A funny thing happened on the way to a trial in Missoula County District Court last week.

Jurors – well, potential jurors – staged a revolt.

They took the law into their own hands, as it were, and made it clear they weren’t about to convict anybody for having a couple of buds of marijuana.

Never mind that the defendant in question also faced a felony charge of criminal distribution of dangerous drugs.

The tiny amount of marijuana police found while searching Touray Cornell’s home on April 23 became a huge issue for some members of the jury panel.

No, they said, one after the other. No way would they convict somebody for having a 16th of an ounce.

In fact, one juror wondered why the county was wasting time and money prosecuting the case at all, said a flummoxed Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew Paul.

District Judge Dusty Deschamps took a quick poll as to who might agree.

Of the 27 potential jurors before him, maybe five raised their hands.

A couple of others had already been excused because of their philosophical objections.

“I thought, ‘Geez, I don’t know if we can seat a jury,’ ” said Deschamps, who called a recess.

Next week it will be 20 years since Margaret Thatcher fell. Pressure had been building on a number of fronts, but the issue which finally destroyed her was the yet-to-be-born euro.

In the last weekend of October 1990, she travelled to a European summit in Rome, where Jacques Delors’ dream of European Monetary Union was high on the agenda.

But while Mrs Thatcher was fighting her lone battle against the prospective single currency abroad, she was being fatally undermined at home.

Geoffrey Howe, her bitterest cabinet critic, went on television to tell the interviewer Brian Walden that in principle Britain did not oppose the euro.

In her Commons statement after returning home, she was forced to slap Howe down: “this government believes in the pound sterling.”

Howe resigned, and days later delivered the famous speech from the back benches that set in motion a leadership contest.

Today, Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, first published in 1993, reads like a prophecy.

It shows how deeply and with what extraordinary wisdom she had examined Delors’ proposals for the single currency.

Her overriding objection was not ill-considered or xenophobic, as subsequent critics have repeatedly claimed.

They were economic. Right back in 1990, Mrs Thatcher foresaw with painful clarity the devastation it was bound to cause.

Her autobiography records how she warned John Major, her euro-friendly chancellor of the exchequer, that the single currency could not accommodate both industrial powerhouses such as Germany and smaller countries such as Greece.

Germany, forecast Thatcher, would be phobic about inflation, while the euro would prove fatal to the poorer countries because it would “devastate their inefficient economies”.

It is as if, all those years ago, the British prime minister possessed a crystal ball that enabled her to foresee the catastrophic events of the past year or so in Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

Indeed, it is one of the tragedies of European history that the world chose not to believe her.

President Mitterrand of France and Chancellor Kohl of Germany dismissed her words of caution. And when Mrs Thatcher was driven from office in 1990, a crucial voice was lost, and a new consensus started to form in Britain in favour of the euro

A WOMAN is suing over an incident where airport staff allegedly pulled down her top and joked about her breasts in public view.

The 23-year-old traveller, from Amarillo, US, is suing the US Government for the emotional distressed she says the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents caused.

The woman says she was singled out for “extended search procedures” while preparing to board a plane to Amarillo in May 2008.

“As the TSA agent was frisking plaintiff, the agent pulled the plaintiff’s blouse completely down, exposing plaintiffs’ breasts to everyone in the area,” the lawsuit said.

“As would be expected, plaintiff was extremely embarrassed and humiliated.” The lawsuit claims that other employees laughed and made jokes about the incident “for an extended period of time”.

A high school basketball coach at Murrah High School in Jackson, Mississippi has been suspended and has been sued for allegedly whipping players for several different reasons.

Marlon Dorsey faced a lawsuit filed Tuesday for the actions against the players. Attorney Lisa Ross filed the lawsuit against Dorsey.

Ross claims to have a video taken with a cell phone of a player that shows the teammate bent over as Dorsey whipped him three times with a weight belt that weighed anywhere from five to ten pounds.

Ross also says that along with the whipping the boys were physically and verbally abused in other ways as well.

Dorsey has admitted to “paddling” the players.

This is what Dorsey had to say in a statement regarding the allegations: “I took it upon myself to save these young men from the destruction of self and what society has accepted and become silent to the issues our students are facing on a daily basis. I am deeply remorseful of my actions to help our students.”

A North Carolina state legislator says he supports the military, but a flyer prepared by his campaign could lead some to question which country’s.

Democrat Tim Spear’s campaign has apologised after inadvertently sending voters a leaflet showing actors in World War II-era German uniforms.

The firm that produced the advert touting his support for the military has accepted blame, US media reported.

The state Republican Party obtained the flyer and distributed it to the media.

A longtime federal judge was freed on a $50,000 bond Monday after his arrest on federal charges that he bought cocaine and other illegal drugs while involved in a sexual relationship with an exotic dancer for the past several months.

North Fulton Senior U.S. District Judge Jack T. Camp Jr. was arrested late Friday night near Sandy Springs. Camp, 67, is accused of purchasing cocaine and marijuana, along with prescription painkillers that which he shared with an exotic dancer he met last spring at the Goldrush Showbar in Atlanta, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit for his arrest.

Camp met the dancer, identified in the affidavit as CI-1, when he purchased a private dance from her, according to the affidavit by Special Agent Mary Jo Mangrum, a member of a task force investigating public corruption. He returned the next night and purchased another dance and sex from her, the affidavit said. The two then began a relationship which revolved around drug use and sex.

The city will change the lettering on every single street sign – at an estimated cost of about $27.5 million – because the feds don’t like the font.

Street names will change from all capital letters to a combination of upper and lower case on roads across the country thanks to the pricey federal regulation, officials said Wednesday.

By 2018, MADISON AVE. will become Madison Ave. and will be printed in a font called Clearview, the city Department of Transportation says.

The Federal Highway Administration says the switch will improve safety because drivers identify the words more quickly when they’re displayed that way – and can sooner return their eyes to the road.

Two Boiling Springs teachers are facing charges after deputies say they threw parties for teenagers that involved alcohol, marijuana and sex.

Sarah Jane Lindsay, 42, of 438 Maplecroft St., and Audrey Beidleman Grabarkiewicz, 44, of 230 Sandy Drive, were taken into custody by Spartanburg County sheriff’s deputies Monday.

Police had been investigating since a parent came forward with a complaint in July.

Lindsay, a teacher at Boiling Springs Elementary, is charged with nine counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and criminal sexual conduct with a minor between 11 and 14 years old.

Grabarkiewicz, a preschool teacher at Lake Bowen Baptist Church, is charged with 10 counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Investigators said Grabarkiewicz also had “sexual relations with some of the victims,” but, because they were older than 16, she will not be charged, according to a statement from the sheriff’s office.

Police in New Zealand burning off seized cannabis were left red-faced when a change in the wind sent smoke billowing over a primary school, it was reported Tuesday.

Officers in the South Island town of Picton were destroying cannabis and shredded paper in an incinerator at the local police station when the incident occurred, the Marlborough Express newspaper reported.

It said St Joseph’s School principal Peter Knowles noticed the smoke on Friday morning and complained to police, who immediately extinguished the fire.

Getty Images The end of a woman’s pleasure cruise turned into a nightmare in Fort Lauderdale when she was mistakenly arrested for prostitution just moments after she got off the ship Monday night. What’s worse is she was carrying her 9-month old son at the time.

Now the woman, Paola Londono of Orlando, is fighting a crime she didn’t commit and understandably upset about the entire ordeal.

“Her baby was taken from her arms,” Londono’s attorney, Jose Baez told the Sun-Sentinel.

“She insisted immediately that it was not her.”

The Broward Sheriff’s Office admits this was a case of mistaken identity. Once Londono appeared on the cruise ship’s guest list, it sent off red flags to authorities for a woman with the same name who was wanted for prostitution and drug possession in Osceola County.

The woman on the run was from the same area, and had the same name and birth date as Londono – with one noticeable difference. The cruise passenger is 32 and the alleged prostitute is 24.

“It’s extremely disappointing that in this day and age, this kind of issue can’t be resolved in a matter of seconds,” Baez said. The Osceola Sheriff’s Office confirmed there was an error and that Londono – the one on a cruise – should not have been arrested.

Russia’s finance minister has told people to smoke and drink more, explaining that higher consumption would help lift tax revenues for spending on social services.

Speaking as the Russian government announces plan to raise duty on alcohol and cigarettes, Alexei Kudrin said that by smoking a pack, “you are giving more to help solve social problems such as boosting demographics, developing other social services and upholding birth rates”.

“People should understand: Those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state,” he told the Interfax news agency.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin fired darts from a crossbow at a gray whale off Russia’s Far Eastern coast on Wednesday in the latest in a series of man-versus-nature stunts designed to cultivate the image of a macho leader.

Putin held his balance in a rubber boat that was being tossed around in choppy waters off the Kamchatka Peninsula, and eventually hit the whale with a special arrow designed to collect skin samples.

“I hit it at the fourth try!” a beaming Putin, kitted out in black-and-orange waterproof suit and black beanie, yelled to a camera crew from the boat.

A biologist with him displayed the skin sample and said it would allow experts to determine where the whale came from.

From the beginning of September, it will be illegal for the Russian capital’s supermarkets, shops and kiosks to sell vodka from 10pm to 10am.

The move will replace lax rules that theoretically forbid Moscow’s shops from selling the grain-based spirit from eleven at night to eight in the morning but which in practice allow them to sell vodka around the clock if they get a permit.

It comes as the Kremlin pushes ahead with the harshest anti-alcohol campaign since former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s draconian ban on vodka sales in 1985.

Mr Gorbachev, who became a hate figure for many ordinary Russians as a result of the ban, decreed that vodka could only be sold from two in the afternoon to seven at night.

His campaign prompted desperate drunks to rush to get their fix by imbibing perfume and other hazardous intoxicants instead.

Many of them died as a result.

Winston Churchill allegedly ordered a cover up of a close encounter between an RAF aircraft and a UFO during the Second World War because it would create “mass panic”, accordingly to newly-released files.

The claim that the then Prime Minister ordered details of the unexplained incident over the East Coast to be kept secret for at least 50 years was made by a scientist who said his grandfather was one of Churchill’s bodyguards.

The tale is told in newly declassified Ministry of Defence UFO files put online by the National Archives. Allegations of the cover-up emerged when the man, from Leicester, wrote to the Government in 1999 trying to find out more about the incident.

He described how his grandfather, who served with the RAF in the war, was present when Churchill and US General Dwight Eisenhower discussed how to deal with the UFO encounter.

The man, who is not named in the files, said Churchill was reported to have exclaimed: “This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one’s belief in the church.”

A year ago, Germany’s financial regulator BaFin warned that the toxic debts of the country’s banks would blow up “like a grenade” once hidden losses from the credit crisis caught up with them.

An internal memo at the time showed that BaFin feared write-offs might top €800bn (£688bn), twice the reserves of Germany’s financial institutions. Nobody paid much attention.

But the regulator’s shock move on Tuesday night to stop short trading on banks, insurers, eurozone bonds – as well as a ban credit default swaps (CDS) on sovereign debt – has left markets wondering whether the slow fuse on Germany’s banking system has finally detonated.

 BaFin spoke of “extraordinary volatility” and said CDS moves were jeopardising “the stability of the financial system as a whole”.

It is unsettling that the BaFin should opt for such drastic measures a week after EU leaders thought they had overawed markets with a €750bn rescue package and direct purchases of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish debt by the European Central Bank.

BaFin’s heavy-handed move seems to proclaim that the rescue has failed. “The market is left asking what skeletons are lurking in the cupboard,” said Marc Ostwald from Monument Securities.

The short ban follows a report by RBC Capital Markets that circulated widely in the City accusing German banks of failing to come clean on 75pc of their €45bn exposure to Greek debt.

The mayor of a southern Mexico town allegedly beat his wife during a mother’s day celebration, sparking national criticism and prompting federal authorities to urge the woman to file a complaint.

Local media reported Wednesday that Enrique Hernandez, mayor of Petantepec in southern Chiapas state, punched and kicked his wife and pulled her hair during a mother’s day concert Monday.

The national newspaper Reforma quoted another mayor at the event as saying Hernandez yelled at his wife, Estela Velasco, and then began hitting her at the public concert in the town of Pueblo Nuevo.

“I tried to help her but the mayor threatened me,” Pueblo Nuevo Mayor Juan Alberto Morales told Reforma.

“He beat her hideously. The lady didn’t want to get any medical attention.”

An official with the Chiapas state government’s Institute for Women said Hernandez’s wife confirmed the attack.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to discuss the case, said federal and state authorities urged Velasco to file a complaint against her husband but she had refused out of fear.

Extramarital Sex Leads to Earthquakes

An Iranian cleric has proclaimed that inappropriately dress women leading to extramarital affairs are the resons behind the devastating earthquakes that frequently rattle the country.

Speaking to worshipped at the Friday prayers here on Apr 16, senior cleric Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said, “Many women who dress inappropriately … cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes.”

“Calamities are the result of people’s deeds…We have no way but conform to Islam to ward off dangers,” the religious leader is quoted as saying in newspaper reports.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has canceled a hearing intended to grill CEOs who took a charge against profits because of the health care reform bill.  The cancellation came after they realized what everyone already knew – that the companies were required to do what they did because of accounting rules.

Waxman and others had reacted with outrage and accused the companies of doing it – in essence, to make health care reform look bad.

AT&T took a $1 billion charge and other companies including Caterpillar, John Deere, and Valero Energy, and 3M took hundreds of millions in charges because of the health care reforms.

The new bill ended a tax break intended to make it attractive for the companies to keep their retirees on company drug benefit plans instead of ending those plans and pushing them into Medicare which would have cost the government much more money. The Democratic memo cancelling the hearing notes, “These one-time charges were required by applicable accounting rules.

Under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles as determined by the FASB, companies are required to take a noncash charge against current earnings to recognize a tax liability for the estimated future tax effects of a new law.”

It goes on to read, “This noncash charge must reflect the entire present value of the loss of future tax deductions on the subsidy, and it must be taken in the period in which the law is enacted. Moreover, if the level of the impact is deemed “material” under SEC regulations, the company must file the report promptly following the triggering event, in this case the enactment of the law.”

Dressed in garish shorts and boxing gloves, orangutans trade punches and spin-kick each other in a boxing ring.

Horrifying footage shows cheering tourists drawn to the barbaric sport at a theme park called Safari World on the outskirts of Bangkok in Thailand.

The same company was banned from doing exactly the same thing just six years ago.

While an orangutan pretends to be knocked out of the boxing ring, others, dressed in bikinis are trained as round card girls and bell ringers.

The apes kickbox each other as a spectacle for tourists in a show lasting more than 30 minutes, before being returned to their dark cages.

It is not known how many orangutans have been captured and trained by Safari World.

Beer deliveries around Copenhagen were interrupted this week after hundreds of Carlsberg workers walked out when the brewer tightened rules on workplace drinking and removed beer coolers from work sites.

The warehouse and production workers in Denmark are protesting against the company’s new alcohol policy, which allows them to drink beer only during lunch hours in the canteen.

Previously, they could help themselves to beer throughout the day, from coolers placed around the site. The only restriction was that they could not be drunk at work.

“It was up to each and everyone to be responsible,” Jens Bekke, a company spokesman said. “

There has been free beer, water and soft drinks everywhere,” he added.

“Yesterday, beers were removed from all refrigerators. The only place you can get a beer in future is in the canteen, at lunch.”

The pastor of a church that organized a massive Easter egg drop is defending the event after some parents reported that it turned into chaos.

On Saturday, 60,000 eggs were dropped from a helicopter at the Rochester Fairgrounds while thousands of people waited below.

Some of the eggs included tickets for valuable prizes, such as flat-screen TVs and Nintendo Wiis.

Some people said the scrum on the ground when the eggs started falling was dangerous.

“I think it was like chaos,” said Sarah Gallo, of Stratham, N.H.

“I saw some people kneeing people, and it was, like, really, really dangerous, I thought.”

Children were left crying and traumatised after a school role play in which one of their teachers was apparently shot dead in the playground.

The pupils, aged ten to 13, saw their religious education teacher run across a field and fall to the ground following a loud bang. Some were so upset that they were sick afterwards, parents said.

The stunt was part of a science lesson designed to teach children how evidence is collected in criminal investigations. They were not told it was fake until ten minutes after the event.

The ’shooting’ happened on Tuesday. More than 300 pupils were called to the hall and warned there was a gun somewhere in the school before being sent back to their classrooms.

Five minutes later, the fire alarm went and the children queued up in the playground. Only a handful knew it was fake.

Three teachers – one brandishing what looked like a gun – were seen running across the school field before shots were heard. Teacher Richard Kent fell to the ground and played dead.

The children were then ushered back to their classrooms as other teachers pretended to tend to Mr Kent. It was ten minutes before it was revealed the scene was fake.

David Cameron is caught up in an extraordinary ‘dwarfgate’ row with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The dispute centres on a claim that Mr Cameron made a remark about ‘hidden dwarfs’ while discussing a photograph showing himself with Mr Sarkozy – who is seven inches shorter than the Tory leader.

The French government was reportedly furious about the comment.

And Shadow Chancellor George Osborne allegedly fuelled the Franco-Tory war by describing a box placed beneath a speaker’s lectern as a ‘Sarkozy box’, before bursting into a fit of giggles.

The jibes, made over a period of three days, led to French officials remonstrating with British counterparts, according to BBC2’s Newsnight.

Greece should consider selling some of its uninhabited islands to cut its debt, according to political allies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Josef Schlarmann and Frank Schaeffler told Germany’s Bild daily that the Greek state should sell stakes in all its assets to raise more cash.

Greek PM George Papandreou is due to meet Mrs Merkel in Berlin later this week for talks about the crisis.

Mr Papandreou has already announced a strict austerity programme.

Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks – and the Acropolis too!” says the headline in the Bild newspaper.

It sounds like the sort of daydream induced by too much ouzo, but the idea comes from two senior politicians in Europe’s biggest economy.

Mr Schlarmann is a senior member of Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Mr Schaeffler is an MP for the Free Democrats – the junior partner in the centre-right coalition.

An investigation is underway after a child was heard giving instructions to a pilot from the air-traffic control tower at one of America’s busiest airports.

In a recording that has been confirmed as genuine by the Federal Aviation Administration, the child makes five transmissions from John F Kennedy International Airport — with the pilots in each case all responding enthusiastically to him.

One conversation between the tower at JFK Airport in New York and a pilot goes as follows:

JFK TOWER: Jet Blue 171 contact departure.

PILOT: Over to departure jet blue 171, awesome job.

The child appears to be supervised, with a controller explaining the reason for the young voice to the pilot.

JFK TOWER: That’s what you get guys when the kids are out of school. (laugh)

A firestorm over racially and ethnically charged incidents at several University of California campuses spread Tuesday as UC San Diego announced a KKK-style hood was found on campus and students in Los Angeles and Irvine demonstrated against intolerance.

“What kind of campus promotes an environment that allows people to think it’s acceptable to target people for their ethnicity, gender or sexuality?” said Corey Matthews, one of about 200 mostly minority UCLA students who held a lunchtime rally.

“It’s something about the tone of the environment that allows this.” At UC Irvine, about 250 people gathered for a “student solidarity speakout” to condemn the recent spate of racist incidents at UC San Diego that targeted black students and another incident last month at UC Davis, which targeted a Jewish student with a swastika carved on her door, said Marya Bangee, an event organizer.

The protests came on the same day UC San Diego announced the discovery of a white pillowcase fashioned into a KKK-style hood—the third racist incident around the campus in as many weeks—and a day after UC Santa Cruz officials found an image of a noose scribbled on the inside of a bathroom door.

Officials found the hood, which bore a hand-drawn circle and cross, on a statue of children’s book author Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, outside the main campus library late Monday. A rose had been inserted between the statue’s fingers.

Gov. David A. Paterson personally directed two state employees to contact the woman who had accused his close aide of assaulting her, according to two people with direct knowledge of the governor’s actions.

Mr. Paterson instructed his press secretary, Marissa Shorenstein, to ask the woman to publicly describe the episode as nonviolent, according to a third person, who was briefed on the matter.

That description would contradict the woman’s accounts to the police and in court. Mr. Paterson also enlisted another state employee, Deneane Brown, a friend of both the governor and the accuser, to make contact with the woman before she was due in court to finalize an order of protection against the aide, David W. Johnson, the two people with direct knowledge said.

Ms. Brown, an employee of the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, reached out to the woman on more than one occasion over a period of several days and arranged a phone call between the governor and the woman, Mr. Johnson’s companion.

Last fall, a woman went to court in the Bronx to testify that she had been violently assaulted by a top aide to Gov. David A. Paterson, and to seek a protective order against the man.

In the ensuing months, she returned to court twice to press her case, complaining that the State Police had been harassing her to drop it.

The State Police, which had no jurisdiction in the matter, confirmed that the woman was visited by a member of the governor’s personal security detail.

Then, just before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer.

She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.

Many details of the governor’s role in this episode are unclear, but the accounts presented in court and police records and interviews with the woman’s lawyer and others portray a brutal encounter, a frightened woman and an effort to make a potential political embarrassment go away.

A Ugandan pastor who screened same-sex pornography in a church to try to bolster support for proposed anti-homosexuality legislation has been condemned by gay rights groups.

Martin Ssempa, one of the main backers of a bill that would impose the death penalty for some offenders, aired the explicit slideshow to several hundred people during a church service in Kampala yesterday.

Explaining his decision to display the images, the evangelical preacher said it was necessary to educate people “about what homosexuals do”.

He told the BBC’s Network Africa programme: “In Africa, what you do in your bedroom affects our clan, it affects our tribe, it affects our nation.”

While Ssempa represents the extreme end of widely held homophobic views in Uganda, he does carry strong influence.

On his website he describes himself as “consultant to the government of Uganda”, and his congregants yesterday included David Bahati, the MP who submitted the private member’s bill to parliament last year.

She survived the Holocaust, but a tenacious life story wasn’t enough for 92-year old Eta Eckstein to keep her Brooklyn landlord at bay.

While out of her apartment in a rehab facility, the grandmother got evicted.

“It’s unspeakable,” says Eta’s grandson, Idan. “They just threw her belongings onto the street.” Eta’s family got no explanation from the landlord

“Family heirlooms, photographs, my dad’s birth certificate, diplomas. It’s all gone. Everything,” Eckstein told NBCNewYork.com.

The “fight club” scrap at a Queens elementary school was uncovered only after the father of one of the combatants heard his son whining that he didn’t have enough fans in his corner.

Tomas Rivera said that he overheard his son complaining to his sparring partner — as the pint-sized pugilists played video games Thursday evening — that he wasn’t getting enough applause during their bout at PS 65 in Ozone Park.

“I heard him go, ‘Oh, they were cheering you more than they were cheering me,’ ” the father told The Post.

Rivera then quizzed his son, also named Tomas, and the 10-year-old spilled the beans about the clash, which was allegedly set up by Joseph Gullotta, the kids’ fourth-grade teacher.

 Rivera said his son initially had a beef with another student when Gullotta told the boy, “Don’t fight with him because I like you guys too much.”

Instead, the teacher allegedly told his son to take out his aggression on longtime pal Justin Stokel, 9.

More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers.

The work computer of one regional supervisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed more than 1,800 attempts to look up pornography in a 17-day span: “It was kind of distraction per se,” he later told investigators. But he wasn’t alone. More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers, according to records obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act and other public documents.

The activities of porn-surfing SEC workers, a small fraction of the overall work force, have been serious enough to warrant a mention in each of the past four semiannual reports sent to Congress by the SEC’s office of inspector general.

In response to the open records request by The Washington Times, the inspector general’s office provided more than 150 pages of records and transcripts on the investigations, but declined to identify the employees involved. The office noted that disclosure of the employees’ names “could conceivably subject them to harassment and annoyance in the conduct of their official duties and private lives.”

Allan Bachman, education manager for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, said such problems are hardly unique to the SEC. He also said the findings are troubling aside from “the egregious nature of what they’re doing.”

Two Bronx men were locked up and left to rot in a filthy jail cell for nearly a week after a pair of cops mistook their candy for a bag of crack.

The “drugs” were finally tested five days later and determined to be popular Coco (coconut) Candy. The charges were dropped.

The trouble began the night of Jan. 15, as José Pena, a 48-year-old plumber, and his longtime pal and colleague Cesar Rodriguez, 33, were headed to a party, and decided to stop at a bodega on 181st Street and the Grand Concourse.

When they came out, cops were waiting and asked to search their Ford minivan.

“I said ‘Go search.’ I even opened the door,” Rodriguez told The Post. An officer rummaged around, came out holding a “Hello Kitty” sandwich bag, and shouted “Bingo!” the men said.

“It’s only candy!” Rodriguez said, as the cops handcuffed him and Pena, and several other police cars rushed to the scene.

Rodriguez said he buys a 50-cent bag of Coco Candy, a hard coconut-based treat, almost every day. Because it easily crumbles, he puts it in a sandwich bag.

“Can you test it? Can you taste it?” Rodriguez asked the cops.

“Shut up!” they replied.

France’s highest administrative body has ruled that double-hyphenated, double-barrelled surnames such as Bruni–Sarkozy must be abolished after imposing the unwieldy spelling on tens of thousands of children in the past four years.

In 2005, the French state – famous for laying down rigid language rules – declared that all new double-barrelled surnames must be spelt with two hyphens: the offspring of Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy, would in theory take the surname Bruni–Sarkozy.

The idea was supposed to distinguish, for administrative reasons, between old double-barrelled names, like Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa – the French president’s full surname – and new, so-called “composed” names.

These cropped up from 2002, when it became possible in France to simply create a “family name” by sticking together the mother’s and father’s surnames.

But parents horrified at the ugly double hyphen launched a crusade to overturn the decision.

The Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative watchdog, has now sided with the single dash camp in a definitive ruling, saying the state had exceeded its legal powers and butchered the French language into the bargain with the double hyphen

The Slovakian government has insisted the authorities in Ireland were aware a passenger was carrying plastic explosives in his bag on a flight to Dublin last Saturday morning before the plane even took off for Ireland.

A strongly worded statement has been issued by the Slovakian Ministry of the Interior defending its handling of the debacle and criticising the actions of the Garda.

The statement also criticised what it claimed was the inaccurate reporting of the case by the media in Ireland.

It pointed out that contrary to media reports in Ireland, plastic explosives had been planted in the luggage of just one passenger, and not eight as has widely been reported.

It said the explosives were planted in the luggage of a passenger, without his consent, at Poprad-Tatry airport in eastern Slovakia on Saturday morning as part of an airport security exercise.

Hat tip to Una!

Albay Governor Joey S. Salceda on Tuesday issued a strong warning against a local official who is reportedly escorting tourists within the designated danger zone around Mayon Volcano.

Disaster officials were also furious after receiving reports that City Councilor Celoy Chan has been allegedly renting his all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) to foreign tourists.

“It’s stupidity,” said Salceda. “We have been spending a lot of money and exerting all our efforts to clear the danger zones and there he is, disregarding what was agreed upon.”

“If he does not stop, we will take action against him,” the governor warned.

As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.

TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them.

The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.

Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer.

Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.

“It literally showed up in my box,” Frischling told The Associated Press.

“I do not know who it came from.” He said he provided the agents a signed statement to that effect.

President Barack Obama has apparently issued a long-awaited executive order on classification that fulfills one of his campaign promises by setting up a National Declassification Center to oversee the release of historical documents.

But the announcement, ironically, is shrouded in secrecy and confusion.

“While the Government must be able to prevent the public disclosure of information that would compromise the national security, a democratic government accountable to the people must be as transparent as possible and must not withhold information for self-serving reasons or simply to avoid embarrassment,” National Security Council official William Leary wrote in a blog post announcing the order.

Oddly, that blog post was dated and time stamped at 4:44 p.m. Monday but does not appear to have shown up on the White House website until a little before noon Tuesday.

Adding to the mystery, the link to the executive order was dead at that time. Then, shortly after this reporter inquired about that dead link, the entire blog post disappeared.

The order reportedly sets deadlines for declassification of information exempted from automatic 25-year declassification requirements and eliminates a veto the intelligence community held over declassification orders from an interagency panel that hears appeals of such cases.

A city correction officer took a cell phone photo of his co-worker sleeping on duty, leading to disciplinary action against both of them.

The photo shows guard Nadja Green, in uniform, leaning back in a chair with her arms folded on her chest, eyes closed and mouth open. An inmate is standing next to her, making a “peace” sign.

The photo, published in the New York Post on Tuesday, came to the attention of Department of Correction officials last week, said Deputy Commissioner Stephen Morello. Once it was authenticated, Green was transferred from her post at the Rikers Island infirmary and removed from supervising inmates.

The department also did the same to Claudel Barrau, the officer who took the photo. Phone numbers for Green and Barrau could not be found. Green has been in the department for 4 1/2 years; Barrau for 18 years.

It’s not the lifestyle of a typical federal judge: Five or six vodka cocktails during lunch; gambling with borrowed money; bankruptcy under a phony name; cash, trips or home repairs from lawyers; and a bail bondsman with business before his court.

Witnesses in the congressional impeachment case against U.S. District Court Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. paint a jarring portrait of the former Louisiana state judge appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by President Clinton.

As Congress wrapped up several weeks of evidence-gathering hearings this week, legal experts who testified before a House task force suggested Judge Porteous is a clear candidate to become just the eighth federal judge in U.S. history to be impeached and convicted by Congress.

Lawmakers appear poised to take their advice and bring charges early next year, setting up a historic trial in the Senate.

It wasn’t a state dinner, and they didn’t crash it on purpose. Still, a Georgia couple who showed up at the White House a day early for a tour somehow wound up at an invitation-only breakfast with President Barack Obama and the first lady.

It left the White House once again explaining how people who were not on an event guest list wound up being ushered into the presidential mansion anyway.

The improbable adventure of Harvey and Paula Darden, Obama supporters from Hogansville, Ga., took place on Veterans Day, two weeks before Virginia socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi infamously crashed the Obamas’ state dinner for the prime minister of India.

The Dardens mistakenly showed up a day early for a tour scheduled through their congressman. The White House and Secret Service both said the Dardens went through the appropriate security screenings and were allowed into the breakfast as a courtesy because there were no public tours the day they arrived.

That explanation was news to Harvey Darden, 67, a retired pharmacist, who said he and his wife never were told about the breakfast. They thought they were simply starting their tour until they were ushered into the East Room, offered a buffet spread and told they’d be meeting the president.

“The further we got into the White House, the more surprised we were,” Darden told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

“My wife looked at me and I looked at her, and I said, ‘You know, I don’t know if we’re in the right place.’”

PRINCE Philip mocked a hero Army cadet blinded by a terrorist explosion by poking fun at his dress sense.

The Queen asked brave Stephen Menary how much sight he had left, but before he could answer, the gaffe-prone Duke of Edinburgh joked: “Not a lot, judging by the tie he is wearing”.

Prince Philip’s tasteless joke was met with an embarrassed silence all-round and Her Majesty gave her husband a disapproving glare.

Hero Stephen was just 14 when he picked up a torch bomb that was hurled into a Territorial Army barracks in White City, west London, by the Real IRA in 2001.

He was almost blinded and his left hand was blown off. His mum Carol, 48, said: “Prince Philip is completely out of touch with reality, he is from another world.”

SO far, the journey of Michaele and Tareq Salahi from unknown arrivistes to notorious party crashers has focused on the apparent slipups of the Secret Service and the White House social secretary.

But to fully grasp the ongoing conniption inspired by the episode, you need to understand that when Ms. Salahi strutted onto the South Lawn in that bright red lehenga, she and her husband breached far more than a secure perimeter. They also trampled countless protocols that are the social, business and networking bedrock of official Washington.

Essentially, the couple used the mixed martial arts approach to upward mobility in a town that still cherishes the Marquess of Queensberry rules. And it looks like the town will be spluttering about it for quite some time.

“Washington is a small ‘c’ conservative kind of society, in which people are aware of the traditions and boundaries of appropriate behavior,” said Wayne Berman, a Republican lobbyist.

“It’s a city about rules, about conventions and if there’s no keg at the party, it doesn’t get crashed.” Of course, if the Salahis had slipped past the bouncers at, say, P. Diddy’s birthday bash and then posted the evidence online, the feat would never have been noticed. But a magnetometer is not simply a velvet rope that beeps, and just because Washington has long been called Hollywood for ugly people doesn’t mean that what works in Hollywood — or New York, or anywhere else, for that matter — will work in Washington.

To set the scene, this comes from the October 8 war room meeting on Afghanistan, with McChrystal teleconferenced in from Kabul to explain what he’d been doing since receiving his orders in March. Smart power:

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a PowerPoint slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of the participants asked. In the first place, it was impossible — the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a major part of the population. “We don’t need to do that,” Gates said, according to one participant. “That’s an open-ended, forever commitment.”

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan — the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.

“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what in effect the commander understands he’s been told to do.’ Everybody said, ‘He’s right.’”

“It was clear that Stan took a very literal interpretation of the intent” of the NSC document, said Jones, who had signed the orders himself. “I’m not sure that in his position I wouldn’t have done the same thing, as a military commander.” But what he created in his assessment “was obviously something much bigger, and more longer-lasting . . . than we had intended.”

They told him — in his official orders — to come up with a plan to eliminate the enemy and, dummy that he is, he thought that meant he was supposed to come up with a plan to eliminate the enemy. Then they told him he didn’t have to. Six months later.

Gordon Brown was snubbed by badly injured Afghan veterans when they closed curtains round their beds during a hospital visit and refused to speak to him.

 More than half the soldiers being treated at the Selly Oak hospital ward in Birmingham either asked for the curtains to be closed or deliberately avoided the prime minister, according to several of those present.

The soldiers, who have sustained some of the worst injuries seen in Afghanistan, described his visit as “opportunistic” and a “waste of time”.

Furious about equipment shortages and poor compensation for their injuries, one soldier said: “It is almost as if we are the product of an unwanted affair … he has done nothing for us.”

If you were wondering what happens to 29-year-old men who still play with Lego, take Jeremy Bell as an example.

The partner at digital marketing company Teehan+Lax was surrounded by heavily armed tactical officers, cuffed and held against the wall of his Richmond St. W. office — until, that is, the cops found the gun he had been holding in front of the window about 90 minutes earlier was a pile of blocks.

The BrickGun Semi-Automatic gun (purchased online from BrickGun, “designers and builders of the world’s most realistic custom Lego weapon models”) arrived at Bell’s office Wednesday.

The lifetime Lego fan finished assembling his toy — complete with build-it-yourself magazine — at 5:40 p.m.
It was in one piece for about 10 minutes before it fell apart, he recalled yesterday.

 But the tenant in an apartment about six metres across the way didn’t see that last part. And so the tenant called the cops.

At about 7 p.m., as Bell and some colleagues played a video game, the Emergency Task Force moved in.

“They were screaming in the hallway for me to come out,” Bell said. “When I went out there and I saw there was an officer kind of crouched down in the stairwell, it was clear what was going on.”

Town halls are installing cameras inside suburban homes to spy on the neighbourhood. The Big Brother tactic – which is allowed under the anti-terrorist Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – is being used by Croydon council in South London to catch those suspected of ‘anti-social behaviour’.

The CCTV cameras are placed inside the house of a willing resident, but trained on the street. If deemed successful, the £1,000 cameras could be installed across the country to catch low-level offenders.

