moonbuggy

‘When thinking of technologically advanced societies pushing the envelope on alternative energy, the Amish of rural Middle America are about the last group that come to mind. Yet the conservative Christian religious sect known for their plain dress and abhorrence for modern conveniences such as automobiles and electricity is embracing solar power.

In Holmes County, Ohio, home to the world’s largest Amish community, an estimated 80% of Amish families now have photovoltaic panels. They use solar power for basic electrical needs like home lighting, powering sewing machines, and charging batteries for lights on horse-drawn buggies. The Amish have gone solar partly for safety concerns – gas lamps are a fire hazard – and partly out of legal requirements – transportation codes require electric lights on horse-drawn buggies. Another reason they are embracing solar power is to avoid connecting to the electric grid, something they feel would endanger their efforts to remain separated from the rest of American society.’

‘US officials said Saturday the suspects nabbed in a foiled Islamic terrorist plot to blow up New York’s main international airport courted support in South America and the Caribbean, including from Jamaat Al Muslimeen, which failed at a bold 1990 coup bid in Trinidad.

Four suspected Islamic extremists, including Abdul Kadir, a former member of Guyana’s parliament, were charged with conspiring to blow up jet-fuel supply tanks and pipelines at John F. Kennedy airport, the US Department of Justice said.

The plot had links to international terrorist cells in the Caribbean as well as South America, but was foiled well before it could be carried out, US Justice officials added.’

That’s not a three year old you wanna mess with. She means business. :)

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‘The phrase “Verschärfte Vernehmung” is German for “enhanced interrogation”. Other translations include “intensified interrogation” or “sharpened interrogation”. It’s a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan. [..]

In Norway, we actually have a 1948 court case that weighs whether “enhanced interrogation” using the methods approved by president Bush amounted to torture. The proceedings are fascinating, with specific reference to the hypothermia used in Gitmo, and throughout interrogation centers across the field of conflict. The Nazi defense of the techniques is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration…’

‘The mayor has ordered the city’s firefighters to cut grass and trim shrubs while on duty to help the service department care for parks and other public areas.

“We have 54 firefighters, and they have a lot of downtime,” Mayor Eric Brewer said Thursday. “Instead of sitting around the station, they’ll be assisting us as we beautify the city.”

The firefighters’ union opposes the plan, arguing that noise from city lawnmowers and protective headphones worn by firefighters might prevent them from hearing their radios when an emergency call comes in.

“We’re firefighters, not service workers,” union vice president Rick Razek said. “It jeopardizes our citizens and will absolutely hinder our response time.”

The mayor’s plan calls for firefighters to travel in a fire truck to their assigned work site and to keep their firefighting gear with them so they can proceed directly to the scene of a fire if called.’

In this video they apply some liquid to a guy’s face and all these little worms start to crawl out of his skin.

Erk.

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‘Detailed plans for the new U.S. Embassy under construction in Baghdad appeared online Thursday in a breach of the tight security surrounding the sensitive project.

Computer-generated projections of the soon-to-be completed, heavily fortified compound were posted on the Web site of the Kansas City, Mo.-based architectural firm that was contracted to design the massive facility in the Iraqi capital.

The images were removed by Berger Devine Yaeger Inc. shortly after the company was contacted by the State Department.

“We work very hard to ensure the safety and security of our employees overseas,” said Gonzalo Gallegos, a department spokesman. “This kind of information out in the public domain detracts from that effort.”‘

‘US officials have warned consumers to avoid using toothpaste made in China after a shipment was found to contain a poisonous chemical used in anti-freeze.

The Food and Drug Administration said it could contain diethylene glycol, which has been blamed for the deaths of at least 50 people in Panama last year.

The brands affected are usually sold at “bargain” retail outlets, the FDA said.

The warning comes amid a series of contamination scandals involving Chinese exports to the Americas.

On Thursday, Nicaraguan health authorities seized 40,000 tubes of Chinese-made toothpaste after they were found to contain diethylene glycol (DEG).

The Dominican Republic, Panama and Costa Rica had already removed thousands of tubes of toothpaste from store shelves. ‘

‘Authorities in Arkansas said an 18-month-old boy died inside a dishwasher that turned on automatically when its door closed.

Officials are still investigating, but said the boy’s death appears to be accidental. They said the likely cause of death was heat exposure.

