Ferrari says it is recalling 1,248 of its 458 Italia supercars after reports of fires breaking out in five of the luxury vehicles in several countries.

The Italian carmaker said Thursday it wants to replace an adhesive that in some circumstances can melt due to overheating and possibly ignite.

Fires in the car that sells for euro197,000 ($253,000) have been reported in California, Switzerland, China and France.

Ferrari spokesman Stefano Lai says the company will be asking the owners of 1,248 cars produced before July 2010 to bring them in to have the glue replaced with mechanical fasteners.

Russia’s finance minister has told people to smoke and drink more, explaining that higher consumption would help lift tax revenues for spending on social services.

Speaking as the Russian government announces plan to raise duty on alcohol and cigarettes, Alexei Kudrin said that by smoking a pack, “you are giving more to help solve social problems such as boosting demographics, developing other social services and upholding birth rates”.

“People should understand: Those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state,” he told the Interfax news agency.

Gen. Yuri Ivanov, 52, deputy head of GRU, the Russian military’s overseas intelligence arm of Russian military, was found dead in mysterious circumstances described in a terse official Russian eulogy as a tragic swimming accident “several days ago.”

No further details were provided such as where he died. Although he apparently drowned off the shore of Syrian Latakia, his body was recovered from Turkish waters ten days after he went missing.
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Our sources surmise that Gen. Yuri Ivanov went missing from a private, secretive engagement from which his aides and guards were banished to wait outside, not swimming alone in the sea of Latakia. This would account for the delay in reporting his disappearance.

They recall in this regard his former position as head of the North Caucasus branch of Russian military intelligence, which he held until late 2006. In this capacity he played a leading role in clandestine operations against al Qaeda and the Chechen revolt.  Among the many terrorist groups present in Syria are al Qaeda cells from the Caucasian. 

A politician tipped as a future Japanese prime minister has said the British are not very likeable, but admitted the way British prisoners marched in The Bridge on the River Kwai demonstrated their best qualities.

Ichiro Ozawa, the former secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Democratic Party, also said he values US democracy but dismissed the American people as “simple-minded”.

The 68-year-old veteran politician, who resigned as the second most important official in the ruling party in June after coming under fire for campaign finance scandals, reportedly said: “I don’t like British people,” before praising British democracy and their discipline, citing the 1957 Second World War II film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, in which British prisoners of war march in orderly ranks.

The film, based on the novel The Bridge over the River Kwai starred Sir Alec Guinness, William Holden and Jack Hawkins. Guinness won an Oscar for his portrayal of Colonel Nicholson, who convinces the other British prisoners of war to build a bridge for the Burma-Siam railway as a means of boosting British morale but which eventually turns into a monument to himself.

The film won six other Academy Awards including Best Picture.

Veterans of the Second World War who fought against Japan said Mr Ozawa’s comments about Britain were insensitive but they would “not get into a sweat about it”.

A Perth Catholic school has apologised to parents who were offended by a Year 4 student pretending to be Adolf Hitler being awarded first place in his class at a school dress-up day.

The inner-city school sent out a letter of apology on Wednesday after parents complained about the boy’s character portrayal at a book-week assembly.

The principal said a handful of parents had approached or emailed him after the event to say the costume, which included a swastika, should not have been allowed in the school.

Children had been asked to dress up as a famous character. “He (Hitler) was a fairly famous person,” he said. Two children from each class were judged as having the best costumes.

The principal was one of a group of teachers who decided who would win. He said claims that other children had been chanting “Hitler” while the student was on stage were untrue.

“It was a form of voting,” he said. “I would strongly deny that the children were chanting ‘Hitler’, I take strong umbrage to that.”

Other characters’ names were also called out as part of the voting process.

“Some people got upset because kids called out Hitler,” he said. The principal said he did not see anything “sinister” in the student’s choice of character.

“To me it’s a mountain out of a molehill,” he said.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin fired darts from a crossbow at a gray whale off Russia’s Far Eastern coast on Wednesday in the latest in a series of man-versus-nature stunts designed to cultivate the image of a macho leader.

Putin held his balance in a rubber boat that was being tossed around in choppy waters off the Kamchatka Peninsula, and eventually hit the whale with a special arrow designed to collect skin samples.

“I hit it at the fourth try!” a beaming Putin, kitted out in black-and-orange waterproof suit and black beanie, yelled to a camera crew from the boat.

A biologist with him displayed the skin sample and said it would allow experts to determine where the whale came from.

You couldn’t miss the large presence of Portland police officers at the Fred Meyer off Southeast Johnson Creek Boulevard this morning.

Mounted patrol officers were out front.

K9 patrol were teaming around and about 60 other uniformed officers from assistant chiefs and commanders to patrol officers and traffic cops were inside.

It was the annual “Shop With a Cop” back-to-school event, with officers helping about 160 children pick out clothing and school supplies for the approaching school year.

But that didn’t stop two shoplifters from going aisle to aisle, picking out a few items of their own.

While officers were helping out the kids, store security alerted the police they had their eyes on two young men packing their own backpacks with merchandise.

A LEADING German Social Democrat has written a book with an apocalyptic vision of his country sliding into poverty, stupidity and Muslim domination.

Thilo Sarrazin, 65, a former Berlin finance minister and current Bundesbank board member, is already under investigation by a public prosecutor for allegedly inciting racial hatred by blaming immigrants for making Germany “dumber” and calling Muslim children “underclass citizens.”

Now his book, Germany is destroying itself: How we are gambling with our country, threatens the strained social fabric of the “multi-culti” Fatherland once more at a time of rising racial tensions and the radicalisation of Islamic youth.

“I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to become, in large part, Muslim, that over wide areas Turkish and Arabic are spoken, where the women wear headscarves and the daily rhythms of life are dictated by the call of the Muezzin,” he writes.

A dismissed policeman armed with an automatic rifle seized a bus in the Philippine capital Monday with 25 passengers, most of them Hong Kong tourists, in a bid to demand his reinstatement, police said.

Six hostages, including three children, were subsequently released, and appeared to be unhurt.

Police sharpshooters took positions around the white-blue-red bus, which was parked near a downtown Manila park, and negotiations to free the remaining hostages were under way, deputy director of Manila police Alex Gutierrez said.

A British billionaire has offered $1 million to the first person who manages to streak naked in front of Barack Obama.

Alki David, ranked 45th in the Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated fortune of £1.15 billion, made the pledge as part of a publicity stunt for a new website.

The Nigerian born businessman, 42, set up the Battlecam site, which offers people thousands of pounds if they perform, and video, crazy stunts live through the site.

Mr Alki, who is also an actor, initially offered $100,000 to the person who successfully streaked in front of the US President, reports the Daily Telegraph.

But now he has raised the stakes to $1 million (£639,000) after being told the prize money was “not enough” to warrant such a daring prank.

The only catch is the person has to have the website’s name scrawled across their stomach.

From the beginning of September, it will be illegal for the Russian capital’s supermarkets, shops and kiosks to sell vodka from 10pm to 10am.

The move will replace lax rules that theoretically forbid Moscow’s shops from selling the grain-based spirit from eleven at night to eight in the morning but which in practice allow them to sell vodka around the clock if they get a permit.

It comes as the Kremlin pushes ahead with the harshest anti-alcohol campaign since former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s draconian ban on vodka sales in 1985.

Mr Gorbachev, who became a hate figure for many ordinary Russians as a result of the ban, decreed that vodka could only be sold from two in the afternoon to seven at night.

His campaign prompted desperate drunks to rush to get their fix by imbibing perfume and other hazardous intoxicants instead.

Many of them died as a result.

Memphis City Council member Janis Fullilove sent a letter of apology to the president of the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials for what she described as “over the top” behavior at a party last week.

 Fullilove, regional director for NBC-LEO, said Tuesday that she engaged in dancing — including pole dancing — on a river cruise during the group’s gathering in Memphis.

“Yes, I was on the pole,” said Fullilove. “I was having a good time but I wasn’t drinking.

“I went overboard because I was trying to do the Soul Train. I was dancing on the pole and I was just trying to have a good time.

“It was over the top. It was over the top and I apologize.”

Last week we were attacked by the sun. For real.  Huge solar eruptions sent a blast of radiation toward Earth. Thankfully, the planet’s natural magnetic shield warded off the worst effects. Life went on uninterrupted.

That won’t always be the case. In 1859, Richard Carrington recorded what is now called the “Carrington Effect” — intense solar activity that can disrupt modern life dramatically.

In Carrington’s day, there were few electromechanical systems for intense solar radiation to mess with. The new fangled telegraph systems suffered the most. Solar-induced power surges knocked some operators from their chairs and set fire to the paper rolls used to record dashes and dots.

Fortunately, no Carrington Effect has occurred since the whole world became electrified. But scientists worry about what might happen when a real solar tsunami hits.

It is a real danger. In 2008, the National Academies released a report on the “adverse effects of extreme space weather on modern technology — power grid outages, high-frequency communication blackouts. …” Much of the planet’s energy and communications infrastructure is just too fragile to weather a massive electromagnetic onslaught.

Many veterans of World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam brought home tales of heroism and valor and, unbeknownst to their loved ones, potentially explosive war souvenirs.

The police in Bangor, Me., received a call this month: a woman found a live hand grenade in a moving box, where it had probably sat for decades.

She believed that it belonged to her late husband, who served in the Vietnam War and probably brought it home as a keepsake.

A bomb squad was summoned to detonate it.

“These men are passing away because they’re in their 80s or 90s, and now, unfortunately, family members are unaware of the fact that they have war souvenirs,” said Sgt. Andrew Parsons of the New Hampshire State Police explosives unit.

“When they find Grandpa’s treasure chest and pull things out, lo and behold there’s a hand grenade at the bottom.”

Imagine you suddenly discovered part of your umbilical cord was still attached.

Scientists just did that for the planet Earth. What’s been found is a clear sign that beneath the crust in northern Canada there is a chunk of pristine, undisturbed rock from the time when Earth was nothing but molten rock. 

The evidence comes in the form of lava rocks that, themselves, are a mere 60 million years old. But these rocks contain an early Earth mixture of helium, lead and neodymium isotopes which suggest the mantle rock beneath the crust that yielded them is a virgin pocket of Earth’s original material.

That pocket had survived for 4.5 billion years under Baffin Island without being mixed by plate tectonics or erupted onto the surface.

“I was surprised that any of the (original) mantle survived,” said geoscientist Matthew Jackson of Boston University.

He is the lead author on a paper announcing the discovery in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

 ”Finding a piece of the original mantle has been a holy grail. The original Earth was a big ball of magma. That’s our (planet’s) original composition.”

Friday the 13th proved suitably unlucky for one 13 year-old boy who was struck by lightning before being taken to hospital — at 13:13 on the dreaded date.