The London borough has become the first to test out placing CCTV cameras inside homes Charles Farrier, of the campaign group No-CCTV, said: ‘There is no evidence they act as a deterrent and we should be concentrating on the root problem anyway and working to gel our communities.’

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, said: ‘Unless the public are aware of where these cameras are, I believe this council should be taken to court for a breach of human rights.’  Critics say the scheme has echoes of the East German Stasi secret police, which recruited members of the public as spies.

Those who would trade freedom for security deserve (and obtain) neither.

Citing Time magazine’s selection of NASA’s proposed Ares rockets “The Best Invention of the Year” based on a single purported “test flight” of the vehicle on October 28th, the Space Frontier Foundation congratulated NASA on its propaganda triumph.

The Foundation pointed out that the rocket launched by NASA was not an Ares 1 at all, but a dummy vehicle cobbled together from pieces of other space systems, an elaborate mock-up shaped and painted to look like the actual vehicle, which isn’t even scheduled to fly for another 6 years.

“While many reporters know that Ares 1 is far behind schedule and likely to be canceled as an unnecessary and expensive distraction from real exploration missions, apparently Time magazine fell for this publicity hoax. There was no boy in the balloon and there most definitely was no Ares rocket launched in Florida last month,” said the Foundation’s Rick Tumlinson.

“If anyone at Time had bothered to go beyond the NASA and contractor flacks, they would have found out what most people in the space community already knew. This was a marketing ploy designed to save a program threatened with imminent cancellation.”

Time’s assertion that the Ares 1 rocket is “The best and smartest and coolest thing built in 2009″ is a simple error of fact and should be immediately retracted. There was no Ares 1 vehicle built in 2009.

“Even if a real Ares 1 launch vehicle were ever built and launched, it would still be an obscenely wasteful duplication of existing commercial and military rockets, which doesn’t seem too smart or cool during our federal budget meltdown,” Tumlinson added.

Writing last week in the Huffington Post, Apollo Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin put into words what is common knowledge in the space launch community: “Turns out the solid booster was – literally – bought from the Space Shuttle program, since a five-segment booster being designed for Ares wasn’t ready. So they put a fake can on top of the four-segmented motor to look like the real thing. Since the real Ares’ upper stage rocket engine, called the J-2X wasn’t ready either, they mounted a fake upper stage. No Orion capsule was ready, so – you guessed it – they mounted a fake capsule with a real-looking but fake escape rocket that wouldn’t have worked if the booster had failed. Since the guidance system for Ares wasn’t ready either they went and bought a unit from the Atlas rocket program and used it instead. Oh yes, the parachutes to recover the booster were the real thing — and one of the three failed, causing the booster to slam into the ocean too fast and banging the thing up. So, why you might ask, if the whole machine was a bit of slight-of-hand rocketry did NASA bother to spend almost half a billion dollars (that’s billion with a “b”) in developing and launching the Ares 1-X? The answer: politics.”

It’s deflating news for the sheriff at the center of the investigation into the Colorado balloon hoax.

The Boulder County district attorney announced Wednesday that he would personally investigate allegations that Larimer County Sheriff John Alderden improperly conducted his probe into the alleged balloon hoax committed by the Heene family.

A lawyer for Richard Heene wrote a letter to the Larimer County district attorney on Monday, accusing Alderden of breaking a Colorado law that prevents officials from publically disclosing information in a case involving charges of child neglect.

Alderden is seeking charges against Richard and Mayumi Heene of orchestrating a hoax on Oct. 15 that their 6-year-old son, Falcon, was trapped on board a wayward weather balloon. The Heenes allegedly launched the balloon from their home to drum up interest in a potential reality television show. Falcon Heene was later found safe in the family’s attic.

Alderden’s spokeswoman told The Associated Press Wednesday that the sheriff denies any wrongdoing in the Heene investigation.

One of Russia’s most powerful tycoons — barred entry to the U.S. for years due to U.S. government concerns about possible ties to organized crime — visited the country twice this year under secret arrangements made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska met with FBI agents in August and earlier this month as part of a continuing criminal probe, according to two administration officials. The focus of that probe couldn’t be learned.

Mr. Deripaska used the opportunity of his recent U.S. visits to meet with top executives of U.S. investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The aluminum giant he controls, UC Rusal, is preparing for an initial public offering, a vital part of Mr. Deripaska’s efforts to save his debt-burdened business.

The U.S. trips came at an opportune moment to help reassure bankers his visa difficulties may be easing. Mr. Deripaska’s visa troubles are a potentially sensitive issue for investors, bankers say.

Mr. Deripaska also stopped in Detroit to meet with top executives at General Motors Co. to discuss the sale of a stake in its Adam Opel AG unit to a Russian-backed consortium that includes Mr. Deripaska’s AO GAZ auto maker, people familiar with the visit said.

The State Department, which rules on requests for U.S. visas, hasn’t publicly said why it previously denied entry to Mr. Deripaska, and declined to comment on the recent visits.

Isn’t a diplomat supposed to be–you know–diplomatic? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to think so.

On her current visit to Pakistan, she managed to insult both her own government and Pakistan’s in the space of a few minutes.

The Associated Press has reported on interviews and a Q and A session that Clinton gave in Islamabad. I came across it via The Corner, where John Hannah was appalled by this partisan attack by Clinton on her own government:

As a way of repudiating past U.S. policies toward Pakistan, Clinton told the students “there is a huge difference” between the Obama administration’s approach and that of former President George W. Bush. “I spent my entire eight years in the Senate opposing him,” she said to a burst of applause from the audience of several hundred students. “So to me, it’s like daylight and dark.”

One can only agree with Hannah’s comment: Does anyone advising President Obama and the secretary of state really believe that this kind of partisanship and trash-talking abroad about another American president is going to buy us much long-term goodwill among either our friends or our adversaries? Do they imagine that this sort of thing really helps to advance U.S. national interests?

Interestingly, that paragraph has now been deleted from the version of the AP account to which Hannah linked, although it can still be found elsewhere. But the linked version adds this report of Clinton slandering the government of Pakistan, which is equally appalling, but for different reasons:

While U.S. officials have said they believe Osama bin Laden and senior lieutenants have been hiding in the rugged terrain along the border with Afghanistan, Clinton’s unusually blunt comments went further as she suggested that Pakistan’s government has done too little to act against al-Qaida’s top echelon.

“I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” Clinton said in an interview with Pakistani journalists in Lahore. “Maybe that’s the case. Maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”

Parents are being banned from playing with their children in council recreation areas because they have not been vetted by police.

Mothers and fathers are being forced to watch their children from outside perimeter fences because of fears they could be paedophiles.

Watford Council was branded a ‘disgrace’ yesterday after excluding parents from two fenced-off adventure playgrounds unless they first undergo criminal record checks.

The local council has told parents that they are no longer welcome at two play areas because they have not been vetted by police Children as young as five will instead be supervised by council ‘play rangers’ who have been cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau.

Councillors insist they are merely following Government regulations and cannot allow adults to walk around playgrounds ‘unchecked’.

The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden.

The decision to use Stockholm’s rabbit cadavers as bioenergy to warm Swedes living in Värmland doesn’t sit well with Stockholm-based animal rights activists.

“Those who support the culling of rabbits surely think it’s good to use the bodies for a good cause. But it feels like they’re trying to turn the animals into an industry rather than look at the main problem,” Anna Johannesson of Vilda kaniners värn (‘Society for the Protection of Wild Rabbits’) told the local Vårt Kungsholmen newspaper.

Every year, the city of Stockholm kills off thousands of rabbits in an effort to protect trees and shrubbery in the city’s extensive network of parks and green space.
…
But rather than simply disposing of the dead rabbits, the city instead froze them for eventual transport to a special heating plant in Karlskoga in central Sweden, where the bunny bodies are then burned as a form of bioenergy.

He had been squatting inside an unexploded mine which had remained undisturbed for the past 60 years. But the lobster nicknamed Lionel paid the ultimate price when Royal Navy divers failed to coax the stubborn crustacean out of his home – which tragically became his watery grave.

After the divers stumbled upon the 600lb mine off Swanage, Dorset, they took pictures of it and alerted Portland coastguard, who contacted the Royal Navy bomb disposal unit.

The experts inspected the device and found Lionel inside. He refused to be temped out of his make-shift house and delivered a nasty nip to the frogmen.

The bomb squad had no choice but to set charges to the mine with Lionel still inside and, after setting up a 1,000m cordon, blew it up. The huge explosion sent a 50ft plume of water shooting skywards and shook the nearby town of Swanage.

Lionel the lobster sadly did not survive.

Most world leaders try to avoid repeating gaffes. Not Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian Prime Minister has called President Obama “tanned” again — but this time he did not miss the opportunity to joke about the First Lady’s skin colour as well.

After his return from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Mr Berlusconi told a rally of conservative supporters that he was bringing greetings from someone in the United States.

“What’s his name? Some tanned guy. Ah, Barack Obama,” he said. He then added: “You won’t believe it, but the two of them sunbathe together, because the wife is also tanned.”

One of France’s highest-profile prisoners escaped from jail on Wednesday by packing himself into a cardboard box.

Embarrassed officials were at a loss to explain how Jean-Pierre Treiber, 45, a double murder suspect, managed to elude detection in the box he had built himself at a workshop in the high security prison of Auxerre, Burgundy.

With its hidden human cargo, the box was loaded with dozens of others onto a lorry for delivery to the Yonne region, southeast of Paris. During the 100-mile journey, he broke free and leapt from the lorry.

The driver only realised there was a problem once he had reached his destination, when he spotted a hole in the tarpaulin covering the boxes, some of which were flattened. Police have sealed off roads and a huge area of woodland in the hunt for Treiber using helicopters and sniffer dogs.

There has been traffic chaos in two Paris suburbs after their feuding mayors declared the same busy road one-way, but in opposite directions.

Patrick Balkany, the conservative mayor of Levallois-Perret, initially made the D909 one-way to reduce the amount of commuter traffic through his district.

But Gilles Catoire, the Socialist mayor of neighbouring Clichy-la-Garenne, said this increased congestion in his area. He made his section of the road one-way in the opposite direction.

With the contradictory road-signs in place, the unsurprising result was gridlock, prompting the deployment of municipal and national police to direct traffic away from the area.

“What Clichy has done is not a long-term solution, but it is a response to a unilateral decision by the town of Levallois,” Clichy’s deputy mayor, Alain Fournier, was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

San Francisco has paid at least $150,000 for Kenny Walters in the past year. He isn’t employed, has an arrest record as long as his hair, and can often be found passed out in a doorway on Haight Street.

Kenny Walters’ job is to get drunk.

 He’s certainly not alone. “Chronic inebriants” are a grim and disturbing fact of life in San Francisco. They also cost the city millions.

The frustration is that the public service network – police, fire and medical professionals – doesn’t seem to make a dent when it comes to people like Walters. There are suggestions, like a pilot program for high-impact users at the Department of Public Health, or the Community Justice Center to target frequent users, but nothing seems to get traction.

A five-year study found that 225 high ambulance users cost the city an average of $13 million annually, said Maria X. Martinez, a deputy director at the Department of Public Health.
…

Recently Walters, who came from Arizona a year and a half ago, was curled up in the fetal position on the sidewalk near Masonic and Haight. Tourists with a camera walked past him; some peered down to see if he was breathing.

“Basically he comes out here and drinks himself to this point every day,” police Officer John Andrews said. “It’s like the movie ‘Leaving Las Vegas,’ ” in which where Nicolas Cage’s character goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death.

A man who roasted his pet dog to enjoy as a meal with his family and friends escaped prosecution after authorities in New Zealand determined the animal was killed humanely.”We were in a dilemma at seeing something we were fairly upset about — but being in a position of being able to do absolutely nothing about it,” said Garth Halliday, of the Auckland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, on Monday.

The SPCA — which investigates acts of animal cruelty and presses charges — responded to the house in Mangere, south of Auckland. There, officers found the charred body of a Staffordshire terrier cooking in a barbecue pit.

“They had had the dog for a while, but the man told us his wife was getting tired of the dog. He was becoming a pest,” Halliday said.

“They decided to get rid of him. But instead of bringing him to the SPCA — which we recommend — they decided to have a meal, and cook and eat him.”

Child safety campaigners have reacted with horror after it emerged that a convicted paedophile pensioner is still being prescribed Viagra on the NHS.

Serial paedophile Roger Martin, 71, is still receiving the libido-enhancing drug despite a long history of abuse resulting in his latest sex attack on an 11-year-old girl.

The sickening revelation came to light as Martin was sentenced at Peterborough Crown Court for the attack in December 2008.

Widower Martin, who has a history of sex offending dating back more than 30 years, was ‘reluctantly’ spared jail because of his age and ill-health.

But Judge Nicholas Coleman highlighted Martin’s continuing use of the drug as a matter of public interest and revealed there is nothing the authorities can do to stop him.

Probation officers cannot force the paedophile to stop taking Viagra if his doctor, who is reliant on the patient volunteering information about his past, continues to prescribe it.

A Bakersfield woman says she has been hounded by county animal control officers to license her dog. Funny thing is, the pooch officials were so concerned about is a stuffed animal.

Dottie Elkin lives by herself in a quaint home in south Bakersfield. For the past few months the 83-year old says she’s hated getting the mail, due to letters she’s receiving from the Kern County Animal Control Department.

“I told them I do not have a dog, it’s a stuffed dog,” Elkin said. That’s right, Elkin has a stuff “guard dog” named Wolf, keeping watch at her front door.

For the last six months she’s been getting letters from animal control asking her to license the dog or face a $200 fine.

YOUNG, inexperienced government regulators were so wowed by Bernard Madoff’s ritzy Midtown headquarters that they asked about job openings and dropped off resumes while missing clear evidence he was running a massive Ponzi scheme, a new book claims.

“No wonder they never found anything,” Madoff firm secretary Elaine Solomon told author Andrew Kirtzman for his book, “Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff,” The Post’s Dan Mangan reports.

In the book out today, Solomon, speaking out for the first time since Madoff’s epic downfall last winter after years of operating his multibillion-dollar scam, said the arch-fraudster got anxious every time investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission came knocking at his Third Avenue office in the Lipstick Building.

“But he needn’t have worried,” Kirtzman writes. “He and his aides were amazed at the youth and experience of the regulators who showed up at their door.” Solomon said, “They would walk in and we’d look at them and we’d say to each other, ‘What do you think their combined age is, 12?’

Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year, officials with state-run companies said on Friday.

Officials said they were lowering the prices of 24 basic goods to help Cubans get through the difficulties provoked in part by the global financial crisis and three destructive hurricanes that struck the island last year.

Cuba’s financial reserves have been depleted by increased spending for imports and reduced export income, which has forced the communist-led government to take extraordinary measures to keep the economy afloat.

“The corporation has taken all the steps so that at the end of the year there will be an important importation of toilet paper,” an official with state conglomerate Cimex said on state-run Radio Rebelde.

The shipment will enable the state-run company “to supply this demand that today is presenting problems,” he said. Cuba both imports toilet paper and produces its own, but does not currently have enough raw materials to make it, he said.

A Malaysian teacher forced a student to smoke 42 cigarettes for four hours as punishment after a cigarette and lighter were found in his locker, a news report said Thursday.

A school official confirmed that the English teacher subjected the student to the unusual punishment, but said the teenager was made to smoke fewer than 42 cigarettes.

He declined to elaborate. He said the teacher was upset when she found a model student, 16-year-old Mohamad Alif Arifin, had a cigarette and lighter in his locker in the school in the northern island of Langkawi.

The boy was also smelling of cigarettes, said a school official, who declined to be named citing protocol. He said the school apologized to the boy’s uncle, who lodged a police report when he found out about the punishment.

Four of the top five models sold so far under the U.S. “cash for clunkers” program, aimed at boosting the auto industry, are made by foreign automakers, according to Transportation Department data.

Ford Motor Co.’s Focus was the top seller, followed by Toyota Motor Corp.’s Corolla, Honda Motor Co.’s Civic and Toyota’s Prius and Camry, data from the department showed today.

Initial clunkers legislation sponsored by Representative Betty Sutton, an Ohio Democrat, would have barred discounts for new vehicles manufactured overseas and offered higher payments for cars and trucks produced in the U.S. than for those made in Canada and Mexico.

The “Buy American” provision was dropped from the final legislation because of opposition from foreign automakers and free-trade advocates who said it would conflict with U.S. obligations to the World Trade Organization.

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday.

“The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”

The Marines’ ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next.

New York has a long history as a magnet for the poor and the homeless. Even the famous poem on the Statue of Liberty, addressed to the world’s “huddled masses”, exhorts: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me!”

But now? Not so much. A New York scheme to send hundreds of homeless people on a one-way ticket out of town has led to more than 550 families relocated since 2007. Under the scheme, initiated by New York’s mayor Mike Bloomberg, the city pays for bus and plane tickets, or petrol vouchers, to destinations varying from cities elsewhere within the US mainland to places like South Africa or Puerto Rico.

The scheme is aimed at saving the costs of putting up homeless families in expensive shelters. It only happens if a family can show they have relatives to stay with elsewhere who are willing to look after them. Then New York will stump up the cash and make the arrangements for them to get out of town, often within a few days of agreeing to leave.

The level of help varies. One couple from Michigan were given $400 (£240) in petrol cards so that they could drive home after a failed quest to find New York jobs. Another family of five got free plane tickets to Paris and then free rail tickets when they arrived to get them to the northern French town of Granville. Though the travel expenses can often cost thousands of dollars, city officials say it is cheaper than housing families in shelters which can cost around $36,000 a year.

Being laid off in Florida isn’t surprising news these days, but what happened to poor Scott Janke doesn’t seem quite right.

