People visiting a UK park in the hope of seeing Christmas reindeer were greeted with a horrific sight — the bodies of several animals which had fallen through the ice and drowned.

The bodies and antlers of at least eight deer and stags could be seen protruding through the frozen lake at a Durham deer park, the Daily Mail reported.

Visitors could also see hoof marks leading to where the deer broke the ice and fell into the freezing lake.

Parents of children who were visiting the park, which promotes itself as an “authentic” place to celebrate Christmas, said they were stunned by the sight.

“My son was distressed and we did not feel comfortable,” said a woman who was visiting with her eight-year-old son.

“It was an awful sight and nothing seems to be done about it.”

Amid a flurry of criticism, a NASA-funded team on Thursday backed off the more extravagant, textbook-changing claims they’d made about a bacterium that had allegedly substituted arsenic for phosphorus in its DNA.

The original announcement, made at a NASA news conference Dec. 2, seemed to break a cardinal rule of biology that all organisms need some phosphorus to survive.

NASA researchers claimed to have discovered an exotic organism in California’s Mono Lake that lived instead on arsenic, thus broadening the types of life that may exist in the universe.

The news made headlines worldwide including a New York Times story that ran in The Inquirer on Dec. 3.

On Thursday, the researchers issued a more modest claim. Instead of saying the microbes had completely substituted arsenic for phosphorus, a new statement says the arsenic replaced “a small percentage” of the phosphorus.

A number of biologists say they’ll be surprised if even this stands the test of time.

The claims “do not follow from their results,” said Simon Silver, a University of Illinois microbiologist who specializes in heavy-metal resistance in bacteria.

“This conclusion is not merited from what they did and measured and I think it most likely is a mistake and should never have been claimed or published.”

The co-pilot of an Air India Express 737 sent the jetliner into a terrifying 7,000-foot plunge in May when he accidentally hit the control column while adjusting his seat, investigators report.

According to the report from India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the co-pilot panicked and was unable to execute the proper procedures as the jetliner dropped from 37,000 feet at a 26-degree angle.

The plane and its 113 passengers were saved when the pilot, who’d gone on a bathroom break, used an emergency code to get into the locked cockpit, jumped back into his seat and grabbed the controls to bring the plummeting plane out of its dive.

The aircraft would have broken apart if the descent had continued, the aviation agency report said.

The aircraft was not damaged and no one was injured, the report said. After the pilot, 39, regained control of the plane, he told passengers, who were in the middle of a meal when the jet plunged, that the plane had “went through an air pocket and that is why there was a rapid descent,” according to the report.

A New Brunswick logger is unrepentant after beginning to dismantle a wood pile that turned out to be a sculpture titled Deadwood Sleep.

Ron Fahey of Sackville said Monday he was granted permission in August from Mount Allison University to take the logs stacked in an area behind the president’s residence alongside a waterfowl park in the town.

“I got the okay to just take the wood and, to me, it was just a pile of wood,” he said. “If that’s art then I’m in the wrong racket. I guess I’m not cultured.”

He said he was going to use it for firewood and had started to haul some of the wood away on Saturday when the town manager came rushing over to ask if he had permission to touch it.

Mr. Fahey, 59, realized the mistake and stopped working on the pile, though he’d already pulled several logs off.

Andrea Ward, grounds manager at Mount Allison University, said there was confusion over which pile of wood Fahey was to dismantle behind the historic Cranewood residence on the campus.

“Basically we said, ‘We don’t think the wood you’re looking at is on your property, but we do have some wood on our property if you’re interested,’ ” she said.

Three planes belonging to the airline Germanwings reportedly took off this weekend with jet fuel in their drinking water tanks, which nearly made it into passengers’ coffee cups.

According to daily Bild, a 21-year-old service company employee on Saturday thought he was filling the planes at Berlin’s Schönefeld airport with water, not realising the 3,000-litre tank was contaminated with fuel.

The mistake was not discovered until after the planes to Zweibrücken, Cologne and Munich took off, Germanwings spokesman Joachim Schöttes said on Sunday.

The crews all reported noticing a strange smell while preparing beverages for passengers, at which point they decided to serve juice and soft drinks instead, Bild reported.

“The passengers had to do without tea and coffee,” Schöttes said.

Bartlesville Police are investigating the death of a 10-day-old baby.

The infant’s mother, Lyndsey Fiddler, has been arrested for second-degree manslaughter. Police officers were called to a downtown apartment at 7:42 p.m. Thursday after receiving a 911 call.

When they arrived, they found the infant dead inside a washing machine, having been put in there with clothes and gone through an entire wash cycle.

Bartlesville Police Chief Tom Holland says in his 40 years of police work he has never seen or heard of anything like this.

“I started in Fort Worth and have walked into apartments with seven dead bodies, seen terrible crimes, mass murder, even,” Holland said.

Police say an aunt of the mother went over Thursday night to check on Fiddler and her three kids and found a terrible scene.

“The mother was asleep and she had trouble waking her and heard the washer out of balance, clanging, so went to lift the lid so it would stop and in the washing machine, saw the baby,” Holland said.

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 baby died when a family of 12 leapt from their second floor balcony in Paris claiming they were fleeing the devil.

Eight more were injured, some seriously, in the tragedy when they jumped 20ft into a car park in Paris suburb of La Verriere.

The baffling incident occurred when a wife woke to see her husband moving about naked in the room, police said.

She began screaming ‘it’s the devil! it’s the devil!’, and the man ran into the other room where 11 others adults and children were watching television.

One woman grabbed a knife and stabbed the man before others pushed him out through the front door.

When the man forced his way back in, they all began screamed in terror and leapt from the balcony screaming ‘Jesus! Jesus!’

A plane crash in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that killed a British pilot and 19 others could have been caused by an escaped crocodile, a magazine has reported.

The aircraft plummeted to the ground when the animal, which had been smuggled into the cabin, sparked panic among passengers, the unnamed sole survivor told African magazine Jeune Afrique.

A British expert, who is investigating the crash for the Department for Transport, said he could not rule out a crocodile as the cause, but added it would be “extremely unlikely”.
…
According to reports, the accident followed a stampede of terrified passengers fleeing the crocodile after it freed itself from a sports bag in which it had been carried on board.

A top-secret Iranian military installation was struck by a triple blast Tues. Oct. 12 the day before Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Lebanon.

debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report the site held most of the Shehab-3 medium-range missile launchers Iran had stocked for striking US forces in Iraq and Israel in the event of war – some set to deliver triple warheads (tri-conic nosecones).

The 18 soldiers officially reported killed in the blasts and 14 injured belonged to the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) main missile arm, the Al-Hadid Brigades.

The Imam Ali Base where the explosion occurred is situated in lofty Zagros mountain country near the town of Khorramabad in the western Iranian province of Lorestan. This site was selected for an altitude which eases precise targeting and the difficulty of reaching it for air or ground attack.

It lies 400 kilometers from Baghdad and primary American bases in central Iraq and 1,250 kilometers from Tel Aviv and central Israel. Both are well within the Shehab-3 missile’s 1,800-2,500-kilometer operational range.

