‘The pilot of a Qantas Boeing 767 from Sydney carrying 185 passengers to Darwin was targeted by a powerful laser beam, prompting an investigation by federal police and aviation authorities.
The incident, just before midnight on August 3, resulted in the pilot having to fly the next day’s return leg from Darwin to Sydney as a passenger.
A Qantas spokesman, Lloyd Quartermain, said last night that the pilot, who has not been named, had been referred to Qantas’s doctor for assessment. Mr Quartermain declined to comment on whether the pilot was injured. He said the decision to replace him as pilot for the return flight was “a precautionary measure”.’
‘President Bush is worried about a new threat to America and is asking congress to approve a $50 billion defense supplemental. They are after your children!’
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‘A 60-year-old Stuart man was arrested and charged with domestic battery after he allegedly urinated on his sleeping girlfriend and her son early Saturday morning.
Wilfred Hart, of the 2100 block of Northwest 20th Avenue, allegedly woke the woman and her 13-year-old son at about 5:45 a.m., called her “dirty trailer trash,” and then forced her out of bed and into the shower because she smelled bad, according to a Martin County Sheriff’s Office report.’
‘A 59-year-old German woman has had most of a pencil removed from inside her head after suffering nearly her whole life with the headaches and nosebleeds it caused, Bild newspaper reported on Monday.
Margret Wegner fell over carrying the pencil in her hand when she was four.
“The pencil went right through my skin — and disappeared into my head,’ Wegner told the newspaper.’
‘Police chiefs in the Thai capital, Bangkok, have come up with a new way of punishing officers who break the rules – an eye-catching Hello Kitty armband.
The armband is large, bright pink and has a Hello Kitty motif with two hearts embroidered on it.
From today, officers who are late, park in the wrong place or commit other minor transgressions will have to wear it for several days.
The armband is designed to shame the wearer, police officials said.’
‘A giant, smiling Lego man was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort on Tuesday.
Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-metre (8-foot) tall model with a yellow head and blue torso.
“We saw something bobbing about in the sea and we decided to take it out of the water,” said a stall worker. “It was a life-sized Lego toy.”
A woman nearby added: “I saw the Lego toy floating towards the beach from the direction of England.”
The toy was later placed in front of the drinks stall.’
‘Jim Cramer from CNBCs Mad Money has a total meltdown last week after the stock market took a slide. This guy is reportedly worth $100 million, if I had that much money I would not be freaking out at things like this.’
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‘Adolf Hitler kept a vast record collection of ‘forbidden’ music by Jewish composers, it was revealed yesterday.
Recordings by Mendelssohn and Offenbach were hidden in sealed boxes – but scratchmarks suggest they were among his favourites.
Russian composers were also banned under the Third Reich. But in private Hitler repeatedly played Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky and hundreds more works he publiclly labelled “sub-human music”.’
‘In the early 1990s, a Russian drilling rig encountered something peculiar two miles beneath the coldest and most desolate place on Earth. For decades, the workers at Vostok Research Station in Antarctica had been extracting core samples from deep scientific boreholes, and analyzing the lasagna-like layers of ice to study Earth’s bygone climate. But after tunneling through 414,000 layers or so– about two miles into the icecap– the layers abruptly ended. The ice below that depth was relatively clear and featureless, a deviation the scientists were at a loss to explain. In search of answers, the men drilled on.
Unbeknownst to the Russians, their drill had mingled with the uppermost reaches of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world; a pristine pocket of liquid whose ecosystem was separated from the rest of the Earth millions of years ago. As for what sort of organisms might lurk in that exotic environment today, no one can really be certain.’
‘At the time of the Crusades, Europe was divided into states whose rulers were involved in petty territorial disputes. In Jerusalem (the most popular site for pilgrimages in Medieval Europe) at the time, the Seljukian Turks were gaining power and Europe saw it as a threat to the safety of the Pilgrims and to Christendom. In 1070 Jerusalem was taken, and in 1071 Diogenes, the Greek emperor, was defeated and made captive at Mantzikert. Asia Minor and all of Syria became the prey of the Turks. Antioch succumbed in 1084, and by 1092 not one of the great metropolitan sees of Asia remained in the possession of the Christians.’
‘More than 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols distributed to Iraqi forces by the US are missing, feared fallen into the hands of insurgents, a congressional watchdog warned today.
The highest previous estimate of missing weapons was 14,000, but a new report from the government accountability office (GAO) said US military officials did not know what had happened to 30% of the weapons the US had given to Iraqi forces since 2004.