 Janke, who was the esteemed town manager of Fort Myers Beach, was fired Tuesday because of his wife’s job — or rather the kinds of jobs she did on film.

Janke’s wife, Anabela Mota Janke, is a porn star better known by the name of Jazella Moore. If you’re familiar with her work, then you can see the problem at hand. The couple has been married for about a year, but an adult industry website outed Moore as Janke’s undercover porn wife.

And then the firestorm of debates on political correctness and public decency ensued.

Commissioners voted unanimously to fire Janke, who by all accounts — even those of the commission — had done a stand up job running the town.

The French Army were branded ‘imbeciles’ today after an artillery exercise caused a massive fire which destroyed dozens of houses and left hundreds homeless.

Rather than improving the marksmanship of the Foreign Legion, the shelling led to mass evacuations in a suburb of Marseilles.

More than 300 people have been evacuated from their homes and more than 1,000 acres of bush were left blazing, as 170 firefighters backed by helicopters and waterbombing aircraft fought the fire.

As it continued to blaze today, military chiefs were making panicked apologies for the disaster.

Hundreds of competing lawmakers screamed and wrestled in South Korea’s parliament Wednesday as a rivalry over contentious media reform bills descended into a brawl that sent at least one to a hospital.

Lawmakers from the ruling Grand National Party occupied the speaker’s podium in a bid to quickly pass the bills aimed at easing restrictions on ownership of television networks. Opposition parties responded by stacking up furniture to block ruling party members from entering the main hall of the National Assembly.

The parliament plunged into chaos, as lawmakers scuffled and shouted abuse at each other. Women lawmakers from the rival parties joined in the melee, grabbing each other by the neck and trying to bring opponents to the floor.

YTN television network reported some were injured. One woman lawmaker was seen lying on a blue mattress with nurses checking her blood pressure. The lawmaker was later taken to a hospital, YTN said.

Ukraine has banned the hit comedy “Bruno” on the grounds that its “unjustified” showing of genitals and homosexual sex could have a damaging effect on Ukrainians’ moral health, officials said Wednesday.

The ban is not the first time “Bruno” star Sacha Baron-Cohen has run into trouble in the former Soviet Union after his previous creation, the Kazakh journalist Borat, caused controversy in the Central Asian state.

 The film, which stars Cohen as a gay Austrian fashionista with a habit of making outrageous remarks, has already hit the top spot at the North American box office. But Ukraine’s film censors were less impressed, with nine members out of the culture ministry’s 14-person commission voting for a total ban.

An investigation is under way in Australia over claims that navy sailors competed with each other to bed their female colleagues for cash prizes.

According to Channel Seven news, sailors on board HMAS Success put a cash value on each woman’s head.

Sleeping with a female officer or a lesbian, or having sex in a strange place, won more money, the report said.

The Defence Department confirmed that a number of individuals had been sent back to Australia for interviews.

Indian defence scientists are planning to put one of the world’s hottest chilli powders into hand grenades.

They say the devices will be used to control rioters and in counter-insurgency operations.

Researchers say the idea is to replace explosives in small hand grenades with a certain variety of red chilli to immobilise people without killing them.

The chilli, known as Bhut Jolokia, is said to be 1,000 times hotter than commonly used kitchen chilli.

An Arkansas prisoner nearly died after guards left him lying naked in his own feces for a weekend, and while investigating the incident corrections officials found that guards received lap dances while on the job, documents obtained by The Associated Press show.

The prison system fired Lt. John Glasscock, who supervised guards on duty at the maximum-security Tucker Unit prison. One sergeant was fired, another was demoted and three others received written warnings, according to a report stamped “Sustained (Allegation is True).” The report said Glasscock gave false information to investigators and did substandard work “resulting in injury and/or property damage.”

The disclosure of the inmate’s near death comes after two convicted murderers escaped a different state prison by wearing guard uniforms and officers at the Tucker Unit fatally shot a man who officials said fled from a contraband checkpoint.

Combined, the incidents raise new questions about a troubled state prison system described by a federal judge 40 years ago as a “dark and evil world.”

A family has been warned their mail could be halted after postmen refused to deliver to their house – because of a vicious kitten.

Royal Mail chiefs wrote to Ken Ridge claiming that six-month-old Illy had attacked a postal worker.

 Mail deliveries to the house could now be suspended as a result of the attack on the woman, he was told.

 Mr Ridge, 65, who lives in Clapham, South London, with his 30-year-old son Bradley, said: ‘We were not around when this happened, but it seems some mail was put through the letterbox and their hand was scratched.

‘Illy is only a kitten and I am sure she was just playing. ‘Then we got a letter from the mail delivery office warning our deliveries could be stopped.’

An inventory of deadly germs and toxins at an Army biodefense lab in Frederick found more than 9,200 vials of material that was unaccounted for in laboratory records, Fort Detrick officials said Wednesday.

The 13 percent overage mainly reflects stocks left behind in freezers by researchers who retired or left Fort Detrick since the biological warfare defense program was established there in 1943, said Col. Mark Kortepeter, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

He said the found material included Korean War-era serum samples from patients with Korean hemorrhagic fever, a disease still of interest to researchers pursuing a vaccine.

Other vials contained viruses and microbes responsible for Ebola, plague, anthrax, botulism and host of other ailments, Kortepeter said in a teleconference with reporters.

The family of an Australian Aboriginal elder who died after being “cooked” in the back of a prison van on a scorching hot day is considering suing, they said.

A coroner Friday dismissed treatment of the 46-year-old man as inhumane and a “disgrace,” saying he would ask prosecutors to consider criminal charges over his death from heatstroke in Western Australia in January 2008.

The elder, known only as Mr Ward as his first name was withheld for cultural reasons, was transported 360 kilometres (225 miles) to jail in temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 F) in a van with faulty air conditioning.

Ward, who was arrested a day earlier for drink driving, spent four hours in the searing heat between the mining towns of Laverton and Kalgoorlie, suffering third-degree burns where his body touched the metal floor, the inquest heard.

Western Australia Coroner Alastair Hope found that Ward was effectively “cooked” to death and heavily criticised the state prisons department, the private security firm that operated the van and the two guards who escorted Ward.

An Arizona inmate who died after spending nearly four hours in the desert heat was left in an outdoor holding cell for twice as long as she should have been, the state prisons director said Wednesday.

Three corrections officers have been put on paid leave while the state investigates Wednesday’s heat-related death of Marcia Powell, who was left in her unshaded cell in 103-degree heat at a prison in Goodyear.

“The death of Marcia Powell is a tragedy and a failure,” prisons director Charles Ryan said.

“The investigation will determine whether there was negligence and will tell us how to remedy our failures.”

Powell, who was serving a 27-month sentence for prostitution, was placed alone in the cell while being moved to an onsite detention unit. Ryan said officers placed Powell in the cell after a disturbance at the detention unit, but he would not elaborate on the nature of the disturbance.

Staff Sgt. Bartek Bachleda doesn’t consider himself a hero, but passengers on a recent jumbo jet flight might beg to differ.

One of 300 passengers on a United Airlines flight from Chicago, Illinois, to Tokyo, Japan, in April, Bachleda noticed white “smoke” billowing from the left side of the Boeing 747-400 jet on takeoff and then again at cruising altitude of over 30,000 feet. He said he was sure it was a leak, a big one that could lead to a potentially dangerous situation.

Bachleda, 30, should know. He serves in an air refueling squadron in the U.S. Air Force. He videotaped the midair vapor from his window seat and tried to warn a flight attendant. But at first, she paid him no heed.

“When I initially hit the call button, she thought maybe I wanted something, and she said, ‘Sir, I’m handing out drinks, I’ll be right back with you,’ ” Bachleda said.

The envelopes fill white plastic tubs, stacked on hundreds of shelves in the basement of the Library of Congress. They’re spreading to a ground-floor space that once housed the gift shop and are clogging offices on the fourth floor. And each day, the mail trucks bring about a thousand more.

A serious logjam in the U.S. Copyright Office has created a growing mountain of paper applications, more than the staff can process. Like the marching buckets of water in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the envelopes just keep coming, threatening to flood the operation.

The problem has tripled the processing time for a copyright from six to 18 months, and delays are expected to get worse in coming months. The library’s inspector general has warned that the backlog threatens the integrity of the U.S. copyright system. The irony is that the slowdown stems from a new $52 million electronic process that is supposed to speed the way writers and others register their literary, musical or visual work.

This investment turned out to be as risky as it was risque.

A sex theme park that featured explicit exhibits of genitalia and sexual culture is being demolished before it can even open, a government spokesman in southwestern China said.

The park, christened “Love Land” by its owners, went under the wrecking ball over the weekend in the city of Chongqing, said the spokesman, who like many Chinese bureaucrats would give only his surname, Yang.

Yang refused to give the reason for the demolition or other details. However, photographs of the adult-only park had circulated widely on the Internet over the weekend, prompting widespread mockery and condemnation.

Exhibits had included giant-sized reproductions of male and female anatomy, dissertations on how the topic of sex is treated in various cultures and what the official China Daily newspaper called “sex technique workshops.”

The park’s main investor, Lu Xiaoqing, had earlier claimed that the attractions sought only to boost sexual awareness and improve people’s sex-lives.

Riot police broke up several gay rights demonstrations in Moscow on Saturday, hauling away scores of protesters hours before the capital hosted a major international pop music competition.No injuries were reported, but the detentions could damage Russia’s desire to be seen as a modern nation as it holds the finals of the Eurovision song contest, a cultural event televised around the world. City officials had warned that they would not tolerate marches or rallies supporting the rights of gays and lesbians, but activists had targeted Moscow and the Eurovision contest to press their claims that Russia officially sanctions homophobia.

Moscow police spokesman Anatoly Listovetsky said 40 people were detained, but media reports said up to 80 had been seized. None of the protests in central Moscow took place near the capital’s Olimpiysky Sports Complex, where the Eurovision concert being held live Saturday night.

Police seized gay rights advocates as well as some religious and nationalist protesters who staged counter-demonstrations. They also took away gay rights activists for talking to reporters, and ripped the bra and shirt off one female protester.

More details available here: Russian Riot Police Arrest Scores of Gay Rights Protesters

The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job.

Dr. Xiaoming Li, the researcher conducting the program, is director of the Prevention Research Center at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. The grant, made last November, refers to prostitutes as “female sex workers”–or FSW–and their handlers as “gatekeepers.”

“Previous studies in Asia and Africa and our own data from FSWs [female sex workers] in China suggest that the social norms and institutional policy within commercial sex venues as well as agents overseeing the FSWs (i.e., the ‘gatekeepers’, defined as persons who manage the establishments and/or sex workers) are potentially of great importance in influencing alcohol use and sexual behavior among establishment-based FSWs,” says the NIH grant abstract submitted by Dr. Li.

Terrified residents at a Corpus Christi, Texas, state school for the mentally disabled were forced to be part of a brutal “fight club” operated by night shift employees, who made videos of the sessions with their cell phones, the newly released videos show.

Mentally disabled residents forced to brawl as employees prod and laugh. On the videos employees can be seen and heard laughing and prodding the residents to fight.

One resident is seen on the video trying to run away from his attacker and a large group of employees and residents tracking him through the halls. When cornered, he wails and moans and tells the employees, “I will behave.”

The videos were discovered by police in March when one of the school employees left his phone at a hospital and it was turned over to police. In an effort to find its owner, officers saw the disturbing videos.

The U.S. government is pouring billions into General Motors in hopes of reviving the domestic economy, but when the automaker completes its restructuring plan, many of the company’s new jobs will be filled by workers overseas.

According to an outline the company has been sharing privately with Washington legislators, the number of cars that GM sells in the United States and builds in Mexico, China and South Korea will roughly double. The proportion of GM cars sold domestically and manufactured in those low-wage countries will rise from 15 percent to 23 percent over the next five years, according to the figures contained in a 12-page presentation offered to lawmakers in response to their questions about overseas production.

OFFICIALS in a county in central China have been told to smoke nearly a quarter million packs of locally made cigarettes annually or risk being fined, state media reports.

The Gong’an county government in Hubei province has ordered its staff to puff their way through 230,000 packs of Hubei-produced cigarette brands a year, the Global Times said.

Departments that fail to meet their targets will be fined, according to the report. “The regulation will boost the local economy via the cigarette tax,” said Chen Nianzu, a member of the Gong’an cigarette market supervision team, according to the paper.

The measure could also be a ploy to aid local cigarette brands such as Huanghelou, which are under severe pressure from competitors in neighbouring Hunan province, according to the paper.

Fort Lauderdale Rep. Alcee Hastings nearly turned C-Span into XXX-Span when he ran through a laundry list of sex fetishes on the House floor in D.C. on Thursday.

The outraged Hastings was apparently mad that the odd array of sex acts and fetishes were listed in an amendment to a hate crimes bill that he had to read over.

The Florida pol gave a warning before he ran through the list of nearly 25 different sexual terms – part of a two-minute rant worthy of late-night talk show television.

 “I apologize to our transcriber, but I want to put into the record what we have to put up with in the Rules Committee,” Hastings said. OK, now run and get your dictionary because you are going to need it to keep up.

Hastings list included but was not limited to: asphyxiphilia, apotomnophilia and autogynophilia (a quick Web search gave the definition as “a form of sexual response in biological males characterized by sexual arousal over the idea of being or becoming female.” Translation: jones-ing to change one’s name from Bob to Betty).

The White House apologized late Monday after the U.S. military – without public warning – buzzed New York City with one of the presidential planes trailed by an F-16 fighter jet. Not even Mayor Bloomberg knew they were coming.

Flying in as low as 1,000 feet to 1,500 feet above New York City and taking photographs along the way, the planes circled the Statue of Liberty and flew over Manhattan, Staten Island, and New Jersey – then vanished.
Before they were gone, hundreds of frightened people had jammed the emergency lines, thousands of terrified people evacuated from buildings in the city and across the river in Jersey, and many New Yorkers had flashbacks to the 9/11 attacks.

“I approved a mission over New York,” Louis Caldera, director of the White House military office, said in a hastilly-prepared statement. “I apologize and take responsibility for any distress that flight caused.

An unexpected surprise in their son’s backpack caught some Yakima Washington parents off guard. It was human waste, with a note attached from the boy’s teacher. And the school isn’t denying that’s what happened.

“I’m still kinda in shock over this, because why would somebody do this? It’s disgusting,” said Jason, the father of the little boy. It all started on Friday at Apple Valley Elementary, when kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Graham called Jason and told him her classroom was “stinky” and asked if it could possibly be his son.

Jason’s son had a couple of accidents in the past. So when the teacher called, he says he told her right away, there was an extra set of clothes in his son’s bag. But when the 5-year-old came home, the boy was still wearing his original outfit, and Jason says his son was completely clean.

It wasn’t until Jason’s wife emptied her son’s backpack that they got a big surprise.

“She found a clear plastic baggie with a piece of fecal matter wrapped up in some a brown paper towel with the note on it. ‘This little turd was on the floor in my room’ And that’s all it says. Q: Nothing else? A: Nothing else. If it was his did she see him do this? Or did she follow him around to make sure this was his, did she see it drop out? Or just assume it was his because he had an accident a few months ago?”

Valerik Kashkin, a clown in the Moscow State Circus, was performing in Liverpool’s Sefton Park last Saturday when he fell from a three metre high slack wire, injuring his foot.

Although he continued to perform for the rest of the show, when he went to hospital later that evening, he was told he had broken the metatarsal bone in his left foot.

When he returned to the circus he was told by management he could no longer wear the size-18 shoes because they compromised his health and safety.

Mr Kashkin features in the circus’ reworking of the Rasputin tale, The Monk’s Dream.

His routine includes dressing himself whilst walking on a wire, dress himself within a hoop of fire, and playing a drum-kit, trumpet and double-bass all at the same time.

But he is now worried performing in his regular sized footwear will lose impact on the audience.

Dutch commandos have freed 20 fishermen whose vessel was hijacked by Somali pirates and used to launch an attack against a tanker in the Gulf of Aden.

The captives, all Yemeni, were freed when Dutch forces chased pirates back to the fishing dhow by following the smaller craft used in the attack.

The dhow was being used by the pirates as a “mother ship” from which to launch armed attacks on commercial shipping.

Meanwhile, officials suspect a Belgian-registered ship may have been attacked.

The Dutch took action after receiving a distress call from the Greek-managed tanker.

Intercepting the pirates, the troops then boarded the fishing vessel and freed the 20 Yemenis.

…

The pirates were set free, the Associated Press news agency reports, because under Dutch law they could not be held at sea under the circumstances in which they were captured.

Goldman Sachs is attempting to shut down a dissident blogger who is extremely critical of the investment bank, its board members and its practices.

The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.

Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled “Facts about Goldman Sachs” – the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago.

In that time Mr Morgan, a registered investment adviser, has added a number of posts to the site, including one entitled “Does Goldman Sachs run the world?”. However, many of the posts relate to other Wall Street firms and issues.

According to Chadbourne & Parke’s letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site “violates several of Goldman Sachs’ intellectual property rights” and also “implies a relationship” with the bank itself.

Washington state environmental regulators say they’ve finally found the source of pollution that has been fouling a creek near Vancouver Lake: the agency’s own sewer pipes.

City workers have discovered that an office building’s sewer line was mistakenly connected to a storm drain, rather than the municipal sewer main.

The 1970s-vintage building houses Washington state Department of Ecology regional offices, as well as those of the Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

A Polish politician has criticised his local zoo for acquiring a “gay” elephant named Ninio who prefers male companions and will probably not procreate, local media reported today.

“We didn’t pay 37 million zlotys ($11 million) for the largest elephant house in Europe to have a gay elephant live there,” Michal Grzes, a conservative councillor in the city of Poznan in western Poland, was quoted as saying.