The boy, who has not been named, was treated for a minor burn after being hit along with two others at an air show in Suffolk, eastern England, a spokeswoman said.

Staff at the St Johns Ambulance service said there had been heavy rain all day before they witnessed a big flash of lightning and a loud clap of thunder over the sea off the Suffolk coast.

“We got a call that someone had been struck by lightning so we immediately sent our paramedics to the scene, followed by an ambulance,” said Rex Clarke, head of the team of St John Ambulance volunteers at the event.

Perhaps the clue is in today’s date, Friday 13, but equity investors should be very afraid if the reappearance of a US technical indicator believed to herald an imminent market crash is to be believed.

The ‘Hindenburg Omen’ is the ominously-titled list of five separate indicators linked to the New York Stock Exchange which when they occur at the same time, have historically warned of an impending crash.

Named after the tragic events of 1937 when the zeppelin airship Hindenburg dramatically exploded into flames in New Jersey, influential US market blog Zero Hedge reported over night that the five technical indicators appeared to have occurred last Tuesday.

In fact Zero Hedge describes the Hindenburg Omen as: ‘Easily the most feared technical pattern in all of chartism (for the bullishly inclined).

Those who know what it is, tend to have an atavistic reaction to its mere mention.’

Brazil’s government has ordered its air force to officially record any sighting of unidentified flying objects.

A government decree said all military and civilian pilots as well as air traffic controllers should register any UFO sightings with the national aerospace defence command.

The information will be stored in the national archives in Rio de Janeiro. It will be made available to researchers, including those seeking evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Anything unusual that is seen, photographed or video filmed in Brazil’s air space will now have to be reported and catalogued.

But the air force said it would limit itself to collecting information, and would not be chasing UFOs.

As they prepare for the world Olympic Games in 2012, the British are doing more than mere construction of the facilities.

The British tourism agency – VisitBritain – has issued an official etiquette guide for hospitality workers including cab drivers as they seek to show off a friendlier side.

The Olympics can bring the nation billions of pounds and thousands of visitors.

Realizing that not all cultures think and act the same, a guide telling British hospitality workers how they should act around visitors from the various countries when they come to visit for the Olympic Games to be held in London in July and August of 2012.

According to the guide:

Indians don’t like to be hugged or touched by strangers.

The French can be rude and picky when it comes to restaurants.

Canadians don’t like being mistaken for Americans

Brazilians don’t like personal questions. Middle Easterners don’t like to be told what to do.

The Polish are hurt by stereotypes.

Read the whole thing!

A COMPUTER engineer died after tying himself naked to a tree with a cord wrapped around his penis, an inquest heard.

Kevin Kirkland, 44, used a pair of makeshift rope handcuffs to attach himself to the trunk, but got trapped when a knot jammed around his wrists, The Sun said today.

Walkers discovered his body slumped against the tree the following morning near his home in Newport, Shropshire.

He was wearing just his socks and boots and had a small piece of cord wrapped around his penis.

The inquest heard how bachelor Kevin died from hypothermia and blood loss from cuts on his wrists, which were caused by his desperate attempts to escape.

Online whistle-blower WikiLeaks has posted a huge encrypted file named “Insurance” to its website, sparking speculation that those behind the organization may be prepared to release more classified information if authorities interfere with them.

At 1.4 gigabytes, the file is 20 times larger than the batch of 77,000 secret U.S. military documents about Afghanistan that WikiLeaks dumped onto the Web last month, and cryptographers say that the file is virtually impossible to crack — unless WikiLeaks releases the key used to encode the material.

“There’s no way that anyone has any chance of figuring out what’s in there,” Paul Kocher, president of US-based Cryptography Research, said Thursday.

That hasn’t stopped bloggers and journalists from speculating. Some say the files could be the 15,000 or so intelligence reports which WikiLeaks says it’s held back for vetting. Others, pointing to its enormous size, say it could be a compilation of the 260,000 classified diplomatic cables allegedly accessed by Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.

Sheikh ‘Abd Al-Muhsin Al-’Obikan, an advisor at the Saudi Justice Ministry, recently issued a fatwa allowing the breastfeeding of adults.

The fatwa is aimed at enabling an unrelated man and woman to be secluded in the same room, a situation which Islam considers forbidden gender mixing. The rationale behind the fatwa is that breastfeeding creates a bond of kinship between the man and woman, rendering the man her mahram,[1] thus making it acceptable for them to be together in seclusion.

The fatwa created a stir in Saudi Arabia and in the Arab media at large, arousing a wave of criticism from clerics and columnists alike. Clerics claimed that breastfeeding could not create a bond of kinship between a female and an unrelated male over two years of age, and some claimed that the fatwa contradicted the shari’a.

Columnists argued that such grotesque fatwas are insulting to women, and also tarnish the Muslims’ image. One columnist pointed to a paradox, namely that the fear of gender-mixing is prompting clerics to encourage lewd behaviors like women breastfeeding grown men. Despite this criticism, Al-’Obikan has stood his ground, and even reiterated his position in greater detail.

Winston Churchill allegedly ordered a cover up of a close encounter between an RAF aircraft and a UFO during the Second World War because it would create “mass panic”, accordingly to newly-released files.

The claim that the then Prime Minister ordered details of the unexplained incident over the East Coast to be kept secret for at least 50 years was made by a scientist who said his grandfather was one of Churchill’s bodyguards.

The tale is told in newly declassified Ministry of Defence UFO files put online by the National Archives. Allegations of the cover-up emerged when the man, from Leicester, wrote to the Government in 1999 trying to find out more about the incident.

He described how his grandfather, who served with the RAF in the war, was present when Churchill and US General Dwight Eisenhower discussed how to deal with the UFO encounter.

The man, who is not named in the files, said Churchill was reported to have exclaimed: “This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one’s belief in the church.”

A drunken man went on a rampage while driving a shovel loader in northern China, smashing into shops and vehicles and killing 11 people, a government spokesman said Monday.

The incident began when 38-year-old Li Xianliang killed a customer Sunday at the Hongyuan coal depot in Hebei provinces Yuanshi county where he worked driving a shovel loader, said a news release issued by the county government.

Li, who had been drinking, then drove his loader down an adjacent road, smashing into cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks and roadside shops, the news release said.

The tractor eventually came to a stop in a field where police subdued the man after the hour-long rampage.The man was taken into custody and likely faces the death penalty if convicted of murder.

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.

Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.
…
Scientists said the rapid dissipation of the surface oil was probably due to a combination of factors. The gulf has an immense natural capacity to break down oil, which leaks into it at a steady rate from thousands of natural seeps. Though none of the seeps is anywhere near the size of the Deepwater Horizon leak, they do mean that the gulf is swarming with bacteria that can eat oil.

Man hit by six meteorites is being ‘targeted by aliens’

A Bosnian man who claims he is being targeted by extraterrestrials after a series of meteorite strikes on his house has now been hit by a sixth space rock in the space of a few years.

Radivoje Lajic first came to international attention in 2008, shortly after the fifth meteorite had crashed into the roof of his house in the northern village of Gornji Lajici.

And now, within the past month, another rock has hit the roof of his house, in defiance of all the odds – making it six strikes since the plague of meteorites began in 2007.

Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that all the falling rocks he has handed over were meteorites. They are now trying to work out what exactly it is about his house that particularly attracts them. The strikes always happen when it is raining heavily, he says, never when there are clear skies.

Lajic has his own explanation, of course. After the fifth rock struck his house, he said: ‘I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate.’

A businessman enraged that a helicopter blew debris on to his car and garden tried to cling to it as it took off, a court heard.

Houshang Jafari, 59, lost his temper as the aircraft landed near his £1million flat, the jury was told.

He kicked the helicopter, tried to open the pilot’s door and hurled a carrier bag at the windscreen, it was alleged.

Then he held on to the skid bar as terrified pilot Mark Blokland tried to take off, the prosecution claim.

The heavily built businessman caused the helicopter to pitch wildly but it eventually lifted off.

Mr Jafari was allegedly angry after it blew debris at his Land Rover as it landed in gardens shared by flat owners in a converted manor house.

Yesterday, accused of putting the pilot and passengers in ” catastrophic danger”, he denied endangering aircraft safety. Private pilot Mr Blokland hired the helicopter for a lunch outing with wife Tammy and two friends who also had a £1.2million flat in Dower House at Frenchay, Bristol. James Patrick, prosecuting, said: “Mr Jafari was extremely angry, some would say livid. He had a carrier bag which he threw at the helicopter.

Maggots falling from an overhead luggage bin has stopped a US plane from taking off.

Passengers were horrified to see the larvae dropping onto an unsuspecting passenger as others began to panic and cause a commotion, US media report.

US Airways blamed spoiled meat in a suitcase on board the Atlanta-to-New York flight on Monday.

The plane was taxiing down the runway at Atlanta’s international airport when passengers were told they would be returning to the airport gate because of a “minor emergency”.

“The maggots, they started to drip out of the bin in row 15,” passenger Dona Adamo told TV network Fox 5.

Unfortunately, crazed dictator Kim Jong-il chose the 7-0 mauling at the hands of Portugal to be the first football game ever broadcast in the impoverished communist nation.

“The Portuguese won the game and now have four points,” the Korean Central Broadcasting commentator said at the conclusion of the match. “We are ending our live broadcast now.” It then cut to factory workers and engineers praising the Dear Leader.

Seems the result may not have tallied too well with Kim Jong-il’s narrative that North Korea is a socialist paradise populated by athletic supermen.

Moon Ki-Nam, a former North Korean coach who fled the country in 2004, told reporters: “The players and coach are rewarded with huge houses when they win. But they have to atone for losing by being sent to work in the coal mines.”

A drunk driver trapped after overturning his car cracked open another can of beer while he waited for emergency crews to rescue him, a New Zealand court was told.

Paul Nigel Sneddon, 47, pleaded guilty to careless driving and drunken driving after being nearly three times over the legal alcohol limit in a district court in the city of Palmerston North, the Dominion Post newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Police found Sneddon, a former baker, trapped in his overturned Ford Laser on June 1, drinking a can of beer after he failed to take a corner properly and crashed through a wooden barrier, flipping his vehicle.

Defense lawyer Peter Young said that when Sneddon found he could not open the doors, “he had nothing else to do at that point, so he had another beer.”

When asked by police how much he had consumed, Sneddon replied: “Plenty, I’ve been drinking for four days straight.”

Black-clad demonstrators broke off from a crowd of peaceful protesters at the World Summit, torching police cruisers and smashing windows with baseball bats and hammers.

Police with shields and clubs earlier pushed back another small group of demonstrators who tried to head south toward the security fence surrounding the perimeter of the Group of Twenty global economic summit site. Some demonstrators hurled bottles at police.

