random/odd news of the day

[stryfe]

<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&u=/nm/20020307/od_nm/dogs_dc_4">Rush on Valium for Dogs with Panic Attacks</a href>
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli vets are giving valium to dozens of dogs suffering from panic attacks as escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence brings the sounds and stresses of war closer to Jerusalem.

Dogs start howling, become overly aggressive, shake uncontrollably or lose bladder control when the rattle of gunfire in the West Bank reverberates into apartment buildings, veterinarians said.

"Only today I treated an Alsatian who has stopped eating and refuses to leave his house," Benny Sapir, a Jerusalem veterinarian, said.

Another vet said he had not seen so many nervous dogs since Iraq rained Scud missiles on Tel Aviv during the 1991 Gulf War.

[Sleepy Introvert Ninja]

<font size="3" face="System, Small Fonts" color="#400040">
Our today's news is your current news.
Then making your today's news our
yesterday's news. All news is just news.
</font>

[p_kusmin]

no news is good news...

[stryfe]

<a href="http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26777">So where is the plane?</a href>
by Geoff Metcalf

I receive a lot of strange information from a wide variety of sources. Some of it is intriguing. Some of it is flat-out weird. I try (and frequently fail) to temporarily set aside my own personal prejudices to objectively as possible consider the merits of both the intriguing and weird.

Recently, an interesting French website has been asking questions about the crash of American Airlines Flight 77, which reportedly crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11.

The conventional wisdom has been inculcated into us that there were four terrorist hijacked airplanes that tragic day. But there are refutations for each of the official scenarios floating around. The conspiracy theory industry hasn't been this jazzed since the JFK assassination.

However, in the shadow of the creative writing, multi- phased propaganda and bovine excrement, there are several questions that at least should be asked and answered...

[stryfe]

<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020311/od_nm/crime_safrica_tiger_dc_3">Tigers Maul S.African Robber After Botched Heist</a href>
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A thief escaping from a botched robbery at a game sanctuary near Johannesburg made a fatal mistake when he climbed a high fence and found himself in the tigers' den, police said Monday.

"They grabbed him and first played with him. He died of a broken neck and a fractured skull," police spokeswoman Milica Bezuidenhout told Reuters. The body was removed after the tigers, a male and a female, had been sedated, she said.

The 28-year-old victim, a South African, and an accomplice had held up the gate guard at the Rhino and Lion Reserve at Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg, Saturday, but fled when staff and visitors became suspicious and chased them.

The accomplice and the driver of the getaway car were arrested and were to appear in court later Monday, Bezuidenhout said.

[stryfe]

<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&u=/nm/20020312/od_nm/condoms_dc_1">First Female Condom Machine in Launched</a href>
PARIS (Reuters) - President Jacques Chirac's campaign spokeswoman Roselyne Bachelot marked International Women's Day by inaugurating France's first female condom machine.

But the plan aimed at polishing the incumbent's feminist credentials ahead of the presidential election in May backfired when women protesters complained that the female condoms were three times the price of the versions made for men.

One female condom costs two euros ($1.76) -- customers can snap up three of the male version for the same price.

Bachelot unveiled the new condom machines -- blue for men, pink for women -- in a central Paris metro station, one of five stations now equipped with them.

Bachelot, slightly suspect in conservative circles because she was the only right-wing deputy to support a "gay marriage" bill passed by the left-wing government, swept aside taboos over the female condom and dismissed suggestions it was "noisy."

The female condom, a sac-like device inserted by the woman before sex, has been available in some countries for several years. But amid criticisms that its plastic crackles and that it reduces sensation for both partners, it has not won wide acceptance.

The AIDS (news - web sites) awareness group Act Up denounced Friday's event in a statement as a publicity stunt and said the conservative Chirac was "using the vagina as an electoral ploy."

Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, his chief rival in the two-round election ending on May 5 both used International Women's Day as a way to lobby for the key female vote.

[angoraphobia]

the female condom seems awfull cumbersome and odd.....i really dont see it being too popular...but ive never tried using it so i wouldnt know....

[Hyde]

A Jamestown mother, yesterday, allegedly attached a jumper cable clamp to her 3-year-old son's penis, causing serious bodily injury to the little boy. Today, the 22-year-old mother, Danielle Monroe, has been charged with 2nd degree assault, a felony, and endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor, for failing to give her son medical attention for over three hours. The boy has since undergone surgery and has been released. Monroe's son and two other children are in the care of The Chautauqua County Child Welfare Services. Monroe is being held without bail.

[stryfe]

Originally posted by Hyde
A Jamestown mother, yesterday, allegedly attached a jumper cable clamp to her 3-year-old son's penis, causing serious bodily injury to the little boy. Today, the 22-year-old mother, Danielle Monroe, has been charged with 2nd degree assault, a felony, and endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor, for failing to give her son medical attention for over three hours. The boy has since undergone surgery and has been released. Monroe's son and two other children are in the care of The Chautauqua County Child Welfare Services. Monroe is being held without bail.

okay, what the deuce?