“We were supposed to have a herd, but as Ninio prefers male friends over females how will he produce offspring?” said Grzes, who is from the right-wing opposition Law and Justice party.

Hat tip to Kara!

The drive to bring good manners back to football has reached new heights after a referee issued a yellow card to a player for “breaking wind” as a penalty was being taken.

The official deemed the act “ungentlemanly conduct” and booked the player responsible. However Chorlton Villa, who conceded a goal on the second take, went on to win the match 6-4 against local rivals International Manchester FC at Turn Moss in Stretford, Manchester, last Sunday.

Ian Treadwell, manager of Chorlton Villa for the past eight years, said his team had learnt lessons from the game in which three players were dismissed and two were booked.

While President Obama took off for home around Tuesday 2 pm ET from Baghdad aboard Air Force One, the bulk of the journalists who followed him on his European journey found themselves stuck in Turkey.

Several hours before the president took flight, the United crew providing transportation for the White House Press Corps’ return discovered a problem with the United 777 scheduled to leave a few hours later.

It turns out the motor that moves the captain’s left chair forward to reach the controls was broken.

Military researchers have dressed live pigs in body armor and strapped them into Humvee simulators that were then blown up with explosives to study the link between roadside bomb blasts and brain injury.

For an 11-month period that ended in December, researchers subjected pigs and rats to about 200 blasts, according to Pentagon documents and interviews. The explosions have ranged in intensity, wounding some of the pigs and killing others. Roadside bombs are the top killer of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The research on pigs has determined that body armor does not worsen brain injury, said Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which conducted the study. The military feared body armor would deflect the force of blasts toward the head and increase the risk of brain injury.

An Italian scientist predicted a major earthquake around L’Aquila weeks before disaster struck the city on Monday, killing dozens of people, but was reported to authorities for spreading panic among the population.

The first tremors in the region were felt in mid-January and continued at regular intervals, creating mounting alarm in the medieval city, about 100 km (60 miles) east of Rome. Vans with loudspeakers had driven around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their houses after seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani predicted a large quake was on the way, prompting the mayor’s anger.

Giuliani, who based his forecast on concentrations of radon gas around seismically active areas, was reported to police for “spreading alarm” and was forced to remove his findings from the Internet.

A former quantitative analyst at Harvard Management Company, the university’s once-vaunted endowment manager, tells the Harvard Crimson she was fired for voicing concern to then-university president Larry Summers’ chief of staff about the money manager’s risky use of derivatives the traders didn’t understand.

The episode dates back to 2002, when analyst Iris Mack, whose website identifies her as the second African American woman to earn a Harvard PhD. in applied math (and someone who likes primary colors) joined the much-venerated Harvard Management Company, which invests the university’s then $18 billion endowment, to find what she termed a “frightening” state of affairs.

“The group I was working for had no background whatsoever to be working on [derivatives],” Mack says, adding that, to her knowledge, several of her colleagues were not licensed securities traders.

“Sometimes the ways they handled even basic Black-Scholes models [widely used to price stock options] were puzzling.”

So Mack took inventory of the abuses — high employee turnover, lax risk management practices and a “low level of productivity in the workplace” were among others, and detailed them in an email to Marne Levine, Summers’ chief of staff and a Treasury staffer on the Obama Transition Team. (Summers was the only person to whom Meyers reported, and according to a recent Forbes story he personally ordered the university’s biggest derivatives trade, a purchase of interest rate swaps that cost the university billions this year.)

 A month after sending her email, Mack was fired after a meeting in which the endowment fund’s then-chief furnished her the emails and castigated her for making “baseless accusations.” She later sued for wrongful termination and settled out-of-court with the university. But she claims the practices “shocked” her, and — the punchline is — she had joined the company from Enron.

A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them.

The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.

By the time firefighters got into the house in Doncaster, Michelle Colly, 25, her husband, Mark, 29, and son, Louis, 3, were dead. Their daughter, Sophie, 5, was taken to hospital and believed to be critically ill.

Davey Davis, 38, a friend of the family, said: “It was the most harrowing thing I have ever witnessed. Michelle was at the bedroom window yelling, ‘Please save my kids’ and we wanted to help but the police were pushing us back and not allowing us near. We were willing to risk our lives to save those kiddies but the police wouldn’t let us.

“Tempers were running very high, particularly with the women who were there, but the police were just saying we have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety.

So here’s what the White House is telling American reporters – and by extension the American people – about Britain. It’s laid out in an inch-thick “press kit”, with the Seal of the President of the United States emblazoned on the cover, handed out to each of us on board the White House press charter en route from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to Stansted.

The United Kingdom, we are told, is “slightly smaller than Oregon”. As for the the British climate, it is “generally mild and temperate” and “subject to frequent changes but few extremes of temperature”. A “group of islands close to continental Europe”, Britain has been “subject to many invasions and migrations”.

We’re taken through the Roman invasion (”brought more active contacts with the rest of Europe”), the Norman invasion (led to “active involvement in European affairs…for several hundred years”) and various travails with the Welsh, Scots and Irish before the British empire reached its zenith in Victorian times. Then it all started to go wrong.

“The losses and destruction of World War I, the depression of the 1930s, and decades of relatively slow growth eroded the United Kingdom’s preeminent international position of the previous century”.

Those fretting about the demise of the term “special relationship” might not be reassured by this briefing book. There’s talk of a “strong bilateral relationship”, of the UK being “one of the United States’ closest allies” and of “close coordination” and “bilateral cooperation” between two countries who “continually consult on foreign policy”. Everything except “special”.

President Obama’s nominee for secretary of the Navy was involved in a divorce that drew national attention for his secret taping of a conversation between his wife and his family priest that he used against her in court proceedings.

The nominee, Ray Mabus, is a former governor of Mississippi and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and he served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Mr. Mabus, a Democrat, was a strong supporter of Mr. Obama in the campaign last year.

 In 1998, as Mr. Mabus and his wife, Julie (now Julie Hines), sought to work out their marital problems, he surreptitiously recorded a meeting the couple had with the Rev. Jerry McBride, a mutual friend.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, is fighting for her political future following the disclosure that she paid for the cost of pornographic films with her taxpayer-funded allowance.

Miss Smith apologised for submitting the £10 bill for the two adult films, which were watched by her husband, Richard Timney, while she was away in London. She promised to repay the money.

Mr Timney, who is also paid from public funds to work as his wife’s Parliamentary assistant, made a public apology for the “embarrassment” he had caused her.

During her recent visit to Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an unexpected stop at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and left a bouquet of white flowers “on behalf of the American people,” after asking who painted the famous image.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was miraculously imprinted by Mary on the tilma, or cloak, of St. Juan Diego in 1531. The image has numerous unexplainable phenomena, such as the appearance on Mary’s eyes of those present in the room when the tilma was opened and the image’s lack of decay.

Mrs. Clinton was received on Thursday at 8:15 a.m. by the rector of the Basilica, Msgr. Diego Monroy. Msgr. Monroy took Mrs. Clinton to the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which had been previously lowered from its usual altar for the occasion.

After observing it for a while, Mrs. Clinton asked “who painted it?” to which Msgr. Monroy responded “God!”

SINCE devolution a decade ago, MSPs have broken new ground in tackling major health issues such as smoking, alcohol and obesity.

But now they have turned their focus to the wellbeing of pet tropical fish, which are becoming obese and suffering a lack of social interaction. Holyrood’s petitions committee yesterday called on the Scottish Government to investigate the conditions in which Siamese fighting fish, otherwise known as Betta splendens, are kept in pet shops.

MSPs agreed that rules preventing the spectacular fish from being kept in goldfish bowls rather than proper tanks were too lax and poorly enforced.

US President Barack Obama has indirectly praised former French president Jacques Chirac’s fierce opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the online edition of the daily Le Figaro reported on Thursday. In a letter described by Chirac as ‘very nice,’ Obama wrote, ‘I am certain that we will be able to work together, in the coming four years, in a spirit of peace and friendship to build a safer world.’

Nine employees are under investigation over allegations of new fights among mentally disabled residents of the troubled Corpus Christi State School, a state lawmaker said Saturday night.

State Rep. Abel Herrero said the workers are on leave while officials look into complaints that the staff members did nothing to intervene in the fights involving residents Wednesday and Thursday.

The new allegations follow six staffers being charged earlier this month with injury to a disabled person over separate fights allegedly organized for the staff’s entertainment. Videos of those fights were found on a cell phone.

“Appalling,” said Herrero, a Corpus Christi-area Democrat. “Completely unacceptable. It’s important that the state exhaust every resource to once and for all ensure the safety and well-being of our state’s most vulnerable population.”

Maybe you don’t spend your weekends perusing SEC filings, so perhaps you missed the one in November in which AIG, the world’s most unloved big company, reported that it planned to distribute $469 million in bonuses to some employees. This was after the government began pouring billions into AIG to save it from the fate of Lehman Brothers but long before populist outrage over the bonuses exploded this week.

And maybe you aren’t a regular reader of Rep. Elijah Cummings’s blog on the Huffington Post. His Nov. 27 entry, “A Bonus by Any Other Name Still Stinks,” complains that “just one day after being told that top AIG executives would be forgoing bonuses this year,” he had been “shocked” to learn that they would be getting “cash awards” as “retention payments.”

But surely you didn’t miss the Oct. 8 article in this very newspaper headlined “AIG Spa Trip Fuels Fury on Hill; Pressing Executives to Concede Mistake, Lawmakers Blast Them About Bonuses.” Or how about the New York Times on Oct. 17: “A.I.G. Agrees to Let New York Review the Propriety of Its Pay Packages”?

In short, you knew about this, if you cared. So why didn’t your self-righteous populist fury boil over before now? One of my favorite things about the news is the randomness of what becomes a big story. This is far from the first time some scandal that was reported with a yawn on Page D13 popped up months later on Page 1.

While not exactly a film buff, Gordon Brown was touched when Barack Obama gave him a set of 25 classic American movies – including Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins on his recent visit to Washington.

Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem. The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words “wrong region” came up on his screen.

Although he mournfully had to put the popcorn away, he is unlikely to jeopardise the special relationship – or “special partnership”, as we are now supposed to call it – by registering a complaint.

We are not making this up:

Barack Obama was elected commander-in-chief promising to run the most transparent presidential administration in American history. This achievement and the overall promise of his historic administration caused the National Newspaper Publishers Assn. to name him “Newsmaker of the Year.”

The president is to receive the award from the federation of black community newspapers in a White House ceremony this afternoon. The Obama White House has closed the press award ceremony to the press.

Mexico’s government condemned Forbes Magazine on Thursday for putting the country’s most wanted man, a violent drug lord, on its annual list of the world’s richest people.

Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman made the prestigious business magazine’s list for the first time on Wednesday, sharing the 701st spot at $1 billion in assets. The amount was based on his estimated share of drug shipments to the United States.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora accused U.S.-based Forbes of coming to the defense of a criminal and said it was “deplorable” for the publication to compare Guzman with honest and law-abiding business people.

Guzman, who is just 5 feet tall, escaped from prison in 2001 and set off a wave of killings across Mexico in an attempt to dominate the country’s highly lucrative drug trade into the United States.

You’d think President Obama had booted the Brits out of America — again!

London newspapers are howling over a string of alleged snubs by Obama to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during his visit to Washington last week — including a squabble over presidential gift-giving.

 ”President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain,” sniffed The Daily Telegraph Friday.

 ”His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling.”

The list of complaints is longer than the Magna Carta: Obama canceled a planned, podium-to-podium news conference with Brown (actually, none was ever scheduled); he recently removed a bust of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the Oval Office; and he gave gifts to the Brown family that were “about as exciting as a pair of socks,” one Fleet Street wag whined.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opened her first extended talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov by giving him a present meant to symbolize the Obama administration’s vow to “press the reset button” on U.S.-Russia relations.

She handed a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift: a red button on a black base with a Russian word peregruzka printed on top.

 “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton asked.

“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said.

Instead of “reset,” Lavrov said the word on the box meant “overcharge.”

To many in Old Town Alexandria, the sex shop that opened recently on King Street is nothing short of scandalous, a historical desecration just blocks from the boyhood home of Robert E. Lee. But to Michael Zarlenga, it’s justice.

Zarlenga spent $350,000 on plans to expand his hunting and fishing store, the Trophy Room. He worked with city officials for almost two years and thought he had their support — until the architectural review board told him he couldn’t alter the historic property.

Furious and out of money, Zarlenga rented the space to its newest occupant, Le Tache.

“I can’t say I didn’t know it would ruffle feathers,” said Zarlenga, 41. “Actually, I was hoping for a fast-food chain because I thought that would be more annoying to the city.”

How’s this for action. Northern Trust — the bank TMZ exposed this week for throwing a series of lavish parties and concerts in L.A, is giving back the $1.6 billion in federal bailout money! We had our cameras out as the bank hosted fancy dinners for hundreds of clients and employees.

We had video of the Sheryl Crow concert it threw after closing down the House of Blues. And then there were concerts by Chicago, as well as Earth, Wind & Fire … and the Tiffany gift bags for the ladies. The story triggered a furor in D.C … Congressman Barney Frank demanded that Northern Trust repay the money it blew.

If Der Spiegel is correct, the German finance ministry is drafting rescue plans to prevent default on the edges of the eurozone leading to a full-blown collapse of Europe’s monetary system.

This is an entirely appropriate policy in economic terms. One dreads to think what would happen if the world’s twin reserve currency were to disintegrate at this stage. But what about the solemn pledge to voters by Germany’s political elites – promiscuously given over the years – that monetary union would never leave them on the hook for the debts of half Europe?

The vast imbalances that have been allowed to build up under the seductive protection of EMU leave German taxpayers facing bail-out liabilities that exceed the cost of reparations after the First World War, in proportional terms. The political ground has not been prepared for this. EMU was foisted on the German people without a referendum, in the face of deep public scepticism and scathing criticisms by the professoriat. This failure to secure a mandate for such a revolutionary undertaking is coming back to haunt them.

HE WAS one of Ireland’s most reckless drivers, a serial offender who crossed the country wantonly piling up dozens of speeding fines and parking tickets while somehow managing to elude the law.

So effective was his modus operandi of giving a different address each time he was caught that by June 2007 there were more than 50 separate entries under his name, Prawo Jazdy, in the Garda Pulse system. And still not a single conviction.

In the end, the vital clue to his identity lay not with Interpol or the fingerprint database but in the pages of a Polish-English dictionary. Prawo jazdy means driving licence.

Hat tip to Una!

A vulnerable patient starved to death in an NHS hospital after 26 days without proper nourishment. Martin Ryan, 43, had suffered a stroke which left him unable to swallow. But a ‘total breakdown in communication’ meant he was never fitted with a feeding tube. It was one of a number of horrific cases where the NHS fatally failed patients with learning difficulties, a health watchdog is expected to rule later this month.

The Army mistakenly sent letters addressed “Dear John Doe” to 7,000 family members of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, unleashing calls from troubled relatives and prompting a formal apology yesterday from the Army’s top general.

“The indication that anyone would perceive that a hero is not significant, that they would not direct this personally to them, is shattering,” said Merrilee Carlson, whose son, Sgt. Michael Carlson, died in Baqubah, Iraq, on Jan. 24, 2005. “While it’s a simple mistake, it’s a very tragic mistake,” said Carlson, who learned of the letter from other families and expected to receive one yesterday.

The letters, mailed late last month by the Army’s Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operation Center in Alexandria, contained information about private organizations that assist families of the fallen. But in what the Army called a printing error by a contractor, the letters did not contain specific names and addresses; instead, they had the placeholder greeting “Dear John Doe.”

A group of AIG execs went on an $87,000 partridge hunt at a posh English manor last week – on the US taxpayers’ dime and at the same time the debt-riddled insurance giant was accepting another nearly $40 billion from the government to shore it up, according to Britain’s News of the World.

The party included four AIG execs – including at least two from New York, the paper said.

AIG’s general manager in Frankfurt, Sebastian Preil, flippantly told one undercover reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011 – but the shooting was great today, and we are all relaxing fine,” the newspaper said.

The two New York execs were Jeffrey Malkovsky, a senior director in Manhattan, and John Roberts, who advises AIG, the paper said. Roberts came with Hilary James, manager of the Bristol Plaza hotel in New York.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said political leaders are discussing the idea of closing the world’s financial markets while they “rewrite the rules of international finance.” “The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,” Berlusconi said today after a Cabinet meeting in Naples, Italy. A solution to the financial crisis “can’t just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell as much 8.1 percent in early trading and pared most of those losses after Berlusconi’s remarks. The Dow was down 0.5 percent to 8540.52 at 10:10 in New York. Group of Seven finance ministers and central bankers are meeting in Washington today, and will stay in town for the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings this weekend. European Union leaders may gather in Paris on Oct. 12, three days before a scheduled summit in Brussels, Berlusconi said today, while Group of Eight leaders may hold a meeting on the crisis “in coming days,” he said.

A suburban New Orleans legislator is revisiting the controversial idea of paying poor women to undergo sterilization.

 State Rep. John LaBruzzo told New Orleans Citybusiness, in an article published this week, that the program he is thinking about would be voluntary. It would pay poor women $1,000 to have their fallopian tubes tied.

“I’ve got a stack of e-mails for and against,” LaBruzzo said. “Two-to-one in favor of something being done.”

An Iowa community college president resigned less than a week after a photo was published appearing to show him pouring beer into a young woman’s mouth.

The school’s board of trustees on Thursday unanimously approved Robert Paxton’s resignation. It also approved a severance package that officials said was valued at about $400,000.

Mark Crimmins, the president of the board, said although the incident happened in Paxton’s private life, “it reflected poorly on the college.”

A Connecticut youth baseball team with a phenomenal 9-year-old pitcher has been disqualified because its team is too good.

