‘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.
(3.1 and 13.9meg Flash videos)
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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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see it here »
‘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.’
‘An Indian suspect was forced by police to eat 50 bananas as a laxative, to retrieve a necklace he was accused of stealing and swallowing.
When the bananas failed to produce the desired effect, police fed Sheikh Mohsin rice, chicken and local bread.
Finally the necklace, which appeared on an X-ray taken on the suspect, was excreted and retrieved.
Mr Mohsin will appear in court on Monday in the eastern city of Calcutta, and could face a prison sentence.’
‘Tibet’s living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without permission from China’s atheist leaders. The ban is included in new rules intended to assert Beijing’s authority over Tibet’s restive and deeply Buddhist people.
“The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid,” according to the order, which comes into effect on September 1.
The 14-part regulation issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs is aimed at limiting the influence of Tibet’s exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, and at preventing the re-incarnation of the 72-year-old monk without approval from Beijing.’
‘A 21-year-old who has been accused of having sex with minors was arrested on more sex assault charges today.
David Holden of Manchester, who police say thinks of himself as a werewolf, was arrested on a warrant charging him with one count each of second-degree sexual assault, sale of marijuana, providing tobacco to a minor and public indecency. He also has been charged with four counts of impairing the morals of a minor. [..]
Investigators have received reports that Holden had been intentionally scratching minors and consuming their blood, other warrants say. He follows the Gothic culture and refers to himself as a “Lycan werewolf,” they say.
The latest warrant says he is also into Paganism and devil-worshipping.’
‘A mentally ill man was able to roam a busy emergency department, masquerading as a doctor and “consulting” patients, in a serious security breach that exposes the worsening staffing crisis in Australia’s hospitals.
In the recent incident at Wyong Hospital on the NSW central coast, the intruder was able to examine five patients before being challenged while trying to escort one of them outside for a cigarette. He then ran off.
While none of the five patients was harmed, hospital sources describe the incident as a near miss. They say emergency department rosters are now dominated by “transients” such as locums – making it all but impossible for regular staff to spot someone who should not be there.’
Where can you see lions? Only in Kenya.
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I don’t know that I’ve seen the Top Gear crew flee for their lives very often. :)
(14.5meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘State Representative Bob Allen told police he was intimidated and just playing along when an undercover officer suggested the lawmaker give him $20 and oral sex in a public restroom.
That’s according to a taped statement and other documents released in the case Thursday.
The Republican lawmaker has repeatedly declared his innocence.
In the tape-recorded conversation with police after his arrest, Allen indicates he was scared when approached in the Veterans Memorial Park men’s room. He said –quote– “This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park.”‘
‘All in all, it hadn’t been a good day. Bad traffic, a malfunctioning computer, incompetent coworkers and a sore back all made me a seething cauldron of rage. But more importantly for this story, it had been over forty-eight hours since I’d last taken a dump. I’d tried to jumpstart the process, beginning my day with a bowl of bowel-cleansing fiber cereal, following it with six cups of coffee at work, and adding a bean-laden lunch at Taco Bell. As I was returning home from work, my insides let me know with subtle rumbles and the emission of the occasional tiny fart that Big Things would be happening soon.’