Our Iranian sources report that Tehran spent hundreds of millions to build one of the largest subterranean missile launching facilities of its kind in the Middle East or Europe. Burrowed under the Imam Ali Base is a whole network of wide tunnels deep underground. Somehow, a mysterious hand rigged three blasts in quick succession deep inside those tunnels, destroying a large number of launchers and causing enough damage to render the facility unfit for use.

A woman died of blood poisoning two days after having her tongue pierced as a birthday treat, an inquest was told on Thursday.

Amanda Taylor wanted the stud so she could look like royal Zara Phillips and pop star Pink, her family said.

The 34-year-old collapsed within 48 hours of having the 2cm (0.8in) steel bar put through her tongue. Just before she died, she wrote on Facebook: ‘I feel like crap.’

Before yesterday’s hearing, Miss Taylor’s mother Lorraine, 61, said: ‘I was against [the piercing] and Amanda never did anything unless she had my blessing.

‘But her friend was having it done too so I said: “You’re going to be 34 – I’ll give you my blessing but I’m still not 100 per cent happy”.

A California man fell to his death and two Korean women were injured after they were stuck by lightning at the Grand Canyon on Friday afternoon.

An eyewitness to the man falling said he was trying to jump from one outcropping to another just off the South Rim Trail.

The body of Andrew N. Stires, 42, of Burbank, Calif., was found by a National Park Service helicopter crew about 500 feet below the rim.

High winds and lightning prevented the recover until Saturday, according to park rangers.

The two Korean women were believed to have been struck by secondary lightning while standing on the rim east of the visitor center, rangers said.

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.

Ferrari says it is recalling 1,248 of its 458 Italia supercars after reports of fires breaking out in five of the luxury vehicles in several countries.

The Italian carmaker said Thursday it wants to replace an adhesive that in some circumstances can melt due to overheating and possibly ignite.

Fires in the car that sells for euro197,000 ($253,000) have been reported in California, Switzerland, China and France.

Ferrari spokesman Stefano Lai says the company will be asking the owners of 1,248 cars produced before July 2010 to bring them in to have the glue replaced with mechanical fasteners.

Many veterans of World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam brought home tales of heroism and valor and, unbeknownst to their loved ones, potentially explosive war souvenirs.

The police in Bangor, Me., received a call this month: a woman found a live hand grenade in a moving box, where it had probably sat for decades.

She believed that it belonged to her late husband, who served in the Vietnam War and probably brought it home as a keepsake.

A bomb squad was summoned to detonate it.

“These men are passing away because they’re in their 80s or 90s, and now, unfortunately, family members are unaware of the fact that they have war souvenirs,” said Sgt. Andrew Parsons of the New Hampshire State Police explosives unit.

“When they find Grandpa’s treasure chest and pull things out, lo and behold there’s a hand grenade at the bottom.”

A businessman enraged that a helicopter blew debris on to his car and garden tried to cling to it as it took off, a court heard.

Houshang Jafari, 59, lost his temper as the aircraft landed near his £1million flat, the jury was told.

He kicked the helicopter, tried to open the pilot’s door and hurled a carrier bag at the windscreen, it was alleged.

Then he held on to the skid bar as terrified pilot Mark Blokland tried to take off, the prosecution claim.

The heavily built businessman caused the helicopter to pitch wildly but it eventually lifted off.

Mr Jafari was allegedly angry after it blew debris at his Land Rover as it landed in gardens shared by flat owners in a converted manor house.

Yesterday, accused of putting the pilot and passengers in ” catastrophic danger”, he denied endangering aircraft safety. Private pilot Mr Blokland hired the helicopter for a lunch outing with wife Tammy and two friends who also had a £1.2million flat in Dower House at Frenchay, Bristol. James Patrick, prosecuting, said: “Mr Jafari was extremely angry, some would say livid. He had a carrier bag which he threw at the helicopter.

He may have never told a lie, but George Washington apparently had no problem stiffing a Manhattan library on two books.

Two centuries ago, the nation’s first President borrowed two tomes from the New York Society Library on E. 79th St. and never returned them, racking up an inflation-adjusted $300,000 late fee.

But Washington can rest easy. “We’re not actively pursuing the overdue fines,” quipped head librarian Mark Bartlett.

“But we would be very happy if we were able to get the books back.” Washington’s dastardly deed went unknown for almost 150 years.

Then in 1934, a dusty, beaten-up ledger was discovered in a trash heap in the library’s basement.

A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.

The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the “immortal soul clause” to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul.

“By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions.”

GameStation’s form also points out that “we reserve the right to serve such notice in 6 (six) foot high letters of fire, however we can accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by such an act. If you a) do not believe you have an immortal soul, b) have already given it to another party, or c) do not wish to grant Us such a license, please click the link below to nullify this sub-clause and proceed with your transaction.”

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.

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

Uma Thurman’s latest film is set to be one of the biggest box office flops ever after just one ticket was sold for the movie on its opening day.

Over its opening weekend at the beginning of March, only around a dozen people went to see Motherhood, a semi-autobiographical account of parenting in New York written and directed by Katherine Dieckmann. The film took just £88 at the British box office on its opening weekend.

On its debut Sunday, takings at the box office were just £9 – the price of a ticket for one person.

Only one British cinema was given permission to launch the film earlier this month, with the film’s producers hoping that exclusivity would generate a buzz and lead to box office success by word of mouth.

Instead, cinema goers stayed away from the Apollo West End in record numbers in a move that will be embarrassing for Thurman, the star of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill who divides her time between London and New York.

Motherhood, which also stars Jodie Foster and Minnie Driver, is thought to have made only £40,000 when it opened in America last year, despite costing around £3.4 million to make.

In freak accident, hydrogen peroxide used to lighten hair sparks when hair dresser lights a cigarette, causing her car to explode.

A British hairdresser died after her cigarette ignited a leaking bottle of hydrogen peroxide bleach which then blew up in her car as she drove along a quiet country lane, the Bournemouth Echo reported Thursday.

Jennie Mitchell’s grieving father Bob urged hairdressers to show extreme caution when carrying the hydrogen peroxide, a powerful bleach used to lighten hair when mixed with ammonia.

“The hydrogen peroxide had ventilated in the car. She opened the window, which introduced oxygen,” he said.

“Jennie was a smoker and it’s likely that she lit or had a lit a cigarette.”

“Until the accident, nobody knew this could happen. We keep saying, you couldn’t have written this in a script.”

A woman dropped her gym bag on the tracks of a crowded Upper East Side subway station yesterday — then made the fatal decision to jump after it as screaming straphangers watched in horror.The 48-year-old victim was crushed by a northbound No. 6 train barreling into the 77th Street Station below Lexington Avenue as she tried desperately to claw her way back to the platform.

“She had one choice to make and seconds to make it,” said Alfonso McGruder, 55, of The Bronx, who witnessed the tragedy. “She didn’t make the one that would have saved her life.

Rose Mankos lost her life trying to retrieve a nylon LeSportsac bag filled with exercise clothes, toiletries and her cellphone, sources said.”She tried to go under the platform because the train was bearing down on her. Then she tried to climb onto the platform, but she couldn’t do that. Then she just froze.”

“People were yelling at the lady on the tracks when they saw the train coming,” said Hakeem Nhl, 53, a vendor on the opposite platform. “People were screaming, ‘Oh, my, God! Oh, my God!’ “

Witnesses reported that the train operator sounded his horn eight times and attempted to brake.