The team, Will Power Fitness, has an 8-0 record thanks in large part to pitcher Jericho Scott, the New Haven Register reports. His pitching is so fast and accurate, the Liga Juvenil De Baseball De New Haven asked the team’s coach, Wilfred Vidro, to replace him so he wouldn’t frighten other players.

“The spirit of the league was community, family, well-being, nurturing,” Peter Noble, the league’s attorney, told the Register. “It’s an extended family and it’s been disrupted.”

A federal judge Tuesday lifted a gag order on three MIT students who were barred from talking publicly about security flaws they discovered in the state’s automated mass transit fare system, even as a lawyer for the agency acknowledged the system was “compromised.”

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. rejected a request by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to impose a five-month injunction blocking the students from revealing anything about the security system. O’Toole also dissolved a temporary restraining order that had prohibited the students from speaking about their findings this month at DefCon, an annual computer hackers’ convention in Las Vegas.

The transit agency sued after learning of a preconference Web advertisement for the presentation by the students — Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa — that said “Want free subway rides for life?”

The Democratic National Convention Committee has hired a disgraced former Denver police lieutenant to coordinate security at the Colorado Convention Center during the convention.

But the committee isn’t talking about why they hired Gary Lauricella or if they knew about his background when they hired him.

Lauricella was hired as a “security consultant,” according to the DNCC. One convention center employee said he has been managing security at the convention center since mid-July. The Democrats are holding numerous convention-related events at the Colorado Convention Center next week.

Several current Denver police officers who spoke on the condition their names not be used expressed surprise that the DNCC would hire Lauricella as a top security consultant, given his spotty background.

n 2003, a CBS4 investigation named Lauricella, a 29-year police veteran, as one of three top commanders in the Denver Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons Bureau who were routinely leaving their posts in the middle of the afternoon to work an outside job as a $30 an hour crossing guard for a private school.

They’re the government… and remember, they’re here to help. A bumbling inspector with the Transportation Safety Administration apparently has some explaining to do, after nine American Eagle regional jets were grounded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday.

Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage… reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes’ noses as handholds.

“The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers,” one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. “They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder.”

Officials with American Eagle confirmed to ANN the problem was discovered by maintenance personnel, who inspected the planes Tuesday morning… and questioned why the TAT probes all gave similar error indications.

One Eagle pilot says had the pilots not been so attentive, the damaged probes could have caused problems inflight. TSA agents “are now doing things to our aircraft that may put our lives, and the lives of our passengers at risk,” the pilot wrote on the forum.

The City of Denver has been working to make sure everything is in tip-top shape for all the visitors coming to town for the Democratic National Convention, and now a local salon is helping in that effort.

It seems to be a first — don’t move the homeless, clean them up. That was the work of one salon and the recipients didn’t even seem to care if the Democrats were coming to town. Sly’s Salon at 17th and Grant was offering free haircuts to the homeless Monday.

“To give them haircuts and make them all spiffed up for the Democratic National Convention, because they are part of our community as well,” said Ghandia Gohnson, co-owner of Sly’s Salon.

Beijing’s ruthless demand for perfection was highlighted when Tan Zongliang was made to squirm on China Central Television after missing out in the men’s 50m pistol competition.

Even though it was his first ever Olympic medal, he was harried until he bowed his head and admitted he had “let his country down” for not getting gold.

His grilling goes against the central belief of International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin, who stated: “The important thing is not to win, but to take part.”

And it has angered some residents Sky News spoke to in Beijing, who said they felt uncomfortable watching it, and a bronze medal was something to be proud of.

A drunk fan of Olympic competitors from Belgium has been identified as the country’s sports minister.

A loud Belgian fan had been shouting out during a doubles match between Argentinian and Belgian players.

Eventually Argentine tennis ace David Nalbandian lost his temper and told him to be quiet.

But other Belgian supporters recognised the “very drunk” man as sports minister Michel Daerden, media in the country have reported.

Cinderella, Snow White, Tinkerbell and other fictional fixtures of modern-day childhood were handcuffed, frisked and loaded into police vans Thursday at the culmination of a labor protest that brought a touch of reality to the Happiest Place on Earth.

The arrest of the 32 protesters, many of whom wore costumes representing famous Disney characters, came at the end of an hour-long march to Disneyland’s gates from one of three Disney-owned hotels at the center of a labor dispute.

Those who were arrested sat in a circle on a busy intersection outside the park holding hands until they were placed in plastic handcuffs and led to two police vans while hundreds of hotel workers cheered and chanted.

Hat tip to Trish!

British forces were accused of staying on the sidelines during a battle in Iraq because of a “secret deal” between the UK and an Iranian-backed militia, it was reported today.

However the deal may have been a victory for Britain as news came today that Iraqi militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr has reportedly agreed to disarm his Shia milita.

Al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army has been the main militant group opposing American and British forces in Iraq, in Baghdad in particular. Its Shi’ite affiliation also led it to stir sectarian tensions in Iraq, giving rise to real fears of the country descending into civil war as Western forces pull out.

Last summer an “accommodation” was made between British intelligence and elements of the Mehdi Army.

Under the deal’s terms, no British soldier could enter Basra without the permission of Defence Secretary Des Browne.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia’s history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

“He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word,” she earlier told the court. “I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

The Dallas Housing Authority has spent nearly $20 million on questionable rental assistance payments, including money for 45 people who had died, according to a new federal audit of the agency.

Most of the questionable spending involved ineligible clients, clients not reported to the federal government, and duplicate payments to landlords, according to a draft report on an audit by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General.

The report is the last of three federal audits, all of which have been critical of the DHA’s accounting practices and its management of rental assistance vouchers.

China has admitted it could introduce further emergency measures to cut air pollution during the Olympic Games.

One expert said that could mean taking 90% of Beijing’s private cars off the streets at particularly bad times.

Figures show pollution levels have been relatively high over recent days – on some days thick smog is severely reducing visibility.

The BBC found one pollutant at the Olympic Village was three times higher than the recommended level on Monday.

Free cigarettes are no longer handed out at Congressional Black Caucus functions. And it has been years since anyone referred to Edolphus Towns, Democrat of Brooklyn, as the “Marlboro Man” for his campaign contributions from the tobacco industry.

But the Congressional Black Caucus has not severed its financial ties to big tobacco. And that can complicate matters when the political discussion involves smoking’s impact on African-Americans.

A rift has opened in the 43-member caucus over a menthol provision in legislation that would enable the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco. To reduce smoking’s appeal to teenagers, the legislation would outlaw flavored cigarettes — except for menthol cigarettes, which are specifically exempted.

With menthol brands making up about 28 percent of the $70 billion American cigarette market, the exemption was seen as a necessary compromise to win broad backing for the legislation.

But menthol has become a politically charged subject in Washington because an estimated 75 percent of black smokers choose mentholated brands.

Instead of “stick ‘em up,” it will be more like “pull ‘em up” now that fashion police in New Jersey have started a crackdown on baggy pants.

It’s happening in Paterson, where city officials want to put the kibosh on this form of fashion.

Bart Johnson says wearing his pants low in a fashion statement, but one councilman is saying pull it up. He’s even crafted a proposal to ban “baggy pants.”

Teenagers and even little ones and women are sporting the fashion. The “saggy” or “baggy” look, where pants are pulled down and boxers are exposed seems to be all the rage these days.
…
“We’re tired of seeing your behind,” Davis said. “We don’t want to see your back side. We don’t need to see your underwear. We don’t need to see your drawers. Wear your pants.”

Police were called out to break up the annual “mooning” of Amtrak trains in Laguna Niguel on Saturday when the crowd grew to 8,000 and many began baring more than just their behinds.

“We had some mooners and some female flashers and some people who were nude altogether,” said Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. “There was also lots of drinking. We felt that it was in the public’s interest to shut it down.”

Mooners, flashers and others dispersed peacefully about 3 p.m. and there were no arrests, Amormino said. More than 50 officers responded from several police agencies, backed up by helicopters.

Some participants were angered by the police response.

“What was the point of stopping people from enjoying themselves when they were under control?” asked Robert Zoellner, 47, a first-time mooner from Mission Viejo. “Everybody was getting along.”

While the Metro police had banned the use of Tasers for a time, they still used a controversial method to subdue unruly people, according to an I-Team report.

The city’s policy to use the method, which calls for the injection of a drug into a person, came as a “total surprise” to people most would expect to know all about it.

For almost two years, Metro police have had the option of calling for a needle loaded with a strong sedative to control the most unruly people they encounter on the street.
…
The drug is called Midazolam, which is better known as Versed. People who have had a colonoscopy have probably had a shot of the drug for the procedure.

“The drug has an amnesia effect, and we use that therapeutically because one of the nice ways to take care of the discomfort is to make people forget that they’ve had it,” said biomedical ethics and law enforcement expert Dr. Steven Miles.

THERE was no mistaking it when Barack Obama addressed the League of United Latin American citizens in Washington last week: the Democratic nominee for president is rapidly going grey.

Perhaps it was the lighting at the Washington Hilton. Perhaps it really is the strains of the most hard-fought Democratic primary in modern history.

Perhaps, too, there has been a deliberate strategy by his campaign to “olden” him, as some blogs have suggested in the US.

Senator Obama acknowledged last week that the campaign had taken its toll, saying: “The grey is coming in quick.” He told a room full of donors in Colorado Springs, Colorado: “By the time I’m sworn in, I will look the part.”

He will be 47 a month after the November election.

MBTA general manager Dan Grabauskas is spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars urging suburban commuters to “Dump the Pump,” brave the heat and take the T, yet the transit boss continues to drive to work from Ipswich to Boston in the cool comfort of his T-owned SUV.

Grabauskas was observed by a Herald reporter on several occasions over the past seven weeks, including yesterday, driving his agency-owned 2008 Ford Escape hybrid to his office at the state Transportation Building in Park Square – a roughly 60-mile-a-day commute round-trip.

The T chief also drove his roomy, air-conditioned ride to a June 19 event in Lowell promoting his new $52,000 “Dump the Pump” ad campaign aimed at getting people to take public transportation to conserve gas and help improve the environment.

The agency’s Web site also promotes taking the T as a “No Brainer” option to getting hosed at the gas pump.

Gordon Brown and his fellow world leaders have sparked outrage after it was disclosed they enjoyed a six-course lunch followed by an eight-course dinner at the G8 summit where the global food crisis tops the agenda.

The Prime Minister was served 24 different dishes during his first day at the summit – just hours after urging the world to reduce the “unnecessary demand” for food and calling on British families to cut back on their wasteful use of food.

Mr Brown and his wife Sarah were among 15 guests at the “blessings of the earth and the sea social dinner”.

The dinner consisted of 18 dishes in eight courses including caviar, smoked salmon, Kyoto beef and a “G8 fantasy dessert”.

…

African leaders including the heads of Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal who had taken part in talks during the day were not invited to the function.

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated – according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

A market trader has been banned from selling a batch of kiwi fruits because they are 1mm smaller than EU rules allow.

Inspectors told 53-year- old Tim Down he is forbidden even to give away the fruits, which are perfectly healthy.

The father of three will now have to bin the 5,000 kiwis, costing him £1,000 in lost sales.

Speaking yesterday from the stall in Bristol he has owned for 20 years, Mr Down said: ‘It’s total nonsense. I work hard enough to make a living without all these bureaucrats telling us what we can and can’t sell.

‘They’re saying I’m a criminal for selling this fruit, but the real crime is that all this fruit will go to waste – all because it’s 1mm too small.

Spain’s parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.

Parliament’s environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.

“This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity,” said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.

Rescuers in the Philippines may bore a hole in a ferry capsized by a deady typhoon in a desperate attempt to find survivors among more than 800 missing passengers and crew, an official said Monday.

A group of 28 ferry passengers and crew washed ashore after drifting at sea for more than a day from the site where their ship was capsized and left most of the hundreds aboard missing and presumed dead, officials said.

Manila’s DZBB radio said the survivors, 20 male passengers, four women and four crewmen, drifted at sea for more than 24 hours wearing their lifejackets, reaching Mulanay township in eastern Quezon province late Sunday.

A public school teacher preached his Christian beliefs despite complaints by other teachers and administrators and used a device to burn the image of a cross on students’ arms, according to a report by independent investigators.

Mount Vernon Middle School teacher John Freshwater also taught creationism in his science class and was insubordinate in failing to remove a Bible and other religious materials from his classroom, the report said.

Martha Stewart has been refused a visa to Britain because of her criminal convictions for obstructing justice, the Daily Telegraph has learned.

The lifestyle guru, convicted four years ago in the US for obstructing justice, was planning to speak at the Royal Academy and to hold meetings with several figures in the fashion and leisure industry, including Jasper Conran, and was due to travel within the next few days.

The refusal by the UK Border Agency was sent to Ms Stewart, aged 66. A spokesperson for the business magnate said: “Martha loves England and hopes this can be resolved and that she will be able to visit soon.”

It’s a slow week in the northern territory of the Cape Cod National Seashore when a man with a yellow towel flashing passers-by is the sole complaint about public sex acts.

In the past decade, the number of complaints about explicit, open public sex in the Provincetown and Truro portions of the national park has more than tripled, Seashore acting chief ranger Craig Thatcher said. The activity ranges from flashing to masturbation to men’s outdoor orgies, he said.

This summer, federal authorities are introducing a new tactic to discourage debauchery in the dunes: pairing up with local officials and business leaders to try to persuade culprits to behave better through public education.

Around 4,000 local government bodies in Nepal have gone on strike after a Maoist minister locked up an “errant official” in a toilet.

The official had incurred the minister’s wrath for allegedly running an illegal stone mine.

Striking workers said that his incarceration inside a toilet was an “inhumane and objectionable act”.

But the minister responded by saying that the official now knows what it is like to live in a “foul environment”.

A court on Wednesday issued a landmark ruling classifying Chinese South Africans as black, making them eligible for benefits for those discriminated against under the former apartheid regime.

The ruling from the Pretoria high court came after the Chinese Association of South Africa (CASA) challenged their exclusion from laws aimed at redressing economic imbalances under white-minority rule, which ended in 1994.

CASA argued that Chinese citizens continue to be marginalised under the country’s black economic empowerment and affirmative action legislation. Both laws benefit the country’s black, Indian and mixed-race communities.

Russian air force planes dropped a 25-kg (55-lb) sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home last week while seeding clouds to prevent rain from spoiling a holiday, Russian media said on Tuesday.

“A pack of cement used in creating … good weather in the capital region … failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft),” police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti.

Ahead of major public holidays the Russian Air Force often dispatches up to 12 cargo planes carrying loads of silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder to seed clouds above Moscow and empty the skies of moisture.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said he and his wife knew Countrywide Inc. was treating them as “VIP” customers when they refinanced mortgages on two homes in 2003, but it didn’t cross his mind he was getting a financial perk from the sub-prime lender.

Dodd, who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee oversees mortgage lenders, said he did not ask and Countrywide’s representatives did not say what the VIP treatment entailed.

“We knew at the time that we were being dealt with within a special section of the company,” Dodd explained. “We really just assumed it was a courtesy, because we had an existing mortgage with them — two mortgages with them.”

He noted that he and his wife, Jackie Clegg, were pre-existing customers with excellent credit. Clegg assumed that they were merely going to receive more attentive customer service, Dodd said.

He said he had never sought nor had any knowledge of any special rate he was getting from Countrywide.

So the AP has been threatening bloggers who quote their stories:

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

Even after an AP spokesman acknowledged that the organization’s tactics were “heavy-handed,” they still didn’t really back off:

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

Now, in a slightly ironic twist, the AP is taking content from a blog site. Namely, mine.

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

Verizon has released details of the agreement it and other ISPs signed last week to block access to Usenet groups that have been caught trafficking child pornography. Instead of simply blocking the handful of offending groups, however, Verizon has decided to enforce a blanket ban on what could be tens of thousands of completely innocent groups.

It all started when New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo enlisted the help of Verizon and other ISPs with his assault on child pornography spread through Usenet groups. A while ago, Cuomo’s investigators submitted anonymous reports to ISPs like Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable about child pornography images stored on their servers and trafficked through Usenet groups. When the ISPs did nothing—failing to uphold their policy of taking swift action against peddlers of child porn—Cuomo’s investigators threatened to charge the ISPs with fraud and deceptive business practices.

Winnie the Pooh, Luke Skywalker and British football hooligans could shape the foreign policy of Barack Obama if he becomes US President, according to a key adviser.

Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.

Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”

Students in Texas said a three-week lesson that assigned students the roles of Germans and Jews during the Holocaust got out of hand when some students took the role-playing too far and the “Germans” spat and hit the “Jews”.

The exercise in the Ninth Grade Academy school’s Advanced Placement Geography course Waxahachie, 50 kilometres south of Dallas, was meant to bring home the reality of intolerance during the Holocaust, school officials said.

Students and teachers said the students tagged as Jews were forced to stand against the wall as those portraying Germans passed by in the hallway.

The Jewish students were also the last to eat lunch and had to pick up everyone’s garbage, the station reported.

Some students said the exercise got out of hand when the “German” students spat on or hit the Jewish students.

Disgruntled scientists renewed their vows this week to call Pluto a planet despite an international governing body’s latest ruling to reclassify the tiny world.

On Wednesday, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) declared that Pluto will henceforth be known as a “plutoid,” a new class of objects that has two members (the other being Eris, a small body beyond Pluto). The IAU, considered in charge of naming celestial objects, has been around since 1919. It demoted Pluto to “dwarf planet” status in 2006.

The latest decision was announced by email to the press, and it took researchers by surprise. Even IAU members and astronomers who discovered Eris and other objects that might eventually be called plutoids were not consulted or informed.

That’s left many scientists peeved that the IAU developed the new term and its definition behind closed doors. They accuse the IAU of being secretive, out of touch and of failing to consider basic physical characteristics that researchers use to define planets.

