspaper, is a former employee of Trashy Girls Lingerie. She said she met Woods in Las Vegas.

6.) Mindy Lawton. The 33-year-old pancake house waitress from Orlando claims she was dumped by
Woods in 2007. According to the Post, it was her affair with Woods that was caught on camera by the National Enquirer, when he was snapped dropping her off at her trailer park. The threatening news later led to a Woods Men’s Fitness cover in exchange for the magazine’s silence about the alleged affair, the New York Post reports.

7.) Holly Sampson. The 36-year-old from Los Angeles is a former porn star, who has starred in such films as “OMG, Stop Tickling Me” and “Flying Solo 2.” According to the Sun, she has neither confirmed nor denied her affair with Woods.

8.) Unidentified Alleged Mistress No. 8. A former cocktail waitress from Orlando, Fla. does want to reveal her identity yet, according to her attorney Michael O’Quinn. But this she has said: at the time the affair allegedly began, she was 20 years old and met Woods at the Roxy in Orlando, where she was a VIP server.

9.) Unidentified Alleged Mistress No. 9 is reported to be a “sexy” British TV presenter who was single at
the time, but is now married.

10.) Unidentified Alleged Mistress No. 10. is reported in a UK paper to be a “sex-addicted cougar.”

11.) Joslyn James. The star of many, many porn videos was named on the sports blog Deadspin.com as a Tiger regular, but did not respond to the site’s call for comment.

She’s really teed off now!

Tiger Woods’ beautiful wife, Elin Nordegren, has left their Florida mansion amid the onslaught of shocking claims that the golf great cheated on her with at least 10 other woman, it was revealed yesterday.

Nordegren, who has two kids by the skirt-chasing Woods, is now living at a residence near the Windermere home they once shared, RadarOnline.com reported, citing neighbors and sources close to Woods.

“She’s incredibly hurt by what has gone on, but . . . she’s working it out as best she can,” Elin’s friend and Grand Slam tennis champ Lindsay Davenport told “Entertainment Tonight.”

“Everyone’s wish when you get married is to make it work, and we’ll see if they’re able to do that.” Woods’ lawyer, publicist and agent did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Last week, Nordegren, 29, a Swedish model, bought a $2.29 million house on an island near Stockholm, according to the Daily Express newspaper in London.

Westport police investigating the discovery of a decomposing body at a bush campsite were shocked to find most of the body had been devoured by a dog, a coroner’s inquest in Greymouth has heard.

Regional coroner Richard McElrea said yesterday he would have dealt with the case in the privacy of his chambers but Douglas Arllington, a brother of the dead man, had concerns that warranted a public airing. The remains of Charles Harold Arllington, 53, of Westport, were found on August 22 last year.

A reclusive man, Arllington had been living in a tent amid dense bush bordering a farm on Nine Mile Road, about eight minutes’ drive from the Westport Post Office.

When a farmhand, Joshua McDonald, got sick of Arllington’s dog scavenging near the house he went to the campsite to remonstrate with him – and instead discovered a collapsed tent and the remains of a body.

Detective John Cunneen said little but the torso and head remained of the man, and marks on the body were consistent with a dog having gnawed on it, the Greymouth Star reported.

To set the scene, this comes from the October 8 war room meeting on Afghanistan, with McChrystal teleconferenced in from Kabul to explain what he’d been doing since receiving his orders in March. Smart power:

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a PowerPoint slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of the participants asked. In the first place, it was impossible — the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a major part of the population. “We don’t need to do that,” Gates said, according to one participant. “That’s an open-ended, forever commitment.”

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan — the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.

“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what in effect the commander understands he’s been told to do.’ Everybody said, ‘He’s right.’”

“It was clear that Stan took a very literal interpretation of the intent” of the NSC document, said Jones, who had signed the orders himself. “I’m not sure that in his position I wouldn’t have done the same thing, as a military commander.” But what he created in his assessment “was obviously something much bigger, and more longer-lasting . . . than we had intended.”

