Over the last several months, 22,741 New Yorkers contacted the city’s Department of Sanitation and arranged for the pickup of refrigerators, air-conditioners and freezers.

In more than 11,000 instances, the machines vanished before sanitation workers arrived in their white trucks to pick them up.

Who, then, is stealing the household appliances of New York City? Perhaps it is not the most pressing question facing city authorities, but it is something of a mystery nonetheless. The appliances did not develop legs and walk away, and they did not simply disappear.

Scavengers, to be sure, abound in New York, especially during tough economic times. But the sheer magnitude of the thefts — 11,528 appliances, to be precise — over a relatively brief period suggests to some in city government and the recycling industry that a more organized enterprise may be at work as well.

Panic broke out at the Moruga Composite School yesterday as 17 female students fell mysteriously ill and began rolling on the ground, hissing and blabbering in a strange tongue, after suffering bouts of nausea and headaches. Two of the students reportedly tried to throw themselves off a railing and had to be physically restrained, triggering fears of a possible demon attack.The drama started during the lunch hour in the Form One block and quickly spread to other areas. Form Five student Kern Mollineau, who attends the Lighthouse Tabernacle Church, said he got worried when the girls’ eyes began rolling up in their heads and they began beating up on the ground.

Jupiter has lost one of its iconic red stripes and scientists are baffled as to why.

The largest planet in our solar system is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere, with one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere.

However, the most recent images taken by amateur astronomers have revealed the lower stripe known as the Southern Equatorial Belt has disappeared leaving the southern half of the planet looking unusually bare.

The band was present in at the end of last year before Jupiter ducked behind the Sun on its orbit.

However, when it emerged three months later the belt had disappeared.

Journalist and amateur astronomer Bob King, also known as Astro_Bob, was one of the first to note the strange phenomenon.

He said: Jupiter with only one belt is almost like seeing Saturn when its rings are edge-on and invisible for a time – it just doesnt look right.

It is not the first time this unusual phenomenon has been noticed.

Jupiter loses or regains one of its belts every ten of 15 years, although exactly why this happens is a mystery.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country’s highest military and civilian leaders died when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia on Saturday, killing 96, officials said.

Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors on the Soviet-era Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

The Army chief of staff, Gen. Franciszek Gagor, National Bank President Slawomir Skrzypek and Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Kremer were also on board, the Polish foreign ministry said.

Russia’s Emergency Ministry said there were 96 dead, 88 part of a Polish state delegation.

…

Putin has been put in charge of a commission investigating the crash, the Kremlin said.

WHILE the Top End and Central Australia have been battered by torrential rains, a Territory town has reportedly had fish falling from the sky.

The freak phenomena happened not once, but twice, on Thursday and Friday afternoon about 6pm at Lajamanu, about 550km southwest of Katherine, The Northern Territory News reports.

Christine Balmer, who took the photos of the fish on the ground and in a bucket, said she had to pinch herself when she was told “hundreds and hundreds” of small white fish had fallen from the sky.

“It rained fish in Lajamanu on Thursday and Friday night,” she said, “They fell from the sky everywhere.”

“Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere. “

“These fish were alive when they hit the ground.”

Seen on a recent Citibank (C) statement: “Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change.”

I joined a Facebook group called “Who is Ellie Light?” This morning I was invited to join a new group: “Who is Mark Spivey?”

Who is Mark Spivey? I know only this: that he is the author of this pro-Obama letter that has appeared in numerous publications:

A recent Associated Press article stated that President Barack Obama’s hesitancy on the Afghan war buildup implies weakness. I wish world leaders had more of that kind of weakness.

Clearly, Obama does not want to send soldiers into harm’s way without a clear goal, a solid plan and an exit strategy, three aspects sorely missing from former President George W. Bush’s military ventures. I know that we Americans are used to presidents who play cowboy, who say things like “bring ’em on” and “mission accomplished” without a second thought; presidents who send Americans into battle on falsified weapons reports.

But it seems our current president understands that you don’t send soldiers into battle without first nailing down what they’re supposed to be doing, and why. So hats off to Obama’s “hesitation.” Soldiers are human beings, not chess pieces. It’s about time we get a president who understands that.
— Mark Spivey

The letter has appeared — at a minimum! — at The Minnesota Daily, at the Baltimore Chronicle (on the same page as Ellie Light’s letter!), at the San Diego Union-Tribune (where he claims to be from San Diego), at the Naples News (where he claims to be from Naples, Florida), and at Buzzflash.com. And there are more. You know what to do.
…
Also: Ed Morrissey forwarded me an e-mail he received from Ellie Light several days ago. The mail appears to have been routed through the IP address 212.24.236.50, which comes back to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia??

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 website based in India has reported researchers with the Chandrayaan-1 mission may have found “signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.” DNAIndia.com quoted Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre as saying that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. “The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,” Pal said.

At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea but said, “It is an intriguing suggestion, and we are certainly very interested in learning more of their results.”

Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Impact Probe, or MIP impacted the within the Shackleton Crater on the Moon’s south pole on Nov. 14, 2008. An anonymous Chandrayaan-1 scientist said MIP’s mass spectrometer detected chemical signatures of organic matter in the soil kicked up by the impact.

“Certain atomic numbers were observed that indicated the presence of carbon components. This indicates the possibility of the presence of organic matter (on the Moon),” a senior scientist told DNAIndia.

Who’s been firebombing all those Italian cafés in Montreal? The answer police have been getting so far: silenzio.

Police are stumped as to why at least five bars in the city have been hit by Molotov cocktails in less than a month, but it’s clear that the victims don’t want to talk.

The head of the Montreal police arson squad said his detectives are mulling a number of theories, but, with merchants remaining mute, all they have are hypotheses.

There’s the possibility that a Mafia war has erupted. Or perhaps a brazen street gang is trying to move in on the Mob’s turf. Or maybe rival gangs are battling among themselves. Police have even considered an arsonist with a particular penchant for putting latté-makers out of business.

“None of the hypotheses have been set aside, but none have been validated for the time being, either,” said Cmdr. Robert Quevillon, who heads the police arson and economic crimes unit.

The mystery surrounding a missing merchant ship deepened Thursday with the vessel’s operator suggesting piracy and maritime experts suspecting foul play or even a secret cargo. The Kremlin ordered Russian warships to join the hunt for the 4,000-tonne, 98-meter bulk carrier Arctic Sea, whose fate has baffled maritime authorities across Europe and North Africa.

