‘At the western entrance to the Iraqi city of Fallujah Tuesday, Muamar Anad handed his residence badge to the U.S. Marines guarding the city. They checked to be sure that he was a city resident, and when they were done, Anad said, a Marine slipped a coin out of his pocket and put it in his hand.
Out of fear, he accepted it, Anad said. When he was inside the city, the college student said, he looked at one side of the coin. “Where will you spend eternity?” it asked.
He flipped it over, and on the other side it read, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16.”
“They are trying to convert us to Christianity,” said Anad, a Sunni Muslim like most residents of this city in Anbar province. At home, he told his story, and his relatives echoed their disapproval: They’d been given the coins, too, he said.’
‘ A homeless woman lived in the closet of a Japanese man for one year before she was found and arrested.
Apparently the fact that someone was living in his home wasn’t enough to tip him off. It took the fact that food was missing from his house to give him a hint that something was wrong. Since he lived alone, and didn’t have any rats, he installed security cameras in his rooms and set them up to transmit to his mobile phone.
Shortly after, he saw something in those images, and thinking that there was a burglar in the house, he called the police. When the police arrived, they found the house locked, but when they entered the house they found something they didn’t expect.’
‘Werner Forßmann, (August 29, 1904 – June 1, 1979) was a physician from Germany. He is credited with the first catheterization of a human heart. In 1929, while working in Eberswalde, he made an incision into his arm and fed a urinary catheter into the right atrium of his own heart. He then walked down a flight of stairs to the radiology department, where he had an X-ray taken showing the catheter in his heart. Although he was later fired from another hospital for this, he received his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956 for his pioneering feat into cardiological studies.’
‘Doctors at Brook Army Medical Center are testing a regeneration powder that could help injured soldiers regrow fingers and other body parts lost in battle.
The powder, nicknamed “Pixie Dust” after the fairy dust that enabled children to fly in Disney’s Peter Pan, is made from tissue extracted from pigs. It attracts stem cells and convinces them to grow into the tissue that used to be there. This was reported first on CNN.
Doctors at BAMC used the powder last week on a wounded soldier to encourage the regeneration of a finger in lost in Iraq.
“If it is next to the skin, it will start making skin. If it’s next to a tendon, it will start making a tendon, and so that’s the hope, at least in this particular project, that we can grow a finger,” Dr. Steven Wolf told CNN.
Doctors said they are watching patients for unexpected side effects, such as cancer.’
‘A call for a woman armed with a taser at a high school Wednesday morning turned out to be a man in a dress. [..]
“As we were walking up to the classroom, I saw some guy in a dress, in pink rubber boots. It looked pretty ridiculous, I’m not going to lie,” said senior Ian Metz. He says he wasn’t scared by the stranger until he thought he saw a gun in the man’s hand.
It was actually a taser, but it was enough to send Metz running into class to tell his teacher.
“It’s going to sound completely out of nowhere, but there’s a man out there with a gun and pink boots,” Metz told his teacher. [..]
“He has posted a lot of things on the internet that certainly need to be cleared up,” said Cmdr. Tor Bjornstad, Olympia Police. [..]
In the Capital High School Tragedy posting, there is a thread that reads “In about an hour or so, teens from Capital High School will be parking out from my house, and littering as usual. If i (sic) SHOOT ONE, perhaps the FIRST ONE TO PARK OUTSIDE, Can i (sic) PLEASE HAVE SOMEONE TO TALK TO ABOUT MY GENDER ISSUES?”‘
‘A roadside toilet stop ended in pain, embarrassment and almost death for a tourist when a highly venomous snake bit the end of his penis.
The deadly brown snake slithered between his legs and lunged at his manhood as he crouched on a roadside near Laura, 300km northwest of Cairns, about a month ago.
Details of the incident only came to light yesterday after they were confirmed by a paramedic.
“It certainly had a swipe at him,” an ambulance spokesman said yesterday.
“But it didn’t envenomate him.
“As it came through it must have got a bit of a shock.”‘
Australia should make this into an advertising slogan to attract tourists. ‘Come to Australia. Our wildlife will bite you on the cock.’ Can’t fail. 🙂
‘A bullied office worker has been awarded £5,000 after her boss raised his right buttock from his chair and broke wind in her direction.
Humiliated mother-of-three Theresa Bailey, 43, was the only woman on a sales team where “laddish” behaviour made her life a misery, and continued despite complains to senior managers.
After she objected to sexist banter a beach ball was thrown at her head – and when she had problems working her computer was ordered to wear a badge saying “I’m simple”.
Now an employment tribunal has ruled that Mrs Bailey was sexually discriminated against while working for direct marketing firm Selectabase, in Deal, Kent, and awarded her £5,146.’
‘A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they’re allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings.
Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones.
“I get chest pain and it doesn’t go away right away,” he said.
Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.’