[stryfe]

this is kinda neat...it's a rubber band gattling gun.
<a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020312/310851.html">For the gun enthusiast who has $400 and 144 rubber bands</a href>
direct link to the real deal.
<a href="http://www.backyardartillery.com/machinegun/"><img src="http://www.backyardartillery.com/machinegun/goodone3.jpg"></a href>

[stryfe]

in case people miss this in geographica...
<img src="http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20020313/i/1016034556.2751914023.jpg">
<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020313/en_nm/afghan_picture_dc_1016034264&cid=579">National Geographic Finds Girl in Famed Photo</a href>

By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For nearly two decades, National Geographic (news - web sites) has been flooded with requests for information about a beautiful Afghan teen-ager with piercing green eyes whose cover image became one of its most recognized photographs.

But the woman's identity has only just been uncovered after the National Geographic photographer who first saw her in a refugee camp in Pakistan 18 years ago, finally tracked down the woman in a remote village south of Jalalabad, Afghanistan (news - web sites).

"Every time I went there (to Afghanistan or Pakistan), I asked about her, but I never had any leads," freelance photographer Steve McCurry, who took the picture for National Geographic in 1984, told Reuters.

McCurry says hardly a day has gone by that people have not asked him about the young woman, whose name he did not take down when he took her picture for the January 1985 cover of National Geographic.

This January, he returned with a National Geographic team to the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan where he took the picture and found someone who said he grew up with the woman's brother.

"The refugee camp was set to close and so I knew this was my only chance to find her," said McCurry. "I couldn't believe it when the brother finally turned up with his sister. I knew immediately it was her."

The woman, who is now about 30 years old, was identified as Sharbat Gula. She remembered McCurry taking the picture but had never seen a copy of it and was surprised and embarrassed by all the attention it attracted.

Gula got married shortly after McCurry first saw her and had four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. She was repatriated from the camp in 1992 and returned to Afghanistan with her family.

Her life had been tough in Afghanistan and McCurry said she had struggled to survive.

"What the second picture shows is that she is still alive and survived quite well in fact ... but that pain and hardship is still written in her face. It is not a face of joy," he added.

NEW PHOTOS TAKEN

A conservative Pashtun, Gula sought her husband's permission to lift her veil to show her face for the latest photographs, which appear in National Geographic's April edition.

McCurry said he saw Gula as a representative of the plight of the Afghan people, who endured an extended war with the Soviet Union and the rise and fall of the Taliban.

"She's really emblematic of the Afghan spirit," he said, adding that a education fund had been set up by National Geographic for young Afghan girls.

National Geographic used several scientific methods to ensure they had found the right woman, including iris recognition in which the colored portion of the eye is examined.

No two human irises are the same and a direct match holds a near 100 percent probability of authenticity, National Geographic said. The woman's eyes were found to be a perfect match.

[stryfe]

the sony <a href="http://foxnews.com/story/0,2933,48225,00.html">SDR-4X</a href>
<p><img src="http://foxnews.com/images/50724/1_21_sdr_4x_robot.jpg"><img src="http://foxnews.com/images/50724/2_22_031902_sdr_4x.jpg"></p>
He also comes with a clunky, sci-fi name and a price tag resembling that of a luxury car.

The silver, round-eyed SDR-4X humanoid robot was unveiled Tuesday and will go on sale later this year. Sony Corp. would not say much more about its plans for the 23-inch tall robot.

``This robot was designed to live with people in homes,'' said Toshitada Doi, Sony executive vice president.

Tuesday: A group of SDR-4X perform a synchronized dance during a media unveiling at a Tokyo hotel.
For that, the robot has sensors on the bottom of its feet to help it walk on uneven surfaces such as carpeting and has been programmed to tumble without falling apart and then get up on its own, Doi said.

The SDR-4X is an upgraded version of a humanoid robot shown about a year ago. It has two cameras to see things better, including being able to tell the difference between the edge of a table and the patterns on the floor. That has been a challenge for another Sony product, the puppy-shaped robot Aibo, which has only one camera.

The new robot will be considerably more expensive than Aibo, which already has sold more than 100,000 units worldwide. The latest Aibo model sells for $1,400 in Japan and $1,500 in the United States.

``This robot will be cost as much as one car, a luxury car,'' Doi said.

For that money, the SDR-4X can carry on simple conversations with its 60,000-word vocabulary, recognize color, dodge obstacles in its path and even sing once programmed with music and lyrics.

The robot also can be programmed to recognize 10 people through their faces, stored as digital images shot with its camera, and their voices, picked up through seven microphones. It also will remember their names.

I'd hate to see a SDR-4X go haywire, reach for a kitchen knife and kill your pet cat or dog....while shredding your bed scenario...

[stryfe]

<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020319/ap_on_sc/antarctic_ice">Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses</a href>
Tue Mar 19,12:16 PM ET

By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press Writer

<table><tr><td><img src="http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20020319/i/1016544789.2819113026.jpg" height="200"></td><td><font color=white size=2>LONDON - A large Antarctic ice shelf in an area of the giant continent that is warming faster than the global average has collapsed with "staggering" rapidity, British scientists said Tuesday.