The Maltese-registered vessel, carrying a $1.3-million cargo of timber, was supposed to have docked on August 4 in the Algerian port of Bejaia. It never arrived and is thought to have last made contact from the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of France.

Mikhail Boytenko, editor of Russia’s respected Sovfracht maritime journal, said that the ship may have been carrying a secret cargo unknown to the vessel’s owners or operators.

Busted: Statue’s a Dead Ringer for Jacko 

The Pharaoh of Pop doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as King of Pop, but visitors to Chicago’s Field Museum could swear that’s Jacko’s face on a 3,000-year-old Egyptian bust.

The spitting image limestone sculpture has been on display at the museum since 1988, but recently started drawing attention because of its likeness to Jacko — complete with disfigured nose.

Unfortunately the bust, which was carved sometime between 1550 B.C. and 1050 B.C., is of a woman and MJ likely never had the chance to see the statuette.

“I have no idea whether Jackson ever visited the museum,” a Field spokesperson said to the Sun-Times. “But the similarity between the limestone statue of a woman – which is about 3,000 years old — and Jackson is astounding.”

Walk around Kodinji village and you’ll think that you have double vision. The village is home to as many as 230 sets of twins.

Nobody knows why there are so many twins in the village of 15,000 people, although one local doctor suspects it might be due to the water.

In fact with about 35-45 twins per live birth, this village in North Kerala, India, has four times more twins than normal. Not surprisingly, the village has been dubbed “the twin village.”

The latest official estimates by the Kodinji’s Twins and Kins Association (TAKA), which conducted door-to-door surveys at the start of the year, found that there were 204 sets of twins.

Based on births since the survey was conducted, there are probably now around 230 sets of twins in the village, locals said. That number is set to rise as there are five women pregnant with twins.

Police in northern Bangladesh say they have arrested dozens of swindlers who conned people out of money by calling them on mobile phones and pretending to be genies with supernatural powers.”It has become an epidemic here,” said Farhad bin Imrul Kayes, police chief of Gobindaganj district. “In the last three months alone we have arrested 24 of these so-called ‘kings of genies’, some of whom have even become rich in just a year,” he told AFP.

The scammers would gather personal information about their victims beforehand, call them and speak “in a tone similar to Arabic,” Kayes said.

The distinct possibility that precious metals may have been stolen from the Royal Canadian Mint is “inexcusable,” the federal minister responsible for the Crown corporation said Monday.

The findings of a long-awaited external audit, released earlier in the day, concluded that $15.3 million in missing gold is not the result of accounting or bookkeeping errors, raising even more questions about the whereabouts of the metals from what has been touted as one of the most secure facilities in Canada.

“The mint’s still unexplained loss of precious metals is inexcusable,” Transport Minister John Baird and Minister of State for Transport Rob Merrifield, whose department is responsible for the mint, said in a joint release. “The mint will be held accountable.”

For the second day in a row a newborn girl has been born on New York City’s mass transit system. A Brooklyn bus became a makeshift delivery room on Friday morning. A woman passenger helped the mother deliver the baby that just couldn’t wait to come aboard.

Paramedics took the new mother and baby to a hospital. Their names were not released.

On Thursday, conductor Bretta Sykes helped a mother deliver a girl in a subway car. The mother of two says she used information from her own chilbirth classes to coach the woman through her seven-minute delivery.

A New York City Transit spokesman says it could be the system’s first consecutive births on a subway train and a bus.

Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland.

 They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each. Italian authorities have not yet determined whether they are real or fake, but if they are real the attempt to take them into Switzerland would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history; if they are fake, the matter would be even more mind-boggling because the quality of the counterfeit work is such that the fake bonds are undistinguishable from the real ones.

What caught the policemen’s attention were the billion dollar securities. Such a large denomination is not available in regular financial and banking markets. Only states handle such amounts of money.

The question now is who could or would counterfeit or smuggle these non-negotiable bonds.

A top-secret meeting of the world’s richest people to discuss the global financial crisis was held in New York on May 5, IrishCentral.com has learned exclusively.

The mysterious, media-blackout meeting was called by Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire-Hathaway; Bill Gates, co founder of Microsoft; and David Rockefeller Jr., chairman of Rockefeller Financial Services.

In addition to Gates, Buffett and Rockefeller, the attendees included Oprah Winfrey, George Soros, Ted Turner, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, among others.

It was held in the President’s Room at Rockefeller University In New York at 3 p.m. on that Tuesday afternoon.

How so many giant figures in American life managed to interrupt and coordinate their schedules on such short notice, and meet in total secrecy in the world’s media capital remains a mystery — as does the ultimate outcome of the billionaires’ conference.

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it’s hard not to think immediately of England’s Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.

Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the “guides” themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite).

What’s most widely agreed upon—based on the evidence available—is that the Guidestones are meant to instruct the dazed survivors of some impending apocalypse as they attempt to reconstitute civilization. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion. A few days before I visited, the stones had been splattered with polyurethane and spray-painted with graffiti, including slogans like “Death to the new world order.” This defacement was the first serious act of vandalism in the Guidestones’ history, but it was hardly the first objection to their existence. In fact, for more than three decades this uncanny structure in the heart of the Bible Belt has been generating responses that range from enchantment to horror. Supporters (notable among them Yoko Ono) have praised the messages as a stirring call to rational thinking, akin to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Opponents have attacked them as the Ten Commandments of the Antichrist.

Fourteen thoroughbred horses dropped dead in a mysterious scene Sunday before a polo match near West Palm Beach, Florida, officials said.

State and local veterinary teams are trying to figure out what happened at the International Polo Club Palm Beach in Wellington, Florida, as team Lechuza Caracas prepared to compete in a U.S. Open match. It’s unclear what killed the horses but necropsies and blood tests were being done Sunday, the Palm Beach Post reported.

The U.S. Polo Association, the sport’s governing body, is expected to open an investigation Monday, the Sun-Sentinel newspaper reported. Two horses initially collapsed, and as vets and team officials scrambled to revive them, five others became dizzy, said Tim O’Connor, spokesman for the polo club.

Vandals cut fiber-optic cable lines belonging to AT&T at two locations early today, knocking out phones and access to 911 emergency services to thousands of residential customers and businesses in southern Santa Clara County, in Santa Cruz and San Benito counties and along the Peninsula, authorities said.

Four AT&T fiber-optic cables in an underground vault were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in south San Jose, police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said.

Four more underground cables, at least two of which belong to AT&T, were cut about two hours later along Old County Road near Bing Street in San Carlos, authorities said.

John Britton, spokesman for AT&T, said, “Clearly, we have some vandalism. Someone purposefully and deliberately cut the wires.”