“This isn’t our Toronto and my response is anger,” Toronto Mayor David Miller told CP24 television. “Every Torontonian should be outraged by this.”

The roving band of protesters in black balaclavas shattered shop windows for blocks, including at police headquarters, then shed some of their black clothes, revealing other garments, and continued to rampage through downtown Toronto.

Protesters torched at least two police cruisers in different parts of the city.

Police in riot gear and riding bikes formed a blockade, keeping protesters from approaching the security fence a few blocks south of the march route. Police closed a stretch of Toronto’s subway system along the protest route and the largest shopping mall downtown closed after the protest took a turn for the worse.

A Southwest Airlines employee called police after finding 40 to 60 human heads in a package set to be transported to a Fort Worth medical research company, the airline said.

“It wasn’t labeled or packaged properly,” said Ashley Rogers, a Southwest spokeswoman. “They called the local authorities.”

The incident happened in Little Rock, Ark., last Wednesday, she said.

Little Rock police turned the heads over to the county coroner, who questions where they came from and if they were properly obtained.

“We’ve come to the conclusion that there is a black market out there for human body parts for research or for whatever reason,” said Pulaski County coroner Garland Camper. “We just want to make sure these specimens here aren’t a part of that black market and underground trade.”

A Mexican matador was arrested for breaching his contract after losing his nerve and running from the bullring.

The 22-year-old vaulted over the protective wall at the side of the ring as the crowd hooted and whistled in derision.

He was briefly persuaded back into the bullring by organisers but gave up before coming face to face with half-ton beast and skulked from the ring a second time.

He was arrested after the bullfight following complaints by organisers that he had breached his contract.

He was later released after paying a fine.

The 1,100-mile journey of a diver’s camera lost in the Caribbean has been revealed with the extraordinary help of a sea turtle who switched it on and filmed some of the epic adventure.

Royal Dutch Navy sergeant Dick de Bruin was exploring a wreck off the tropical island of Aruba last year when his bright red camera silently floated away.

Yet following a six-month odyssey the camera has found its way back to Mr Dr Bruin, with some unique ocean footage recorded by the turtle.

The lost camera was reunited with Mr de Bruin thanks to some impressive detective work by a Florida coastguard, who spotted it pounding against the rocks of a Key West marina on May 16.

Paul Shultz waded into the waters for a closer look and fished out the Nikon camera, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.

Its waterproof plastic case was covered with six months’ worth of crusty sea growth, but the camera itself was in an almost pristine condition.

However, clues to tracking down its owner were few.

There were photos of two men preparing to scuba dive; a family nestled together on a couch; a mysterious relic settled deep into the sea floor – and a puzzling video clip of splashing water that appeared to have been taken as the camera thrashed around under the control of something that wasn’t human.

Immigrants are making Germany ‘dumber’, according to a board member of the country’s central bank.

 Thilo Sarrazin claimed the ‘limited education’ of immigrants – coupled with their high birth rate – meant Germans ‘are becoming dumber in a simple way’.

He said: ‘There’s a difference in the reproduction of population groups with varying intelligence.’

It is not the first time the 65-year-old member of the Bundesbank has caused controversy since he joined last year.

In October he described Muslim children as ‘underclass’ citizens.

‘I don’t have to accept someone who lives off a state they reject, doesn’t properly take care of the education of his children-and keeps producing more little girls in headscarves,’ Mr Sarrazin said.

‘That goes for 70 percent of the Turkish and 90 percent of the Arabic population of Berlin.’

He added that they were not fit for much other than ‘fruit and vegetable selling’.

A recently discovered comet is surprising skywatchers by becoming brighter than predictions had first suggested and can now be seen with the unaided eye during the next few weeks.

 Comet McNaught, officially catalogued as C/2009 R1, was discovered by Australian astronomer Robert McNaught last September using the using the 0.5-meter Uppsala Schmidt telescope and a CCD camera.

It’s the 51st comet that bears McNaught’s name.

Although initially an extremely faint object, enough observations of the newfound comet were made to allow Brian Marsden of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., to calculate an orbit.

Comet McNaught is expected to pass closest to the sun (perihelion) on July 2, at a distance of 37 million miles (60 million km).

The comet is visible now for people with dark skies away from urban and suburban lighting. By mid-June it may be an easy skywatching target for most people.

Russia has uncovered at least 495 skeletons, many with head gunshot wounds, in a mass grave probably dating back to purges under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s, municipal authorities said on Wednesday.

 At least 3.5 tonnes of bones were extracted from the site on the outskirts of the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok after it was discovered by workmen building a road, the city government said in a statement.

 Millions of Soviet citizens were executed or died in labour camps during Stalin’s rule from the 1920s until his death in 1953, but discoveries of mass graves became less frequent after a surge in finds that followed the 1991 Soviet collapse.

Experts were checking the hypothesis that the bodies were victims of Stalin’s purges.

“Practically all of the skulls have bullet wounds,” said Yaroslav Livanksy, the head of a group of volunteers who helped to excavate the site.

AN increasing number of humans are being killed by wild elephants each year in Bangladesh – with many of the fatalities occurring because people settle in the animals’ migration corridors.

Bangladesh is home to only an estimated 227 wild Asian elephants, but up to 100 more migrate through the country each year, mostly through the north and northeast, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

As more people in Bangladesh, one of the world’s most densely populated nations, settle in the elephant corridor areas, they are more likely to be attacked by confused, angry pachyderms.

There are now hundreds of villages along the densely-forested Indian border and residents of the area say they frequently have to drive away herds of wild elephants that come to raid their paddy fields and fruit trees.

During harvesting season, the villagers form night patrols and use kerosene torches, firecrackers and drums to drive the elephants away, but these efforts are becoming increasingly futile.

Tribal leader Luise Neng Minja said the elephants, which shelter in the forest during the day and come down to villages at night, used to flee but now they are no longer so scared.

“I’ve seen an elephant snatch a torch from a man with its trunk while we were driving away a herd, and throw the flame on a house, setting it on fire,” said Luise, 51.

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

…

Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.

Seven seniors at a Southern California high school were facing disciplinary action for participating in a game called “Beat the Jew” in which losers were subjected to “incineration” or “enslavement,” a school administrator said Friday.

The game involved some students playing the role of Nazis who blindfolded and dropped off other students playing Jews who must find their way back to the campus, said Sherry Johnstone, assistant superintendent of personnel for Desert Sands Unified School District.

It was not immediately clear what either punishment comprised for losing players, she said.

The director of an Australian zoo said on Friday he is “horrified” after a seven-year-old boy broke into the zoo, fed an assortment of animals to a crocodile and clubbed various lizards to death with a rock.

The boy’s attacks happened early Wednesday and were captured on a zoo security camera, said Rex Neindorf, director of the Alice Springs Reptile Centre in Australia’s Northern Territory.

The boy, whose identity cannot be revealed, jumped the zoo’s security fence before bludgeoning three lizards to death with a rock, including the zoo’s much-loved 20-year-old goanna, which he then fed to “Terry,” an 11-foot, 440-pound saltwater crocodile, said Neindorf.

The boy also threw several live animals into the crocodile’s enclosure, and at one point tried to clamber over the fence surrounding the enclosure in an effort to get closer to the crocodile.

A huge fireball has been spotted on Jupiter in yet another collision from space caught on camera and video by amateur astronomers.

The new Jupiter crash occurred on June 3 at 20:31 UT (4:31 p.m. Eastern Time) and was spotted by skywatcher Anthony Wesley in Australia and fellow amateur astronomer Christopher Go in the Philippines.

Wesley’s photos show the Jupiter fireball blazing in the atmosphere of the gas giant planet. So far, no visible scar in the clouds has been reported from the event.

Wesley described the event as a “large fireball” on his website, where he posted the photos taken from Broken Hill, Australia.

This new impact on Jupiter comes less than a year after a spectacular crash on July 19, 2009, when what scientist now think was an asteroid about 1,600 feet (500 meters) wide slammed into the planet.

That collision created a massive bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. It was Wesley, too, who first spotted the July 2009 collision. His observations kicked off an international observation campaign to study the impact site.

Astronomers initially suspected a comet in last year’s impact, but announced this week that a rogue asteroid was the most likely culprit.

Israeli forces seized a Gaza-bound aid vessel without meeting resistance on Saturday, preventing it from breaking an Israeli maritime blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory days after a similar effort turned bloody.

The military said its forces boarded the 1,200-ton Rachel Corrie cargo ship from the sea, not helicopters. The takeover stood in marked contrast to a violent confrontation at sea earlier this week when Israeli commandos blocked a Turkish aid vessel trying to break the blockade.

At the time, Israeli commandos rappelled from helicopters and a clash with passengers left nine pro-Palestinian activists dead.

Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich says Saturday’s takeover took only a few minutes and that the vessel was being taken to Israel’s Ashdod port.

Hundreds of seemingly drunk parrots are falling out of trees and the sky in a northern Australian town, mystifying veterinary surgeons who are struggling to care for them.

The brightly coloured lorikeets are showing classic signs of drunkenness by losing all coordination and passing out, and then cowering in cages as they recover from their “hangovers”.

“They definitely seem like they’re drunk,” said Lisa Hansen, a veterinary surgeon at the Ark Animal Hospital in Palmerston, near Darwin.

“They fall out of trees… and they’re not so coordinated as they would normally be.

They go to jump and they miss the next perch.”

 Hansen said nobody was sure what was causing the symptoms, although it may be a plant they are eating.

Other theories include an outbreak of a mystery virus.

University of Reading researcher Mark Gasson has become the first human known to be infected by a computer virus.

The virus, infecting a chip implanted in Gasson’s hand, passed into a laboratory computer.

From there, the infection could have spread into other computer chips found in building access cards.

 All this was intentional, in an experiment to see how simple radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips like those used for tracking animals can host and spread technological diseases.

The research shows that as implantable bionic devices such as pacemakers get more sophisticated in the years ahead, their security and the safety of the patients whose lives depend on them will become increasingly important, said Gasson.

 ”We should start to think of these devices as miniature computers,” Gasson said.

And just like everyday computers, they can get sick.

Down with disease Gasson had a relatively simple chip implanted in the top of his left hand near his thumb last year.

 It emits a signal that is read by external sensors, allowing him access to the Reading laboratory and for his cell phone to operate.

He and his colleagues created a malicious code for the chip. When the lab’s sensors read the code, the code inserted itself into the building computer database that governs who has access to the premises.

“The virus replicates itself through the database and potentially could copy itself onto the access cards that people use,” Gasson said.

Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first synthetic living cell.

The researchers constructed a bacterium’s “genetic software” and transplanted it into a host cell.

The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species “dictated” by the synthetic DNA.

