‘Up to 20 heavy vehicles and large pieces of equipment are stolen from NSW construction sites every week and sold on black markets as far away as South America and South Africa.
Thieves are making off with equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They are helped by the extraordinary fact that a universal key operates most of the machinery.
There were 1174 heavy vehicle thefts in the year to June 30, with only a 68 per cent recovery rate, the National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council found.
The trafficking of stolen heavy equipment is two-way between Australia and the world.
The Australian buyer of a second-hand backhoe from Britain found a 9mm pistol and ammunition secreted in the dashboard. British police found the backhoe, tractors and excavators had been stolen and shipped to Australia.’
‘A Territory man filmed himself speeding at 150km/h while masturbating at the wheel of his drug-laden car, a court heard.
His Holden SV6 was allegedly laden with 5kg of drugs, including two cannabis plants resting on the back seat, the court was told.
Brendon Alan Erhardt, 39, was granted bail so he could marry his girlfriend of six months before he goes to jail.
Prosecutor Sergeant Melinda Edwards said in court the father-of-three told police he “had masturbated while driving” just before he was stopped for speeding on the 130km/h stretch of the Stuart Hwy.
“(He) also video recorded himself masturbating while travelling at a speed of 150km/h.”
Sgt Edwards said Mr Erhardt — who was disqualified from driving — also told officers his act was “not dangerous” as the “only person he could hurt was himself”.’
‘Surgeons have performed the world’s first double arm transplant.
The 16-hour operation was carried out last Friday on a farm worker who lost both arms in an accident.
The 54-year-old man was given the arms of a teenage boy who is believed to have died in a road crash. [..]
The patient, who lost his arms in a threshing machine six years ago, is said to be recovering well from the surgery. Doctors said he regained consciousness on Sunday and smiled at his wife. [..]
He said it was difficult to forecast the psychological effect on the man of having the arms of a youth 35 years his junior.’
‘On the last day of his life, Dallas Carter sat down in his apartment and addressed a letter “TO Whom it my concert.”
He was not a good speller and he could not read well, but the 44-year-old father stitched together, on green construction paper, the last will and testament of a poor man. It ran three pages, 380 words, and it began with the formality of a legal document.
I, Dallas D. Carter, …
This was before the police arrived, before gunshots lit the night and the children fled apartment B28.
… buy the time you get this letter I will be gone or dead. it’s not a good letter. sometime people do dump thing I’m not really a bad person Just life gets away from me sometime …
Before that Saturday night, no one would have expected Dallas Carter to do what he did.’
‘Diners in Xiangfan are enjoying the novelty of eating their meals in ankle-deep water, reports Xinhua Net.
News of the flooded restaurant spread and the restaurant is now packed with diners while waitresses say they are struggling to keep up with orders.
The owner said he was prepared to temporarily close the restaurant after the heaviest rains for 50 years brought floods to the city.
But he had a change of heart when he heard how the eatery’s new wet look was bringing in the customers.
“It’s very cool. Not only in temperature, but also for a fun new way of having a meal,” said one diner.’
Have a drumstick and your brain starts clickin’..
(1.4meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘Children screamed in fear when they found a naked body of a man on their way to school in Alice Springs yesterday.
Witnesses said it appeared the caucasian man had been half-eaten by dogs.
Residents of the Hidden Valley town camp in Alice Springs east made the gruesome discovery about 8am yesterday.
A man was driving a group of about five children to school when they came across the body. It lay just off the road close to the town camp’s entrance. [..]
The children’s grandfather described the scene as “horrific”.
The grandfather said: “A lot of meat was torn out of one leg and an arm. I think a dog made a meal of him. [..]’
‘Queensland will become hotter and super-cyclones will batter the coast as far south as Brisbane by 2070, the nation’s top scientists have warned.
In a top-level ministerial briefing note seen by The Courier-Mail, the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre, the co-ordinating body for the nation’s 15 peak scientific bodies, offers stark predictions about climate change. [..]
The latest climate change projections predict that by 2030: Average annual temperature will increase by between 0.6C and 1.2C, and that after 2030, the rate of increase will be highly dependent on emission levels.
Also, cyclones will be stronger, more frequent and last longer, and the region of cyclone activity will shift southwards, affecting areas 300km further south by 2070.