Alex Kozinski is more accustomed to appearing on lists to fill U.S. Supreme Court vacancies than headlines involving pornographic scandals.

But on Wednesday, the chief judge of the country’s largest federal appeals court was forced to suspend an obscenity trial he was presiding over after sexually explicit images posted to his personal Web site became public.

The Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site that Kozinski had posted sexual material on his personal Web site and then blocked access after being interviewed about it Tuesday evening.

Kozinski, 57, told the Times he thought the material on his site, which included a video of a man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal, couldn’t be seen by the public. The judge said he didn’t believe any of the images were obscene.

Facing a shortage of foreign exotic dancers, a group representing 53 of Ontario’s strip club owners is turning to immigration consultants to find a loophole in the rules governing foreign workers.

The Adult Entertainment Association of Canada is looking for alternative, legal, ways to hire foreign-born strippers and dancers. One way might be to use foreign student visas since foreign students can now work for 20 hours a week in any job, said the group’s executive director Tim Labrinos.

In 2004, then-minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada Judy Sgro resigned after extending the visa of a Romanian exotic dancer who had worked for her election campaign.

Police arrested 17 people and shut six London Underground stations during a chaotic night of partying to mark the last day of drinking on the Tube.

A booze ban is now in effect on the Tube, London buses, Docklands Light Railway and tram services across the capital.

Passengers are no longer allowed to drink from or carry open containers of alcohol.

The measure was announced earlier this month by new London mayor Boris Johnson.

But a night that started in a celebratory mood soon turned sour as thousands of revelers poured into London’s Tube stations.

A top Iranian cleric from the northeast, Ayatollah Ahmad Elmalhoda, has reportedly called feminists “whores and foreign spies”.

“These whores, clutching a piece of paper in their hands to gather signatures, are working for foreign powers and want to destabilise the Islamic Republic,” said Elmalhoda.

He is the highly influential prayer leader in the northeastern holy Shia city of Mashad.

Elmalhoda has called on the government to “intervene decisively against these whores, because it is improper to leave them to act with impunity.”

A few weeks ago, Elmalhoda said women who do not wear the Islamic veil as instructed “turned men into animals.”

Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class.

After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said.

By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class.

Melissa Barton filed a complaint with Morningside’s school resource officer, who investigated the matter, Port St. Lucie Department spokeswoman Michelle Steele said. But the state attorney’s office concluded the matter did not meet the criteria for emotional child abuse, so no criminal charges will be filed, Steele said.

A former SS doctor accused of sending 900 sick children to their deaths under the Nazi euthanasia programme has been awarded a German medical association’s highest honour.

The decision comes as Jewish organisations continue to press Germany to put 92-year-old Hans-Joachim Sewering on trial for mass murder.

He was given the Guenther-Budelmann medal by the German Federation of Internal Medicine for “unequalled services in the cause of freedom of the practice and the independence of the medical profession and to the nation’s health system”.

Sewering was a doctor at a tuberculosis clinic near Munich before World War II.

He allegedly signed orders sending 900 German Catholic children from the clinic to a “healing centre”.

In fact, it was a killing centre carrying out a secret Nazi policy of murdering the handicapped who were declared “useless eaters” by the Nazis before the war.

Protests by one of India’s lower castes spread to new areas Monday as government forces were ordered to evict demonstrators who had blocked highways and railroad tracks, government officials said.

Four days of bloody demonstrations in western India by members of the Gujjar community have so far claimed the lives of 36 protesters and one policeman in the worst-hit Rajasthan state.

The Gujjars are seeking to reclassify their hereditary caste to a lower level, which would allow them to qualify for government jobs and university places reserved for such groups. The government has refused.

The riots have paralyzed road and rail traffic between Jaipur, the state capital, and Agra, where the famed Taj Mahal monument is located, as well as to Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital, said Rohit

A New York City man is suing JetBlue Airways Corp. for more than $2 million because he says a pilot made him give up his seat to a flight attendant and sit on the toilet for more than three hours on a flight from California.

Gokhan Mutlu, of Manhattan’s Inwood section, says in court papers the pilot told him to “go ‘hang out’ in the bathroom” about 90 minutes into the San Diego to New York flight because the flight attendant complained that the “jump seat” she was assigned was uncomfortable, the lawsuit said.

Mutlu was traveling on a a “buddy pass,” a standby travel voucher that JetBlue employees give to friends, from New York to San Diego on Feb. 16, and returned to New York on Feb. 23, the lawsuit said.

Initially, Mutlu was told a flight attendant had taken the last seat on the plane, but then he was advised she would sit in the employee “jump seat,” meaning he could have the last seat, the lawsuit said.

The pilot told him 1 1/2 hours into the five-hour flight that he would have to relinquish the seat to the flight attendant, court papers say. But the pilot said that Mutlu could not sit in the jump seat because only JetBlue employees were permitted to sit there, the lawsuit said.

In the five years since the FBI and ATF were merged under the Justice Department to coordinate the fight against terrorism, the rival law enforcement agencies have fought each other for control, wasting time and money and causing duplication of effort, according to law enforcement sources and internal documents.

Their new boss, the attorney general, ordered them to merge their national bomb databases, but the FBI has refused. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has long trained bomb-sniffing dogs; the FBI started a competing program.

At crime scenes, FBI and ATF agents have threatened to arrest one another and battled over jurisdiction and key evidence. The ATF inadvertently bought counterfeit cigarettes from the FBI — the government selling to the government — because the agencies are running parallel investigations of tobacco smuggling between Virginia and other states.

The squabbling poses dangers, many in law enforcement say, in an era in which cooperation is needed more than ever to prevent another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Michael A. Mason, a former head of the FBI’s Washington field office who retired in December from a senior post at FBI headquarters, said outside intervention might be needed.

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the “dignity” of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called “plant rights” is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring “account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.” No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” is enough to short circuit the brain.

A “clear majority” of the panel adopted what it called a “biocentric” moral view, meaning that “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.” Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim “absolute ownership” over plants and, moreover, that “individual plants have an inherent worth.” This means that “we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily.”

There has been outrage in Italy after the outgoing government published every Italian’s declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet.

The tax authority’s website was inundated by people curious to know how much their neighbours, celebrities or sports stars were making.

The Italian treasury suspended the website after a formal complaint from the country’s privacy watchdog.

The information was put on the site with no warning for nearly 24 hours.

False identifications based on a terrorist no-fly list have for years prevented some federal air marshals from boarding flights they are assigned to protect, according to officials with the agency, which is finally taking steps to address the problem.

Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) familiar with the situation say the mix-ups, in which marshals are mistaken for terrorism suspects who share the same names, have gone on for years — just as they have for thousands of members of the traveling public.

One air marshal said it has been “a major problem, where guys are denied boarding by the airline.”

“In some cases, planes have departed without any coverage because the airline employees were adamant they would not fly,” said the air marshal, who asked not to be named because the job requires anonymity. “I’ve seen guys actually being denied boarding.”

The federal government has said no to Weed.

Or at least to the bottle caps on beer brewed at a popular local brewery in this small Siskiyou County town, which has a name that no doubt would have kept 1970s pot-smoking duo Cheech and Chong giggling.

Weed brewer Vaune Dillmann faces possible sanctions or fines from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau if he continues to brew and sell beer with bottle caps printed with the label “Try Legal Weed.”

Bureau spokesman Art Resnick said Monday that the bottle caps tell consumers to support an illegal drug – a policy that violates rules of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau as well as the agency’s predecessor, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

Food riots caused by rising food prices have erupted around the world. Five people died in uprisings in Haiti, perhaps the first of many casualties to come from the fad of being “green.”
Food riots also broke out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. The military is being deployed in Pakistan and Thailand to protect fields and warehouses. Higher energy costs and policies promoting the use of biofuels such as ethanol are being blamed.

“When millions of people are going hungry, it’s a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels,” an Indian government official told the Wall Street Journal. Turkey’s finance minister labeled the use of biofuels as “appalling,” according to the paper.

Biofuels have turned out to be a lose-lose-lose proposition. Once touted by the greens and the biofuel industry as being able to reduce the demand for oil and lower greenhouse gas emissions, biofuels have accomplished neither goal and have no prospect for accomplishing either in the foreseeable future.

The head of the RAF has ‘erupted’ with rage over revelations Prince William landed a £10million RAF helicopter in girlfriend Kate Middleton’s backyard during a military exercise.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy is said to have been furious at the ’sheer stupidity’ of the situation and demanded a ‘line-by-line’ explanation from subordinates.

Details of the angry reaction emerged as the young royal came under fire for using a RAF Chinook for a second time to fit in a personal visit.

He landed the machine in girlfriend Kate Middleton’s back garden during an official military exercise.

One senior RAF source told the Mail: ‘William hasn’t done anything wrong but the naivety of those around him in allowing him to make these flights without foreseeing the potential problems they could cause is astonishing. I think there has been a bit of royal fever here.’

Authorities have charged a western Oklahoma sheriff with coercing and bribing female inmates so he could use them in a sex-slave operation run out of his jail.

Custer County Sheriff Mike Burgess resigned Wednesday just as state prosecutors filed 35 felony charges against him, including 14 counts of second-degree rape, seven counts of forcible oral sodomy and five counts of bribery by a public official.

Burgess, the top officer in the county of 26,000 since 1994, appeared in court Wednesday was released after posting $50,000 bail.

A message left at Burgess’ home Thursday was not immediately returned.

Among other things, Burgess is accused of having sex with a female drug court participant who was in his custody. The crimes are to have occurred between October 2005 and April 2007.

An Iranian police chief in charge of fighting vice in Tehran was jailed today for reportedly consorting in an underground brothel.

Local media reported that General Reza Zarei was jailed after being caught with six naked women at a prostitution den in the Iranian capital.

Ali Reza Jamshidi, a spokesman for Iran’s judiciary, confirmed today that Mr Zarei had been taken to jail. He refused to elaborate further about the case, however, saying it was now “in the legal stage.”

But officials, speaking anonymously, have supported the allegations, which have been extensively reported in recent weeks.

Those who peer at children in public could find themselves on the wrong side of the law in Maine soon.

A bill that passed the House last month aims to strengthen the crime of visual sexual aggression against children, according to state Rep. Dawn Hill, D-York.

Her involvement started when Ogunquit Police Lt. David Alexander was called to a local beach to deal with a man who appeared to be observing children entering the community bathrooms. Because the state statute prevents arrests for visual sexual aggression of a child in a public place, Alexander said he and his fellow officer could only ask the man to move along.

“There was no violation of law that we could enforce. There was nothing we could charge him with,” Alexander said.

Remember: Fascists always claim they do it to protect the children…

A piece of artillery that was apparently misfired by the military crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home miles away Friday and injured a young girl’s cat, which had to be euthanized, officials said.

No people were injured when the two-pound piece hit the Jefferson Township home about two-and-a- half miles from the Picatinny Arsenal and landed in the girl’s bed, said Peter Rowland, arsenal spokesman. She wasn’t home, but her cat was sleeping on the bed.

A judge has tossed out a defamation lawsuit brought by a businessman shown in the movie “Borat” as he is chased down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

The 2006 hit, starring Cohen as a crass Kazakhstan journalist, can be deemed “newsworthy,” defined in its most liberal and far-reaching terms, U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska said.

New York civil rights law provides limited protection for any person whose image is used for advertising or trade purposes without his written consent, she said, and the nonconsensual use of a person’s image to depict newsworthy events or matters of public interest is exempt from the law.

The lawsuit had sought unspecified damages from the movie’s producer, Twentieth Century Fox, for Jeffrey Lemerond, who claimed he was humiliated when the Borat character tried to catch him.

In the movie, Lemerond, a Dartmouth College graduate and financial analyst, is shown running and yelling “Go away!” as Borat chases him in an attempt to hug strangers.

The Terminal 5 fiasco at Heathrow has led to a reported 19,000 bags being placed in temporary storage – and it could take up to a week to get them back to their owners.

British Airways Chief Executive Willie Walsh told the Jeff Randall Live programme on Sky News he accepted “full responsibility” for the chaos.

But Mr Walsh said the terminal’s travel disruptions were “easing”.

Earlier, Aviation Minister Jim Fitzpatrick told MPs that passengers using the new £4.3bn terminal had suffered “an unacceptably poor experience”.

Passengers should get the assistance and compensation to which they were entitled, he declared.

Mr Fitzpatrick was speaking after BA cancelled a further 54 flights at T5, with a further 50 being axed on Tuesday.

It seemed like an honorable goal: Draft an honor code for University of Texas at San Antonio students to follow, exhorting them not to cheat or plagiarize.

But when students threw a draft of the new honor code onto the Internet for feedback, some noticed a problem: Parts of the code appeared to have been lifted word for word from another school’s honor code, without attribution. Even the definition of plagiarism was, well, plagiarized.

Akshay Thusu, the student in charge of the honor code effort, said it was an oversight, the result of a draft that was crafted five years ago and passed through different students and faculty advisers before landing in his lap.

Disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been identified as a long-standing client of a second high-priced call-girl ring, The Post has learned.

The ex-governor regularly patronized Wicked Models, the Manhattan-based operation taken down Tuesday, according to financial documents and other evidence unearthed in a yearlong prostitution in vestigation, law-enforcement sources said.

With eight months to go before the U.S. presidential election, the candidates have raised almost $1 billion to fund their campaigns — more than the size of the economies of several African countries.

The unusually long race for the White House — which began in earnest more than a year ago — has been a cash bonanza, especially for Democrats who are breaking all records.

Republicans lag behind but still rake in tens of millions and have time to make up ground in the money game between now and the November 4 national election.

Between January 2007 and February, the candidates raised a record $814 million. By the end of this month, analysts expect the total taken in and spent by the candidates and interest groups will reach $1 billion.

Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

An indictment unsealed in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a member of a Michigan nonprofit group, of arranging for three members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam’s regime. Prosecutors say Iraqi intelligence officials paid for the trip through an intermediary.

At the time, the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq.

The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California. There was no indication the three lawmakers knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.

A Superior Court judge on Thursday ordered Starbucks Corp. to pay its California baristas more than $100 million in back tips and interest that the coffee chain paid to shift supervisors.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Patricia Cowett also issued an injunction that prevents Starbucks’ shift supervisors from sharing in future tips, saying state law prohibits managers and supervisors from sharing in employee gratuities.

Starbucks spokeswoman Valerie O’Neil said the company planned an immediate appeal of the ruling, calling it “fundamentally unfair and beyond all common sense and reason.”

The lawsuit was filed in October 2004 by Jou Chou, a former Starbucks barista in La Jolla, who complained shift supervisors were sharing in employee tips.

Wake County wants to put a tax on dogs and cats of up to $30 a year — an idea that is making some veterinarians, pet owners and animal advocates bristle.

Under a proposal that county commissioners still must approve, the annual tax would start in July and be levied on every dog and cat. The licensing tax would be $15 for a dog or cat that had been spayed or neutered; $30 for non-fixed canines and felines. Residents could get a bargain on three-year licenses — $40 for fixed animals; $80 for those not spayed or neutered.

If all of the estimated 86,000 county pets were licensed, Wake would take in $2.5 million annually and the tax would replace pet license fees in Raleigh, Cary and Garner.

Harvard University says about 10,000 of last year’s applicants may have had their personal information compromised.

At least 6,600 Social Security numbers were exposed. Worse, a compressed 125 M-byte file containing the stolen student data is currently available via BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer network.

In a statement published Monday night Harvard officials said the database containing summaries of GSAS applicant data for entry to the Fall 2007 academic year, summaries of GSAS housing applicant data for the 2007-08 and 2006-07 academic years, and administrator information had been compromised. The server had been taken offline for several days last month to investigate the extent of the problem.

Most troubling are the 6,600 summaries from admissions candidates from the United States that were copied. Harvard officials said the data includes the applicant’s name, Social Security number, date of birth, address, e-mail address, phone numbers, test scores, previous school attended, and school records.

Grim tales of cannibalism highlighting the brutality of West Africa’s civil wars emerged in testimony Thursday at the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor.

Joseph “Zigzag” Marzah, who described himself as Taylor’s chief of operations and head of the death squad before Taylor became president, said African peacekeepers and even United Nations personnel were killed and eaten on the battlefield by Taylor’s militiamen.

Prosecutors described Marzah as a key witness with inside knowledge of the former Liberian president’s operations in Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone, where he is accused of responsibility for the widespread murder, rape and amputations committed by soldiers loyal to him.

Taylor, 59, has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is accused of orchestrating violence in Sierra Leone’s civil war, which ended in 2002, and trading in illegally mined diamonds to finance the conflict.

A man accused of using a camera to take pictures under the skirt of an unsuspecting 16-year-old girl at a Tulsa store did not commit a crime, a state appeals court has ruled.

The state Court of Criminal Appeals voted 4-1 in favor of Riccardo Gino Ferrante, who was arrested in 2006 for situating a camera underneath the girl’s skirt at a Target store and taking photographs.

Ferrante, now 34, was charged under a “Peeping Tom” statute that requires the victim to be “in a place where there is a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy.” Testimony indicated he followed the girl, knelt down behind her and placed the camera under her skirt.

In January 2007, Tulsa County District Judge Tom Gillert ordered Ferrante’s felony charge dismissed. That was based upon a determination that “the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy,” according to the appellate ruling issued last week.

On Web sites touting the mind-blowing powers of Salvia divinorum, come-ons to buy the hallucinogenic herb are accompanied by warnings: “Time is running out!” and “stock up while you still can.”

That’s because salvia is being targeted by lawmakers concerned that the inexpensive and easy-to-obtain plant could become the next marijuana. Eight states have already placed restrictions on salvia, and 16 others, including Florida, are considering a ban or have previously.