The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms.

The researchers hope eventually to design bacterial cells that will produce medicines and fuels and even absorb greenhouse gases.

The team was led by Dr Craig Venter of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Maryland and California.

He and his colleagues had previously made a synthetic bacterial genome, and transplanted the genome of one bacterium into another.

Now, the scientists have put both methods together, to create what they call a “synthetic cell”, although only its genome is truly synthetic.

Austin police arrested five high school students on accusations of making homemade bombs out of household cleaners and setting them off at the home of teachers.

Police say four of the five students attended Brentwood Christian School on North Lamar. They are Jacob Cardenas, Henry Rhea, Brady Johnson, and Brian Lam.

The school’s president described them as good students with no past behavior problems.

The fifth student arrested, Luke Mallett, attends Hyde Park Baptist School. According to arrest affidavits, it was Mallett’s idea to build the bombs and set them off at the homes of Brentwood Christian School teachers.

“All of them emphatically say they were playing around, and it was a joke. They meant no harm to anybody; they didn’t mean to harm anybody’s property. They are actually friends with these teachers, and it was just meant as a practical joke,” said Corporal Scott Perry, Austin Police Department.

A year ago, Germany’s financial regulator BaFin warned that the toxic debts of the country’s banks would blow up “like a grenade” once hidden losses from the credit crisis caught up with them.

An internal memo at the time showed that BaFin feared write-offs might top €800bn (£688bn), twice the reserves of Germany’s financial institutions. Nobody paid much attention.

But the regulator’s shock move on Tuesday night to stop short trading on banks, insurers, eurozone bonds – as well as a ban credit default swaps (CDS) on sovereign debt – has left markets wondering whether the slow fuse on Germany’s banking system has finally detonated.

 BaFin spoke of “extraordinary volatility” and said CDS moves were jeopardising “the stability of the financial system as a whole”.

It is unsettling that the BaFin should opt for such drastic measures a week after EU leaders thought they had overawed markets with a €750bn rescue package and direct purchases of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish debt by the European Central Bank.

BaFin’s heavy-handed move seems to proclaim that the rescue has failed. “The market is left asking what skeletons are lurking in the cupboard,” said Marc Ostwald from Monument Securities.

The short ban follows a report by RBC Capital Markets that circulated widely in the City accusing German banks of failing to come clean on 75pc of their €45bn exposure to Greek debt.

Parents at Coconut Grove Elementary School are calling for the ouster of Principal Eva N. Ravelo this week after she told a parent in an e-mail to “eat sh– and die.”

The controversy, which is now under review by the Miami-Dade County school district’s central office, started Monday.

Abigail DuBearn, a member of the school’s Educational Excellence School Advisory Committee, or EESAC, had asked Ravelo and other council members whether student representatives of the committee “could be notified today and be invited to attend and participate” at Monday’s meeting.

Ravelo, 44, then replied to DuBearn’s e-mail with the message: “Advise her to eat sh– and die.” Ravelo spelled the swear word as it appears here — without the last two letters.

Maria Orjeda, the school’s reading coach, who spoke on behalf of Ravelo, said the principal meant to send the e-mail about DuBearn to her assistant principal, Ramón Dawkins, instead of DuBearn.

DuBearn could not be reached for comment Thursday.

“Ms. Ravelo takes full responsibility for the mistake. She apologized to Mrs. DuBearn on Tuesday,” Orjeda said.

The principal, who is still running the school, has been instructed not to speak with the media, Orjeda said.

Ravelo could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

The mayor of a southern Mexico town allegedly beat his wife during a mother’s day celebration, sparking national criticism and prompting federal authorities to urge the woman to file a complaint.

Local media reported Wednesday that Enrique Hernandez, mayor of Petantepec in southern Chiapas state, punched and kicked his wife and pulled her hair during a mother’s day concert Monday.

The national newspaper Reforma quoted another mayor at the event as saying Hernandez yelled at his wife, Estela Velasco, and then began hitting her at the public concert in the town of Pueblo Nuevo.

“I tried to help her but the mayor threatened me,” Pueblo Nuevo Mayor Juan Alberto Morales told Reforma.

“He beat her hideously. The lady didn’t want to get any medical attention.”

An official with the Chiapas state government’s Institute for Women said Hernandez’s wife confirmed the attack.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to discuss the case, said federal and state authorities urged Velasco to file a complaint against her husband but she had refused out of fear.

Jupiter has lost one of its iconic red stripes and scientists are baffled as to why.

The largest planet in our solar system is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere, with one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere.

However, the most recent images taken by amateur astronomers have revealed the lower stripe known as the Southern Equatorial Belt has disappeared leaving the southern half of the planet looking unusually bare.

The band was present in at the end of last year before Jupiter ducked behind the Sun on its orbit.

However, when it emerged three months later the belt had disappeared.

Journalist and amateur astronomer Bob King, also known as Astro_Bob, was one of the first to note the strange phenomenon.

He said: Jupiter with only one belt is almost like seeing Saturn when its rings are edge-on and invisible for a time – it just doesnt look right.

It is not the first time this unusual phenomenon has been noticed.

Jupiter loses or regains one of its belts every ten of 15 years, although exactly why this happens is a mystery.

In a remote corner of northern Alberta, Canadian beavers have built the world’s largest dam, proving once and for all they are worthy of their status as a national symbol.

The roughly 850-metre dam — located at the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park, about 200 kilometres northeast of Fort McMurray — is believed to be the work of several generations of beavers.

The massive structure captured international attention this week, more than two years after it was first discovered by an Ottawa ecologist surveying the area through satellite imagery.

The dam is so big, it can be seen from space.

“I think it’s great that our Canadian icon is bringing attention to our national parks,” park spokesperson Mike Keizer told CTV.ca, a reference to the beaver’s role as a national emblem.

But the dam won’t become a tourist attraction, despite the buzz. The wood-and-mud formation stands in an isolated spot, a multiple-day paddle and hike through un-trailed areas – so far that even rangers only view it from the air, Keizer said.

In the words of prosecutors, the bar tabs of Shawn Clark were “epic.”

Amid thumping music and twirling dancers, the former labor union official dropped $65,000 in seven years at go-go bars across New Jersey.

On average, prosecutors say, he hit clubs once or twice a week, buying pints of beer, bottles of chardonnay and shots of liquor chased by fizzy energy drinks at places like Johnny A’s Hitching Post in Paterson, Double D’s in Morristown and Pure Go Go in Manville. Some days he spent more than $1,000.

And every round, prosecutors say, was illegally charged to an American Express account belonging to the union where Clark was business manager.

“We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of liquid lunches, some lasting three to four hours … all on the union credit card,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan W. Romankow said during opening arguments today at Clark’s federal trial in Trenton.

If anyone has noticed the soaring share price of Priceline.com, it’s an easy bet that Canadian actor William Shatner had something to do with it.

Unofficial word on Wall Street is that Shatner, who was initially paid in Priceline shares when he became pitchman for the Internet travel website startup in 1997, is now worth a cool $600 million.

No wonder he looked so happy singing a duet of Total Eclipse of the Heart on Lopez Tonight the other week.

Priceline’s shares, which at one point plummeted to $1.80 during the dot-com crisis in 2000, are now trading close to $300 apiece.

And although the company won’t disclose how many shares (or salary) Shatner receives, it’s presumed to be plenty.

After all, it’s Shatner’s personality driven ads for the website that has made it so popular.

As he approaches his eighth decade on the planet, Shatner has gone through more ups and downs than a freight elevator.

After starring in the iconic role of Captain Kirk on Star Trek in the late ’60s, he later could find no work and lived in a truck he’d park on the street in the San Fernando Valley area of L.A.

WHEN her baby died soon after delivery, Gulbahor Zavidova, 28, a poor farmer’s wife, longed to be pregnant again.

After months of trying she and her husband visited a doctor who told her she could never have another child because she had been sterilised.

The procedure had been performed immediately after she gave birth, by doctors who did not ask her consent.

 On learning she could not bear children, her husband left her. “Not a day passes without me crying,” she said. “I was outraged when I found out what they had done. How could they do such a horrible thing without asking me?”

According to human rights groups, tens of thousands of young women like Zavidova have been sterilised without their consent in the authoritarian former Soviet state of Uzbekistan.

Uzbek sources say the measure was ordered by Islam Karimov, the president, who has ruled with an iron fist for 20 years. The policy is aimed at keeping down the country’s poor population — with 28m people, it is Central Asia’s most densely populated state.
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Critics claim every doctor was told to persuade “at least two women” a month to have the procedure.

Doctors who failed faced reprisals and fines.

Astonished police in Hungary stop group of Afghan refugees who claim they have spent three years WALKING to Britain

It was January 2007 and the four teenagers decided they would walk to London – home, they thought, of the best music in the world.

Unfortunately, they lived in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, and faced an almost 4,000-mile trek to get to Britain.

Three years and three months later, the foot-sore refugees have been arrested in Hungary. Some 1,200 miles short of their destination, they may now be deported back to their homeland.

PRESIDENT OBAMA has been caught in a shocking cheating scandal after being caught in a Washington, DC Hotel with a former campaign aide, sources say.

And now, a hush-hush security video that shows everything could topple both Obama’s presidency and marriage to Michelle!

A confidential investigation has learned that Obama first became close to gorgeous 35 year-old VERA BAKER in 2004 when she worked tirelessly to get him elected to the US Senate, raising millions in campaign contributions.

While Baker has insisted in the past that “nothing happened” between them, the ENQUIRER has learned that top anti-Obama operatives are offering more than $1 million to witnesses to reveal what they know about the alleged hush-hush affair.

Among those being offered money is a limo driver who says that he took Vera to a secret hotel rendezvous where the President was staying.

On the condition of anonymity, the limo driver said he took Baker “from a friend’s home in the DC area to the Hotel George where I learned later that Obama would be spending the night.”

The driver recalled that he “waited in the lobby while she went to change her outfit. 

“But to the best of knowledge she did not have a room at the hotel and she was not staying there so I thought that it was a bit odd.”

Tiger Woods confessed to cheating with as many as 120 women behind his wife’s back during their five-year marriage, the National Enquirer reported Thursday.

But a one-night stand with the 21-year-old daughter of a neighbor in Florida was the final straw for Elin Nordegren, the U.S. magazine quoted sources as saying.

The Enquirer claimed the distraught mother-of-two decided to sign divorce papers after learning it was investigating Woods’ alleged fling with Raychel Coudriet, whom he had reportedly known since she was just 14.

The scandal-plagued golfer was said to have listed all the women he bedded as part of his treatment for sex addiction at the Gentle Path rehab center in Mississippi earlier this year.

But a source told the magazine that Woods left his young neighbor off the list.