TWO Russian men died in a sauna after jumping into a plunge pool that had accidentally been heated to boiling point, investigators and media said.

The two men jumped into the pool to cool down after sweating in a steam room. A third man tried to save the victims but was unable to pull the men out of the boiling water, Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid reported today.

The two men’s bodies were discovered in the sauna in the city of Kirov in central Russia on February 18 and “their death was caused by overheating”, the Kirov regional investigative committee confirmed in a statement.

The water in the pool was “overheated due to an error by one of the victims,” investigators said.

An Australian woman walking to work was killed during a freak accident after she was struck in the head by flying metal thrown up by a grass cutter, which left her decapitated.

The 42 year-old woman, who has not been named, is believed to have been struck by a 60cm piece of steel pipe, in what witnesses described as a “freak accident”.

Workplace safety officials have launched an investigation into the accident, which occurred on Wednesday morning in the north Queensland town of Townsville.

The Daily Telegraph understands the woman was decapitated and died instantly at the scene after walking past an empty block of land just after 8am.

Police said a tractor pulling a grass cutter ran over a steel pipe that had been lying in the long grass, which was then sent flying through the air at great speed.

Hat tip to Jonathan!

Last month, on the night of January 19, Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh arrived in Dubai, oddly without his bodyguards. He checked into the five-star Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel. He was allegedly on a weapons-buying trip.

A little after midnight that same night, eleven European tourists arrived at the Dubai airport carrying tennis rackets and various kinds of sporting equipment, apparently on vacation. Images of the group were captured on CCTV cameras at the airport.

The following afternoon, one of the eleven European tourists checked into the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel, specifically into room 237 located directly across the hall from where al-Mabhouh was staying in room 230. Throughout the day, all eleven Europeans roamed around the luxury hotel.

CCTV camera footage released by the Dubai police shows one of the tourists entering a bathroom. When he emerges, he’s wearing a false beard and a baseball cap. The group was not made up of tourists; rather, they were an assassination team on a mission to kill the commander from Hamas. One member of the hit squad, a female, roams around the hotel in a dark wig, a floppy hat, and sunglasses.

That evening, a little after 8:00 p.m., Mabhouh arrived back at the hotel and immediately went to his room. According to Dubai’s chief of police Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, forensic tests indicate that within the hour, Mabhouh was dead, having been suffocated to death. Two hours after the attack, the assassins left Dubai. They were in the country for only 19 hours.

Twitter users responded snarkily Wednesday to the name of Apple’s latest innovation the iPad, pushing the phrase “iTampon” to a number two “trending” topic on the microblogging site.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the new gadget amid high expectations, and Twitter users followed his announcement online, with both “Steve Jobs” and “Official Apple iPad” scoring high on the site’s trending topics.

But by late afternoon, joking messages drawing attention to the connotations many associated with the name iPad were being uploaded by Twitter users all over the world, in a variety of languages.

A geologist has gone on trial in Switzerland for allegedly causing earthquakes while drilling for hot rocks to produce clean energy.

Markus Haering, who designed the geothermal project, rejected allegations that he deliberately damaged properties and said local people knew the risks. The deep drilling underground caused a series of earthquakes in 2006, including one of 3.4 magnitude, rattling residents of the north-western city of Basel.

Geopower Basel, the project leader, has already paid around 9 million Swiss francs (£5.3 million) in compensation for cracked walls and other damage on properties near the experiment.

The project was suspended at the time and shut down last week after a risk analysis concluded that more quakes could follow if the drilling continued.

The experiment aimed to be the world’s first to generate power commercially by boiling water on naturally occurring rocks 3 miles underground.

The Swiss efforts are being closely watched in the United States, where the energy department is sponsoring more than 120 geothermal energy projects in several states.

A leading US company, AltaRock Energy, in September stopped drilling at one key development site north of San Francisco, citing drilling difficulties, but said quake fears were not a factor.

“We had very little knowledge of seismicity” before starting to drill, Mr Haering testified. He called the resulting quakes “a learning process for everyone involved”.

Three Eurostar trains travelling from Paris to London were stuck in the undersea Channel Tunnel linking France and Britain early on Saturday because of snowy weather, a Eurostar spokesman said.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 passengers were on the trains but were safe and efforts were being made to get them to London, he said. A fourth train travelling to London returned to Paris before reaching the tunnel.

“It’s a technical failure and the trains are stuck at the moment,” the spokesman told BBC television. A rescue locomotive and a shuttle train were being used to move passengers out of the tunnel.

The temperature difference between inside the tunnel and outside had caused “technical problems,” the spokesman said.

“It is snowing in northern France, its very cold, conditions are very bad. Everyone is suffering from the bad weather, the airports are suffering, people on the roads are suffering, and so are our Eurostar trains,” he said.

Dropping Tiger Woods is not as easy as taking down a few billboards or canceling a media campaign.

For Accenture, the corporate consultancy that on Sunday announced it would discontinue its six-year relationship with the celebrity golfer, Woods is so tightly intertwined in every component of its brand – appearing even on company stationery – that it must now essentially start from scratch to redefine itself to the public and its clients.

The enormity of the marketing challenge facing Accenture is leading some in the marketing industry to take a look at the wisdom of resting an entire corporate identity on a single individual.

“No matter how blue chip a stock is, it can always go bad on you,” says Jeremy Mullman, sport marketing reporter for Advertising Age.

The 25-year-old chemistry student, who has not been named by police, was working at his parents’ home in Konotop when relatives heard a “loud pop”.

They rushed to his room and discovered his body. The lower half of his face had been seriously disfigured by the blast.

 The Russian news agency Ria Novosti said forensic tests found the chewing gum was covered with an unidentified chemical substance, thought to be some type of explosive.

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.”

A U.N.-run radio station says a passenger plane overshot a runway in eastern Congo and landed in lava, injuring 20 people. Radio Okapi said the plane was flying from Kinshasa to Goma on Thursday and passengers had warned the crew that there were heavy clouds. One passenger told the station that the plane had landed in lava near Goma’s airport. An official from the U.N. mission in Congo, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he does not have permission to speak with media, said there were 117 passengers aboard. They included the governor of North Kivu province, who was not hurt.

Hat tip to Kara!

The Lowell High School student newspaper published Friday included an advertisement for a white supremacist Web site, reportedly paid for by a group promoting a “campaign to inform, awaken and radicalize our White American youth.”

The site, www.victoryforever.com, features “white resistance music” as well as T-shirts, stickers and links to similar sites.
The ad in The Lowell said “Free Music Downloads” and included the Web site address in a small box below an Arby’s ad inside the paper.

The school distributes the newspaper, the Lowell, once a month to its 2,600 students as well as subscribers through the mail.

The contents of the online site caught school officials by surprise. They pulled all remaining copies of the paper and won’t be mailing out subscription copies, said district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe.

Skeletal remains found in Death Valley may belong to one or more of the four German tourists who vanished in searing summer heat 13 years ago, authorities said Friday.

Two hikers discovered the bones Thursday in a remote area of the famous Mojave Desert park. The hikers were search-and-rescue workers from Riverside County but they were off duty at the time, Inyo County sheriff’s spokeswoman Carma Roper said.