Four of the five main online forums that al-Qaeda’s media wing uses to distribute statements by Osama bin Laden and other extremists have been disabled since mid-September, monitors of the Web sites say.

The disappearance of the forums on Sept. 10 — and al-Qaeda’s apparent inability to restore them or create alternate online venues, as it has before — has curbed the organization’s dissemination of the words and images of its fugitive leaders. On Sept. 29, a statement by the al-Fajr Media Center, a distribution network created by supporters of al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups, said the forums had disappeared “for technical reasons,” and it urged followers not to trust look-alike sites.

It would appear that the ghost of Ted Bundy has returned or showed up at the Florida Prison and appears to be having a great time.

 The reports coming from the Florida State Prison have gotten strange indeed. It appears that the Ghost of Ted Bundy has showed up and is terrorizing prison guards and inmates at the prison. A guard who has asked not to be identified says that Bundy’s Ghost appears in the area where he was executed and in his former cell where he spent his last hours before being put into Florida’s Electric Chair. Up until the end Bundy tried to save his life by offering to tell where more bodies were buried but in the end they refused to give him any more time and he was executed.

Stonehenge has a new age ? and a new purpose. It’s long been understood that the Neolithic stone circle on Salisbury Plain in southern England was an observatory tuned to the summer solstice and the positions of the stars. But new excavations led by a pair of British archaeologists show that it was also a healing center, a sort of pagan Lourdes for chronically ill and crippled pilgrims from across western Europe. “Stonehenge would attract not only people who were unwell, but people who were capable of [healing] them,” Professor Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University told the BBC. The dig by Darvill and fellow archaeologist Geoff Wainwright also may reset the timeline of the Stonehenge site.

The tie that binds John and Rebecca Jackson is about 4 feet by 14 feet, woven of herringbone twill linen. It once led to their romance; years later, it still dominates their thoughts and fills their conversations.

It brought Rebecca, an Orthodox Jew, to the Catholic Church; it led John to suspend himself from an 8-foot-tall cross to study how blood might have stained the cloth. Together, the two have committed to memory every crease, scorch mark and unexplained stain in their years-long pursuit of the mystery

By day, the engineers work on NASA’s new Ares moon rockets.

By night, some go undercover to work on a competing design. These dissenting scientists and their backers insist they have created an alternative rocket that would be safer, cheaper and easier to build than the two Ares spacecraft that will replace the space shuttle.

They call their project Jupiter, and like Ares, it’s a brainchild of workers at the Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA facilities.

The engineers involved are doing the work on their own time and mostly anonymously, with the help of retirees and other space enthusiasts.

Round-the-world flying adventurer Steve Fossett may have faked his own death, investigators have claimed.

Steve Fossett went missing last September when his final flight in a light plane over the Nevada desert went missing

Fossett, a friend of Virgin boss Richard Branson, and the first man to fly non-stop round the earth in a hot air balloon, went missing last September when his final flight in a light plane over the Nevada desert went missing.

However, Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the US Civil Air Patrol has said Fossett, whose body or plane was never found, could still be alive.

She said: “I’ve been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found.

“It’s not like we didn’t have our eyes open. We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We’re pretty good at what we do.”

Don’t blame a bird for the punch that the Northwest Airlines plane took in the nose on Sunday.

Northwest is now examining the dented nose cone of a Boeing 757 jet that was damaged during a flight from Detroit to Tampa. Images snapped by passengers (MSNBC even has some video, above) show the front tip of the plane looking a bit like a beer cup smashed in after a football game.

A spokeswoman for the Tampa airport initially told The Associated Press that the damage was probably caused by a bird striking the plane in mid-flight.

But this afternoon, the Federal Aviation Administration essentially ruled out that possibility as more details became available.

With the blankest of blank expressions on their faces, these mysterious figures have been popping up in the most unlikely of places.

The faceless mutants have a penchant for A-list celebrity bashes and have been spotted at Elton John’s White tie ball and Harrods summer sale, opened by Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall.

With a membrane of skin stretched tightly over their eyes, noses and mouths, the alien-like figures were most recently snapped ‘watching’ a match perched on Murray Mount at Wimbledon.

Floods sweeping southern China seem to have fulfilled the final stanza of an Internet curse involving Beijing’s Olympic mascots, but censors have been quick to remove postings that might fuel the superstition.

After a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province last month, Internet users tied four of the five “Fuwa” mascots to the calamities that have struck China in the run-up to the Games, which begin in August. One Fuwa is a panda, the totem of Sichuan.

The others resemble a torch, reminding netizens of the protests against the international Olympic torch rally; a Tibetan antelope tied to widespead demonstrations in Tibetan areas; and a swallow that looks like a kite, linked to a deadly train crash in Shandong province.

The media calls from Paris, New York and Australia were just starting to ebb Thursday for Sandra Malone when a new frenzy started: the mysterious sixth human foot that had apparently washed ashore in front of the campground she manages was nothing but a hoax.

It was the latest twist in a story that has many people on Vancouver Island and the mainland riveted. In less than a year, four right feet and one left foot — all encased in buoyant sneakers — have washed ashore in the Strait of Georgia. The latest was found Monday in Ladner, just south of Vancouver.

On Wednesday, everybody thought the number of feet had risen to six after a woman who was collecting rocks for an art project at Campbell River spotted a black Adidas running shoe with two bones sticking out of it. The woman rushed to tell Malone, who ran to the beach and then called police.

A police helicopter crew has spotted what is described as an unusual aircraft in the Vale of Glamorgan.

The helicopter was above St Athan, which is home to an RAF base and close to Cardiff International Airport.

But three-man crew could not capture any images before the object vanished over the Bristol Channel on 7 June.

South Wales Police said the helicopter did not give chase and described the crew as very experienced. The sighting has been reported for investigation.

The most complex, “mind-boggling” crop circle ever to be seen in Britain has been discovered in a barley field in Wiltshire.

The formation, measuring 150ft in diameter, is apparently a coded image representing the first 10 digits, 3.141592654, of pi.

It is has appeared in a field near Barbury Castle, an iron-age hill fort above Wroughton, Wilts, and has been described by astrophysicists as “mind-boggling”.

Michael Reed, an astrophysicist, said: “The tenth digit has even been correctly rounded up. The little dot near the centre is the decimal point.

A severed foot — the sixth this year — washed up on the shore of a Canadian island on Wednesday, police said.
Severed feet have washed up on Westham Island, south of Vancouver, British Columbia.