They told him — in his official orders — to come up with a plan to eliminate the enemy and, dummy that he is, he thought that meant he was supposed to come up with a plan to eliminate the enemy. Then they told him he didn’t have to. Six months later.

Gordon Brown was snubbed by badly injured Afghan veterans when they closed curtains round their beds during a hospital visit and refused to speak to him.

 More than half the soldiers being treated at the Selly Oak hospital ward in Birmingham either asked for the curtains to be closed or deliberately avoided the prime minister, according to several of those present.

The soldiers, who have sustained some of the worst injuries seen in Afghanistan, described his visit as “opportunistic” and a “waste of time”.

Furious about equipment shortages and poor compensation for their injuries, one soldier said: “It is almost as if we are the product of an unwanted affair … he has done nothing for us.”

Three more women say they have played a round with Tiger.

Two more blonds and a brunette were added to Tiger Woods’ sultry scorecard Saturday – bringing the married father of two to six over par on his betrayed supermodel wife.

Sources told the Daily News that Manhattan clubgoer Cori Rist, 31, is yet another blond beauty who has hit the sheets with Tiger.

A Las Vegas cocktail waitress and aspiring model – Jamie Jungers – became the fifth woman linked to the golf pro Saturday.

Jungers, 26, reportedly hired an Orlando lawyer and prepared to dish her story to a British tabloid, RadarOnline.com reports.

If you were wondering what happens to 29-year-old men who still play with Lego, take Jeremy Bell as an example.

The partner at digital marketing company Teehan+Lax was surrounded by heavily armed tactical officers, cuffed and held against the wall of his Richmond St. W. office — until, that is, the cops found the gun he had been holding in front of the window about 90 minutes earlier was a pile of blocks.

The BrickGun Semi-Automatic gun (purchased online from BrickGun, “designers and builders of the world’s most realistic custom Lego weapon models”) arrived at Bell’s office Wednesday.

The lifetime Lego fan finished assembling his toy — complete with build-it-yourself magazine — at 5:40 p.m.
It was in one piece for about 10 minutes before it fell apart, he recalled yesterday.

 But the tenant in an apartment about six metres across the way didn’t see that last part. And so the tenant called the cops.

At about 7 p.m., as Bell and some colleagues played a video game, the Emergency Task Force moved in.

“They were screaming in the hallway for me to come out,” Bell said. “When I went out there and I saw there was an officer kind of crouched down in the stairwell, it was clear what was going on.”

A man has left around £220,000 in his will to towns across the world that share his surname.

Solicitors acting on behalf of Eric Gordon Douglas from Edinburgh, have sent a cheque for £10,887.73 to Douglas Borough Council on the Isle of Man as part of the bequest. But the council for the island’s capital have appealed for more information on Mr Douglas in order to recognise his donation.

Council leader David Christian said today: ”There was around £220,000 left to 20 places across the globe that shared his surname.

”If we can get more information then that would be excellent. We literally know nothing about the gentleman apart from his name and that we were told by his lawyers that he was from Edinburgh.

Copenhagen’s Lord Mayor has written to all 500 climate change delegates pleading with them to abstain from using services of the city’s ‘unsustainable’ prostitutes.

The city council contacted 160 hotels asking them not to arrange prostitutes for guests attending the conference. Enlarge Copenhagen’s Ritt Bjerregaard said: ‘I think it’s deplorable that you can buy a woman for sex’

Together with the anti-trafficking organisation, The Nest International, and tourism group Wonderful Copenhagen, it issued postcards featuring the slogan, ‘Be sustainable – don’t buy sex’, which been distributed to hotels.

A sex workers interest organisation, SIO, has hit out at claims that sex tourism increases during high-level summits.

Joseph Stalin sent millions to their deaths during his reign of terror, and his name was taboo for decades, but the dictator is a step closer to rehabilitation after Vladimir Putin openly praised his achievements.

