‘Last June, Matthew Lincoln was attending an evening service at his nondenominational Tennessee church when he approached the altar where a visiting minister was offering individual prayers for parishioners. Assigned “catchers” were present on the altar in case congregants fainted, fell, or otherwise lost control. When the minister, Robert Lavala, slightly touched his forehead, the Knoxville-area man “received the spirit and fell backwards.” Except nobody was there to catch him, Lincoln charges in a $2.5 million lawsuit filed yesterday against Lakewind Church and its pastors. Lincoln, 58, claims that he fell backwards, striking his head against the “carpet-covered cement floor,” according to the Circuit Court complaint [..]
Lincoln alleges that Lakewind and its pastors were “negligent in not supervising the catchers to be sure that they stood behind the person being prayed for…should they have a dizzying, fainting, or falling in the spirit as had occurred on many occasions before.”‘
‘A peace campaigner from Newtown will tomorrow ask Reading magistrates for a warrant to arrest George W Bush.
Peter Burt, of Biko Court, is taking his case to court to try to get the American president arrested for war crimes.
Mr Burt, of Reading Peace Group, plans to outline the offences that ‘Dubya’, left, has committed and the international laws that he has broken, including the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Afghanistan and the abduction, illegal detention and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
He said: “The historians of the future will mention the name Bush in the same breath as the names of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and other great criminals who have committed the most appalling crimes that humanity has known.
“I will be asking Reading magistrates to stand up for international law by issuing an arrest warrant so that George Bush can be held to account for his crimes in the International Criminal Court.”‘
‘German nursing homes are using a novel strategy to stop Alzheimer’s patients from wandering off: phantom bus stops.
The idea was first tried at Benrath Senior Centre in Düsseldorf, which pitched an exact replica of a standard stop outside, with one small difference: buses do not use it. [..]
“It sounds funny but it helps,” said Franz-Josef Goebel, the chairman of the “Old Lions” association.
“Our members are 84 years old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works, but the long-term memory is still active.
“They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.”
The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.
“We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later and invite them in for a coffee,” said Richard Neureither, Benrath’s director. “Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.”‘
‘A footage of the first polar bear seen in Iceland in 20 years being shot dead by police has been posted online.
The bear, an adult male weighing around 250kg, was presumed to have swum some 300km from Greenland or from a distant chunk of Arctic ice to Skagafjordur in northern Iceland.
It was planned to sedate the animal and move it back to Greenland but the police decided it was safest to kill the bear immediately.
“There was fog up in the hills and we took the decision to kill the bear before it could disappear into the fog”, said police spokesman Petur Bjornsson.’
‘Bethlehem Police arrested a man Wednesday after they say he followed two female teenagers in his car and offered them money to allow him to smell their feet.
Police say John Robinson, Jr., 32, of Selkirik, trailed the teens in his gold and brown 1989 Chevrolet pick-up truck on Glenmont Road sometime on Wednesday.
Robinson approached the teens, according to police, and offered them 20 dollars for the chance to smell their feet in order to satisfy a sexual gratificaation.
Robinson was arrested Thursday and charged with harrassment and endangering the welfare of a child.’
‘Morphine, as little as a single dose, blocks the brain’s ability to strengthen connections at inhibitory synapses, according to new Brown University research published in Nature.
The findings, uncovered in the laboratory of Brown scientist Julie Kauer, may help explain the origins of addiction in the brain. The research also supports a provocative new theory of addiction as a disease of learning and memory.
“We’ve added a new piece to the puzzle of how addictive drugs affect the brain,” Kauer said. “We’ve shown here that morphine makes lasting changes in the brain by blocking a mechanism that’s believed to be the key to memory making. So these findings reinforce the notion that addiction is a form of pathological learning.”‘
‘Doctors in Japan who carried out surgery on a man to remove a tumour had good news and bad news for him.
The good news was he did not have cancer.
The bad news: The growth that had been causing him pain was in fact a 25-year-old surgical towel.
The patient had been carrying the cloth since 1983, when surgeons left it in him after a minor operation to treat an ulcer, a spokesman for the hospital said.
The man, now 49, went in to another hospital in late May after suffering abdominal pain. [..]
“The towel was greenish blue although we are not sure about its original colour,” the Asahi General Hospital spokesman said, adding it had been crumpled to the size of a softball.’
‘It’s the dramatic moment stunned Shelley Buddington caught her cheating fella in bed — with her half-naked MUM.
After snapping the sleazy panic-stricken pair on her mobile phone Shelley posted the damning picture on her Facebook internet page for the world to see.
And she told us: “Some might think putting it on the website is an evil thing to do. But is it worse than being betrayed by your mother and boyfriend? I don’t think so!
“I just wanted to show everyone what bastards they’d been to me.”
Shelley’s nightmare unfolded when she paid a surprise visit to her 43-year-old mum Lesley, in Kingswood, Bristol.