“They really have no idea where they are,” Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Centre for Defence Information, told the Washington Post, which reported the GAO’s findings. “It likely means that the United States is unintentionally providing weapons to bad actors.”‘
‘The Army Corps of Engineers, which accidentally dumped sand filled with old military ordnance on Surf City’s beach, now wants the town to help pay to remove it.
Local officials are angered by the suggestion that they should help foot the bill for a federal goof that already has cost the town an unknown amount of tourism business.
“If they’re talking about getting any money out of Surf City to pay for their mistakes, they can forget about it,” Mayor Leonard T. Connors told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Army Corps spokesman Khaalid Walls said local governments are routinely asked to help pay for projects.
“That’s protocol. All our projects are cost-shared,” Walls said.
The town had to close its beach in March after World War I-era ordnance, including fuses and other military hardware, started surfacing in sand pumped ashore during a $71 million beach replenishment project.’
A pastor says “tits” by accident during a sermon. This was followed up by a candid camera prank where the pastor is told he’s in all sorts of trouble.
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‘Today I come rushing home because it’s the end of the semester and I have finals coming up and I need to write two papers tonight so that I can go camping this holiday weekend with peace of mind so I get home and GIL says, hey honey, you’re just in time! I’m cooking french fries!
Oh that’s good, I say, because I haven’t eaten yet and I have all this work to do. Let me just put my bike away. I walk into the kitchen and notice my computer’s not on the kitchen table. Which. Means. It’s…. oh, SHIT!!!!
I open the over door. No fries. Just one miserable looking laptop. (STOP: EXPLANATION OF WHY I KEEP MY LAPTOP IN THE OVEN: I keep it there because I live in a high crime area in a house with windows that don’t even lock. I figure the oven’s actually a very safe place. Who would think to look there for valuables? and if the house burns down the computer’d be okay. The system worked just fine when I was living alone.)’
‘Two dairy farms have dumped milk after the discovery of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope in 25 nearby drinking water wells.
Officials from Sorensen’s Dairy and Oasis Dairy said they will stop selling milk until it is tested for the isotope, polonium-210, by the Food and Drug Administration. Officials said there’s no known health risk at this time.
A study released Friday by the U.S. Geological Survey found the radioactive isotope in 24 private wells and one public well around Fallon, about 60 miles east of Reno. Polonium-210 is known to cause cancer in humans.’
‘Even by astronomical standards, Roger Angel thinks big.
Angel, a leading astronomer at the University of Arizona, is proposing an enormous liquid-mirror telescope on the moon that could be hundreds of times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Using a rotating dish of reflective liquid as its primary mirror, Angel’s telescope would the largest ever built, and would permit astronomers to study the oldest and most distant objects in the universe, including the very first stars.
“It’s an idea that’s been around, and we decided to flesh it out,” Angel says. [..]
Angel dreams of a 100-meter mirror, which would be larger than two side-by-side football fields and would collect 1,736 times more light than the Hubble.’
‘We began receiving these photographs, without any explanatory text, in July 2007. Presumably they document the case of a young boy who somehow managed to impale his nose with a fork, with the first picture (possibly taken in an emergency room or doctor’s office) showing him before medical treatment, and the second showing him some time later after the fork had been removed and his injury had begun to heal. However, we do not yet have any specific information about the origins of these images.’
He looks like he might be secret service or something. In any case, they really don’t want that woman to go past those containers. 🙂
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‘A man accused of selling a teenage girl for sex in return for drums of diesel denied yesterday that it ever happened.
David John Chaney, 58, of Cwmbran, is accused of procuring the girl to become a prostitute and living off the profits of prostitution.
He has denied the charges and nine other counts at Cardiff Crown Court. The other counts include five charges of indecent assault, one of rape, and three of supplying drugs.
Chaney, of The Crescent, told the court he visited a burger van in a lay-by with the girl on a number of occasions and that a lorry driver who stopped there had offered him diesel.
Asked by his barrister, Hilary Roberts, if he had offered the girl to the driver to buy or have sex with, on that or any other occasion, Chaney replied “no”.’
‘Draw your way to the finish, get through level after level of mazes with this addicting paint ‘ball’ game.’
‘The mystery owner of a fingertip found by a woman in Greater Manchester has come forward.
The 57-year-old man, from Wigan, was delivering charity bags to a house in Farnworth, Bolton, when it is thought that a dog bit him.
His fingertip was found by a woman on Balmoral Road on Friday evening, prompting a police appeal.