The Prime Minister and former KGB agent used an appearance on national television to give credit to Stalin for making the Soviet Union an industrial superpower, and for defeating Hitler in the Second World War.

In a verdict that will be obediently absorbed by a state bureaucracy long used to taking its cue from above, Mr Putin declared that it was “impossible to make a judgment in general” about the man who presided over the Gulag slave camps.

His view contrasted sharply with that of President Medvedev, Russia’s nominal leader, who has said that there is no excuse for the terror unleashed by Stalin.

Mr Putin said that he had deliberately included the issue of Stalin’s legacy in a marathon annual question-and-answer programme on live television, because it was being “actively discussed” by Russians.

A Russian professor has evolved a technique that turns alcohol into powder for packaging in pill form.

Evgeny Moskalev of Saint Petersburg Technological University created the pills, which allow people to consume their favorite drinks just like any other solid food, the Times of India reports .

The new technique can solidify any kind of alcohol. People would be able to measure the amount of alcohol they consume by taking the pills.

“We have developed a technology that allowed us to turn any liquid solution into powder,” Moskalev said.

The technology has been tested on liquor containing as much as 96% alcohol content.

She’s like the Ashton Kutcher of the ape world: an orangutan in the Vienna Zoo now has a Facebook fan page to showcase the photos she takes with a digital camera.

The orangutan, named Nonja, uses a Samsung ST 1000 point-and-shoot that automatically uploads the photos.

When this post was published, Nonja had over 9,000 “fans” subscribed to her page.

But there’s a catch: coverage of the camera-toting ape in the U.K.’s Daily Mail explains that the camera has been modified to dispense a raisin whenever the shutter button is pushed.

So Nonja is evidently more interested in tasty treats than in artistic endeavors.

FIVE people who stared at the sun in the hope they might be witnessing religious apparitions are being treated for serious eye damage, a top eye surgeon has revealed.

And a number of people who attended the recent religious gathering at the Catholic shrine are reporting symptoms of damaged retinas, said Dr Eamonn O’Donoghue, of University College Hospital in Galway.

Dr O’Donoghue revealed he is treating five patients for serious eye injuries caused by staring at the sun at recent gatherings at Knock organised by Dublin “spiritual healers” Joe Coleman and Keith Henderson.

And he has warned those planning to attend a similar gathering this Saturday that they risk damaging their eyes if they stare at the sun for any length of time.

Hat tip to Una!

Meat has been grown in a laboratory for the first time, Dutch researchers say.

Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, told The Sunday Times that he and colleagues have succeeded in growing what he described as soggy pork in a lab and are now investigating ways of improving it enough to pass potential consumers’ taste tests.

“What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue,” Post told the newspaper. “We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there. This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.”

Europe has long been condemning the communist regime, but none of the countries has gone as far as Poland, where a law was signed allowing people to be fined or imprisoned for keeping and buying communist symbols.

Twenty years after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Polish government are about to completely erase memories of the Cold War past and make everything from the hammer and sickle and red flag to trendy Che Guevara t-shirts and posters illegal.

On Friday, President Lech Kaczynski approved an amendment to the criminal code which outlaws production, possession, spread and sale of items or recordings containing symbols of communism. Anyone who disobeys the law – for instance, waves a red flag singing The Internationale in the centre of Warsaw – can be fined or even sent to jail for up to two years.

However, communist attributes can still be used for artistic, research and educational purposes. Collectors will not be punished either. The law was put forward by the opposition Law and Justice Party and was passed by the Polish parliament in early November.

“Communism was a genocidal system that led to the murder of tens of millions of people,” Jaroslaw Kaczynski – the president’s twin brother and the head of the party – said back then. “No symbol of communism has a right to exist in Poland, because these are symbols of a genocidal system that should be compared to German Nazism.”

Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets on Sunday, barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise vote that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population.

Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic. Business groups said the decision hurt Switzerland’s international standing and could damage relations with Muslim nations and wealthy investors who bank, travel and shop there.