Identification for one of the missing tourists was found near the bones, she said.

“We’re fairly certain” that the remains are those of one or more of the long-missing visitors, Roper said. However, formally identifying the remains will be a long process, she said. The cause of death also must be determined.

“At this point, it’s being handled like a criminal investigation … but there is no evidence of foul play at this point,” Roper said.

The remains were found southeast of Goler Wash, a rugged area accessible only by 4-wheel-drive vehicles.

The area is several miles south of the spot where an abandoned minivan the tourists had rented was found months after they were reported missing.

QANTAS has stood down two pilots after a Boeing 767 landing in Sydney came within 700ft of the ground before the flight crew realised they had not lowered the plane’s undercarriage.

The airline and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau have launched investigations into the October 26 incident. The pilots are due to be interviewed by authorities on Friday.

The crew on the Melbourne-Sydney CityFlyer service apparently recognised the problem and had started go-around procedures when they received a “gear too low” aural warning from the aircraft’s enhanced ground proximity warning system.

It is understood investigators are looking at possible human error and a communication breakdown between the first officer and captain about who was lowering the landing gear.

A 6-year-old boy is floating over northeastern Colorado in a homebuilt balloon and authorities are racing to try and rescue him.

The balloon, in the shape of a flying saucer is covered in foil and filled with helium. It has a compartment for a passenger underneath. It lifted the boy into the air near Fort Collins Thursday morning after the balloon became untethered at the boy’s home.

“We were sitting eating, out looking where they normally shoot off hot air balloons. My husband said he saw something. It went over our rooftop. Then we saw the big round balloonish thing, it was spinning,” said neighbor Lisa Eklund.

The father and son had apparently been working on the aircraft for some time.

An explosive world record attempt came under fire today as a barge carrying fireworks appeared to blow up and burst into flames.

 Around 175,000 people turned up for Roar on the Shore to see 110,000 fireworks set off in under 60 seconds from the barge between Bournemouth and Boscombe piers in Dorset last night.

But instead of rockets shooting to the skies, the event was over in about six seconds as the metal barge appeared to explode, with flames spreading across the deck. Visitors were then left facing delays of up to three hours to leave the town as the roads became gridlocked. Ruth Downing, 33, from Bournemouth, said: ‘It looked like the barge just exploded and then caught fire. I think the wind might have caused problems.

‘It was very disappointing not so much a roar as a growl. We thought it would be rockets exploding in the sky in this amazing fireworks display, but instead if you blinked you would have missed it. ‘It was just a big bang, a blinding flash and then flames. That was probably the most exciting bit because it looked like the barge was on fire.’

A case of mistaken identity ended up killing a beloved family pet. Maria Velez and her son, Austin, went to pick up their cat, Buddy, from the vet only to discover he had been euthanized, the St. Petersburg Times reports.

Velez said when she arrived at Hernando County Animal Hospital, workers handed over a cat that bore Buddy’s orange tiger-stripe markings but was missing its tail and far too skinny to be her pet. Workers then realized that Buddy was dead.

An animal service worker who meant to call Buddy’s owner called the wrong person. That person said they did not want the cat, and gave the OK to euthanize Buddy.

“I was horrified,” Velez told to St. Petersburg Times. “My poor baby.”

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.

A report in a Russian military journal claims that half the planes Russia lost in its war with Georgia last year were shot down by friendly fire.The article, in the Moscow Defence Brief magazine, also claims that Russia lost a total of six military aircraft, two more than it is admitting to.

The report is highly critical of Russian forces during the brief war.
…

It says there was a total absence of co-operation between the Russian army and the Russian air force, which led them to conduct completely separate campaigns.

Russian forces easily overwhelmed Georgian troops during the brief war.

A bank clerk fell five storeys to his death down an office stairwell seconds after being seen using his mobile phone, an inquest heard yesterday.

Investigators are trying to establish if Richard Pow, 26, slipped and fell over the railing while distracted by the handset.

Mr Pow, whose fiance Eleanor Sharman is pregnant with his child, had cycled to work at the HBOS building in Leeds on Monday last week and had just used the office changing rooms on the fifth floor.

Deputy coroner Richard Manning said: ‘He was standing on the fifth floor stairwell landing, apparently either texting or using his mobile phone. Then a member of staff heard a very loud bang. ‘

Mr Pow’s body was found on the ground floor directly below where he had last been seen.
…
Three years ago Mr Pow won £20,000 on the Channel 4 gameshow Deal or No Deal.

IT admins across the globe are letting out a collective groan after servers and PCs running McAfee VirusScan were brought down when the anti-virus program attacked their core system files.

In some cases, this caused the machines to display the dreaded blue screen of death. Details are still coming in, but forums show that it’s affecting McAfee customers in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere.

A UK-based Reg reader, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized by his employer to speak to the press, said the glitch simultaneously leveled half of a customer’s 140 machines after they updated to the latest virus signature file.

“Literally half of the machines were down with this McAfee anti-virus message IDing valid programs as having this trojan,” the IT consultant said. “Literally half the office switched off their PCs and were just twiddling their thumbs.”

…Based on anecdotes, the glitch appears to be caused when older VirusScan engines install DAT 5664, which McAfee seems to have pushed out in the past 24 hours. Affected systems then begin identifying a wide variety of legitimate – and frequently crucial – system files as malware. Files belonging to Microsoft Internet Explorer, drivers for Compaq computers, and even the McAfee-associated McScript.exe were being identified as a trojan called PWS!hv.aq, according to the posts and interviews.

Two people have been struck and killed by one Amtrak train in Alameda County.

One was killed in Berkeley, and another two hours later in Oakland.

The first fatality happened around 12:20 p.m. in Berkeley according to Amtrak officials.

After the accident the train was held at the crime scene until 1:50 p.m.

About thirty minutes later, after continuing on it’s route, the same train struck and killed another person in Jack London Square in Oakland.

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.”

A dog playing fetch in Germany has found and delivered to its owner a U.S. hand grenade from World War II.

Police in the western town of Erkrath said Monday they were called by the dog’s 40-year-old owner who stopped walking her pooch when she recognized the “rusty” object it was carrying was a weapon.

Police summoned a munitions expert Sunday to identify and defuse the grenade.

 Kill Bill and Kung Fu star David Carradine has been found dead in a Bangkok hotel room on Thursday.

Thai police told the BBC the 72-year-old was found naked by a hotel maid in a wardrobe with a cord around his neck and other parts of his body.

The US star was in Thailand filming his latest film, Stretch, according to his personal manager Chuck Binder. Mr Binder said the news was “shocking”, adding: “He was full of life, always wanting to work… a great person.”

A US embassy official confirmed the actor’s death, but added that the cause of death had not yet been established.

A small-town newspaper is apologizing for running a classified advertisement calling for the assassination of President Barack Obama.

Warren Times Observer Publisher John Elchert says the ad appeared Thursday.

It read, “May Obama follow in the steps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!”

The four presidents were all assassinated. Elchert tells The Associated Press that the newspaper’s advertising staff didn’t make the historical connection.

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.

A New Zealand couple are reportedly on the run after $10 million – instead of $10,000 – was mistakenly deposited in their bank account.