The right foot was found by a local woman walking on the beach, said Sgt. Mike Tresoor of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the town of Campbell River on Vancouver Island, British Colombia.

Authorities were planning an afternoon news conference to release more details.

The foot was the sixth discovered on shorelines in the area since August, according to local police and media reports. Another foot — a severed left foot still clad in a shoe — was found Monday on the shore of Westham Island, south of Vancouver. Police said it was taken to a coroner for DNA testing.

The severed left foot, which was in a shoe, was taken to a coroner for DNA tests, she added.

A fifth human foot in a year has washed ashore off the coast of British Columbia, and this time it’s a left one.

Police said two people out for a walk spotted the left foot floating in water off Westham Island on Monday morning.

Delta Police Const. Sharlene Brooks said officials are working with the B.C. Coroner’s office to see if this foot is linked to any other partial remains recovered in the province.

Westham Island is at the mouth of the Fraser River, about 15 miles south of Vancouver.

“A passerby noticed a shoe floating in the water, pulled it in and notified police,” Brooks said. “We’re treating it as a criminal investigation.”

Boxun News, a Chinese-language Web site based outside China, reported that an unnamed expert has claimed that there was a nuclear explosion near the epicenter of the Sichuan earthquake, based on witness reports and the discovery of concrete rubble believed to have come from an underground military installation. The news of this nuclear explosion has raised questions about the cause of the earthquake.

Mr. He, a local resident, stated that when the earthquake occurred on May 12, people saw something erupt from the top of a mountain next to the valley, “It looked like toothpaste being squeezed out,” said He. “No, it wasn’t [magma]. It was these concrete pieces. The eruption lasted about three minutes.”

According to a China News Services (CNS) report on May 31, 2008, paramedics from People’s Liberation Army (PLA) hospitals and psychologists from Beijing onsite May 23 found concrete debris at the bottom of a valley near the epicenter. The half-mile-wide valley was covered with debris 10 – 20 inches thick, covering the valley floor for almost 1.5 miles.

Researchers have produced aerial photos of jungle dwellers who they say are among the few remaining peoples on Earth who have had no contact with the outside world.

Taken from a small airplane, the photos show men outside thatched communal huts, necks craned upward, pointing bows toward the air in a remote corner of the Amazonian rainforest.

The National Indian Foundation, a government agency in Brazil, published the photos Thursday on its Web site. It tracks “uncontacted tribes” — indigenous groups that are thought to have had no contact with outsiders — and seeks to protect them from encroachment.

More than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, and about half live in the remote reaches of the Amazonian rainforest in Peru or Brazil, near the recently photographed tribe, according to Survival International, a nonprofit group that advocates for the rights of indigenous people.

Hat tip to Joel!

Sensational sightings of a flying human above the skies of Mexico could be genuine, says a paranormal expert.

The mysterious woman-like figure was caught on camera as it hovered above mountains in Nuevo Leon city.

UFO watchers said the figure appeared to be wearing a cape, leading to claims that it was a witch or wizard when it was first seen in 2006.

Now Mexico’s leading UFO expert Anna Luisa Cid says the sightings were true after carrying out her own investigations.

“I think that the possibility is there,” Cid said. “An imaginary object is not recorded on film, nor does it produce over 40 witnesses.”

Nuevo Leon UFO club managed to film the spooky flying character.

Red colored lights that formed a square and then a triangle were seen floating over north Phoenix late Monday, a sight reminiscent of an unexplained 1997 sighting that has become part of the area’s lore.

There was no immediate word where they came from.

The Air Force said the lights weren’t from any of their flight operations and officials at Deer Valley airport and Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport could not explain it.

The lights were visible for about 13 minutes around 8 p.m. Monday.

Radivoje Lajic claims he is being targeted by aliens and has reinforced his roof in Gornja Lamovite with a steel girder.

He said: “I am obviously being targeted by aliens. I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense.

“The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate.”

The chances of just one meteor hitting your house is many billions to one.

Belgrade University has confirmed that all the rocks Mr Lajic has handed over were meteorites, but not that they all hit his house.

Merle Brandell and his black lab Slapsey were beachcombing along the Bering Sea when he spied a plastic bottle among the Japanese glass floats he often finds along the shore of his tiny Alaskan fishing village.

He walked over and saw an envelope tucked inside. After slicing the bottle open, Brandell found a message from an elementary school student in a suburb of Seattle. The fact that the letter traveled 1,735 miles without any help from the U.S. postal service is unusual, but that’s only the beginning of the mystery.

About 21 years passed between the time Emily Hwaung put the message in a soda bottle and Merle Brandell picked it up on the beach.

“This letter is part of our science project to study oceans and learn about people in distant lands,” she wrote. “Please send the date and location of the bottle with your address. I will send you my picture and tell you when and where the bottle was placed in the ocean. Your friend, Emily Hwaung.”

Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.

In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: “Look into my eyes”, before finding the till empty.

In the latest incident captured on CCTV, he targeted a bank at Ancona in northern Italy, then calmly walked out.

A female bank clerk reportedly handed over nearly 800 euros (£630).

The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.

More than 100 students in a western Ugandan school become possessed by demonic spirits, Uganda’s state-run newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The New Vision said that authorities at Sir Tito Winyi Primary School in the western district Hoima described the “hysterical” students as suffering from a demonic attack.

“The situation is bad. About 100 pupils are totally mad. They are chasing everybody including teachers and fellow pupils, throwing stones, banging doors and windows,” the paper quoted headmaster Vincent Kitende as saying.

Hat tip to Kara!

Eight House Democrats were mailed a letter and photo of a Times Square recruiting station in Manhattan before it was bombed this morning, according to House insiders.

The letter did not contain any specific threats against the lawmakers or the site, but the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI are now investigating the matter.

It was unclear which lawmakers received the letters or when, but House aides confirmed they were all Democrats.

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 trooper in Gaston County said he stopped a man for speeding on Interstate 85, but discovered a lot more once looking inside the vehicle.

The trooper said Milan Krivsky had identification from several states and a West Virginia registration.

When the trooper looked inside the SUV, he says he found a radar gun, video monitor, digital video and audio equipment, laptops, cell phones and blue lights. Other items found inside, such as various kinds of tape and cutting devices, could also be a cause for concern.

“There’s a lot of disturbing things we found inside of the vehicle,” said Trooper J.J. Letcavage. “I would definitely fear the worst, anywhere from a possible abduction to physical harm. I have no doubt in my mind that that would be a capability of this guy.”