Authorities said the boy’s 13-year-old brother found him inside the dishwasher Wednesday. It was still running. Authorities said the toddler’s brother opened the dishwasher after noticing the child’s blanket lying on the ground on front of the appliance.

The child died before paramedics arrived.’

‘[..] Peter William Eaves contacted Last Word to tell us that, while the surface of a long-established sand/gravel drive (laid in the 1920s or 30s) was being improved, a very strange phenomenon was discovered.

Beneath the drive, at a depth of 25 centimetres, were least 13 live crabs (all being around 7 cm in width). See a video of the crustaceans, courtesy of Mark Leitch. One had a barnacle its back, so it seems that it must have at one time lived near the sea. The nearest sea water is an estuary around 4km, and the sea itself considerably further.

Peter has owned the land next to the drive for around 40 years and reports there have been no repairs or excavations there during that period. We’re hoping that there’s some one out there than can tell us what on earth is going on here.’

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‘The father of a teenaged girl faces attempted murder charges for allegedly slamming his van into six people, including his daughter, outside a Scarborough, Ont., high school on Friday.

The six were sitting in a park near Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute, near Birchmount Road and Sheppard Avenue when a van came speeding towards them, said police.

The daughter, her boyfriend and a friend of the couple were taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

Witnesses allege the father was angry over the daughter’s relationship with her boyfriend.

“This was not an unintentional collision,” said Sgt. James Cassells of traffic services with Toronto police.’

‘Bus drivers are to be issued with DNA kits so that passengers who spit on them can be traced by police.

The “spit kits” are already supplied at all 275 Tube stations and are expected to be rolled out this summer across London’s 7,000-strong bus fleet.

It is the latest initiative against anti-social behaviour on buses and has coincided with the Mayor’s introduction of free bus travel for under-16s.

The DNA kits will allow drivers to take swabs of saliva that can be passed to the police and checked against criminal records. Transport for London says that about seven out of 10 samples provides a match.’

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‘The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.’

‘Canadian encryption vendor Certicom yesterday filed a wide-ranging lawsuit against Sony, claiming that many of the products offered by the electronics giant infringe on two Certicom patents. This might sound like business as usual until you realize what’s being targeted: AACS and (by extension) the PlayStation 3.

Certicom has done extensive work in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and the patents in question build on this work. The patents have already been licensed by groups like the US National Security Agency, which paid $25 million back in 2003 for the right to use 26 Certicom patents, including the two in the Sony case. Now, Certicom wants Sony to pay up, claiming that encryption present in several key Sony technologies violates Certicom patents on “Strengthened public key protocol” and “Digital signatures on a Smartcard.”

The biggest charge is that the encryption in AACS itself is infringing. The practical implications of this claim are huge; AACS is included in Sony’s Blu-ray players, PlayStation 3, and Blu-ray and PS3 discs. Certicom says Sony needs to take out a license for all of these uses.’

‘Two people police say were hoping to avoid drinking and driving chose instead to head home on horseback, and ended up under arrest anyway.

Culpeper police officers Lonnie Myers and Tim Chilton heard a disturbance last Thursday around midnight and found Culpeper residents Eric Kyff and Lauren Allen arguing, Sgt. Scott Jenkins said.

Kyff and Allen, who appeared to be intoxicated, wanted to “travel home several miles by horseback to avoid drinking and driving,” Jenkins said. [..]

The two were charged with public intoxication and taken to the county jail. The horses were held across the street in front of the police department.’

‘Researchers are seeking to formally classify a new family of abnormal sexual behaviours or “sexsomnias” that occur while people are asleep.

Ranging from masturbation to fondling to unconscious rape, sleep-related sexual abnormalities need to be properly categorized and labelled so physicians will recognize them when they crop up, according to a paper published today in the journal SLEEP.

“We wanted to call attention to how sexuality looms throughout all the known disorders of sleep,” says Dr. Carlos Schenck, a University of Minnesota psychiatrist and the paper’s lead author.’

This guy gets caught sleeping with his girlfriends best friend by that Cheaters TV show. He keeps telling the TV people to get out of his house, but they won’t leave.

So, it’s paintball time. :)

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‘A 43-year-old German man was taken to hospital in critical condition after he fell off a second storey balcony during a spitting contest with his 12-year-old son, police said Friday.

A spokesman for the police in the eastern town of Cottbus said the man in Forst had apparently lost his balance after thrusting too far forward in his attempt to outspit his son.