After learning of the claim, a furious Nordegren, 30, allegedly called Woods while he was having dinner with friends following his golf comeback at the U.S. masters.

“She was screaming so loudly that everyone at the table could hear what she was saying,” a source told the magazine.

Marauding hippopotamus on Thursday April 22 destroyed over forty nursery beds at Moriba rice field in Janjangbureh, CRR.

The nurseries which were due for transplanting were seriously damaged thus causing another setback for farmers in the Central River Region, the farming community of which has double season annually.

A delegation comprising of agricultural officers from Sapu Agricultural Office, together with the National Assembly member for the area Hon.Foday Jibani Manka, Alh Omar Mambureh and the press visited the scene.

Speaking shortly after the visit, the National Assembly member for the area Hon. Foday Jibani Manka explained that the rice farm was established in 2002 in response to the clarion call made by President Jammeh ‘back to the land’.

He said that such damages caused by the hippos have never happened though the hippos do cause damage but not to this extent. He appealed to the Department of Wildlife and Conservation to intervene in order to minimize the damages.

The principal agricultural officer, Mustapha Drammeh opined that the hippos have caused extensive damages on the seedlings which were due for transplanting. He noted that the season has thus been delayed as a result of this. He also pointed out that hippos are always destroying rice fields, which is a big setback for farmers in the area.

How did they Nazi this coming?

Three men who showed up in full Nazi regalia to a hardcore punk show at an Old City bar Friday night were attacked by as many as 50 people on the streets after leaving the venue, according to witnesses and club management.

The headlining band at the Khyber that night was Murphy’s Law, led by front man Jimmy G, who formerly went by the moniker Jimmy Gestapo.

In an e-mail to the Daily News, Jimmy G confirmed that some guys had showed up to the concert in “full Nazi field dress.”

“And they did get their asses kicked,” he wrote. “Again.”

Khyber owner Stephen Simons, who was not at the show, said he had been told that the crowd inside “largely ignored and mocked” the three men.

But after they exited the club, on 2nd Street near Chestnut, they were attacked by a group of up to 50 people, he said.

“I guess being on 2nd Street in SS uniforms on a Friday night is a way to incite a semi-riot,” Simons said.

The parent company of Wikipedia is knowingly distributing child pornography, the co-founder of the online encyclopedia says, and he’s imploring the FBI to investigate.

Larry Sanger, who left Wikipedia in 2002, said Wikimedia Commons, the parent company of Wiki products including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews and Wikiquote, is rife with renderings of children performing sexual acts.

Sanger sent a letter to the FBI earlier this month outlining his concerns and identifying two specific Wikimedia Commons categories he believes violate federal obscenity law.

The first category, entitled “Pedophilia,” contains 25-30 explicit and detailed drawings of children performing sexual acts. The category was created three years ago. The second, “Lilicon,” provides cartoons similar in detail and depiction.

One of the more egregious cartoons shows a rendering of a young child about to perform oral sex on a much older man. related links

“I wasn’t shocked that it was online, but I was shocked that it was on a Wikimedia Foundation site that purports to be a reference site,” said Sanger, who is now involved in educational projects like Citizendium.org and WatchKnow.org, non-profit directories of videos for students grades pre-K to 12.

The last rat was seen on the tiny island of Canna four years ago after specialist pest controllers were brought in from more than 11,000 miles away to deal with the problem.

But now islanders are complaining that the rodent’s disappearance has led to thousands of rabbits invading the island because there are no rats to keep their numbers down.

The problem is so bad that locals say historic monuments are being “devastated” by the rabbits and they are devouring the self-sufficient islanders’ gardens away.

Even the island’s only restaurant has responded to the bounty and put on dishes of rabbit and cranberry with pistachio and rabbit pie in a rosemary and thyme cream sauce.

Twenty Nepali climbers are setting off to Mount Everest this week to try and remove decades-old garbage from the mountain in the world’s highest ever clean-up campaign, organizers said on Monday.

Many foreign and Nepali climbers have cleaned Mount Everest in the past but Namgyal Sherpa, leader of the Extreme Everest Expedition 2010, said no one had dared to clean above 8,000 meters (26,246 feet), an area known as the “death zone” for the lack of oxygen and treacherous terrain.

Sherpa and his team of seasoned climbers, carrying empty rucksacks and special bags, will risk the zone’s thin air and freezing temperatures to pick empty oxygen bottles, gas canisters, torn tents, ropes, and utensils lying between the South Col and the 8,850 meter (29,035 feet) summit.
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More than 4,000 climbers have since scaled the mountain and tourism, including climbing, is a key source of income for Nepal, among the world’s poorest countries. Sherpa’s team hopes to bring down at least 2,000 kg of garbage and the corpse of a climber killed two years ago. “I have seen three corpses lying there for years,” Sherpa said.

Remember back in January when HP announced it would bring a tabletop 3-D printer to market, at a place and time to be named later? That place and time just became a quite a bit less ambiguous.

Today Stratasys, the company that is manufacturing the device for HP, announced that it has shipped the first units of the HP-branded Designjet 3D fabrication machines, which will be available in May — but only in Europe. The Designjet 3D is based on Stratasys’s Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology, which turns three-dimensional CAD drawings into tangible prototypes by extruding partially molten ABS plastic in extremely fine layers one atop the other, forming the entire 3-D model in a single piece from the ground up.

Designjet 3D will print in ivory-colored plastic only while Designjet Color 3D will print single-color parts in up to eight different colors (we’re not sure why you can’t just put a different hue of ABS plastic in the Designjet 3D).

Aimed at businesses large and small as well as educational institutions and individual inventors, the idea is to offer a point of entry into 3-D printing for those who want to prototype in-house directly from their computers. That kind of convenience can save a lot of time and money on product development, but it also comes with a sizeable up-front cost.

In our earlier coverage to speculated that the price of HP’s printer would come in under $15,000 — the price of a similar printer recently released by Stratasys. But HP today announced that the Designjet 3D would retail starting at less than €13,000, or just under $17,500. Which means the price of entry into the 3-D club may still sit somewhere between unfeasible and pie-in-the-sky for many garage-shop hobbyists.

Three of the Royal Navy’s most illustrious ships are to spearhead a dramatic operation to rescue 150,000 Britons stranded abroad by the volcanic ash crisis.

After a meeting of emergency planning committee Cobra in Whitehall this morning, Gordon Brown revealed the aircraft carriers HMS Ark Royal and HMS Ocean will be made available for the massive relief effort.

A third Royal Navy vessel, HMS Albion, is already on its way to Spain to pick up troops and ‘may be able to be of help’, the Prime Minister said.

Mr Brown also announced that Spain’s Madrid airport, which remains clear of the ash cloud, is likely to be used as a hub for stranded Britons returning from Asia, Africa and the U.S. Travellers could then be ferried by bus and train to Spanish and Channel ports, to be picked up by the Navy ships.

He may have never told a lie, but George Washington apparently had no problem stiffing a Manhattan library on two books.

Two centuries ago, the nation’s first President borrowed two tomes from the New York Society Library on E. 79th St. and never returned them, racking up an inflation-adjusted $300,000 late fee.

But Washington can rest easy. “We’re not actively pursuing the overdue fines,” quipped head librarian Mark Bartlett.

“But we would be very happy if we were able to get the books back.” Washington’s dastardly deed went unknown for almost 150 years.

Then in 1934, a dusty, beaten-up ledger was discovered in a trash heap in the library’s basement.

A Whatcom County man’s friendship and aggressive support for a man convicted in the infamous Enumclaw horse-sex case led to his arrest this week for allegedly operating a bestiality farm just south of the Canadian border, federal prosecutors said Friday.

Douglas Spink, 39, a one-time dot.com millionaire, convicted drug smuggler and horse trainer, was quietly living on rural property south of Sumas when he connected with James Tait, who was in a Tennessee jail on a bestiality charge.

Tait had earlier been convicted of trespassing in 2005 in the Enumclaw case, in which a Gig Harbor man died after having sex with a horse.

The two men’s communications set in motion an investigation that resulted in Spink’s arrest Wednesday at the Sumas farm for suspicion of violating his federal probation for drug smuggling.

Federal prosecutors and Whatcom County sheriff’s officials say Spink also allowed people to come to the farm and have sex with animals.

He was “promoting tourism of this nature for bestiality,” Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo said Friday.

A white supremacist rally on the lawn of Los Angeles City Hall ended with a handful of arrests Saturday afternoon as counter-protesters showered police and white supremacists with rocks, bottles and other debris.

[Update, 4:50 p.m.: All five people arrested were counter-protesters, police say.] A rally by 40 members of a group calling itself the National Socialist Movement drew hundreds of counter-protesters from throughout the region.

In the hours leading up to the rally, where members called for the removal of all nonwhites from America’s southwest, counter-protesters scuffled with people perceived to be sympathizing with the white supremacists’ message.

One man, who sported Nazi tattoos, was severely beaten near City Hall while another man, who carried a confusing sign about religion with a scribbled swastika, was pummeled by a mob of people on Spring Street between 1st and 2nd.

The Los Angeles Police Department went on tactical alert during the event and took responsibility for escorting the white supremacists to and from the demonstration site.

Earlier in the week the group had obtained a permit for the demonstration.

Extramarital Sex Leads to Earthquakes

An Iranian cleric has proclaimed that inappropriately dress women leading to extramarital affairs are the resons behind the devastating earthquakes that frequently rattle the country.

Speaking to worshipped at the Friday prayers here on Apr 16, senior cleric Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said, “Many women who dress inappropriately … cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes.”

“Calamities are the result of people’s deeds…We have no way but conform to Islam to ward off dangers,” the religious leader is quoted as saying in newspaper reports.

A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.

The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the “immortal soul clause” to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul.

“By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions.”

GameStation’s form also points out that “we reserve the right to serve such notice in 6 (six) foot high letters of fire, however we can accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by such an act. If you a) do not believe you have an immortal soul, b) have already given it to another party, or c) do not wish to grant Us such a license, please click the link below to nullify this sub-clause and proceed with your transaction.”

An East Hampton, Connecticut, woman is facing several charges after her 2- and 3-year-old sons were playing in the woods for hours wearing nothing but diapers on Friday morning, police said.

Julie Root, 27, was arrested shortly after coming home from work.

A neighbor called East Hampton police when she had heard the children playing alone by the road in the rain for at least an hour.

When two officers arrived, they found the two small boys walking in the woods on the south side of Flatbrook Road near a stream. The boys were wearing no clothing other than their diapers and they were freezing cold, police said.

An ambulance was called and the boys were taken to Marlborough Clinic for a medical evaluation.

While all of this was taking place, Root walked up to the scene and said she had returned from working third shift at 7:30 a.m. and had possibly dozed off, allowing the boys to slip out of the house.