‘Shit Box is a lightweight portable cardboard toilet, made specifically for outdoor use. The box pops up from a convenient 12 inch flat pack to a rigid, reusable, comfortable toilet. Each box comes with ten degradable poo bags.’
‘A donkey has been sent to prison in southern Mexico for a brutal case of ass-ault and battery.
The animal was locked up at a local jail that normally holds people for public drunkenness and other disturbances after it bit and kicked two men near a ranch in the state of Chiapas.
The two victims accuse it of biting one of them in the chest and then kicking the other as he came to the rescue, fracturing his ankle.
Police said it took half a dozen men to control the enraged beast.’
‘A 16-year-old Pasco High School student was arrested Tuesday and charged with aggravated domestic violence after allegedly spiking her mother’s food.
The deputies said the girl’s mother was allergic to many types of food. Her allergies are actually so severe that she carries around an EpiPen, a spring-loaded injector of epinephrine or adrenaline, which prevents her from entering anaphylactic shock.
On May 7, when deputies said the teen added seasoning salt to her mother’s food, the 39-year-old woman had a severe allergic reaction.
Apparently, the woman’s reaction was so serious that she couldn’t inject herself with the EpiPen, as usual, and her teenage daughter had to do it for her.’
This is bizarre, but really cool. It gets somewhat more interesting as it progresses. 🙂
Peace, love, ecstasy..
(8.2meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘A surge in US airstrikes within densely populated areas of Iraq has led to a dramatic rise in civilian casualties.
According to the Washington Post, ever since an attempted crackdown on Shi’ite militias by the Iraqi government in March, which led to increased attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad that killed some Americans, the US military has been firing missiles almost every day into the crowded Shi’ite slum of Sadr City.
Residents describe the attacks as indiscriminate and say they have led to many civilian deaths. However, the US Army states that they choose their targets carefully and often refrain from firing for fear of civilian casualties. [..]
CNN reports further on Iraqi victims of US gunfire, noting that “anger against the Americans is only increasing.”‘
‘A woman who felt harassed when road workers whistled at her stripped naked in response, police said.
Workmen in the small northern farming town of Kerikeri, New Zealand, were repairing the main street when the young woman, an Israeli tourist, took offence at their attention.
She calmly stripped bare to use an ATM – bringing an abrupt halt to both the whistles and the road work – then put her clothes back on and walked away.
Sgt. Peter Masters said the woman told police she didn’t take kindly to the men’s wolf-whistles.
“She said she had thought ‘… I’ll show them what I’ve got,’ ” as the men whistled at her, he said. [..]
“She was taken back to the police station and spoken to and told that was inappropriate (behaviour) in New Zealand,” he added.’
‘Climate models predicted it wouldn’t happen until the end of the century.
So Seattle researchers were stunned to discover that vast swaths of acidified sea water are already showing up along the Pacific Coast as carbon dioxide from power plants, cars and factories mixes into the ocean.
In surveys from Vancouver Island to the tip of Baja California, the scientists found the first evidence that large amounts of corrosive water are reaching the continental shelf — the shallow sea margin where most marine creatures live. In some places, including Northern California, the acidified water was as little as four miles from shore.
“What we found … was truly astonishing,” said oceanographer Richard Feely, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “This means ocean acidification may be seriously impacting marine life on the continental shelf right now.”‘
‘At 2:25 P.M., I happened to be down on the street, smoking a cigarette with a co-worker. Out of the blue, I hear “Splat,” followed by piercing, vivid screams of fear and nauseous anxiety.
Suddenly, I saw two girls running down the side of the street with blood and muscle tissue covering their faces. And I just walked around, asking myself what the hell was going on.
In the confusion, my buddy told me to turn around. I did, and there it was: [..]’
‘Astronomers have found some matter that had been missing in deep space and say it is strung along web-like filaments that form the backbone of the universe.
The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday.
Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter — the protons and neutrons that make up atoms — but there also is an even larger amount of invisible “dark” matter.
Now about half of the missing baryonic matter has turned up, seen by the orbiting Hubble space telescope and NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE.’
‘Pensioner Malcolm Butterworth completed 18,235 pieces of one of the world’s biggest jigsaws — then found the remaining five were missing.
But thanks to German efficiency, he’s now managed to fill the gaps in the whopping jigsaw — nearly 10ft wide — after nearly a year completing it.
Retired businessman Malcolm, 70, of Llandudno, was given the Ravensburger “4 Historic World Maps” as a Christmas present.
Now he’s had it stuck to hardboard and hopes to sell it in aid of the town’s St David’s Hospice.’
‘”His heart filled virtually his whole chest,” recalls Dr. Diane Meier describing her very first patient, an 89-year-old suffering from end-stage congestive heart failure.
It was the first day of Meier’s internship at a hospital in Portland Oregon, and after being assigned 23 patients, she was suddenly told that one of her patients, who had been in the Intensive Care Unit for months, was “coding.” She raced to the ICU where the resident told her to put in a “central line.”