“The Swiss have failed to give a clear signal for diversity, freedom of religion and human rights,” said Omar Al-Rawi, integration representative of the Islamic Denomination in Austria, which said its reaction was “grief and deep disappointment.”

It’s a disturbing game with devastating consequences, and a new WTHR survey suggests it is rampant in Indiana schools.

“Ball tapping” is the act of intentionally hitting or kicking a male in the genitals. Earlier this month, an Eyewitness News investigation showed the game has become commonplace in some area schools, resulting in serious injuries for students.

As part of the investigation, WTHR also conducted a statewide survey of school nurses. The results are in, and they show the problem of ball tapping is more common and widespread than many school officials had realized.

School nurses from 163 Indiana schools participated in the anonymous survey, and 33% of those nurses said they’re aware of ball tapping happening at their school within the past twelve months. But a closer look at the statistics shows the problem is much more serious in some schools than in others.

23% of school nurses who work at the elementary level say they’ve seen or heard of ball tapping at their school. That number nearly doubles in high schools, where 43% of school nurses say they’ve seen it. And in middle schools, 62% of school nurses said they’re aware of students engaged in ball tapping.

A BOLT of lightning hit three homesteads in a village in the Transkei and killed four people from one family, including two elderly women and two children, on Tuesday evening.

A third elderly woman from the same family miraculously escaped from a burning house, but sustained serious burn wounds in the process.

The incident, which happened at about 5pm, shocked the residents of Ndwana village in Ntabankulu. The deceased are Nomakethe Myolwa, 60, Maphembetshiya Nfeketho, 70, Ntuthuko Myolwa, 8, and her brother Athini Myolwa, 7.

The survivor, Madumeni Myolwa, 70, managed to crawl out of the burning house. She was admitted to hospital in Mount Ayliff to be treated for burn wounds.

According to OR Tambo District Municipality disaster management, Tuesday’s incident has brought the number of deaths caused by lightning to 14 in Ntabankulu since late October.

A creepy string of calf mutilations in southern Colorado has a rancher and sheriff’s officials mystified. Four calves were found dead in a pasture just north of the New Mexico state line in recent weeks.

The dead calves had their skins peeled back and organs cleared from the rib cage. One calf had its tongue removed.

But rancher Manuel Sanchez has found no signs of human attackers, such as footprints or ATV tracks. And there are no signs of an animal attack by a coyote or mountain lion. Usually predators leave pools of blood or drag marks from carrying away the livestock.

You’ll need to be 21 to take a bite out of this Thanksgiving turkey. New York City tavern owner Paul Hurley said he’ll unveil what he is calling the nation’s first 100-proof turkey on Monday. A spokesman for the owner of O’Casey’s Tavern in Midtown Manhattan said that the bird is infused with fruit-flavored and 100-proof Georgi vodka for three days before being cooked. The flavors of vodka include peach, raspberry, cherry and apple.

The gravy is also laced with the distilled liquor.

LIKE many adopted children, Matthew Roberts set about finding his biological parents with a mix of nerves and excitement. In particular, he hoped that discovering his father’s identity would help him to work out what made him the man he had become. But nothing could have prepared him for being told his dad was… serial killer CHARLES MANSON.

Over a five-week period in the summer of 1969, Manson and his Family of commune followers committed a series of nine gruesome murders. Victims included pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski. Matthew, 41 – who bears a haunting resemblance to his father – sank into depression after discovering his identity.

He has since been in contact with his dad in a series of letters to his California prison and Manson has replied – each time chillingly signing off with a swastika. Now Matthew, who was given up for adoption as a baby, has told of his horror at finding out he was the son of a monster.

He says: “I didn’t want to believe it. I was frightened and angry. It’s like finding out that Adolf Hitler is your father. “I’m a peaceful person – trapped in the face of a monster.”

Ugandan officials say they are offended that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has praised former dictator Idi Amin.

Officials including President Yoweri Museveni’s secretary Tamale Mirundi say Amin ruled brutally in the 1970s.