He tumbled over the ledge and landed on a balcony of the ground floor apartment, police said. He was taken to hospital in a rescue helicopter.’

‘There are shocking allegations against a Palm Bay city supervisor. A former employee said she was constantly flashing and using sexually explicit language in front of workers. He said, when he complained, he was fired and is now suing.

It’s unusual for a man to file a sexual harassment suit against a female. Usually, it’s the other way around. But the man who used to work with her said his boss was so vulgar and inappropriate, he had to take action

Boxes are filled with evidence backing Tom Rolfe’s sexual harassment case against the city of Palm Bay. He worked for the city as a meter reader for four years and said he was fired when he complained about his supervisor, Donna Elliot.

“She just dropped her pants, bent over and showed everybody everything,” Rolfe said.’

‘A Russian governor has promised an SUV, a TV or a fridge to every woman in his region who gives birth on upcoming Constitution Day in an attempt to help beat a demographic crisis, his office said on Thursday.

The governor of the southern Ulyanovsk region even suggested giving people time off work nine months before the June 12 celebration to boost their chances, although he was not being entirely serious, his spokesperson said. [..]

Existing mothers who give birth to another child on June 12 will be rewarded with a Patriot sports utility vehicle from local UAZ factory she said.’

‘A German couple had to call out the fire brigade after tying each other up in chains – and then losing the key to the padlock.

Jochen Ranstett, 56 and his wife Maria, from the town of Weiden, dressed up in leathers and chained each other to their beds, but lost the key during the romp.

After hours of trying to free themselves they finally gave up and called for help on Jochen’s mobile phone.

He said: “It was so embarrassing. We just wanted to try something a bit different and we ended up with this.

“I even had to be taken to hospital because my wrists had swollen so much from trying to get out of the handcuffs.”‘

It’s relatively obvious. :)

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‘An Indian court has ruled against a group of female flight attendants who were grounded from the national airline for being overweight.

The court said that state-owned Indian Airlines had the right to take the step in the interest of flight safety and in the face of growing competition.

The flight attendants had argued that the move was demeaning.

The airline began a system of measuring air hostesses based on their height and weight last year.

The Delhi High Court has ruled in favour of the airline, saying that with aircraft flying at higher altitudes, the safety of the passengers depended on the crew’s ability to perform.’

‘China’s heritage bureau has launched a probe into Chinese mining companies alleged to have brought down part of the Great Wall to allow their trucks to avoid paying road tolls, state media reported on Thursday.

Coal mining companies operating near Hujiayao village, on the border between the northern province of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, had also taken soil from parts of the Ming-era (1368-1644) wall to build houses and piled “small mountains” of coal against it, Xinhua news agency reported, citing a local newspaper.

“Big trucks carrying coal had even opened a big gap in the Great Wall to make a coal shipping thoroughfare,” the paper said.’

‘A Dutch reality television show in which a supposedly dying woman had to pick one of three contestants to whom she would donate a kidney was revealed as an elaborate hoax on Friday.

The show, which the broadcaster had said aimed to focus attention on a shortage of donor organs in the Netherlands, was condemned by Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende before broadcast Friday night and sparked controversy worldwide.

Identified only as “Lisa,” the 37-year-old woman who had been said to be suffering from a brain tumor was to base her selection on the person’s history and conversations with the candidates’ families and friends.

In the last minutes of the program, she was revealed as a healthy actress and producers stunned viewers by saying “The Big Donorshow” was a hoax.

The contestants were also part of the deception, although all three are genuine kidney patients.’

Followup to Reality show prize: a kidney.

‘Before he became known as “Monster Pig,” the 1,051-pound hog shot in Delta was known by another name.

Fred.

Rhonda and Phil Blissitt told The Anniston Star on Thursday evening that, on April 29, four days before the hog was killed, Fred was one of many livestock on their farm.

Late Thursday evening, their claims were confirmed by Andy Howell, Game Warden for the Alabama Department of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries.

“I didn’t want to stir up anything,” Rhonda Blissitt said. “I just wanted the truth to be told. That wasn’t a wild pig.”

Added Phil Blissitt:

“If it went down in the record book, it would be deceiving, and we’d know that for the rest of our lives.”‘

Followup to Boy Bags Wild Hog Bigger Than ‘Hogzilla’.