The couple, who ran a Rotorua service station, were understood to have applied for a $10,000 overdraft from Westpac but instead had the larger amount mistakenly paid into their account.

Detective Senior Sergeant David Harvey said some of the money had since been withdrawn and the Asian couple had disappeared, the New Zealand Press Association reported.

Interpol had been called in to help find them, NZPA said.

The service station has closed its doors after going into receivership.

Police say a man is dead after slipping from the roof of a car while joyriding.

The man was one of two male passengers riding on the roof of a Toyota Camry in Sunnyvale Saturday night, police say.

The car was traveling between 30 and 40 miles per hour.

The victim slipped off the car’s roof, holding on while being dragged an undetermined distance and then falling onto the road.

The victim died shortly after being taken to El Camino Hospital.

A worker at a Lübeck soup factory died after getting trapped inside a giant cauldron and cooking to death, daily Bild reported Saturday.

The accident happened at midday on Friday, the newspaper reported, when the man climbed into a cauldron at the Eraso soup factory to clean it.

The cauldron’s lid suddenly closed while the 36-year-old was still inside and began to fill with steam as part of the disinfection process.

A doctor confirmed that the unidentified man had been cooked to death.

A giant set of golden arches outside a McDonald’s in eastern Arizona toppled in high winds Wednesday, crushing a Naperville couple’s Chevy Trailblazer as they sat inside the parked vehicle. Retirees Russell and Carolyn Janke suffered multiple injuries.

They had stopped at the McDonald’s on the Navajo Nation reservation in Window Rock as they were making their way back to suburban Chicago from their winter home near Tucson.

Navajo acting Police Chief Steven Nelson said winds hit 60 mph Wednesday, causing the sign to be blown down from atop a pole across the street from the restaurant.

“It was a freak accident,’’ Nelson said.

A Ukranian driver already having a bad day – having taken a wrong turn onto a highway – found it getting a lot worse when he gingerly crept over a water-filled pothole, only to discover it was a 12-foot deep crater.

 The formerly shiny hatchback moved over the hole and then, with no time to reverse, found itself plunging deep into an abyss caused by a broken water main.

The driver had to smash his rear window and scramble out to the top to avoid a muddy end, before waiting for workmen to come and rescue his car. A crowd then formed as workers drained the hole, exposing the extensive damage suffered by the Vokswagen, which will also need a good clean before getting back on the road.

Some apparent sexual experimentation landed a southern Maryland woman in a hospital with injuries tough to imagine and even more difficult to forget.

Maryland State Police airlifted the 27-year-old woman to Prince George’s County Hospital Center early Sunday morning after she was injured in an incident involving a sex toy attached to a saber saw blade, TheBayNet.com reported.

Workers at a pet store in Northeast Philly spent half the day Tuesday freakin’ out.

They went to pick up a big box of fish at the airport today.

 They came back with a big box. Eight feet long. It had a body inside.

 We got this frantic email at 12:36 p.m.: “Please contact me ASAP about a dead body mistakenly picked up at the airport a few minutes ago by a local pet store. Was supposed to pick up fish and we received a dead human body! Is in the store RIGHT NOW!”

Many “reply all” fiascos result in mere embarrassment, but American diplomats have been told they may be punished for sending mass responses after an e-mail storm nearly knocked out one of the State Department’s main electronic communications systems.

A cable sent last week to all employees at the department’s Washington headquarters and overseas missions warns of unspecified “disciplinary actions” for using the “reply to all” function on e-mail with large distribution lists.

The cable, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, was prompted by a major interruption in departmental e-mail caused by numerous diplomats hitting “reply all” to an errant message inadvertently addressed and copied to several thousand recipients.

A four-year-old boy grabbed a gun and shot his babysitter after the teenager accidentally stepped on the child’s foot.

Police said Nathan Beavers, 18, and several other teenagers were looking after a number of young children at a mobile home in Jackson, Ohio, when the shooting occurred.

The child, identified by local media as Ethan Crisp, was apparently angry after Mr Beavers trod on his foot, witnesses said, and stormed off to his bedroom saying he was going to get a gun. Those present assumed he was going to fetch a toy.

But the toddler reappeared clasping a shotgun taken from a bedroom cupboard and fired at Mr Beavers.

The body of Wang Diange, from the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, was found in the wreckage of a house where he had been overseeing the wake of a previous family funeral, after mourners felt a loud explosion which took off half the roof. As it was raining and thundery, they decided that the house, and Mr Wang in particular, had been struck by lightning. The police came to the same conclusion. Further inquiries were made a few days later after Mr Wang’s own funeral. As his body was being put into the cremation chamber, it blew up spectacularly, bursting the doors off the oven. When the fire had been put out, the only clue as to what had happened was a small twisted piece of metal, which seemed to be the glowing remnants of a screw.

A romantic marriage proposal on the Oregon coast turned deadly for the bride-to-be when a wave swept her out to sea.

Police don’t suspect foul play in the disappearances Saturday of Leafil Alforque, Tillamook County Sheriff Todd Anderson said. Thick fog and dangerous water conditions off Neskowin Beach hampered the rescue efforts, and the search was called off Monday.

Scott Napper had a ring in his pocket and planned to pop the question to Alforque, 22, at Proposal Rock, which got its name from couples ready to marry.

Napper said the tide had receded around the rock when the couple began to walk to it, but then a wave around 3 feet high suddenly came in.

“I turned into it to keep from getting pulled under it,” Napper said. By the time he turned to find Alforque, who was only 4-foot-11, she had been caught by the receding waters.

A father arrested after his 6-year-old daughter was shot to death in their Washington state home allegedly told police he had been drinking double shots of vodka while cleaning his guns. Court papers say Richard Peters told detectives he had asked his daughter, Stormy, to bring him the .45-caliber handgun Sunday. He said he must have pulled the trigger, and the girl fell to the floor. She was pronounced dead Monday. Bail for Richard Peters, 42, was set Monday at $250,000. He has been arrested for investigation of first-degree manslaughter.

A construction worker fell about 48 stories to his death at a Manhattan construction site, fire officials said. The worker ? who was on a crew dismantling a crane ? apparently tumbled from a walkway between the crane and the building, according to officials at the scene. He landed in a construction lot that is surrounded by a fence, and his body was placed in an ambulance.

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?”

Several major news organizations, including The Associated Press, prematurely reported the death Wednesday of U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio, who had suffered a brain hemorrhage while driving in suburban Cleveland.

The reports were corrected after a doctor said at an afternoon news conference that Tubbs Jones was in critical condition with limited brain function. The Cleveland Clinic announced later that the 58-year-old Democrat died about 6 p.m. Wednesday.

Various Democratic officials who spoke on condition of anonymity provided the basis for most of the erroneous reports. They were out for anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour on CNN, CBS, Fox and Web sites for The Washington Post and The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer as well as the AP.

The AP moved its one-sentence, Washington-dated NewsAlert reporting the death at 2:30 p.m., attributing the information to a Democratic Party official. After the hospital news conference, the AP moved out a corrected alert at 2:44 p.m.

According to AP Washington News Editor Matt Yancey, the AP had spoken earlier to Democratic and Republican officials about Tubbs Jones’ condition and they declined to speak on the record or on background. One of the Democratic officials later called back and, willing to speak on condition of anonymity, said Tubbs Jones had died.