Local sea levels will be 13 to 20cm above 1990 levels, and 49 to 89cm above 1990 levels by 2070.’
‘The Michigan wedding of Durango newlyweds Andy and Ania Somora came to an abrupt end last weekend after the bride and groom were tasered by local police and spent their wedding night in jail.
Police arrest Ania Somora at her wedding reception Saturday night at Burnison Art Gallery in Chikaming Township, Mich.
According to a news release from the Chikaming Township (Mich.) Police Department, Officer Jeff Enders responded Saturday to the Burnison Art Gallery in Lakeside, Mich., after gallery owner Judi Burnison asked for assistance with unruly guests at the Somoras’ wedding reception. [..]
Skowron said the crowd got particularly unruly after police handcuffed Andy Somora’s father and put him in the back of a police cruiser. He said the elder Somora, whom he described as “a distinguished older gentleman,” was trying to talk to Enders to defuse the situation.
“I didn’t believe it, but I witnessed it. It was brutal, and that’s when Andy got really mad,” he said.
Skowron said Andy Somora had to be restrained by police and was tasered at least twice. His wife also received a shock because she was touching her husband during one of the incidents. Skowron said husband and wife were both arrested, but Chikaming police would not confirm that claim, and no mention of the use of a taser is included in the news release.’
‘Police have arrested an 18-year-old man accused of stealing at least three county buses and driving them on their routes.
James L. Harris is charged with three counts each of third-degree grand theft and burglary of an occupied conveyance, WPLG-TV reported.
The most recent theft occurred Tuesday, when he was arrested and charged.
According to Miami-Dade police, Harris would take the buses from several Miami-Dade Transit bus depots in the county and drive the buses on their routes, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. He would then return the buses at the end of the day.’
‘Aliens have contacted humans several times but governments have hidden the truth for 60 years, the sixth man to walk on the moon has claimed.
Apollo 14 astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell, said he was aware of many UFO visits to Earth during his career with NASA but each one was covered up.
Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as ‘little people who look strange to us.’ [..]
Chillingly, he claimed our technology is ‘not nearly as sophisticated’ as theirs and “had they been hostile”, he warned ‘we would be been gone by now’. [..]
‘I’ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes – we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it’s been happening quite a bit.”
‘Sleep patterns in middle-aged women can increase their risk for stroke, researchers in the United States have found. The greatest increase in stroke risk — 70 percent — was noted among women who slept 9 hours or more per night, according to their report in the medical journal Stroke.
A link between sleep duration and mortality has previously been noted in a number of studies, but evidence of an association between sleep patterns and cardiovascular disease has been lacking, Dr. Jiu-Chiuan Chen, from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and co-researchers note. [..]
After following the group for an average of 7.5 years, the researchers found that 1,166 women experienced an ischemic stroke, the most common type of stroke, which occurs when a blood vessel in the brain becomes blocked. This prevents oxygen from reaching the brain and the brain’s tissue begins to die.
Upon further analysis, Chen’s group found that women with a sleep duration of 6 hours or less, 8 hours, or 9 hours or more increased the risk of stroke by 14 percent, 24 percent, and 70 percent, respectively, compared with sleeping 7 hours.’
‘Katie Holmes has been wearing gloves and long sleeve shirts with the sleeves pulled down over her hands, in order to cover their freakish purple coloration.
It’s rumored that Katie may have taken part in a Scientology purification ritual that caused her hands to turn purple.
According to reports, the purification ritual is called the Purification Rundown or Purif, which is the process of taking ‘vitamin bombs’ to get ‘toxins’ out of their bodies.
It’s reported that in almost every single case, Scientology founder Hubbard recommends dosages in his teachings that are well above the safe limits, in some cases as much as 142 times more than the toxic level. The side effects of such huge overdoses range from liver damage, hair loss, brain swelling and nausea up to fatal heart and respiratory failure.’
‘I was twenty-one and barely a man when the horror came. It has stuck with me to this day, a dark spirit that looms over my shoulder whenever a quiet moment comes over me and leaves me free to think. The shape of the horror has been burned into my mind’s background noise. It has become something that I have to see the same way I have to see a purple after-image after I stare at a bright light source. As hard as it is to see some things, still other things are harder to unsee. God, how I wish I could.