After a nasty surprise Thursday morning for one Bishopville resident, she’s wondering if the “Lizard Man” is back.

Dixie Rawson of Bishopville sent WIS News 10 an e-mail about a big surprise she got at her home Thursday morning. “The whole front half of our van is chewed up. There are bite marks right through the front grill. Both sides of the van above the wheel wells were bitten and the metal is bent like a piece of paper.”

It reminded Dixie of the local legend of the “Lizard Man” that stretches back for decades. Now some are wondering if the Lizard Man is back.

Mysteriously, five spacecraft that flew past the Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions.

These newfound enigmas join the so-called “Pioneer anomaly” as hints that unexplained forces may appear to act on spacecraft.

A decade ago, after rigorous analyses, anomalies were seen with the identical Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft as they hurtled out of the solar system. Both seemed to experience a tiny but unexplained constant acceleration toward the sun.

A host of explanations have been bandied about for the Pioneer anomaly. At times these are rooted in conventional science — perhaps leaks from the spacecraft have affected their trajectories. At times these are rooted in more speculative physics — maybe the law of gravity itself needs to be modified.

Now Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer John Anderson and his colleagues — who originally helped uncover the Pioneer anomaly — have discovered that five spacecraft each raced either a tiny bit faster or slower than expected when they flew past the Earth en route to other parts of the solar system.

As police tried to piece together how a rare, deadly poison ended up in a motel for transients, the 57-year-old man who could hold the key lay unconscious in a hospital.

Adding to the mystery, police said firearms and an “anarchist type textbook” were found in the same room where the ricin was discovered two days later.

Capt. Joseph Lombardo said at a news conference late Friday that the book was tabbed at a spot with information about ricin. Police found the firearms and books on Tuesday after a manager at the Extended Stay America motel called police upon discovering weapons, he said, without elaborating.

Police in Las Vegas, Nevada, are investigating the discovery of the deadly poison ricin in a hotel room Thursday.

Authorities were called to an Extended Stay America hotel around 3 p.m. after a man brought a bag holding a small container to the manager’s office. The man said he found it while retrieving items from a hotel room.

It’s “100 percent ricin,” said Capt. Joe Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. “We don’t know who (the ricin) belongs to or why it would be here at this time.”

You have probably heard of Tickle-Me-Elmo, but what about Death-Threat-Elmo?

That’s what a Tampa-area boy now has.

James Bowman loves Elmo, and his mother thought getting him the high-tech toy, which hooks up to a computer to learn phrases and the child’s name would be a great gift.

But when Melissa Bowman changed the batteries earlier this week, Elmo began making the threat.

A woman who worked for the United Nations died Sunday after falling from the 19th floor of the U.N.’s Secretariat Building, authorities said.

Police and U.N. security officers at the scene, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said the woman in her 40s had jumped from a window after showing up to work early in the morning.

“A U.N. agency staff member died after falling from the 19th floor of the U.N. Secretariat Building,” U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said. “At this time there is no suspicion of foul play.”

The mystery began when one severed foot washed ashore last summer.

The second foot was found a week later, on a busy beach trail.

Now, what began as a strange coincidence has taken on downright baffling dimensions with the discovery earlier this month of a third male foot.

All three feet washed up on a Gulf Island between B.C.’s mainland and Vancouver Island.

The connection between the feet doesn’t end there.

They were all right feet, size 12, and all three were shod in sneakers.

The RCMP and the coroner’s office are investigating who the three men were and what may have happened. The feet are being investigated individually as separate cases.

A dried and decomposing body was found in a bathtub filled with dirt in a Phoenix apartment that was stacked to the ceiling with garbage and human waste.

Phoenix police Sgt. Joel Tranter said Monday that the apartment owners thought it had been abandoned in August.

But the owners didn’t decide to do anything about the filthy apartment until last week, when they paid other people in their complex to clean it out.

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.

Two Komodo dragons have hatched at the Sedgwick County Zoo, apparently without the fertilization of a male. The dragons, both males, are believed to be the first in North America known to have hatched by parthenogenesis, which occurs naturally in some species, including invertebrates and lower plants. It happens more rarely in some vertebrates.

Two other known cases in which Komodo dragons hatched by parthenogenesis were at the London and Chester zoos in England in 2006.

The zoo in Wichita is having DNA testing done to document the mother’s and the babies’ genetic structure because of the remote chance that a male’s sperm was stored on the female’s body.

A 7-year-old boy is in critical condition after being found hanging by his shirt collar from a clothing hook in a charter school’s dressing room, and police tried to determine Thursday whether it was an attack or an accident.

The shirt collar cut off the boy’s oxygen, and he was unconscious when a teacher found him Wednesday, said police Lt. Mark Spangler. He was in critical condition at a hospital Thursday.

“We’re not ruling anything out. We can’t rule anything in at this point,” Spangler said about the investigation. “Nothing is stepping out to us to say that there is some predator out there. … We just don’t know yet.”

The boy had attended an assembly at the Not Your Ordinary School campus and asked to be excused to go the bathroom. He was found as the assembly was ending; there was no surveillance camera in the area.

It’s been dubbed the Mystery of the Missing iPhones. On Jan. 22, Apple reported that it sold 3.7 million units of its smartphones worldwide through the end of 2007. But AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone reseller and by far the largest buyer of the devices, reported that its subscribers activated fewer than 2 million units last year. The big question on the minds of Apple watchers is: Where have the other 1.7 million iPhones gone?

The uncertainty has helped sink Apple’s (AAPL) stock price to $130 a share, down 34% since the beginning of the year. That is far worse than the 13% drop for the tech-heavy Nasdaq index. Apple shares were already under pressure over concerns about how weakening consumer spending would affect the company’s shipments of iPod music players and notebook computers. Now the worries about iPhone sales have entered the mix. “In the past week the stock has fallen further because of potentially lower iPhone shipments,” says Shebly Seyrafi, an analyst at Caris & Co.. A story that recently surfaced in a Chinese newspaper claimed that Apple’s iPhone component suppliers are cutting back on production in anticipation of lower U.S. demand.

City officials in Lewiston, Maine, are confronting a problem straight out of a 1950s horror flick as a mysterious blob has taken over a major sewer line through the town, according to a report on WMTW.com

According to city officials, the doughy, 90-foot mass is comprised of grease, flour and rags, and has been blocking a stretch of 12-inch sewer pipe on Main Street since January 13, WMTW reports.

Proving boomerangs really do come back, an Australian town was Thursday celebrating the return of a boomerang stolen from an outback museum by an American tourist 25 years ago.