“I didn’t know how,” Meier admits. “I felt overwhelmed and inadequate. Then, the patient died …
“Everyone just walked out of the room,” she remembers. I stood there. I still sometimes flash back on that scene: the patient, naked, lying on the table, strips of paper everywhere, the room empty. This was my patient. I felt I was supposed to do something — but I didn’t know what.”‘
‘Blake Dwyer remembers pain:
And shouting.
And fear.
“I thought a swarm of wasps was after me,” the 17-year-old Guyer High School athlete said. “I was trying to fight them off.”
He doesn’t remember the epileptic seizure he suffered July 18, 2007, when he was 16.
He doesn’t remember fighting to keep from being tied to a stretcher or hitting a paramedic.
His brother, Travis Baker, 17, remembers all of it. He recalls screaming at Corinth police to stop shocking Blake with a Taser. His mother, Deana, remembers hearing Travis crying on the telephone.
“He was saying, ‘Blake is having a seizure, and they’re hurting him,'” she said.’
‘The remains of a woman have been found sitting in front of her TV – 42 years after she was reported missing.
Hedviga Golik, who was born in 1924, had apparently made herself a cup of tea before sitting in her favourite armchair in front of her black and white television.
Croatian police said she was last seen by neighbours in 1966, when she would have been 42 years old.
Her neighbours thought she had moved out of her flat in the capital, Zagreb.
But she was found by police and bailiffs who had broken in to help the authorities establish who owned the flat.
A police spokesman said: “So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in.’
‘Police in Russia are investigating after pupils stripped off their clothes, climbed walls or lay on the floor laughing after their school dinners were spiked with drugs.
The teenaged students were given ecstasy in their soup and drinks at their school in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in eastern Russia.
Doctors who were called in said the students showed signs of intoxication and prosecutors later found traces of ecstasy.’
‘A man who allegedly photographed more than 3,000 women’s bottoms as they toured Venice has been arrested.
The man was stopped after police became suspicious of a large bag he was carrying as he followed women through St Mark’s Square. [..]
Police said he was filming through a small hole in the side of the bag.
The officers had become suspicious when they realised he was only following women with short skirts. When they stopped or bent down to pick something up, he was clearly trying to angle the bag behind them.
When the voyeur was finally caught police recovered several DVDs which held more than 3,000 images of women’s bottoms.’
‘My best friend and I were in the diner talking. As usual, it was very late and we were eating French Fries with gravy. Like normal girls our age, we spend a lot of time in the diner while in college, and most of the time we spent talking about boys, music or trivial things, that seemed very important at the time.
We never got serious about anything in particular and spend most of our time laughing.
As I went to take some of my vitamins with a snack as I usually did, she watched me this time with a kind of start, instead of continuing the conversation. She then asked me out of the blue what it felt like to have MS and be sick.’
It’s not a bad theory. Generally applicable to all sorts of things.
‘William Shatner desperately tried to avoid romancing obsessed STAR TREK fans – because they wanted to enact their sci-fi fantasies with the actor.
The 77-year-old, who shot to fame as Captain Kirk in the original 1960s TV show, insists he couldn’t enjoy flings with the series’ most devoted followers because he was so turned off by their bizarre bedroom behaviour.
In his new autobiography, Up Till Now, Shatner explains how women would pretend they were being “beamed up” by the Starship Enterprise commander, shrieking: “So, this is what it’s like to be in bed with Captain Kirk!”
He writes: “You can’t imagine how much of a downer that is in every sense of the word.”‘
‘Welcome to LHCountdown.com, this site is primarily a countdown site to the activation of the Large Hadron Collider but is also a hub collecting all articles relating to and about the LHC.’
.. It’s a bit late in the game to find a counter now. There’s only 14 hours to go.
Still, that’s 14 hours of waiting for the LHC to destroy us all with a blackhole. So I can pretend it’s a doomsday clock. 🙂
‘I do not like koalas. They are nasty, cross, stupid creatures without a friendly bone in their bodies. Their social habits are appalling – the males are always beating their fellows up and stealing their females. They have disgusting defensive mechanisms. Lice infest their fur. They snore. Their resemblance to cuddly toys is a base deceit. There is nothing to commend them.
On top of all that, a koala once tried to do me a very nasty mischief.’
‘An Omaha man saved a life, his own life by getting the courage to turn a knife on himself and perform a tracheotomy.
Steve Wilder has faith in God and after a near death experience last week he has a lot of faith in himself. “I was scared to death. I was thinking about dying.”
Just after midnight, Wilder found himself in a dead sleep. Dead because he woke up and couldn’t breathe, his air passage swollen shut
“It just blocked all the way and I just got up and I panicked!” The 55-year-old Wilder, who didn’t think he had time to call and wait for help, faced an unimaginable choice. Either lie there and suffocate to death or take matters into his own hands with a steak knife. [..]’