The shelf designated as Larsen B, 650 feet thick and with a surface area of 1,250 square miles, has collapsed into small icebergs and fragments, the British Antarctic Survey said. Before breaking apart, the ice shelf was about the size of Rhode Island.

The ice shelf collapse reported Tuesday was first detected on satellite images earlier this month by Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.

"The reason this is worth paying attention to is that we're seeing a very rapid and profound response by the ice sheet to a warming that's been around for just a few decades," Scambos said.<font></td></table>

"And we can use this as sort of a guide for what's going to happen if the rest of the Antarctic should begin to warm because of climate change."

David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey, said the agency predicted three years ago that ice shelves would be disappearing.

"Since then, warming on the peninsula has continued and we watched as piece-by-piece Larsen B has retreated," Vaughan said.

"We knew what was left would collapse eventually, but the speed of it is staggering. Hard to believe that 500 million billion tons of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month."

In recent months, scientists have presented apparently contradictory evidence about warming in Antarctica. Two months ago, the journal Science reported new measurements which indicated that the ice in West Antarctica was thickening, rather than melting.

Scientists are unsure what to make of those measurements, but they are not incompatible with the recently observed ice sheet collapses because they apply to a region much closer to the South Pole than the Antarctic Peninsula.

Referred to as the "banana belt" by polar scientists, the peninsula is much closer to the equator than is the rest of Antarctica and surrounded on three sides by moderating seas.

In the past half century, the Antarctic Peninsula, which is nearest to southern Argentina and Chile, has warmed by 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, much faster than average global warming, the Survey said. As a result, five ice shelves which extend out over the ocean along the peninsula have retreated.

In January, researchers Ian Joughin of the California Institute of Technology and Slawek Tulaczyk of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said ice was thickening in West Antarctica. The scientists said the change, if not merely part of some short-term fluctuation, represented a reversal of the long retreat of the ice.

Their finding came less than a week after a paper in the journal Nature reported that Antarctica's harsh desert valleys — long considered a bellwether for global climate change — had grown noticeably cooler since the mid-1980s.

Air temperatures recorded continuously over a 14-year period ending in 1999 declined by about 1 degree F in the polar deserts and across the White Continent, that paper said.

[stryfe]

<a href="http://www.worldonline.co.za/news/news_center_020325.460947.html">SPCA fumes at Aids-wary goat molesters</a href>

<font color="white" size="2"><table><tr><td width="245"><font color="FFFFCC" size="2">[Johannesburg, 25 March] - Boys in a Northern Province village, where many people have apparently died of Aids, are allegedly turning their attention to goats: they think practising bestiality is the way to avoid getting the disease.</font></td><td><font color="white" size="2">Now the National Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Animals has appealed to people to come forward with information.

The NSPCA said it had noted an SABC news report that boys of Mamvuka Village in Nzhelele Valley in the far north of the province have sex with goats to avoid getting Aids. The organisation said other admissions were made during the news insert, which was broadcast on Sunday evening, but the NSPCA had not yet received any official complaints.</font></td></tr></table>

"Bestiality is a criminal offence. Charges can be laid under the Criminal Procedure Act and also in terms of the Animals Protection Act," the NSPCA statement said. It said two convictions were recently obtained for bestiality and both offenders were imprisoned without the option of a fine.

"An appeal is made to anyone with information on this - or any other bestiality offences to come forward. The NSPCA stresses that charges can only be laid and proceed when information sufficient to prove beyond reasonable doubt is to hand."

Captain Ailwei Mushavhanamadi said the Northern Province police had not received any reports of such crimes. But the SABC interviewed at least one boy who admitted he considered bestiality as safe sex, and that he and his friends had sex with goats up to four times a week.

"We know about Aids and we are very afraid of it. That is why we are having sex with these goats. Goats don't have Aids.

"We see people in the village dying everyday. It's because they have slept with one another and infected each other. Goats can't get those infections. We would therefore rather have sex with them," a grade 11 scholar said.

"It's obvious that if I'm not sick there is nothing I can transmit to goats and goats to me. We won't become HIV-positive because goats don't get Aids. We often share the same goat and don't get each other's diseases," he said.

The NSCPA said some of the statements made during the broadcast revealed a lack of education, and that an information campaign should be launched in the affected areas.

"Whether education or prosecution is the key, the matter cannot move forward without co-operation and solid information. The NSPCA is deeply concerned that the youths repeatedly stated their reasoning for having sex with goats - avoidance of Aids. It is suggested that urgency be given to correcting such myths."

The SABC reported that the practice affected goat-farming in the area. Sinah Musekwa, a goat owner, said nobody wanted to buy his goats any more.

"Since we've learnt that these rumours are true people don't want to be associated with these goats. No one wants anything to do with their meat or milk. I'm going to have to destroy my goats," he said.</font>

[Edited by stryfe on 03-27-2002 at 09:38 AM]