The man, who received treatment at Hope Hospital in Salford, contacted officers after hearing the appeal.’
‘An Upper Dublin man with what a Montgomery County prosecutor labeled a “disturbing” sexual fetish involving dirty diapers will remain under the close eye of county probation officials for the next three years.
Judge William J. Furber this week sentenced C. D. A., of the 400 block of Hutchins Drive, to a three-year probationary sentence for prowling about a home in the 400 block of West 10th Avenue in Conshohocken and removing and/or rooting around in trash bags containing a child’s dirty diapers.
A condition of the probation will require that the probation department’s intensive supervision unit closely monitor A.’s activities.
Another condition of the sentence requires A. to continue to receive outpatient therapy. A third condition bars A. from having any unsupervised contact with children under the age of 13 other than his niece.’
‘A man who became the subject of a book called “The Radioactive Boy Scout” after trying to build a nuclear reactor in a shed as a teenager has been charged with stealing 16 smoke detectors. Police say it was a possible effort to experiment with radioactive materials.
David Hahn, 31, was being held Friday on a $5,000 bond in the Macomb County Jail after he was arraigned Thursday on felony larceny charges. Clinton Township police Capt. Richard Maierle said Hahn denied the charges. [..]
Investigators say Hahn was arrested Wednesday after a maintenance worker saw him stealing a detector from a ceiling in an apartment complex where he lived. They later found the other detectors in his apartment in the Detroit suburb of Clinton Township.
Police say that Hahn’s face was covered with open sores, possibly from constant exposure to radioactive materials.’
Followup to The Radioactive Boy Scout.
‘China has banned the use of slogans like “Raise fewer babies but more piggies” to promote family planning, worried crude language may hamper its message in the world’s most populous country, state media said on Sunday.
The slogans are painted on walls and houses across China, but many are too coarse or even mis-written, the official Xinhua news agency cited a notice from the National Population and Family Planning Commission as saying.
Others judged offensive include “Houses toppled, cows confiscated, if abortion demand rejected” and “One more baby means one more tomb”, it said.’
‘Scientists have explained mathematically why the famous silly walks of Monty Python’s John Cleese have never caught on in the long history of homo sapiens.
The giant, leg-twirling strides of silly walks may enable an individual to leap around swiftly but are simply too expensive in metabolic energy compared with conventional locomotion, according to a paper published by Britain’s Royal Society. [..]
“Inverted pendulum walking is energetically optimal at low speeds and step lengths, and impulsive running is energetically optimal at higher speeds,” they say.
Silly walks gathered cult status in the British television comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, when the gangling Cleese, dressed in a pin-stripe suit and bowler hat, cavorted around as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Silly Walks. ‘
‘A library patron suspected of selling hundreds of books, tapes and DVDs he had borrowed has cost Denver-area libraries tens of thousands of dollars, officials said.
Thomas Pilaar, 33, was suspected of using different names to obtain seven library cards from the Denver Public Library, then checking out 300 items per card and selling at least some of the items, KCNC-TV in Denver reported.
“It appears his intent was to sell 2,100 (items) from the Denver Library collection,” Denver Public Library spokeswoman M. Celeste Jackson told the station. She estimated the losses at about $35,000.’
‘A special council ‘dog fouling squad’ described today how an undercover surveillance operation caught a serial offender – but it wasn’t a dog. It was a man.
The CCTV operation was set up after a member of the public made a complaint to the environmental health service at Kirklees Council, West Yorkshire.
She was suspicious that the offending individual, who regularly left a mess in the same place in Cleckheaton, was not a dog.
Councillor Martyn Bolt, cabinet member for the environment, said: ‘An investigation confirmed the suspicions and concluded that the pile of excrement was not from a dog, but was of the human variety. [..]”
‘The enormous difference between male and female sexual behaviour may be explained, in animals at least, by a tiny organ in the nose rather than by any gender difference in brain circuitry. [..]
In a study published by the British journal Nature, the team engineered female lab mice so that the rodents lacked a gene called TRPC2, effectively short-circuiting the so-called vomeronasal organ. [..]
The findings are important, because they amount to a massive blow to those who for decades have looked for underlying differences in brain structure to explain why sexual behaviour between males and females is so dissimilar.
The answer appears to be this: in the mice at least, there is no difference. The hard-wiring of the brains is the same.
“In the big picture, it suggests that the female brain has a perfectly functional male behaviour circuit” which is repressed by signals from the vomeronasal organ, Professor Dulac says.’