A premature baby who was pronounced dead was “brought back to life” Sunday after five hours in Nahariya Hospital.

The baby girl, who was in a cooler at the hospital, suddenly showed signs of life and was being treated in the premature baby ward.

Doctors estimated that the cooler brought the fetus “back to life.”

The mother, 26, from a Western Galilee village, was in the fifth month of her pregnancy when she underwent a series of tests, during which it was discovered that she was suffering from internal bleeding and that the embryo had ceased to show signs of life.

The woman underwent an abortion and the baby, weighing 610 grams, was extracted from her womb without a pulse, hospital officials said.

A senior doctor pronounced the baby dead and she was transferred to the cooler.

Five hours later, the woman’s husband came to the hospital to take what he thought was his dead baby girl for burial.

When the baby was taken out of the cooler, she began to breath. The premature baby was then taken to the intensive care ward, where doctors were attempting to save her life.

A sidewalk in Times Square turned risky when an entire window pane from a building under renovation simply gave way, shattered into shards and fell more than 40 stories onto scaffolding.

It happened at 1 Times Square near 42nd Street and Broadway at about 2 p.m. Sunday.

The Emergency Unit endeavored to remove a dangling chunk of glass poking from a high-rise window that remained after the pane fell.

No one was hurt, but police closed Broadway from 42nd to 43rd streets for a short time as a precaution.

This is the third time in a week that glass has plummeted from a skyscraper.

A GIANT inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before it landed again.

The art work, titled Complex Shit, is the size of a house.

The wind carried it 200m from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children’s home, said museum director Juri Steiner.

The inflatable turd broke the window at the children’s home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Mr Steiner said.

A privately held rocket company on Wednesday blamed a design error for its latest failure to reach orbit, which caused the loss of three government satellites and human ashes, including the remains of astronaut Gordon Cooper and “Star Trek” actor James Doohan.

The two-stage Falcon 1 rocket, which blasted off from a Central Pacific atoll Saturday night, separated as planned on its way to space, but leftover thrust after engine cutoff caused the first stage to fall back and hit the second stage, according to Hawthorne-based SpaceX.

The rocket, containing the remains of 208 people, dropped in the Pacific and was not recovered.

The family of Doohan, who played Scotty on the television show “Star Trek,” could not be reached Wednesday night.

Greyhound has scrapped an ad campaign that extolled the relaxing upside of bus travel after one of its passengers was accused of beheading and cannibalizing another traveler.

The ad’s tag line was “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage.’”

Greyhound spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh said Wednesday a billboard and some tunnel posters near a bus terminal in Toronto are still up and would be removed later in the day.

“Greyhound knows how important it is to get these removed and we are doing everything possible,” Wambaugh said. “This is something that we immediately asked to be done last week, realizing that these could be offensive.”

Authorities say a Levy County, Fla., man accidentally shot his wife while trying to hit a fox that attacked her.

The couple told deputies they spotted an animal in their yard Friday morning and went outside to see what it was.

The fox bit the woman on the left leg and wouldn’t let go, so she told her husband to get a gun.

The man fired a .22-caliber rifle seven times, killing the animal but also hitting his wife in the lower right leg.

A 15-year-old boy working on a construction site just north of Winnipeg, Manitoba, died Friday after he was buried under a mountain of searing-hot asphalt, fire officials said.

The boy, too young to work on construction jobs under Manitoba labor laws, was part of a paving crew working on a parking lot in the Winnipeg community of Stony Mountain.

“I believe (the truck) dumped off way too much asphalt unexpectedly,” said Stony Mountain fire chief Wallace Drysdale.

Drysdale said he was among the first on the scene, and “we just saw the hair sticking out” of the mound of asphalt. He said that crews could only work digging the boy out for four- or five-minute intervals because their feet were burning from the heat.

Police and labor officials were investigating.

A New Jersey man trying to exterminate insects in his apartment blew it up instead, the New York Daily News reported on Monday.

Isias Vidal Maceda was unhurt in the incident, but 80 percent of his apartment was destroyed, Eatontown, New Jersey police told the newspaper.

The accident occurred as Maceda was spraying for pests in his kitchen. Somehow the bug spray ignited a blast that blew out the apartment’s front windows and triggered a fire that quickly spread, the newspaper said.

A patient at George Washington University Hospital fell from a fifth-story ledge overlooking New Hampshire Avenue in Northwest Washington yesterday afternoon after threatening to jump for several hours, police said.

The man climbed onto the ledge about 12:15 p.m. and for four hours paced and peered at the ground. He fell just before 4:10 p.m. after trying to climb down. The man lost his footing as he tried to move down the building and briefly hung off the ledge by only his hands before falling feet first.

His body partially hit the concrete and a large inflatable air mattress police had set up while trying to coax him down, police said.

A crowd of about 20 people were horrified as they watched the scene unfold.

Dozens of partygoers at an outdoor rave near Moscow last week have lost partial vision after a laser light show burned their retinas, Russian health officials said on Monday.

Moscow city health department officials confirmed 12 cases of laser-blindness at the Central Ophthalmological Clinic, and daily newspaper Kommersant said another 17 were registered at City Hospital 32 in the centre of the capital.

Attendees at the July 5 Aquamarine Open Air Festival in Kirzhach, 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Moscow, began seeking medical help days after the show, complaining of eye and vision problems, health officials told Reuters.

“They all have retinal burns, scarring is visible on them. Loss of vision in individual cases is as high as 80 percent, and regaining it is already impossible,” Kommersant quoted a treating ophthalmologist as saying.

The search teams comb through the backyards of the half-million-dollar homes with metal detectors, placing red flags on the manicured lawns every time they get a hit. To the shock of residents, they sometimes find live bombs.

The bombs are left over from a 12,000-acre World War II bombing range. The area has become an Orlando neighborhood with thousands of homes.

The Army Corps of Engineers has launched a $10 million cleanup of what used to be the PineCastle Jeep Range, but it said bombs could remain there once they’re done.

“Chances are, it’s not a problem,” said Mike Ornella, the man leading the Army Corps cleanup.

But he conceded, “We’re never going to be 100 percent sure. We’re never going to give a 100 percent guarantee that the properties are clear.”

The developer refused comment for this story. Residents are enraged.

New Jersey poison control officials said a Burlington County woman has died and five other people have been sickened in separate incidents around the state after accidentally drinking small amounts of oil used to light patio torches.

Officials said the victims mistakenly thought they were drinking apple juice.

Steve Marcus, executive director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, said the 84-year-old woman died Monday night after suffering lung damage caused by ingesting the kerosene-like substance.

FOUR people including a child were in a critical condition today after live bullets were used instead of blanks during a French special forces open day, army and regional officials said.

Seventeen people were injured in total.

Fifteen civilians and two soldiers were injured in the incident, of which the details remained unclear, involving a demonstration by members of a marines parachute regiment of hostage liberation exercises, a regional authority, Bernard Lemaire, said.

Four of the 17 were seriously injured, with two described as critical following “incomprehensible” scenes at the barracks near Carcassone, in the country’s south-west.

According to local authorities, five children were among the injured.

A Florida man died Tuesday after taking more than two dozen shots of cherry vodka within a half hour, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office.

