`For the second day in a row, officials at W. Tresper Clarke High School prevented a 14-year-old deaf student from bringing his assistance dog to class.
“I feel like they aren’t being fair,” ninth-grader John Cave of Westbury said Thursday of East Meadow School District officials, who don’t believe he needs the dog to attend class. “They act like they’re against me because of my dog.”
John’s parents, Nancy and John Sr., have battled district officials for more than a year over the right of their son to bring a service dog to school.
The Caves believe John and Simba must bond around the clock so that the dog can work most effectively as an assistance dog, trained to alert a deaf child to potential danger, such as fire or smoke alarms and cars.’
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen! Patrick Stefan you should be embarrassed for what you just did. That does not belong in the National Hockey League!’
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‘Don’t call Channel 7 mate, they’ll go fucken crazy.’
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`Authorities in Danville, Pa., have decided to drop a disorderly conduct charge against a 12-year-old special education student who they accused of deliberately wetting her pants at school.
A school superintendent now says that it was a mistake to bring police into a case of school discipline.’
Followup to Young Girl Facing Charges After Wetting Pants
`Sacked former New South Wales Aboriginal affairs minister Milton Orkopoulos allegedly invited two high school captains to smoke cannabis with him in his office at state parliament.
Tim Carter, an electrician’s apprentice from Mr Orkopoulos’s then electorate of Swansea, said he was attending a meeting of school captains from across NSW in 2005 when the minister approached him and a female student.
“He took us away pretty much and said: ‘Do you want a joint?’. He said: ‘Do you really want to be at this meeting? You can come up to my office and get room service,” Mr Carter said yesterday.
Mr Orkopoulos then led the two students to his office and rolled a joint, which the minister and Mr Carter smoked. The three then ordered hot chocolate from the Parliament House room service, before Mr Orkopoulos left the students watching television and returned to work.’
‘Not because of this move.. or this one.. but this one..’
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`[..] here’s one on the Arizona fire chief who was arrested after being found in a compromising position with a neighbor’s lamb. Leroy Johnson, 52, pleaded guilty late last year to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and was sentenced to 18 months probation by a Maricopa County judge. As part of a plea agreement (a copy of which you’ll find below), Johnson was barred from owning any animal during his probationary term, though he was “allowed to possess his dog ‘Major’ and two turtles presently at Defendant’s residence.”‘
Followup to Deputy fire chief faces indecency charge
This guy has built a fully automatic Lego factory that builds little Lego things.
Some people have too much time on their hands, but it’s cool none the less. 🙂
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‘These guys create a seal on a large garbage can and fill it with dry ice and water. Pretty decent explosion.’
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`Three penguins were stabbed and bashed before being killed with a single blow at a Melbourne beach colony.
The remains of two male and one female bird were discovered at the St Kilda breakwater Little Penguin colony just before Christmas.
One of the male penguins also had its left flipper slashed with a knife and one was hit so hard its back was broken.’
‘A calf with two faces, born last week at a farm in the US state of Virginia, has been drawing a crowd.
The calf breathes out of two noses and has two tongues, which move independently, according to farmer Kirk Heldreth.
There appears to be a single socket containing two eyes. There are two lower jaws, but only one mouth.
“It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Heldreth said.’
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`Canada’s wind power business could face a tough year in 2007, with increasing doubts about this green energy source promising to buffet the industry. [..]
There are two main controversies that have popped up to trouble the wind power business: local opposition to turbines from people who live nearby, and concerns over the reliability and efficiency of the electricity produced by wind farms. Increasingly, the two issues are being linked.’
‘A 130 pound guy unsuspectingly gets speared from behind by a 230 pound guy at full speed. Check out that whiplash, probably gonna be sore tomorrow. May even need a neck brace.’
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`Tampa police said a stun gun was used to subdue a 69-year-old man who tried to hit two officers with a metal cane.
Authorities said Nathaniel Youman swung the silver cane at another person before two officers came to his home Wednesday.