Root, who is wearing the t-shirt that reads “I Love Weed” in her mug shot, was heavily under the influence of prescription pain medication, police said.

 British civil aviation authorities ordered the closure of the country’s airspace as of noon on Thursday to shield aircraft from a high altitude cloud of ash drifting south and east from an erupting volcano in Iceland.

The plume of ash shut down airports and forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights in a wide arc from Ireland to Scandinavia.

The closures left airplanes on the tarmac as the rolling cloud — made up of minute particles of silicate that can damage airplane engines — headed from Britain and Scandinavia toward northern France. News reports said Denmark also had restricted air travel.

“From midday today until at least 6 p.m., there will be no flights permitted in U.K. controlled airspace other than emergency situations,” Britain’s National Air Traffic Service said in a statementon its Web site. “This has been applied in accordance with international civil aviation policy.”

 The move effectively grounded all flights in Britain from 11:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (7:00 a.m. Eastern) and affected an estimated 6,000 flights that use British airspace every day, aviation experts said.

Oddly, for travelers, the closure was announced under clear blue skies. Experts had said earlier that the ash may not be visible from the ground but can clog airplane engines.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has canceled a hearing intended to grill CEOs who took a charge against profits because of the health care reform bill.  The cancellation came after they realized what everyone already knew – that the companies were required to do what they did because of accounting rules.

Waxman and others had reacted with outrage and accused the companies of doing it – in essence, to make health care reform look bad.

AT&T took a $1 billion charge and other companies including Caterpillar, John Deere, and Valero Energy, and 3M took hundreds of millions in charges because of the health care reforms.

The new bill ended a tax break intended to make it attractive for the companies to keep their retirees on company drug benefit plans instead of ending those plans and pushing them into Medicare which would have cost the government much more money. The Democratic memo cancelling the hearing notes, “These one-time charges were required by applicable accounting rules.

Under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles as determined by the FASB, companies are required to take a noncash charge against current earnings to recognize a tax liability for the estimated future tax effects of a new law.”

It goes on to read, “This noncash charge must reflect the entire present value of the loss of future tax deductions on the subsidy, and it must be taken in the period in which the law is enacted. Moreover, if the level of the impact is deemed “material” under SEC regulations, the company must file the report promptly following the triggering event, in this case the enactment of the law.”

The leader of a far-right party that won 16.7 per cent of votes in the Hungarian elections has pledged to “eradicate Gypsy crime”.

Gabor Vona, the head of Jobbik, also pledged “very distinct and very spectacular politics”.

He said that he would wear the uniform of the Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard), Jobbik’s banned uniformed wing, at the opening of Parliament.

After a series of court cases the Garda has been declared illegal and police have arrested its members at public gatherings.

Viktor Orban, the leader of the centre-right Fidesz — and almost certain to be the country’s next Prime Minister — said in response that Hungary was a country of law and order, and that any breaches of the law would be firmly dealt with.

TWO escaped convicts have dodged a huge manhunt – by disguising themselves as SHEEP.

The pair dressed in full sheepskin fleeces, complete with heads, to lie low among farm flocks.

Robbers Maximiliano Pereyra, 25, and Ariel Diaz, 28, stole the sheep hides from a ranch after breaking out of an Argentinian maximum security prison a week ago.

And they have managed to evade the 300 cops on their trail – despite locals seeing them running through fields at night.

A farmworker at La Almeda said: “They were wearing grey clothes but had full sheepskins, including the sheeps’ heads, over their heads and backs.”

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today authored by France’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) and recently “obtained” by the FSB shockingly quotes French President Nicolas Sarkozy as stating that President Barack Obama is “a dangerous[ly] aliéné”, which translates into his, Obama, being a “mad lunatic”, or in the American vernacular, “insane”.

According to this report, Sarkozy was “appalled” at Obama’s “vision” of what the World should be under his “guidance” and “amazed” at the American Presidents unwillingness to listen to either “reason” or “logic”.

Sarkozy’s meeting where these impressions of Obama were formed took place nearly a fortnight ago at the White House in Washington D.C., and upon his leaving he “scolded” Obama and the US for not listening closely enough to what the rest of the World has to say.

Apparently, as this report details, the animosity between Sarkozy and Obama arose out of how best the West can deal with the growing threat posed by rising Islamic fundamentalism.

Dressed in garish shorts and boxing gloves, orangutans trade punches and spin-kick each other in a boxing ring.

Horrifying footage shows cheering tourists drawn to the barbaric sport at a theme park called Safari World on the outskirts of Bangkok in Thailand.

The same company was banned from doing exactly the same thing just six years ago.

While an orangutan pretends to be knocked out of the boxing ring, others, dressed in bikinis are trained as round card girls and bell ringers.

The apes kickbox each other as a spectacle for tourists in a show lasting more than 30 minutes, before being returned to their dark cages.

It is not known how many orangutans have been captured and trained by Safari World.

Another sexual assault of a female student has occurred on the UCLA campus, the sixth crotch-grabbing incident in the last month, authorities said on Friday.

In this latest attack, which occurred Wed. about 6 p.m. east of Westwood Village near a Ralphs grocery store, the male suspect reached out and tried to grab the female victim’s crotch, said Sgt. Tim Nyx of the UCLA Police.

These crotch-grabbing incidents date back to March 8. All the attacks occurred between 3:30 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. on Westwood Plaza between Charles E. Young Drive South and just south of Le Conte Avenue, according to campus police.

All six women told police the suspect was Hispanic, 40 to 60 years old, 5 ft 3 in to 5 ft 6 in tall, 150 to 180 pounds, with a dark complexion, brown eyes, and a pot belly.

The women also said the suspect wore “various hats,” during the assaults, including a farmer’s hat and a baseball cap.

According to police, the suspect’s pattern is to wait in the path of female victims who are distracted while using their cell phones, and then as the victim approaches to reach out with his hand and grab the victim’s crotch area.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country’s highest military and civilian leaders died when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia on Saturday, killing 96, officials said.

Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors on the Soviet-era Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

The Army chief of staff, Gen. Franciszek Gagor, National Bank President Slawomir Skrzypek and Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Kremer were also on board, the Polish foreign ministry said.

Russia’s Emergency Ministry said there were 96 dead, 88 part of a Polish state delegation.

…

Putin has been put in charge of a commission investigating the crash, the Kremlin said.

Russia threatened to suspend all child adoptions by U.S. families Friday after a 7-year-old boy adopted by a woman fromTennessee was sent alone on a one-way flight back to Moscow with a note saying he was violent and had severe psychological problems.The boy, Artyom Savelyev, was put on a plane by his adopted grandmother, Nancy Hansen of Shelbyville.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the actions by the grandmother “the last straw” in a string of U.S. adoptions gone wrong, including three in which Russian children had died in the U.S.

The cases have prompted outrage in Russia, where foreign adoption failures are reported prominently. Russian main TV networks ran extensive reports on the latest incident in their main evening news shows.

The Russian education ministry immediately suspended the license of the group involved in the adoption—the World Association for Children and Parents, a Renton, Washington-based agency—for the duration of an investigation. In Tennessee, authorities were investigating the adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, 33.

Any possible freeze could affect hundreds of American families. Last year, nearly 1,600 Russian children were adopted in the United States.

“We’re obviously very troubled by it,” U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington when asked about the boy’s case. He told reporters the U.S. and Russia share a responsibility for the child’s safety and Washington will work closely with Moscow to make sure adoptions are legal and appropriately monitored.

Beer deliveries around Copenhagen were interrupted this week after hundreds of Carlsberg workers walked out when the brewer tightened rules on workplace drinking and removed beer coolers from work sites.

The warehouse and production workers in Denmark are protesting against the company’s new alcohol policy, which allows them to drink beer only during lunch hours in the canteen.

Previously, they could help themselves to beer throughout the day, from coolers placed around the site. The only restriction was that they could not be drunk at work.

“It was up to each and everyone to be responsible,” Jens Bekke, a company spokesman said. “

There has been free beer, water and soft drinks everywhere,” he added.

“Yesterday, beers were removed from all refrigerators. The only place you can get a beer in future is in the canteen, at lunch.”

A west Valley Wal-Mart customer was arrested Thursday after accidentally firing a round while playing with his pistol inside the store.

El Mirage Police Department spokesman Robert Peoples said officers were dispatched to the store near Thunderbird and Dysart roads after a call came in that shots had been fired.

While officers were en route, they discovered no one had been injured and that the store manager was standing with the suspect.

Peoples said the suspect was identified as 30-year-old David Walters, of Surprise.

During the officer’s investigation, witnesses said Walters entered the store carrying a semi automatic pistol in a holster.

According to witnesses, Walters continually “messed” with the gun while it was in the holster.

He would reportedly holster and un-holster the gun, which made the other customers and employees nervous.

The trial of two Russian men accused of chopping up a 16-year-old girl and eating her with potatoes has been postponed after a juror fell ill looking at prosecution images.

The case was postponed after the juror had to be excused while examining photographs of student Karina Barduchian after her death.

Maxim Golovatskikh and his friend florist Yury Mozhnov, both 20, are accused of drowning Karina Barduchian, in a bath, then carving up her body and serving her meat with potatoes to a lodger.

Before the case was halted, the lodger, Ekaterina Zinovyeva, told the court in St Petersburg they had a party with their Goth friends on the night of the murder in January, 2009.

Karina, who was in love with Golovatskikh, stayed the night, she said.

A VIDEO game addict clocked up a new high score on arcade classic “Asteroids” – smashing the previous record set 28 years ago.

Locksmith John McAllister, 41, played the simple joystick-controlled shooting game for 58 hours straight to rack up 41,338,740 points, The Sun reported.

The marathon gaming session was even broadcast live over the internet from his pal’s basement in Portland, Oregon.

“The Asteroids high score record is considered a holy grail. It’s a title that a lot of people would want, and I wanted it,” he told KGW-TV.

The previous high score of 41,336,440 was set by 15-year-old Scott Safran in 1982 – the longest-held high score of all time.

McAllister went without sleep during his game, which could not be paused, and racked up enough extra lives to dash to the toilet without getting a game over.

His score needs to be verified by official referees before he is entered into the record books.

A Columbus man who admitted to punching children in the head at local Walmart stores for excitement has been sentenced to five years of probation and fined $150.

Ralph Conone, 68, pleaded guilty to three counts of assault last week in Franklin County Municipal Court, according to court records.

His attorney earlier told a judge that Conone suffered from mental-health issues and was not a threat to the community.

At the time, Judge Mark Hummer prohibited the news media from photographing Conone so police could circulate his photo in an attempt to find other victims.

No other victims came forward. Judge Scott VanDerKarr sentenced Conone on March 30 to 180 days in jail and fined himon each count, but suspended all but the 20 days Conone spent in jail in exchange for probation.