What I saw in that five by five metal shack in the oil fields will follow me till my dying day.’
‘Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has vowed to stop smoking marijuana – because it makes him too paranoid.
MacFarlane signed a GBP50 million deal with 20th Century Fox in May, in a move which will make him the highest-paid writer-producer in television – and he’s determined to increase his productivity by swearing off illegal drugs.
He says, “I don’t smoke much pot anymore. One of the last times I was stoned, I was convinced that I would die unless I kept moving my body.
“So I sat there, baked, waving my arms around like a crazy person.”‘
‘Family members are angry and speaking out after Dayton police used a stun gun on a woman who is blind and suffering from cancer. Police said they were looking for a suspect when they knocked on Denise Harris’s door Thursday morning. But according to both police and witnesses, things quickly got out of hand and Harris was tased.
“She was able to force herself down on to the floor and not be cooperative, grabbing on to the detective. A taser was dry stunned onto her arm to control her hand movement, then she was cuffed,” said Sgt. Charles Anderson.
Her family said she was yelling at officers because she was scared.
“She was terrified. She was extremely terrified,” said Harris’s niece, Dionna. “She was scared because the person identified themselves as a police officer. But she’s been robbed before by someone using the same technique.” [..]
“She’s blind and they pulled her off her Futon, handcuffed her and tased her because he said she swung at him. She can’t see,” said Harris’s sister Elvita Harris. “I’m very frustrated and upset. Dayton police need to implement a sensitivity program.”
Neighbors said they told officers she was blind and sick.’
‘Three Chinese reporters attending a police briefing on the success of an anti-gun campaign were accidentally shot, media reports say.
An officer picked up one of the weapons on show – a confiscated home-made gun – but it went off in his hand.
A reporter needed surgery for injuries to his ankle, crotch and chest, after being hit by what appeared to be pebbles fired by the gun.
Two others were slightly injured in the incident in Nanchong, southern China.’
‘The moon was mistaken for a “bright, stationary” UFO which had been loitering for at least half an hour, by a confused local in South Wales who made a 999 call to the police.
Today officers released a transcript in order to highlight the time wasted by unnecessary 999 calls.
The bizzare conversation ran as follows: [..]’
‘Thomas Hickman drove through New Mexico, police say, until his Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo ran out of gas. Then the 55-year-old North Richland Hills man walked into a field, tied helium balloons to a gun, covered his mouth with duct tape, and shot himself in the back of the head, according to New Mexico State Police.
That determination is a far leap from what authorities first suspected when Mr. Hickman’s body was discovered March 15 near Santa Rosa, N.M., about 100 miles east of Albuquerque. Authorities initially thought the Red Lobster executive had been kidnapped and slain.
But investigators came to the conclusion that Mr. Hickman committed suicide. The first clue was the bundle of white helium balloons, with the gun still attached, found snagged on bushes and cactus near Mr. Hickman’s body.’
‘Investigators and a grandmother are trying to make sense of a sign found posted in a New Braunfels neighborhood. Is it a joke or something more sinister?
There are plenty of signs at the pool you would expect to see – “No Lifeguard on Duty” and “No Diving.” But a woman who lives in the neighborhood didn’t expect to see a sign with the words “Pool’s Closed” – with the image of a black man – posted on the gate.
Isabelle and Nicholas Martinez are visiting their grandmother and love spending time at the pool. Mary Alice Altorfer says she’ll keep taking them there, despite the sign.
“This kind of stuff is old, and it’s ugly and tired,” says Altorfer. “It’s time for it to be buried.”
Altorfer says the pool wasn’t closed at all. She sensed the real message was racist and directed at her grandchildren.’
‘Up to 30 partygoers at an outdoor rave have been partially blinded by a laser light show.
Health officials confirmed 12 cases of laser-blindness from the event, with reports suggesting up to 17 more.
Some of those affected have lost up to 80 per cent of their vision.
Guests at the Aquamarine Open Air Festival in Kirzhach, Russia, began seeking medical help days after the show, complaining of vision problems.
Lasers like these were erected inside giant tents at the Aquamarine Open Air Festival in Kirzhach, Russia, after heavy rain. Up to 30 ravers suffered permanent damage to their vision.
Heavy rain had forced organisers of the event, which took place on July 5 in the town 50 miles outside Moscow, to put up tents for the all-night dance party.