Reports say Youman was warned to drop the cane, but he refused. The officer asked again and warned Youman that he would be hit with a stun gun if he didn’t comply.
Police said Youman refused and tried to swing the cane at both officers. He was then hit by a stun gun and arrested.
Youman is charged with felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.’
‘A man doused himself in fuel and set himself alight Thursday outside Chile’s presidential palace to protest housing debt. He survived and was arrested. Television pictures showed the man in flames before he jumped into an ornamental pond in front of the La Moneda palace in the heart of the capital of Santiago. He was hospitalised with burns over 11 per cent of his body, local media reported.’
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`A group of researchers claim that they are patenting a possible cure for cancer involving nothing more than sugar and short-chain fatty acid combination.
The Johns Hopkins researchers cautioned that their double-punch molecule, described in the December issue of the journal Chemistry & Biology, has not yet been tested on animals or humans. [..]
The researchers focused on a sugar called N-acetyl-D-mannosamine, or ManNAc, for short, and created a hybrid molecule by linking ManNAc with butyrate.
The hybrid easily penetrates a cell’s surface, then is split apart by enzymes inside the cell.’
‘This is an amazing video of a group of firefighters attempting to put out a building fire when an incredible backdraft occurs pushing them all down. Thankfully nobody was seriously injured in this accident.’
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`President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant.
Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.
A White House spokeswoman disputed claims that the move gives Bush any new powers, saying the Constitution allows such searches.’
`Could there be forbidden sequences in the genome – ones so harmful that they are not compatible with life? One group of researchers thinks so. Unlike most genome sequencing projects which set out to search for genes that are conserved within and between species, their goal is to identify “primes”: DNA sequences and chains of amino acids so dangerous to life that they do not exist.
“It’s like looking for a needle that’s not actually in the haystack,” says Greg Hampikian, professor of genetics at Boise State University in Idaho, who is leading the project. [..]’
‘A Brazilian court has ordered YouTube to be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site, a judicial clerk said today.
Brazilian model, TV host and ex-fiancee of football great Ronaldo, Daniella Cicarelli, sued YouTube after a video of her apparently having sex in shallow water on a beach with her boyfriend was posted to the site.
For days it was the most viewed video in Brazil.’
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`On New Year’s Eve, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq passed 3,000. By Tuesday, the death toll had reached 3,004 — 31 more than died in the Sep. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
But the number of injured has far outstripped the dead, with the Veterans Administration reporting that more than 150,000 veterans of the Iraq war are receiving disability benefits.
Advances in military technology are keeping the death rate much lower than during the Vietnam War and World War Two, Dr. Col. Vito Imbascini, an urologist and state surgeon with the California Army National Guard, told IPS, but soldiers who survive attacks are often severely disabled for life.’
`With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina — and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.
Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places — and trying to expand their terrain. The “company police agencies,” as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere — including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach — private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen’s arrests.’
I should learn to play the oboe with my nutsack. Ha. 🙂
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`”Jackass Number Two,” the wildly raunchy movie featuring stupid-human tricks, opens with a don’t-try-this-at-home disclaimer.
Tragically, 11-year-old Wallison Costa didn’t heed the warning.
The Philadelphia boy was hospitalized in critical condition day after he leapt from a second-story window and fell 10 feet, landing on his head.
The boy got the idea after watching the 2006 movie in which “Jackass” prankster Bam Margera hurls himself through a window to avoid being gored by a horde of angry bulls, police and friends said.’
‘Three children have hanged themselves after seeing footage of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s execution on television.
10-year-old Sergio Pelico, who hanged himself in Texas, had seen the video of Saddam’s execution and had asked about it before his death, police said today.
“We’re theorising he tried to experiment or mimic the behaviour and it got out of control,” said police captain Thomas Claunch.
Police said the boy apparently went to his room, attached a piece of clothing to a bunk bed and tied it around his neck.’
Followup to Full Saddam Execution Video.
‘During a New Years Eve concert this weekend some dude jumped on stage with the Rolling Stones and Keith Richards nails him with his guitar.’
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