Colombia’s precision air strike 10 days ago, on a guerrilla camp across the border in Ecuador, killed rebel leader Raúl Reyes. That was big. But the capture of his computer may turn out to be a far more important development in Colombia’s struggle to preserve its democracy.

Reyes was the No. 2 leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been at war with the Colombian government for more than four decades. His violent demise is a fitting end to a life devoted to masterminding atrocities against civilians. But the computer records expose new details of the terrorist strategy to bring down the government of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, including a far greater degree of collaboration between the FARC and four Latin heads of government than had been previously known. In addition to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, they are President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega and Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Mr. Chávez is said to have been visibly distressed when told of the death of Reyes, a man he clearly admired. He also may have realized that he played a role in his hero’s death, since it was later reported that the Colombian military had located the camp by intercepting a phone call to Reyes from the Venezuelan president.

Thousands of pet cats in Beijing are being abandoned by their owners and sent to die in secretive government pounds as China mounts an aggressive drive to clean up the capital in preparation for the Olympic Games.

Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around.

Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city.

The cull comes in the wake of a government campaign warning of the diseases cats carry and ordering residents to help clear the streets of them.

Cat owners, terrified by the disease warning, are dumping their pets in the streets to be picked up by special collection teams.

Paranoia is so intense that six stray cats -including two pregnant females – were beaten to death with sticks by teachers at a Beijing kindergarten, who feared they might pass illnesses to the children.

A driving instructor accused of being drunk while teaching a lesson in Ipswich pleads not guilty.

Daniel Winsky of Salem was arraigned on a drunken driving charge today in district court.

Court documents say the 52-year-old had a blood alcohol level of .233 after he was stopped by police in December. That’s nearly three times the legal limit.

Witnesses called police while Winsky was instructing a student because he allegedly appeared drunk. Winsky wasn’t driving the car, but instructors have a brake on the passenger side.

All the world’s a stage at some of Minnesota’s bars.

A new state ban on smoking in restaurants and other nightspots contains an exception for performers in theatrical productions. So some bars are getting around the ban by printing up playbills, encouraging customers to come in costume, and pronouncing them “actors.”

The customers are playing right along, merrily puffing away — and sometimes speaking in funny accents and doing a little improvisation, too.

The state Health Department is threatening to bring the curtain down on these sham productions. But for now, it’s on with the show.

At The Rock, a hard-rock and heavy-metal bar in suburban St. Paul, the “actors” during “theater night” do little more than sit around, drink, smoke and listen to the earsplitting music.

“They’re playing themselves before Oct. 1. You know, before there was a smoking ban,” owner Brian Bauman explained. Shaping the words in the air with his hands, like a producer envisioning the marquee, he said: “We call the production, `Before the Ban!”‘

Hat tip to Kara!

The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.

In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that ‘all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish.’

It added: ‘Offenders will be severely punished.’

Desperate for a glimpse into Adolf Hitler’s unpredictable mind, British spies hired an astrologer during World War II to write horoscopes for him and other Nazi leaders, documents declassified Tuesday show. They soon regretted it.

The file released to Britain’s National Archives catalogs the frustrations of MI5 handlers as they tried to prevent the astrologer, Louis de Wohl, from publicly embarrassing high-ranking intelligence and military officers.

“I have never liked Louis de Wohl — he strikes me as a charlatan and an imposter,” reads the first line in the astrologer’s file. The letter is typical and appeared to be signed by Dick White, who went on to become the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency, MI5, in the 1950s.

That view didn’t keep de Wohl from winning a temporary rank as a British army captain. He was sent by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who did not believe in astrology, to the U.S. to persuade Americans that the Nazis would lose within months if they entered the war.

A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.
In a lawsuit filed last month, former Prosper, Inc. salesman Chad Hudgens alleges his managers also allowed the supervisor to draw mustaches on employees’ faces, take away their chairs and beat on their desks with a wooden paddle “because it resulted in increased revenues for the company.”
Prosper president Dave Ellis responded that the allegations amount to “sensationalized” versions of events that have gone uncorroborated by Hudgens’ former coworkers.
“They just roll their eyes and say, ‘This is ridiculous . . . That’s not how it went down,’ ” Ellis said.
The suit claims that Hudgens’ team leader, Joshua Christopherson, asked for volunteers in May for “a new motivational exercise,” which he did not describe. Hudgens, who was 26 at the time, volunteered in order to “prove his loyalty and determination,” the suit claims.
Christopherson led the sales team to the top of a hill near the office and told Hudgens to lie down with his head downhill, the suit claims. Christopherson then told the rest of the team to hold Hudgens by the arms and legs.
Christopherson poured water from a gallon jug over Hudgens’ mouth and nostrils – like the interrogation strategy known as “waterboarding” – and told the team members to hold Hudgens down as he struggled, the suit alleges.
“At the conclusion of his abusive demonstration, Christopherson told the team that he wanted them to work as hard on making sales as Chad had worked to breathe while he was being waterboarded,” the suit alleges.

JUVENILE delinquents had a “sex romp” at a detention centre after staff accidentally left security doors unlocked.

Boys were abl

e to sneak into a girls’ dormitory at the Don Dale centre in Darwin after dark.

“About six inmates” – aged between 15 and 17 – took part in the Valentine’s Day orgy, the Northern Territory News was told yesterday.

Police were brought in to question the inmates.

A Territory mother said she was “furious” when her 15-year-old son – who is serving three months for a minor crime – told her he had taken part in the jailhouse sex escapade.

“He told me that they had all had sex in the one room – it was a big Valentine’s Day sex romp,” the 31-year-old mother said.

A special-education aide at Highlands Senior High School resigned under pressure yesterday and faces possible drug and corruption of minors charges for a hotel party involving high school teenagers.

New Kensington police said they found suspected crack cocaine, empty beer cans and used condoms in a room that Abbiejane Swogger, 34, of Harrison, shared with minors Thursday night at New Kensington’s Clarion Hotel. The room contained drug paraphernalia and a marijuana odor when officers arrived just before noon on Friday to follow up on reports of missing teens, said Detective Dennis Marsili.

Investigators questioned Ms. Swogger at the New Kensington police station Friday afternoon, but did not arrest her. Charges could be filed as soon as today, Detective Marsili said.

A British pilot has been sacked after performing a low-flying stunt with a brand new Boeing 777.

Captain Ian Wilkinson flew the Cathay Pacific plane within 28 feet of the ground with its undercarriage raised, at Boeing’s Seattle airfield.

The aircraft was on its delivery flight and packed with the airline’s VIPs.

The airline said Capt Wilkinson, 55, had not sought or obtained permission for the fly-by on January 30, and had been dismissed.

The co-pilot, Ray Middleton, has also been “subject to disciplinary actions” – understood to be suspension from training duties for six months.

Most of the world’s Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan’s government to block access domestically affected other countries.

The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet’s vulnerabilities, coming less than a month after broken fiber-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.

An Internet expert explained that Sunday’s problems arose when a Pakistani telecommunications company accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world’s fastest route to YouTube. But instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.

Gennifer Flowers is putting the tapes of her recorded conversations with Bill Clinton during their 12-year affair on the auction block, Vegas Confidential learned Monday.

Flowers, who came forward during Clinton’s 1992 Presidential election campaign with details of the relationship, said she decided to part with the tapes after renewed interest surfaced. She was offered $5 million by a Japanese collector in the 1990s, she said.

Asked about the timing of her announcement coming out as Hillary Clinton continues to slide in her presidential bid, “I don’t need to hurt Hillary. She is doing a fine job of that herself, along with her idiot husband. Karma is an interesting thing. If these two don’t get elected, and they are a team, it will be karma coming back to visit them. It’s about time.”

When President Clinton denied the relationship during his presidential campaign, Flowers called a press conference played what she said were secretly recorded phone conversations.

Hopes for a peaceful conclusion to the declaration of Kosovo’s independence were fading as the European Union announced it had withdrawn its staff from the north of the fledgling country in the face of increasingly angry Serb protests.

The civilian staff were meant to be preparing for the EU to take over responsibility for security in Kosovo from the United Nations.

The announcement of the withdrawal came as the United States – which backed Kosovo’s drive for independence – began to evacuate its American staff and their families from Serbia, offering US citizens the chance to join a convoy of 40 cars leaving Belgrade for Croatia.

“We are not sufficiently confident that they are safe here,” said US ambassador Cameron Munter. On Thursday protesters stormed and burned the US embassy in Belgrade. A week after tens of thousands of people took to the streets of the Kosovan capital Pristina to celebrate the country’s unilateral declaration of independence, Kosovo is already effectively partitioned.

AN Israeli politician has blamed a spate of recent earthquakes in the Middle East on gays
Shlomo Benizri of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party said the only way to prevent the earthquakes was for parliament to stop liberalising laws concerning homosexuals, AP reported.

“Why do earthquakes happen? One of the reasons is the things to which the Knesset (parliament) gives legitimacy, to sodomy,” Mr Benizri said.

Mr Benizri said earthquake damage could be avoided if the parliament stopped “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.

Thirty people have been fired by the president of Turkmenistan after a cockroach scurried across the studio table of the nation’s nightly television news program, the Guardian reports.

President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov fired 30 workers from the main state TV station after the roach made an appearance during the 9 p.m. broadcast of Vatan, the nation’s nightly news program, the paper reports. The show — and the bug’s jaunt around the news desk — were repeated at 11 p.m.

Struggling to close a $4.4 billion state government budget gap caused by excessive spending — as is usually the case, revenues continue to rise — Democratic Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer has proposed making New York’s illicit drug dealers pay a tax on their stashes. The new tax would apply to cocaine, heroin and marijuana, and could be paid by buying and affixing “tax stamps” to bags of dope.

The proposal has brought a predictable wave of ridicule.

“I guess if it moves, he’ll tax it,” charged Republican state Sen. Martin J. Golden, who dubbed the proposal “the crack tax.” Other opponents told The Washington Post that because cocaine and weed would be subject to the new levies, it should more aptly be called “the crack-pot tax.”

“How do I explain to my 16-year-old son that we’re giving a certain legitimacy to marijuana, cocaine and heroin?” asked Sen. Golden, a former New York City police officer who represents a Brooklyn district. “Is prostitution next?”

A Toledo city hall prank at the expense of Mayor Carty Finkbeiner created a downtown whodunit yesterday.

For several hours during the day, the telephone voice mail greeting for the city’s purchasing hot line was, “Carty Finkbeiner is a complete moron.”

Katerina Bekyarska, a spokesman for Mr. Finkbeiner, said the outgoing message was changed immediately after it was brought to her attention.

“Someone obviously went in and – trying to do a joke, not a very good one – went in and recorded the message,” Ms. Bekyarska said.

Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. And top consultants collected about $5 million in January, a month of crucial expenses and tough fund-raising.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest campaign finance report, published Wednesday night, appeared even to her most stalwart supporters and donors to be a road map of her political and management failings. Several of them, echoing political analysts, expressed concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s spending priorities amounted to costly errors in judgment that have hamstrung her competitiveness against Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

Rioters stormed the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, on Thursday and started a fire in protest of Kosovo’s declaration of independence earlier this week.

Serbian media said a charred body was found inside the embassy.

U.S. officials told FOX News that the embassy building was secured and the fire was extinguished, but angry demonstrators were still rioting well into the night. The mayhem came after a large organized protest against the situation in Kosovo.

Sources have provided conflicting reports on how extensive the breach of the U.S. Embassy was. Some told FOX News that no protesters made it into the building, which has been closed this week.

Other reports from The Associated Press noted masked attackers had gained entry and tried to throw furniture from an office. The reports also said a blaze had broken out inside one of the offices.

A woman who has been considered dead found out recently that the government still doesn’t believe she’s alive.

According to government paperwork, Laura Todd has been dead off and on for eight years, and Todd said there’s no end to the complications the situation creates.

“One time when I (was) ruled dead, they canceled my health insurance because it got that far,” she said.

Todd’s struggle started with a typo at the Social Security administration. She said the government has assured her since the problem that they have deleted her death record, but she said the problems keep cropping up.

On Wednesday, the IRS once again rejected her electronic tax return. She said she’s gone through it before.

Robert Mugabe wakes up to his 84th birthday today with a damning present from Zimbabwe’s government statisticians – official inflation figures of more than 100,000 per cent.

With Harare’s shop shelves bare of basic commodities and prices rising daily, it is a wonder that inflation can be calculated at all, but the Central Statistical Office’s work is a marvel of precision.

“The year-on-year inflation rate for the month of January 2008, as measured by the All-items Consumer Price Index, stood at 100,580.2 per cent,” it said in a statement yesterday.

Federal authorities think that nearly $50 million was stolen in an embezzlement scheme run out of the D.C. tax office, more than double the amount they had previously uncovered, four sources close to the investigation said.

The corruption at the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue went undetected much longer than initially thought, the sources said, extending back almost 20 years. In addition to tracking the missing money, authorities are looking into gifts suspected of being provided to co-workers and others by the woman accused of leading the scam, former tax office manager Harriette Walters.

The scheme is the largest corruption case in the city’s history. Witnesses have told investigators that Walters, who is accused of issuing larger and larger bogus tax refund checks over the years, lavishly spread the wealth, the sources said.

Kosovo Serbs have set fire to two border crossings to protest against Kosovo’s declaration of independence.

The attacks took place at the northern Jarinje and Banja crossings, manned by United Nations and Kosovo police.

In response, Nato-led peacekeepers were deployed at the crossings. There have been no reports of any injuries so far.

This is the most serious incident since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Sunday, the BBC’s Nick Thorpe in Kosovo says.

Belgrade has said Kosovo’s declaration violates international law.

Enjoy the bloody mess! Hat tip to the USA (especially Condi Rice) and the EU…

Kosovo Declares Independence From Serbia

Kosovo’s parliament declared the disputed territory a nation on Sunday, mounting a historic bid to become an “independent and democratic state” backed by the U.S. and European allies but bitterly contested by Serbia and Russia.

Fireworks lit up the night sky over Kosovo’s capital Pristina, where thousands of giddy ethnic Albanians braved subfreezing temperatures to ride on the roofs of their cars, singing patriotic songs and chanting: “KLA! KLA!” the acronym for the now-disbanded rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.

“Kosovo is a republic _ an independent, democratic and sovereign state,” Kosovo’s parliament speaker Jakup Krasniqi said as the chamber burst into applause.

Serbia immediately denounced the declaration as illegal, and Russia also rejected it, demanding an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

President Bush said the U.S. would work to prevent violence after the declaration and the European Union appealed for calm, mindful of the risk that the declaration could plunge the turbulent Balkans back into instability.

Hours after the declaration, an explosion apparently caused by a hand-grenade rocked a U.N. courthouse in the Serb-controlled north of Kosovo, but no one was injured.

Update @ 16:45 – More here: Protestors riot at US embassy and here: Troops on standby for Kosovo duty

Update @ 18:45 – War fears as Kosovo declares ‘freedom’

A veteran Florida sheriff’s deputy is in hot water after she was caught on video dumping a quadriplegic man out of his wheelchair while he was being booked on Jan. 29, MyFOXTampaBay.com reported.

The video shows Brian Sterner, 32, out of his wheelchair and on the floor while Deputy Charlotte Marshall Jones is booking him into the Hillsborough County Jail, the Web site reported.

Religious police in Saudi Arabia are banning the sale of Valentine’s Day gifts including red roses, a local newspaper has reported.

The Saudi Gazette quoted shop workers as saying that officials had warned them to remove all red items including flowers and wrapping paper.

Black market prices for roses were already rising, the paper said.

Saudi authorities consider Valentine’s Day, along with a host of other annual celebrations, as un-Islamic.

In addition to the prohibition on celebrating non-Islamic festivals, the authorities consider Valentine’s Day as encouraging relations between men and women outside wedlock – punishable by law in the conservative kingdom.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in an effort to deal with food shortages nationwide, threatened today to expropriate farms and raised the price rice producers are permitted to charge.

Fallow farmland “can’t be allowed,” Chavez said on his weekly television and radio broadcast, calling for the National Guard to take over farms with nonproductive lands. He also announced a price boost of 44 percent for rice growers.

It was at least the fourth time this year that Chavez’s government has threatened to use expropriation to deal with shortages of milk, rice, cooking oil and other price-controlled basic foods. The decision on rice prices was another in a series of increases this year, following boosts in the prices of beans, cheese and ultra-pasteurized milk.

The local newspaper reporter in Stephenville, Texas, who helped cover a UFO sighting case there is no longer working at the Stephenville Empire-Tribune newspaper, effective last Thursday, Feb. 7.

Journalist Angelia Joiner had been covering the UFO story which broke early in January and brought national and international news media representatives and researchers to Stephenville, other nearby small towns and the surrounding region.

Mainstream media such as the Associated Press, CNN and other major TV networks and newspapers covered the incident with great interest. The international press also paid special attention to the UFO sightings in Stephenville and towns in the area.

Media personalities such as CNN’s Larry King and NBC’s Today show host Matt Lauer explored the sightings on their shows.
…

According to information obtained for this report, management at the Stephenville Empire-Tribune did not want further coverage in the paper of the sightings by local citizens of something that appeared to be highly unusual. Pressures may have been placed on newspaper management to discontinue articles on the subject.

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.

The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.

These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development.

The destruction of natural ecosystems — whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America — not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

University of Georgia officials said they have removed a pharmacy professor from contact with students as they investigate whether he repeatedly punched a doctoral candidate during a drunken rage at an off-campus party. But some students claim the professor is still teaching and are outraged he hasn’t been fired.

Last semester, Shawn Holaway, a clinical assistant professor in the university’s College of Pharmacy, was accused of an unprovoked attack on graduate student Philip Almeter at a private Homecoming party in Athens. Although the alleged incident occurred Nov. 2 and Almete