The lasers, which are designed to illuminate the sky, were reflected by the canopy into the eyes of the ravers, burning their retinas.’
‘Brandon! Brandon! Brandon, come here!
Thats what I heard for five minutes while we were in the Quicky Mart. Your 3 year old was running all over and knocking stuff down while you and your Whiskey Tango (white trash) wife were getting your post methadone clinic Big Gulps. You would just just yell every 30 seconds “Brandon come here” like an hillbilly fog horn. I wanted to yell “turn your fat jowls and watch your crotch fruit, yelling Brandon every thirty seconds does not make up for your lack of parenting “. I chose not to as I just wanted out of there.’
‘Toddlers who turn their noses up at spicy food from overseas could be branded racists by a Government-sponsored agency.
The National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.
This could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food. [..]
It advises nursery teachers to be on the alert for childish abuse such as: “blackie”, “Pakis”, “those people” or “they smell”.
The guide goes on to warn that children might also “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘yuk'”. [..]
Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council. The guide added: “Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case.”‘
‘An Orlando man has traded the naming rights to his unborn son for a $100 gas card.
David Partin recently heard that a local radio station was giving $100 worth of free gas to the listener who called in with the most interesting item to trade. Central Florida radio hosts Richard Dixon and J. Willoughby were quick to take Partin up on his offer, The Orlando Sentinel reports.
When the baby is born this winter, he will be named Dixon and Willoughby Partin — with the “and” included.
Partin’s girlfriend, Samantha, says at least her son will have an interesting story about how he got his name.’
‘If you have a problem with school officials strip searching 13-year-olds for Advil – or if you care about the government’s standards for informant use and invasive searches – you can take relief in yesterday’s ruling by a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled 6-5 that students cannot be strip-searched based on the uncorroborated word of another student who is facing disciplinary punishment.
“A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to ‘protect’ her from the danger of Advil,” the federal appellate court wrote in today’s opinion. “We reject Safford’s effort to lump together these run-of-the-mill anti-inflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”
“It does not take a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old girl is an invasion of constitutional rights. More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity,” the court continued.’
‘Scientists have identified about two dozen genes that control embryonic stem cell fate. The genes may either prod or restrain stem cells from drifting into a kind of limbo, they suspect. The limbo lies between the embryonic stage and fully differentiated, or specialized, cells, such as bone, muscle or fat.
By knowing the genes and proteins that control a cell’s progress toward the differentiated form, researchers may be able to accelerate the process – a potential boon for the use of stem cells in therapy or the study of some degenerative diseases, the scientists say.
Their finding comes from the first large-scale search for genes crucial to embryonic stem cells. The research was carried out by a team at the University of California, San Francisco and is reported in a paper in the July 11, 2008 issue of “Cell.”
“The genes we identified are necessary for embryonic stem cells to maintain a memory of who they are,” says Barbara Panning, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF, and senior author on the paper. “Without them the cell doesn’t know whether it should remain a stem cell or differentiate into a specialized cell.”‘
‘Chemistry pupils have flunked O-level questions from 50 years ago, deepening fears that the subject is being dumbed down.
The teenagers were unable to answer questions from the 1960s and 1970s set by the Royal Society of Chemistry.
The average mark for the 1960s questions was just 16 per cent. [..]
Even bright pupils were baffled by many of the old questions, said the RSC chief executive, Richard Pike.
He added: ‘There is no doubt that the clever pupils are as sharp as they ever were, but most are being stifled by an educational system that does not encourage more detailed problem-solving and rigorous thinking.”
‘Though the moon has many seas, scientists thought it was dry.
They were wrong.
In a study published today in Nature, researchers led by Brown University geologist Alberto Saal found evidence of water molecules in pebbles retrieved by NASA’s Apollo missions.
The findings point to the existence of water deep beneath the moon’s surface, transforming scientific understanding of our nearest neighbor’s formation and, perhaps, our own. There may also be a more immediately practical application.
“Is there water there? That’s important for lunar missions. People could get the water. They could use the hydrogen for energy,” said Saal.
[..] a high-powered imaging technique known as secondary ion mass spectrometry revealed a wealth of so-called volatile compounds, among them fluorine, chlorine, sulfur, carbon dioxide — and water.’