“We have witnesses that have described the victim as taking anywhere from 23 to 25 shots in 30 minutes,” Hillsborough County Sheriff’s spokesman J.D. Callaway told ABCNEWS.com.

Eric Morris, 26, was allegedly taking part in a drinking game with another patron at an adult nightclub, Angels Show Bar, in Seffner, Fla., just hours before he died, according to police.

Santusht Perera’s physician’s license was suspended after he removed of portions of the wrong lung during surgery and allegedly attempted to conceal the error.

Perera was issued a two-year suspension on June 5 from the State Board of Medical Examiners. The Board’s appellate court upheld the suspension in Perera’s appeal case with a final decision on June 12.

After the surgery, Perera told the patient, Richard Flagg, the right lung tissue, which was wrongfully removed, contained a life-threatening tumor even though he knew it did not.

He altered his records to show he intended to operate on the right lung even though he was actually supposed to remove the tumor in the left lung.

An Air India flight soared past its Mumbai destination on June 4 as its pilots allegedly dozed off in the cockpit, The Times of India reported Thursday.

The napping pilots flew 359 miles past the airport and were still at cruising altitude when nervous air traffic controllers woke them up.

The flight, which was on autopilot flying toward Mumbai, had about 100 passengers on board.

“The plane took off from Dubai at 1:35 a.m. Indian Standard Time and then from Jaipur at 7 a.m. After operating an overnight flight, fatigue levels peak, and so the pilots dozed off after taking off from Jaipur,” an unidentified source told The Times of India.

Air India officials vehemently denied the report, saying the plane lost radio contact with air traffic control for some time, and only flew 14 miles off course.

“We emphatically deny the report. No such incident took place. We’ve checked our records,” Jitender Bhargava, Air India’s director for public relations, told The Times.

For months, Barack Obama’s campaign has repeatedly, and not always successfully, tried to swat away references to Barack “Osama,” the mutating of the candidate’s name into the similar-sounding moniker of the world’s most-wanted terrorist.

Some of the mixups have been made accidentally (as when Sen. Ted Kennedy did it). Some have been made maliciously by Obama’s critics (as when Rush Limbaugh did it).

One mixup, with potentially vast effect, apparently belongs to the unintentional category and gained wide currency this week: The spell-checker in Microsoft’s Hotmail e-mail software recommends that users replace the word “Obama” with “Osama.”

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.

Apparently the Obamas of Kenya have been reading those scurrilous emails to which Barack likes to refer, because they have no doubt — contrary to the claims of the Obama campaign, that the presidential candidate was raised a Moslem. They take that as a given.

As the Jerusalem Post reports, “Barack Obama’s half brother Malik said Thursday that if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background. In an interview with Army Radio he expressed a special salutation from the Obamas of Kenya.”

The Obama brothers’ father, a senior economist for the Kenyan government who studied at Harvard University, died in car crash in 1982. He left six sons and a daughter. All of his children – except Malik — live in Britain or the United States. Malik and Barack met in 1985.

In a remarkable denial issued last November that still stands on the official campaign website, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs issued a statement explaining that “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.”

Apparently Malik Obama, himself a Muslim, had not read the press release.

Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern says substantial vote tallies across the country show the European Union Lisbon reform treaty has been rejected.

Tallies are not official, but Mr Ahern says it is clear the No vote is ahead in a vast majority of constituencies.

This would scupper the treaty, which must be ratified by all members. Only Ireland has held a public vote on it.

Mr Ahern is the first senior figure from the Irish government to admit that it looked like the treaty had failed.

“It looks like this will be a No vote,” Mr Ahern said on live television. “At the end of the day, for a myriad of reasons, the people have spoken.”

A 29-year-old man leaped out of a plane at 10,000 feet with a camera but no parachute Saturday. His body was found next to a house with a damaged roof, police said.

Sloan Carafello of Schenectady, who was observing on the flight, followed an instructor, student and videographer out the door, wearing no skydiving gear, officials said.

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.

It seemed like an almost literal answer to their prayers. When two New Zealand pilots ran out of fuel in a microlight airplane they offered prayers and were able to make an emergency landing in a field — coming to rest right next to a sign reading, “Jesus is Lord.”

Grant Stubbs and Owen Wilson, both from the town of Blenheim on the country’s South Island, were flying up the sloping valley of Pelorus Sound when the engine spluttered, coughed and died.

“My friend and I are both Christians so our immediate reaction in a life-threatening situation was to ask for God’s help,” Stubbs told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

He said he prayed during the ill-fated flight Sunday that the tiny craft would get over the top of a ridge and that they would find a landing site that was not too steep — or in the nearby sea.

TWO golfers yesterday watched open-mouthed as a speedboat flew 100ft through the air in front of them and landed in a greenside bunker.

French tourists Claude Bieth and Catherine Guillet were playing the sixth at the famous Loch Lomond course when the boat hurtled out of the water and took off.

Claude, 62, said: “It clipped the sand and flew about 30 yards through the air.

“The boat seemed to go in slow motion and came to a halt in a bunker.

The motor kept going but it was stuck fast.”

Hat tip to Kara!

It’s never fun calling dad after crashing his car – but when you’ve just wrecked his prized Ferrari you can bet you’re in for an earful.

A Melbourne man had to make that call on Saturday night after destroying the front end of his father’s Italian Stallion in a smash near Rod Laver Arena.

The front of the red sports car, which police said had been speeding, finished wrapped around a pole in the spectacular accident, which took place on Batman Avenue.

The car is an F360 Challenge Stradale, one of just 16 imported into Australia and New Zealand in 2004, with a price tag speeding past the $400,000 mark.

A fire has broken out at one of India’s largest chili markets, burning hundreds of thousands of pounds of chili peppers and covering the nearby area with a cloud of stinging smoke.

Firefighters were still battling the blaze hours after it broke out Saturday morning. Officials have evacuated neighbors of the market in Guntur in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

Residents and officials say the burning chili smoke has stung the eyes and throats of people across the city.

“People are coughing uncontrollably,” says farmer Y. Venkateshwarulu.

Like many boys in the South, Sam White got hooked on the Civil War early, digging up rusting bullets and military buttons in the battle-scarred earth of his hometown.

As an adult, he crisscrossed the Virginia countryside in search of wartime relics — weapons, battle flags, even artillery shells buried in the red clay. He sometimes put on diving gear to feel for treasures hidden in the black muck of river bottoms.

But in February, White’s hobby cost him his life: A cannonball he was restoring exploded, killing him in his driveway.

More than 140 years after Lee surrendered to Grant, the cannonball was still powerful enough to send a chunk of shrapnel through the front porch of a house a quarter-mile from White’s home in this leafy Richmond suburb.

A man was hurt on Thursday after being struck by a piece of plywood that fell from a Manhattan construction site.

Walter Wilkerson, a film company production assistant, was hit by the debris at East 18th Street and Park Avenue South. Wilkinson and a crew were setting up the block to shoot a Mastercard commercial.

Wilkerson was treated and released from Bellevue Hospital Center after arriving at the hospital in fair condition, according to a Bellevue spokesman.