Chavez on Friday called the East African dictator a nationalist and a patriot.

Mirundi countered on Sunday with Amin’s record of torturing and killing opponents — including one of his wives.

James Kizza Baliruno said he was offended by the praise as Amin’s soldiers killed both of his parents in front of him when he was 4 years old.

Times are tough, and people are sat at home chewing bellybutton fluff instead of eating out or ordering in. What are restaurant owners doing? Some are not paying staff, and others are sending abusive emails calling them “fucking lazy motherfuckers.”

Vadim Ponorovsky, the owner of Paradou, a restaurant in the Meatpacking district, described on its website as a “light-filled, airy oasis… filled with warmth and charm,” really REALLY wants waitstaff to collect email addresses from customers, presumably so he can spam them.

Here’s the happy, team-building email he sent out, from a tipster.

To All,

Please read this email carefully.

This is the last time we will be discussing this. This weekend, saturday and sunday we had 451 customers. Guess how many emails we collected? 60? 80? 40? No. None of those. We, or more acurately you, collected 2 emails. Thats less than half of one percent. 2 fucking emails.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ASSHOLES?!?!?! How many times do we have to tell you how important it is that you collect emails. Everytime we have a slow night and you make no money and you sit there bitching about how you make no money, remember its because youre fucking lazy motherfuckers. YOU SHOULD ALL BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY!!!!! ALL OF YOU, INCLUDING THE HOSTS!!!!

Let me guess, youre probably sitting there saying “Vadim is such a fucking asshole. How dare he speak to me like this. I dont need this.” Youre right, you dont, so why dont you get the fuck out. Any and all of you.

Youre probably sitting there saying “How dare he speak to me like this. How dare he not have respect for me”. Youre right there also. I have absolutely no respect for any of you. Why? Because every fucking day, all of you continue to show that you have absolutely no respect for me or Alex. So if you dont respect us enough to do the little that we ask you to do, then GET THE FUCK OUT YOU FUCKING LAZY DISRESPECTFUL ASSHOLES!!!!!

Effective immediately, any server or host who fails to collect at least 20 emails per week, will be fined $100. Anyone failing to collect at least 20 emails for two weeks in a month will be fired immediately. No matter what. No matter who you are. You dont want to do your job, you dont want to do what we ask, you dont belong at Paradou.

Go find another place to work. How dare you disrespect Alex and me this way. How dare you completely ignore what we ask of you time after time after time. I am sick of all this shit, you bunch of fucking children. This is what I have to deal with at 6AM?!?!? I wouldnt tolerate this from my 13 year old, and Im sure as shit not going to tolerate it from any of you assholes.

You give no respect, you get 10 times back.

Who’s been firebombing all those Italian cafés in Montreal? The answer police have been getting so far: silenzio.

Police are stumped as to why at least five bars in the city have been hit by Molotov cocktails in less than a month, but it’s clear that the victims don’t want to talk.

The head of the Montreal police arson squad said his detectives are mulling a number of theories, but, with merchants remaining mute, all they have are hypotheses.

There’s the possibility that a Mafia war has erupted. Or perhaps a brazen street gang is trying to move in on the Mob’s turf. Or maybe rival gangs are battling among themselves. Police have even considered an arsonist with a particular penchant for putting latté-makers out of business.

“None of the hypotheses have been set aside, but none have been validated for the time being, either,” said Cmdr. Robert Quevillon, who heads the police arson and economic crimes unit.

The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.
…

It’s certainly rather creepy, but we’re sure that the inevitable next stage of playing adult movie clips on your partner’s back will be appealing to some. We, of course, are considering the geekier side of this tech. GPS, with a map readout on the back of the wrist would certainly be useful, as would chips that cover your eyeballs and can darken down when the sun is shining too bright.

And a full-body display will eventually be used for advertising. Combine this with bioluminescent ink, for example, and you could turn yourself into a small, walking version of Times Square. At least, unlike a real tattoo, you can switch this one off.