The boomerang, a flying blade used mainly by Aborigines to hunt animals, was posted home to the city of Mount Isa in the northern state of Queensland by a Vermont man who named himself in a letter only as Peter.

“I removed this back in 1983 when I was younger and dumber. It was the wrong thing to do. I’m sorry, and I’m going to send it back,” according to a note read out to Australian media by Mt. Isa mayor Ron McCullough, who added Peter had also sent a check.

A U.S.-based television channel investigating the existence of the legendary Yeti in Nepal has found footprints similar to those said to be that of the abominable snowman, the company said on Friday.

A team of nine producers from Destination Truth, armed with infrared cameras, spent a week in the icy Khumbu region where Mount Everest is located and found the footprints on the bank of Manju river at a height of 2,850 meters (9,350 feet).

One of the three footprints discovered on Wednesday is about one foot long, or is of similar size and appearance as shown in sketches of the mystical ape-like creature believed to live in snowy caves, the TV company said.

Turkeys Visit NY Town for Thanksgiving

Fifteen wild turkeys strutted into a suburban hamlet on Thanksgiving Day and then left just in time to avoid dinner.

The turkeys showed up Thursday morning, drawing crowds of spectators, but left _ marching in single file _ at about 1 p.m.

Jesus is a busy person.

A woman believes she has found the image of Jesus and Mary in a pancake she was cooking for breakfast on a Sunday morning.

Marilyn Smith, of Port St Lucie, Florida, decided to sell the pancake on eBay – after an earlier, cancelled sale in which the pancake reached £165 ($338), the current bid stands at $26.01.

A strange blue cloud seen floating and darting around customers, freezing for 30 minutes and then speeding from an Ohio gas station, remains unexplained even though it was caught on security cams.

The ghostly image was seen moving near and over cars at a Marathon gas station located near the corner of State Road and Pleasant Valley in Parma on Sunday.

Surveillance video of the image showed it flipping and then sitting in the same location for 30 minutes.

It then flies off the screen at a high rate of speed.

UFOs may be fodder for comedians and science fiction but there was no joking Monday when a group of pilots and officials demanded the US government reopen an investigation into unidentified flying objects.

The 19 former pilots and government officials, who say they have seen UFOs themselves or been involved in probes of strange flying objects, told reporters their questions can no longer be dismissed more than 30 years after the US case was closed.

Aliens were responsible for a series of unexplained fires in fridges, TV’s and mobile phones in an Italian village, according to an Italian government report.

Canneto di Caronia, in northern Sicily, drew attention three years ago after residents reported everyday household objects bursting into flames.

TV news footage at the time showed electrical appliances as well as cookers, a pile of wedding presents and furniture smouldering.
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Dozens of experts including scientists, electrical engineers and military boffins, arrived in the village 60 miles east of Palermo to investigate the phenomenon.

Arson was quickly ruled out and at one stage an amazed scientist was interviewed after he described how he saw an unplugged electrical cable burst into flames.

Locals were quick to blame supernatural forces and at the time the Vatican’s chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth backed up their fears and said: “I’ve seen things like this before. Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods. Let’s not forget that Satan and his followers have immense powers.”

Now in an interim leaked report published by several Italian newspapers it has emerged that the Civil Protection Department has concluded the most likely cause was “aliens”.

The most powerful Internet weapon on the planet is apparently dying the death of a thousand cuts. The weapon in question is the Storm botnet. This was the largest botnet ever seen, and it appeared to be acting like something out of a science fiction story. Last Summer, the Storm network was believed capable to shutting down any military or commercial site on the planet. Or, Storm could cripple hundreds of related sites temporarily. Worse, Storm could have done some major damage in ways that have not yet been experienced.

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ “

A brain was found in a bag near an apartment complex Tuesday morning, and the state medical examiner’s office was trying to determine whether it was human or animal, police said.

The brain, or portion of a brain, was discovered in an area next to a suburban Richmond apartment complex under construction and near a mall, Richmond police spokeswoman Karla Peters said. She believed the people who discovered the organ were construction workers, but said she had not confirmed that information.

Hat tip to Kara!

Global financial markets face a permanent shift in power from traditional money managers to opaque groups such as petro-dollar investors, Asian central banks, hedge funds and private equity groups, according to a study out Thursday.

These power brokers had amassed $8,400bn in assets by the end of 2006, three times what they held in 2000 when they were “little more than fringe players” in the capital markets, says the report, published by McKinsey Global Institute.

Their holdings now represent 5 per cent of the world’s $167,000bn of financial assets. If current trends continue, they could control assets worth $20,700bn, or nearly three-quarters of the size of global pension funds, by 2012.

Gallup police reported a bizarre set of circumstances following a recent emergency call to the home of Roman Catholic Bishop Donald Pelotte.

The most recent event happened Thursday when Gallup police reported receiving an emergency call from Pelotte, 62.

An incident report from the McKinley Metropolitan Dispatch Authority reported that Pelotte told operators “…gentle little people, about 3 to 4 feet tall, and wearing Halloween masks” were in the hall. The dispatch log reported that Pelotte said he hid in a closet while the people were in his home.

Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said today.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a “strange odor,” local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.

The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight — if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.

“The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart,” he said. “We don’t really have a good hypothesis for it.”

Advanced Russian Air Defense Missile Cannot Protect Syrian and Iranian Skies

Western intelligence circles stress that information on Russian missile consignments to Syria or Iran is vital to any US calculation of whether to attack Iran over its nuclear program. They assume that the “absolute jamming immunity” which the Russian manufactures promised for the improved Pantsyr missiles was immobilized by superior electronic capabilities exercised by the jets before they were “forced to leave.”

Syria took delivery in mid-August of 10 batteries of sophisticated Russian Pantsyr-S1E Air Defense Missile fire control systems with advanced radar, those sources report. They have just been installed in Syria.

Understanding that the Pantsyr-S1E had failed in its mission to bring down trespassing aircraft, Moscow hastened Thursday, Sept 6, to officially deny selling these systems to Syria or Iran and called on Israel to respect international law. This was diplomatic-speak for a warning against attacking the Russian-made missiles batteries stations where Russian instructors are working alongside Syrian teams.

Western intelligence circles maintain that it is vital for the US and Israel to establish the location and gauge the effectiveness of Pantsyr-S1E air defenses in Syrian and Iranian hands, as well as discovering how many each received.

A US official has confirmed that Israeli warplanes carried out an air strike “deep inside” Syria, escalating tensions between the two countries.

The target of the strike last Thursday remained unclear but Israeli media reported that a shipment of Iranian arms crossing Syria for use by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon was attacked.