She let herself into the house and was immediately suspicious — after spotting lover Andrew Blay’s size 9 Timberland boots placed neatly on the mat.
Barmaid Shelley, 22, admitted: “My stomach churned. For a start, Andrew was meant to be at work.’
‘German police have discovered a well-preserved WWII anti-aircraft cannon in a German man’s garage in part of a series of raids that uncovered more than €100,000 in illegal weapons, German daily Berliner Morgenpost reported on Thursday.
Police discovered the flak cannon, used by the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War, after conducting a search on a family home in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The 49-year-old resident was in possession of 200 illegal firearms, one kilogramme of explosives, and 15,000 rounds of ammunition. The anti-aircraft cannon was resting where a car would normally park.
“I thought I’d seen everything, but you can always be surprised,” chief investigator Manfred Schmandra told the paper.’
‘ Two teenagers who say they hijacked Comcast’s Web portal on Thursday also say they expect to be arrested for their actions.
“I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad,” 19-year-old “Defiant” told Wired’s Kevin Poulsen, who managed to get a one-hour phone interview with Defiant and his 18-year-old cohort “EBK.”
“I slept in my clothes, because the last time they came, I was in my underwear with my dong hanging out and shit,” Defiant said of a past raid.
On Thursday, Comcast’s portal was defaced, leaving some e-mail subscribers without service. On the site, the hackers referenced their group: “KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast.”‘
‘Australian researchers have found that long-term heavy use of marijuana may cause parts of the brain to shrink.
Published in this month’s Archives of General Psychiatry, the study found that the hippocampus and amygdala were smaller in men who were heavy marijuana users compared to non-users.
The study looked at 15 men heavy marijuana users, who had smoked at least five marijuana cigarettes daily for on average of 20 years.
Brain scans showed that on average their hippocampus volume was 12% less and amygdala volume was 7% less than in the 16 men who were not marijuana users.
The hippocampus regulates memory and emotion, while the amygdala plays a critical role in fear and aggression.’
‘Automatic car features are supposed to make life easier for motorists, but they may be leaving some people without the know-how to do things the old-fashioned way. That’s what happened to a driver in Utah County who became trapped inside her own car.
A woman called Orem police Friday afternoon needing help because her battery died and she was locked inside her car.
When police arrived, they found the woman sitting in the car, unable to get herself out. She couldn’t hear the officers instructions through the rolled-up windows so she motioned to them to call her on her cell phone, according to police.
Once officers were able to talk to the woman on the phone, they were able to tell her how to manually operate the slide lock mechanism on the inside door panel to open the door and free herself.
“I’m just glad she had a cell phone to call for help,” an officer said.’
‘I HAVE A 1995 MO’ VAN THAT GOT TRANSFORMED INTO THIS CATBUS. I BROUGHT IT TO A SHOPS AND I WAS LIKE HEY, CAN YOU TURN THIS INTO A CATBUS? SO THEY DID. THEN THAT DAY I DROVE IT HOME. THE CAT BUS ONLY HAS 50K, WHICH ARE ALL HIGHWAY MILES AS I DROVE IT TO WORK 2 DAYS A WEEK AND THAT WAS IT. IT’S IN REALLY GOOD SHAPE AND ALL THE FUR IS STILL ALL THERE. THE STEERING WHEEL HAS A CAT ON IT. IM ONLY ASKING 2900 FOR THE CATBUS BECAUSE ITS REALLY FURRY AND SOMETIMES PEOPLE GET SICK ON IT.’
‘Two Australian burglars broke into a house – only to find it full of police officers staging a drugs raid.
The pair jemmied open a window to get into the house in a midnight raid in Melbourne, reports the Herald Sun.
But they had been beaten to it by police officers who had just burst through the door to search for drugs.
The property was allegedly being used for growing hydroponic cannabis, and the detectives were on a raid to arrest the resident, a man in his 20s.
The startled burglars fled, but were caught a couple of days later, said Det Sen-Sgt Paul Cassidy, of Melton detectives.
“It is unusual,” he said, but declined to comment on whether the burglars had been after money or drugs.’
‘[..] Largent fulfilled the pop-culture dream that was popularized in such movies as Office Space and Superman 3 – stealing a large sum of money, $50,000 to be exact, a few pennies at a time.
Largent used a massive fraud scheme to trick Google Checkout and online brokers like E-trade and Schwab to send him the sum, a few cents at a time. The fraud was made possible by a common practice relatively unknown to the general public. When users open up accounts with these sites, the site sends a tiny payment from a few cents to a few dollars to the user. The payment is meant to verify that the user has access to the account and that it’s active.
By opening 58,000 such accounts, Largent funneled money through the channels into a few private bank accounts. Largent raked in $8,000 from Google’s Checkout alone.’
‘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.’