Conone was ordered to stay away from the stores and commit no further acts of violence. Conone must continue to attend counseling.

A British UFO hunter said he is convinced extraterrestrials are behind recent sheep mutilations on the country’s farms — and claims he witnessed such an event.

Phil Hoyle, 53, of Shrewsbury, England — who said he has been investigating British livestock mutilations for nine years — said he and members of his Animal Pathology Field Unit team witnessed two UFOs using some sort of light to zap sheep and releasing smaller versions of themselves closer to the animals, The Sun reported Monday.

“For a short while it looked more like a Star Wars battle,” he said of the purported incident at a Welsh farm near Radnor Forest.

“The technology involved in these attacks is frightening. These lights and spheres are clearly not ours. They are built by technology and intelligence that’s not from here,” Hoyle said.

Four people were shot and dozens of people were arrested Monday in a mile-long stretch of Manhattan near Times Square in mayhem that police said was connected to the start of the city’s annual auto show.

A group of youths who attended the New York International Auto Show at the Jacob A. Javits Center ran amok in midtown Manhattan.

Chief NYPD spokesman Paul J. Browne said additional officers were on patrol because similar problems have happened during past auto shows.

“Young men looking for trouble afterwards,” he said. “There has been incidents over the years. It’s something we watch over and we prepare for it in advance.”

Police made 54 arrests, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct. Police weren’t sure how many of those arrested knew each other, or what sparked the shootings that began shortly after midnight.

From the game room to the movie theatres – the busiest day of the year at New Roc City is always Easter Sunday.

But never before had the crowd at the entertainment complex been so big – or so out of control – as it was Sunday night.

“They kept on yelling, screaming, you got people throwing rocks,” said Derrick Smith.

200 cops in riot gear were called to disperse a rowdy crowd of teenagers – mostly from the Bronx – who swarmed New Roc City.

Police believe groups of young people who had started Easter Sunday in New York City began texting and e-mailing each other – the message, essentially – ‘let’s go to New Rochelle and takeover New Roc City.’

Police say two teenagers who wandered away from their younger siblings at an Easter egg hunt have found a body at a Des Moines park.

Police Sgt. Chris Scott says the teens came across the man’s body in a wooded area at Beaverdale Park on Saturday morning.

He says the teens had accompanied their siblings to the park’s egg hunt but wandered away.

The body was found at least 300 yards from where the egg hunt took place.

He didn’t know how old the teens were.

About 100 children participated in the annual event.

The pastor of a church that organized a massive Easter egg drop is defending the event after some parents reported that it turned into chaos.

On Saturday, 60,000 eggs were dropped from a helicopter at the Rochester Fairgrounds while thousands of people waited below.

Some of the eggs included tickets for valuable prizes, such as flat-screen TVs and Nintendo Wiis.

Some people said the scrum on the ground when the eggs started falling was dangerous.

“I think it was like chaos,” said Sarah Gallo, of Stratham, N.H.

“I saw some people kneeing people, and it was, like, really, really dangerous, I thought.”

Caroline Aya was playing in front of her house in January when a neighbor put a cloth over her mouth and fled with her.

A couple of days later, the 8-year-old’s body was found a short walk away — with her tongue cut out.

Police believe she was offered up as a human sacrifice in a ritual killing, thought to bring wealth or health.

“If it is a sickness you try to treat it, and if they die that is one thing,” said Caroline’s father, Balluonzima Christ.

“But when you slaughter a person like a goat, that is not easy.”

The practice of human sacrifice is on the rise in Uganda, as measured by ritual killings where body parts, often facial features or genitals, are cut off for use in ceremonies.

The number of people killed in ritual murders last year rose to a new high of at least 15 children and 14 adults, up from just three cases in 2007, according to police.

The informal count is much higher — 154 suspects were arrested last year and 50 taken to court over ritual killings.

Authorities say a 21-year-old man has plunged to his death in an apparent suicide jump off the Empire State Building during the evening rush hour.

Police say the man was dead when rescue workers arrived at the 102-story skyscraper shortly before 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Authorities wouldn’t immediately release his name or say from which floor he had jumped.

The Empire State Building is the third-tallest building in the United States. More than 30 people have committed suicide at the building since it opened in 1931.

Before Tuesday, the most recent was believed to have been in 2006, when a man jumped from a vacant office on the 66th floor.

A ‘highly professional’ criminal gang is on the run after digging their way into the vault of a Paris bank and stealing millions of pounds worth of cash and jewellery.

The meticulously planned raid saw four men using pickaxes and even a flame thrower to get into the vault of a Credit Lyonnais branch in the upmarket Avenue de l’Opera, close to the Louvre Museum.

Once inside they tied up a security guard and then spent at least seven hours emptying more than 200 high security private safes, getting away with more than £20million.

So as to destroy evidence, they then started a fire which set off sprinklers which flooded the entire basement of the bank.

Police have estimated the criminals’ haul to be worth ‘at least’ £22million.

The ingenious heist – which is already being described by French media as the ‘Crime of the Century’ – is thought to have been carried out by a notorious gang dubbed ‘The Termites’.

The bodies of 21 babies, believed dumped by hospitals, have washed ashore on a riverbank in eastern China, state media reported Tuesday.

Video footage showed that the bodies – stashed in yellow plastic bags, at least one of which was marked “medical waste” – included some infants several months old. Some wore identification tags with their mothers’ names, birth dates, measurements and weights. The official Xinhua News Agency said there were also fetuses among the bodies.

Residents discovered the remains under a bridge in the city of Jining, Shandong province, over the weekend. Tags on the feet of eight of the babies traced them back to a hospital in Jining, according to the People’s Daily Web site. Three of them had been admitted earlier to the hospital in critical condition, the report said. It did not say when.

Hat tip to Kara!

At the headquarters of Human Rights Watch, more than 30 storeys above the noise and bustle of Manhattan, there is so much high-mindedness hanging in the air you can almost taste it. This is the epicentre of a certain type of socially smart, progressive activism — the kind that persuades Hollywood grandees, power lawyers and liberal financiers to dig deeply into their pockets.

When the story broke that one of the organisation’s most prominent and vocal members of staff might be a collector of Nazi-era military memorabilia it felt like some sort of sexual scandal had erupted in the Victorian church. For a lobbying group accustomed to adulatory coverage in the media, it was a public-relations catastrophe. Human Rights Watch is one of two global superpowers among the world’s myriad humanitarian pressure groups.

It is relatively young — established in its current form in 1988 — but it has grown so quickly in size, wealth and influence that it has all but eclipsed its older, London-based rival, Amnesty International. Unlike Amnesty, HRW, as it is known, gets its money from charitable foundations and wealthy individuals — such as the financier George Soros — rather than a mass membership.

And, also unlike Amnesty, it seeks to make an impact, not through extensive letter-writing campaigns, but by talking to governments and the media, urging openness and candour and backing up its advocacy with research reports. It is an association that is all about influence — an influence that depends on a carefully honed image of objectivity, expertise and high moral tone.

So it was perhaps a little awkward that a key member of staff was found to have such a treasure trove of Nazi regalia.

Heads turned during the filming of singer Erykah Badu’s latest music video, “Window Seat”

The video was shot in and around Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.

In it, Dallas native Badu walks down Elm Street while stripping her clothes off one piece at a time – until she’s fully nude.

Elm Street is the place where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Badu walks between several people on the street, and a few can be seen staring at her as she strolls and strips.

You can watch the video on her site.

It’s slightly NSFW, although parts of her body have been blurred out.

Badu is completely nude as she approaches the spot on Elm where Kennedy was shot (which is marked with an “X” on the pavement).

The sound of a gunshot can be heard and Badu collapses as if she has been shot.

A Republican National Committee (RNC) spokesperson said the committee is looking into a large expenditure at a Los Angeles club known for simulated bondage scenes and nudity.

A Daily Caller report Monday pointed out the expenditure, which was for almost $2,000 at Voyeur West Hollywood.

An RNC spokesperson said the committee is looking into the matter, but said the expenditure was made by a non-committee staffer and added that the report erroneously hinted that RNC Chairman Michael Steele attended the club.

“The chairman was never at the location in question; he had no knowledge of the expenditure, nor does he find the use of committee funds at such a location at all acceptable,” the spokesperson said.

“Good reporting would make that distinction crystal clear. The committee has requested that the monies be returned to the committee and that the story be corrected so that it is accurate.”

French and Swiss police have launched a cross-border manhunt for an armed gang who stormed a casino in Basle and broke open cash desks before vanishing into the night with hundreds of thousands of euros.

The raid, which prosecutors said was a professional operation orchestrated with “brutal” efficiency, was carried out at 4am this morning at the city’s Grand Casino by about 10 masked raiders armed with machine guns and pistols.

After one man burst through the front entrance with a sledgehammer, his accomplices ran inside and ordered guests to the floor while firing into the air.

“The criminals fired a number of shots, but luckily no one was hit,” the Basle public prosecutor said in a statement. Some of the gang tried to break into the safe room but failed, despite firing bullets into the door. Others went to the cash desks and managed to steal “several hundreds of thousands of [Swiss] francs”.

The gang then sped off across the border in two silver Audi cars whose numberplates were registered in the Bas-Rhin area of eastern France.

The Grand Casino, which describes itself as “the Swiss Las Vegas”, is just 200 metres from the French border. Witnesses said the gang members spoke in French. Today, as the authorities in both countries stepped up the manhunt, casino staff said they were left shaken by the heist.

“This is the first time we’ve been robbed. We are all very shocked. You can prepare for it, but when it happens it’s something else,” a manager, Michael Favrod, told Swiss television.

“Thankfully nothing happened to my colleagues or the guests,” he added. While none of the staff or guests were shot, several were kicked or manhandled. One woman, who accidentally blocked the gang’s getaway, was dragged from her car and beaten, said the authorities.

“The perpetrators knew what they were after. They proceeded quickly, professionally and brutally,” said Peter Gill, a spokesman for the Basle prosecutors.

Uma Thurman’s latest film is set to be one of the biggest box office flops ever after just one ticket was sold for the movie on its opening day.

Over its opening weekend at the beginning of March, only around a dozen people went to see Motherhood, a semi-autobiographical account of parenting in New York written and directed by Katherine Dieckmann. The film took just £88 at the British box office on its opening weekend.

On its debut Sunday, takings at the box office were just £9 – the price of a ticket for one person.

Only one British cinema was given permission to launch the film earlier this month, with the film’s producers hoping that exclusivity would generate a buzz and lead to box office success by word of mouth.

Instead, cinema goers stayed away from the Apollo West End in record numbers in a move that will be embarrassing for Thurman, the star of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill who divides her time between London and New York.