Syria first reported the incident on the day, saying its air defences had engaged five Israeli planes, but did not say what their target was. Israel remained uncharacteristically silent, pointedly refusing to deny that its warplanes were involved in an operation. The closest it came to acknowledging the affair happened was when it made an undertaking to Turkey to investigate how an Israeli long-range fuel tank was dropped on Turkish territory near the Syrian border.

Large chunks of ice, one of them reportedly about 50 pounds, fell from the sky Thursday in this northeast Iowa city, smashing through a woman’s roof and tearing through nearby trees.

Authorities are unsure of the ice’s origin but have theorized the chunks either fell from an airplane or naturally accumulated high in the atmosphere — both rare occurrences.

“It sounded like a bomb!” said 78-year-old Jan Kenkel, who was standing in her kitchen when an ice chunk crashed through her roof at about 5:30 a.m. “I jumped about a foot!”

A mysterious underground chamber has been found inside the Chinese imperial tomb guarded by the famous Terracotta Army, Chinese archaeologists say.

Historical records describing the tomb of Qin Shihuang, China’s first emperor, do not mention the room which is 30 metres (98 feet) deep.

The unopened chamber was found at the site near the old imperial capital of Xian using remote sensing technology.

One expert says it may have been built for the soul of the emperor.

A French space-surveillance radar has detected 20-30 satellites in low Earth orbit that do not figure in the U.S. Defense Department’s published catalogue, a discovery that French officials say they will use to pressure U.S. authorities to stop publishing the whereabouts of French reconnaissance and military communications satellites.

After 16 months of operations of their Graves radar system, which can locate satellites in orbits up to 1,000 kilometers in altitude and even higher in certain cases, the French Defense Ministry says it has gathered just about enough information to negotiate an agreement with the United States.

Kryptonite is no longer just the stuff of fiction feared by caped superheroes. A new mineral matching its unique chemistry – as described in the film Superman Returns – has been identified in a mine in Serbia. According to movie and comic-book storylines, kryptonite is supposed to sap Superman’s powers whenever he is exposed to its large green crystals. The real mineral is white and harmless, says Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London’s Natural History Museum.

Australian rescuers were on Friday trying to solve the “Mary Celeste” style mystery of a yacht found floating off the coast with its engine running, food on its table ready to eat, but no crew.

The 12-meter (36 feet) catamaran was found 80 nautical miles off Townsville on the northeast coast, but there was no sign of the three crewmen who had set sail from Queensland state bound for Australia’s west coast on Sunday.

“What they found was a bit strange in that everything was normal, there was just no sign of the crew,” Jon Hall from emergency management in Queensland told local radio on Friday.

Five decomposed bodies, possibly of a couple and their children who died one after another several years ago, have been found in a house in Japan, triggering media speculation on religious death rites.

Japanese police have not been able to identify the partly mummified, partly skeletonised bodies, which were found lying on their backs on mattresses in a house in Omuta on the southwestern island of Kyushu, a police spokesman said.

Japanese media said the bodies could be of a couple in their 90s and their two daughters and son who had lived in the house.

“They died between about 20 years ago and four years ago, one after another,” the Yomiuri newspaper quoted a relative as saying.

For years Peter Dungworth painstakingly planted thousands of daffodil bulbs in the hope of one day leading his village to a Britain in Bloom award.

But just days before he was due to welcome judges to view this year’s entry he awoke to find each and every flower had been deliberately beheaded.

Now police have launched an investigation amid claims that mean-spirited saboteurs from a rival village may have crept in under the cover of darkness.

It was a device worthy of Rube Goldberg or Wile E. Coyote: a dozen remote-controlled launching tubes secretly buried in the turf at Hong Kong’s most famous horse race track last week, armed with compressed air to fire tiny, liquid-filled darts into the bellies of horses at the starting gate.

 No horses were hurt, because the track supervisor noticed something underfoot before racing started, discovered the elaborate mechanism concealed by grass-colored tape and called in a police bomb squad to remove it.

But the discovery of the device, equipped with elaborate electronic controls, has raised concerns about security during the six Olympic equestrian events to be held in Hong Kong next year.

Police sealed off one of the grandest houses in the ancient city of Pompeii yesterday after a tall column was found smashed. Officials at the site fear the destruction is a sign that Mafia gangs are trying to intimidate them.

 Pompeii is Italy’s most popular tourist destination, drawing 2.5 million visitors every year. And the house of Obellio Firmo is one of its most important. The villa’s owner was a leading figure in the city’s political life: at his funeral – before the fatal eruption of AD 79 – 10kg of incense was burned, at vast expense.

The column stood in the villa’s garden. No one yet knows exactly how or why it toppled over. The House of Obellio Firmo is being restored, and a high scaffolding next to the column was also found on its side: possibly wind or vandals caused the scaffolding to smash into the column.

Doors will soon open to reveal one of the mysteries of the Great Pyramid in Giza, Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News in an exclusive interview. Hawass, one of the world’s leading Egyptologists, said he will show what lies behind secret doors inside the 4,500-year-old pharaonic mausoleum by the end of this year. “Finally, people all over the world will know what is behind the second door in the southern shaft and the third door in the northern shaft,” Hawass said. Built in 2550 B.C. for the pharaoh Cheops, also known as Khufu, the Great Pyramid is the largest of a family of three pyramids on the Giza plateau, on the outskirts of Cairo.

The common view that nerves transmit impulses through electricity is wrong and they really transmit sound, according to a team of Danish scientists.

The Copenhagen University researchers argue that biology and medical textbooks that say nerves relay electrical impulses from the brain to the rest of the body are incorrect.

“For us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation,” said Thomas Heimburg, an associate professor at the university’s Niels Bohr Institute. “The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced.”

Something strange is happening in the outer reaches of our solar system. The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are not where they are supposed to be. These missions, launched in 1972 and 1973, have covered hundreds of millions of kilometers, heading toward the edge of our solar system. But something is holding them back. Each year, they fall behind in their projected travel by about 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles).

Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist John Anderson and his colleagues have been searching for an explanation since 1980. But as of yet, they have found nothing conclusive; no spacecraft behavior or previously unknown property of the outer solar system can explain the deceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft. Scientists are being forced to consider the unthinkable: something may be wrong with our understanding of the laws of physics. An important line of inquiry will be to study mounds of Doppler (velocity) data and spacecraft status data (like temperatures) that have been unavailable to researchers—but that is about to change

They kneeled. They cried. They asked for healing. Before them, on an altar of roses and prayer candles, was a metal baking sheet, stained with what hundreds of Houston Catholics now believe is an image of the Virgin Mary. Guadalupe Rodriguez, a Pugh Elementary School cafeteria worker, discovered the possible miracle on Ash Wednesday, while scrubbing away the last crumbs from the pizza lunch.

A Bucks County family was abruptly awakened after a large piece of icy debris crashed through the roof of their home.

Police were called to the family’s home on 43 Trailwood Drive in Northampton Township after a large chunk of ice came hurtling through the roof just after midnight Friday.

 ”My mom heard a huge explosion-type of sound and we all came out just to see and there was a huge hole in our ceiling,” said Miyoung Choi.

Aside from the impromptu skylight, Choi said ice and insulation was scattered throughout the home in the aftermath of the crash. Fortunately, no one was injured.

A statue of Jesus Christ is causing a sensation at an art gallery after witnesses said they saw sparks shooting from its eyes.

People are claiming the steel and bronze figure possesses miraculous powers and some visitors have taken to kneeling at its feet.

Around 106 years ago, someone slipped a copy of the world’s smallest complete Bible in a child’s boot and stuffed it into a cottage chimney cavity to ward off evil. Now British archaeologists have identified the book, which a renovator discovered while working on the cottage in central England’s Ewerby. In addition to the rarity of the book, the find represents one of the most recent instances of anti-witchcraft using a shoe amulet, according to British Archaeology editor Mike Pitts, who reports on the discovery in his latest issue.

A college student who reported that his car was stolen got a surprise when he learned a woman had mistaken it for her daughter’s car and taken it- using her key. Kate Anderson of Athens became an accidental car thief when she went to pick up her daughter’s car near an Ohio University building last week. Anderson spotted the nickel-gray Toyota Camry and used her daughter’s key to unlock the car, start the engine and drive home- without realizing that the car wasn’t her daughter’s.

Oddly enough, the exact same thing happened to me about 20 years ago.  My friend had a Honda Civic; we walked up to it in the parking lot of a mall, unlocked the door and got in.  It was only after he started the car that we realized that it was not his.  Same make, model and color, same keys – must be something about Japanese cars made in the 80’s.

After six years, you’d think someone would have wondered, “Whatever happened to Vladimir?”

Russian police got their answer late last week when they went to the apartment of Vladimir Ledenev, who hadn’t been seen since 2000, Pravda reported.

What they found left them stunned.

Vladimir’s body was discovered in a sitting position, his arm, still retaining some flesh, leaning on the kitchen table, his head slumped over. An empty vodka bottle and a glass sat in front of him, according to Pravda’s reports.

A Hillsborough County resident’s Ford Mustang was destroyed by just that Sunday, when a large slab of ice fell from the clear Florida sky directly onto the automobile, WTVT reports.

Bigfoot has gone missing in Federal Way, leaving no massive footprints in sight. It isn’t a hoax. An 8-foot-tall, wooden carving of the fabled Northwest beast was reported stolen Monday from a chiropractic office on Southwest Dash Point Road. Tim Payne, who’s had a practice in Federal Way for two decades, propped up the statue near his business’ secluded driveway more than five years ago. His family says he is fascinated with the lore of Bigfoot, which is why he chose the creature instead of a wooden bear or gorilla.

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs was questioned by U.S. investigators about stock options backdating at the company, according to several reports citing unidentified lawyers.

The company behind the popular iPod digital media player has said it was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission for its past option-grant practices.

Jobs was questioned by federal investigators in San Francisco last week, according to reports by the San Francisco Chronicle and Bloomberg, citing unidentified legal sources.

For the first time, scientists have experimentally demonstrated that sound pulses can travel at velocities faster than the speed of light, c. William Robertson’s team from Middle Tennessee State University also showed that the group velocity of sound waves can become infinite, and even negative.

Past experiments have demonstrated that the group velocities of other materials’ components—such as optical, microwave, and electrical pulses—can exceed the speed of light. But while the individual spectral components of these pulses have velocities very close to c, the components of sound waves are almost six orders of magnitude slower than light (compare 340 m/s to 300,000,000 m/s).

FOR the 58th year in a row, a mysterious visitor left birthday cognac and roses at Edgar Allan Poe’s grave yesterday, watched by more onlookers than ever.

Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Poe House and Museum, said 55 people braved a chilly morning to glimpse the annual ritual of the mysterious visitor known as the Poe Toaster.

As in years past, the visitor placed a half-empty bottle of cognac and three red roses at the grave on Poe’s birthday, Mr Jerome said.

An unusual archeological site discovered in Peru’s mountains may hold clues to the history of the Chachapoya people, known as “cloud warriors,” who fought the Inca Empire before the Spanish conquest. Keith Muscutt, a British-born Chachapoya researcher with the University of California Santa Cruz, said Wednesday the site was “strikingly anomalous” because of its size, shape and remote location in the dense forest full of spider monkeys and toucans. The unfortified, possibly ceremonial structure is located in an area previously considered on the periphery of the Chachapoya domain in the upper Amazon region.

Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds.

Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightning, a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms. It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hovering, even bouncing along the ground.

The respectable looking lady at the tea shop in the Sussex market town of Lewes was an unlikely advocate of urban terrorism. “Everyone I know is secretly pleased about the attacks. No one would mind if every last one was blown to pieces,” she confided in a hushed tone.

“If I knew who was carrying out the explosions I wouldn’t tell the police. Good luck to them, I say,” she added.

So what is the object of such passion and hatred in a town usually associated with literature, music, antiques, and good taste? It is the parking meter.

An antique earring thought to have belonged to Hollywood legend Marlene Dietrich has been found under an old rollercoaster, bosses at a theme park in north-west England have said.

The German-born actress and cabaret star lost the pearl and gold earring in 1934 while taking a ride on “The Big Dipper” attraction at Blackpool Pleasure Beach during a personal appearance. The piece of jewellery was unearthed after the site of the old Log Flume lake where the ride once stood was dredged as part of construction work.

Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence.

Officials say they are baffled they cannot find a trace of the missing Adam Air Boeing 737-400 despite marking its coordinates from an onboard Emergency Locator Beacon Aircraft (OLBA). This as the massive, internationally-assisted search operation in Indonesia prepared to halt at nightfall and resume at daybreak on Saturday over an even wider area of Sulawesi Island. “We’re trying to find it but there’s an ‘X-factor’ about it,” said Ahmad, an official from the National Search and Rescue Agency in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province and base of search and rescue operation.