Motherhood, which also stars Jodie Foster and Minnie Driver, is thought to have made only £40,000 when it opened in America last year, despite costing around £3.4 million to make.

State police have charged a central Pennsylvania man with public drunkenness after he was seen giving mouth-to-mouth “resuscitation” to a long-dead opossum along a highway.

Trooper Jamie Levier says several witnesses saw 55-year-old Donald Wolfe, of Brookville, near the animal along Route 36 in Oliver Township Thursday about 3 p.m.

The trooper says one person saw Wolfe kneeling before the animal and gesturing as though he were conducting a seance, while another saw the mouth-to-mouth attempt.

In freak accident, hydrogen peroxide used to lighten hair sparks when hair dresser lights a cigarette, causing her car to explode.

A British hairdresser died after her cigarette ignited a leaking bottle of hydrogen peroxide bleach which then blew up in her car as she drove along a quiet country lane, the Bournemouth Echo reported Thursday.

Jennie Mitchell’s grieving father Bob urged hairdressers to show extreme caution when carrying the hydrogen peroxide, a powerful bleach used to lighten hair when mixed with ammonia.

“The hydrogen peroxide had ventilated in the car. She opened the window, which introduced oxygen,” he said.

“Jennie was a smoker and it’s likely that she lit or had a lit a cigarette.”

“Until the accident, nobody knew this could happen. We keep saying, you couldn’t have written this in a script.”

Children were left crying and traumatised after a school role play in which one of their teachers was apparently shot dead in the playground.

The pupils, aged ten to 13, saw their religious education teacher run across a field and fall to the ground following a loud bang. Some were so upset that they were sick afterwards, parents said.

The stunt was part of a science lesson designed to teach children how evidence is collected in criminal investigations. They were not told it was fake until ten minutes after the event.

The ’shooting’ happened on Tuesday. More than 300 pupils were called to the hall and warned there was a gun somewhere in the school before being sent back to their classrooms.

Five minutes later, the fire alarm went and the children queued up in the playground. Only a handful knew it was fake.

Three teachers – one brandishing what looked like a gun – were seen running across the school field before shots were heard. Teacher Richard Kent fell to the ground and played dead.

The children were then ushered back to their classrooms as other teachers pretended to tend to Mr Kent. It was ten minutes before it was revealed the scene was fake.

In the hours after a monkey on the lam fell into a woman’s pool and then swiped some fruit from her backyard tree, fans of the wily primate cheered it for avoiding capture.

“Go little monkey, go! No cages for you,” wrote a guy named Jack on the “Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay” Facebook fan page. (There were more than 16,000 fans of the elusive monkey as of Wednesday morning.)

“I sure hope ‘they’ don’t catch you!” wrote a woman named Kathleen.

“Why can’t ‘they’ just leave you alone?”

Why, indeed? The rhesus macaque monkey has avoided capture for nearly a year.

Authorities don’t know where the animal came from, but some believe it could have gotten separated from a troupe of wild monkeys in an Ocala-area state park, some 118 miles north of St. Petersburg.

Another possibility: the animal could have escaped from an unpermitted owner. The creature has captivated people in Tampa Bay and beyond — possibly because of his ability to outwit the humans trying to catch him.

“It’s something that you can kind of cheer for,” said Amy Ellis, a Pasco County employee who has become a fan of the monkey on Facebook. “Every day there’s so much bad news. He’s kind of like a little hero.”

When Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, was chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, his office kept a log of nearly 40 pages listing the local politicians and business people and others who sought help getting children into the city’s most selective public schools.

According to an article Tuesday in The Chicago Tribune, which first obtained and reported on the confidential log, those who sought such help included 25 aldermen, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office, the State House speaker, the state attorney general, the former White House social secretary and a former United States senator.

A spokesman for the Department of Education said Tuesday that the log was a record of those who asked for help, and that neither Mr. Duncan nor the aide who maintained the list, David Pickens, ever pressured principals to accept a child. Rather, he said, the creation of the list was an effort to reduce pressure on principals.

“Arne Duncan asked David Pickens to respond to all of these requests, some of which came from him, some from lots of other people, as a way to try to manage a process that was putting a lot of pressure on principals,” said Peter Cunningham, who handled communications for Mr. Duncan in Chicago and is now assistant secretary of the Department of Education.

“This was an attempt to buffer principals from all the outside pressure, to get our arms around something that was burdensome to them. It was always up to the principal to make the decision. Arne never ever picked up the phone.”

Yep, I “believe” it too – do you?

A Chinese boy with 31 fingers and toes is set to undergo an operation to remove the extra digits.

The six-year-old boy, whose name has not been released, has 16 toes and 15 fingers.

One of the fingers is incomplete and appears on X-ray photographs as a “fork” sticking out from the right thumb.

Three fingers on each of the boy’s hands are also fused together by skin.

The boy, from Shenyang in China’s north-eastern Liaoning province, beats the current world record held Indian boys Pranamya Menaria and Devendra Harne, who have 12 fingers and 13 toes.

A 62-year-old man was rushed to hospital after he attempted to take his own life the ancient way. The sexagenarian inserted a zucchini into his anus in the attempted suicide at his home in Hong Kong on Friday.

According to Ming Bao, the man’s daughter who returned home at about 10.40pm was shocked to see her father moaning in pain and lying in a pool of blood.

She rushed him to the hospital for bleeding in the anus.

When asked by the medical assistants, the man said he wished to die and that it was an ancient way to take one’s own life.

Scientists have already created mini-cyborgs out of living cells and semiconductor materials, but now biological cells can also contain tiny silicon chips.

Those silicon chips could become future intracellular sensors that monitor microscopic activities, deliver drugs to target cells or even repair cell structures, according to Nanowerk.

Experiments found that living human cells can ingest or receive injections of silicon chips and continue functioning as usual for the most part.

More than 90 percent of chip-containing HeLa cells — the first immortal human cell line derived from a poor, cancer-stricken woman – still survived a week after receiving their silicon loads.R

Other studies have tested nanoparticles inside living cells. But silicon chips allow for much easier integration of electronics and mechanical parts, say scientists at the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona in Spain.

The study published in the aptly-named journal Small opens the doors for possibly putting microprocessors and other silicon-based devices inside cells. That could lead to promising developments for both micro-computing and medicine.

Unexploded Second World War bombs at an Austrian airfield threaten to shut down a May concert by metal rockers AC/DC.

The concert at Wels Airport on May 22nd has already faced another obstacle — complaints by environmentalists that it would disturb colonies of rare birds in the area.

Now, city officials have informed the metal band that the bombs pose a danger to the estimated 80,000 fans who have bought tickets to the sold-out concert.

Hermann Wimmer, the mayor of Wels, told Austrian TV this week that approval for the concert will not go ahead until experts in demining and bomb defusing evaluate the site.

The airport had been the target of heavy Allied bombing during the war.

Clamp on your foil hat and cower under your bed, Alien Abduction Day is here!

March 20 is Alien Abduction Day, when “the skies are carefully watched by those expecting / wishing to be abducted by an alien life form,” states eHow.com.

The strange holiday’s origins are unclear, though it was clearly popularized by the 2008 Alien Abduction Day festival in Toronto.

The festival was an all around sci-fi street party in Toronto, sponsored by a comic book shop and several local businesses.

But references online exist to the even from years earlier — and watch for Twitter to heat up Saturday with the #AlienAbductionDay tag.

It could be India’s version of “Survivor,” or “The Biggest Loser.”

A famous Indian guru used his television show to boast about his power to kill other men using only a mystic ritual.

So the head on the Indian Rationalist Association offered himself up as a sacrificial lamb.

Sanal Edamaruku volunteered himself for the ritual because he wanted to expose the guru as one of many spiritual con men roaming the country.

While millions tuned in to watch the scheduled murder live on TV, the station canceled the program.

The showdown quickly appeared on YouTube. The guru, Pandit Surender Sharma, is seen chanting mantras and massaging Edamaruku’s forehead.

The willing participant is in good spirits and simply laughs it off. After the show, Edamaruku was still alive.

Hat tip to Jonathan!

A group of people were seriously injured when they were attacked by a swarm of bees in north Phoenix.

It happened at about 8 p.m. at a Wal-Mart store in the area of 3rd Avenue and Bell Road. The victims were rushed to the hospital after the attacks.

Two people are in critical condition and a third person who jumped in to help was also hospitalized.

3TV has learned two women were walking down the street when they were attacked by the swarm of bees. Witnesses say there were so many bees that at one point they could not see the women’s faces.

Heather Laroc, who saw the bee attack, tells 3TV, “We hear screaming from outside and there’s two ladies laying in the street and they’re covered with bees from head to toe. You could just not see their skin and screaming ‘Help, help, help’.”

That woman called the police and the fire department.

By the time first responders arrived the two older women were still blanketed with bees.

They had been stung almost 100 times each. Two men who jumped in to try to help them were also stung.

The women and one man were rushed to the hospital.

Firefighters searched for the hive and eventually found it and took it down.

Tony Blair waged an extraordinary two-year battle to keep secret a lucrative deal with a multinational oil giant which has extensive interests in Iraq.

The former Prime Minister tried to keep the public in the dark over his dealings with South Korean oil firm UI Energy Corporation.

Mr Blair – who has made at least £20million since leaving Downing Street in June 2007 – also went to great efforts to keep hidden a £1million deal advising the ruling royal family in Iraq’s neighbour Kuwait.

In an unprecedented move, he persuaded the committee which vets the jobs of former ministers to keep details of both deals from the public for 20 months, claiming it was commercially sensitive.

The deals emerged yesterday when the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments finally lost patience with Mr Blair and decided to ignore his objections and publish the details.

The man who staged a St. Patrick’s Day bank robbery in a leprechaun costume and died during a police shootout also held up a bank three days before Christmas in a Santa suit, police said Thursday.

Investigators in the Nashville suburb of Gallatin said information from the FBI linked David Christopher Cotton, 20, of Brentwood to the December robbery.

FBI Supervisor Special Agent Scott Augenbaum told The Associated Press that investigators found a Santa suit at Cotton’s home, and that the suspect made similar comments during both robberies.

The man police identified as the getaway driver, 20-year-old Western Kentucky University student Jonathan Ryan Skinner, also was killed.

Police said they think Cotton shot himself to death as officers surrounded the two in a field after a car and foot chase.

Patrol car video of the chase released Thursday shows one of the suspects leaning out of the passenger window of the getaway car and firing several shots at police on the street of a subdivision.

At least one round strikes the front of the car, kicking up a shower of metal and glass. Police said the shots disabled the vehicle, and the video shows a string of other police cars giving chase.

Police said the two ditched their vehicle and ran into a field near a subdivision where they died.

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.