A Buildings Department spokeswoman said the plywood that fell was on a scaffold being raised to assist in facade repair. When it arrived at the 12th floor, the spokeswoman said, it became dislodged and toppled over.

A 14-year-old Japanese girl killed herself by mixing laundry detergent with cleanser, releasing fumes that also sickened 90 people in her apartment house, police said Thursday as they grappled with a spate of similar suicides.

None of the sickened neighbors in Konan, southern Japan, were severely ill, although about 10 were hospitalized, authorities said. The deadly hydrogen sulfide gas escaped from the girl’s bathroom window and entered neighboring apartments.

The girl’s suicide Wednesday night was part of an expanding string of similar deaths that experts say have been encouraged by Internet suicide sites.

A hospital in the Republic of Ireland has admitted removing the wrong kidney from a sick child.

The mistake, that led to a healthy kidney being removed, was described by Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin as an “unprecedented error”.

The Dublin facility said it has given its sincere apologies to the family.

The young child now faces regular dialysis unless a donor kidney can be found. An internal investigation is being carried out by the hospital.

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying South Korea’s first astronaut landed on Saturday in northern Kazakhstan 260 miles off its mark and 20 minutes late, Russian space officials said.
A spokesman for mission control, Valery Lyndin, said the crew — Yi So-yeon, a South Korean bioengineering student; Peggy A. Whitson, an American astronaut; and Col. Yuri I. Malenchenko, a Russian flight engineer — was safe, though the three had been subjected to severe G-forces during the re-entry.

The Russian-made Soyuz capsule touched down at 4:51 a.m. Eastern time about 260 miles off target, the spokesman said, which was highly unusual given how precisely engineers plan for such landings. It was also about 20 minutes later than scheduled.

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.

Can his fractured fiddle — a million-dollar Guadagnini — be fixed? It’s too early to tell.

David Garrett, a former model who has been called the David Beckham of the classical scene, said he tripped while carrying his 18th century violin as he was leaving London’s Barbican Hall after a performance, smashing it to bits.

“I had it over my shoulder in its case and I fell down a concrete flight of stairs backward,” Garrett said Thursday. “When I opened the case, much of my G.B. Guadagnini had been crushed.”

Garrett said he bought the 1772 violin for US$1 million in 2003, and he is now hoping to get it repaired in New York, where he is based.

Hat tip to Kara!

A military plane crashed in a forested area in northwestern Poland, killing 20 people, the prime minister said early Thursday. The officers had been attending a flight safety conference in Warsaw.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the plane crash, which occurred as it was about to land Wednesday evening. The 20 victims included a brigadier general and four crew members, he said.

“Soldiers, husbands, and fathers have died, and that is the most tragic result of this catastrophe,” said Tusk, who had rushed to the site of the accident.

He called it a “huge loss for the Polish air force.”

Hat tip to Kara!

Two Australian graffiti artists drowned when a flash storm swept them along a drain they had been spray painting in Sydney before trapping them at its barred ocean outlet, police said.

A third graffiti artist, who remained conscious during the ordeal, managed to squeeze himself through the bars and into the ocean where he was rescued by surfers on Sunday.

“It’s believed three people, two men and one woman, were allegedly spray painting the walls of a stormwater drain at Maroubra (Beach), when it started to rain,” police said in a statement on Monday.

A little housecleaning nearly cost the Rev. Walter Hermanns a seat at Sunday’s National Football Conference championship game. Hermanns, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair, was getting some help from a friend last Friday when he asked him to take care of a stack of papers left in a bin for shredding.

When his friend got to four Green Bay Packers tickets bundled together with a rubber band, he took off the band, put one in the shredder and then stopped short.

“Something rang a bell and he said, ‘Are you sure you want to shred these?’” Hermanns said.

Too late. The ticket was in shreds.

A postcard featuring a color drawing of Santa Claus and a young girl was mailed in 1914, but its journey was slower than Christmas. It just arrived in northwest Kansas.

The Christmas card was dated Dec. 23, 1914, and mailed to Ethel Martin of Oberlin, apparently from her cousins in Alma, Neb.

It’s a mystery where it spent most of the last century, Oberlin Postmaster Steve Schultz said. “It’s surprising that it never got thrown away,” he said. “How someone found it, I don’t know.”

A retired teacher who spent four days trapped in a freezing toilet says he survived by dipping his feet in hot water.

David Leggat was stuck in the bathroom at his bowling club with no food or contact with the outside world after the door jammed behind him.

The 55-year-old, who spent 16 hours of each day in darkness, was eventually freed after cleaner Cathy Scollay heard his cries for help and raised the alarm.

“There was no reason for anyone to come looking for him,” she said. “David looked awfully grey and shaky when he came out but he managed to walk up the road to his house.”

Hat tip to Kara!

A window washer fell 47 storeys to his death and his brother was seriously injured yesterday when the scaffolding on a high-rise apartment building gave way, authorities said.

The brothers were getting onto the scaffolding from the roof of the 47-storey building when the platform gave way, said Seth Andrews, a fire department spokesman.

“They apparently fell all the way from the top,” added John Mulligan, another fire department spokesman.

A 30-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. His 37-year-old brother was in critical condition at a hospital, officials said. The brothers’ names weren’t immediately available.

A Pasco County man escaped serious injury Sunday when he was ejected from a speedboat traveling upward of 90 mph.

James K. Helmintoller, of Land O’Lakes, was driving his 353 Fastech speedboat down the Anclote River Channel when it hit a wake, ejecting the 43-year-old into the water and sending the unmanned vessel out of the river channel and into the open waters of the Anclote Anchorage bay, according to investigators with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office Marine Unit.

Rhode Island Hospital was fined $50,000 and reprimanded by the state Department of Health Monday after its third instance this year of a doctor performing brain surgery in the wrong side of a patient’s head.

“We are extremely concerned about this continuing pattern,” Director of Health David R. Gifford said in a written statement. “While the hospital has made improvements in the operating room, they have not extended these changes to the rest of the hospital.”

The most recent case happened Friday when, according to the health department, the chief resident started brain surgery on the wrong side of an 82-year-old patient’s head. The patient was OK, the health department and hospital said.

A melee at a Kmart store in Wauwatosa Saturday morning was started by a computer glitch.

The store was running a promotion in which it would give away $10 to anyone applying for its credit card, but the computer glitch led to everyone’s application being granted — bestowing up to $4,000 in instant credit to anyone who applied even if they shouldn’t have qualified.

Once word started to spread about the so-called “free money” Saturday, witnesses said things got pretty nuts inside the Wauwatosa store.

Cow. Coyote. They may begin with the same letters, but the two animals don’t particular look alike.

Try telling that to a man in Colfax, Michigan, who gunned down his neighbour’s cow, claiming he thought it was a coyote.

Unbelievably, the cow’s owner and the police don’t buy his story.

An amateur hockey player died after a puck struck him in the chest and caused him to go into cardiac arrest late Thursday, officials said.

Nathan Crowell, 22, a University of New Haven student, was pronounced dead at Bridgeport Hospital shortly after the incident during a league game at a Shelton hockey rink, police and team officials said.

His death remained under investigation Friday, but police said no foul play is suspected.

Crowell, who is from Portsmouth, R.I., tried to block an opposing player’s slapshot with 3 seconds left in the game when the puck struck him and he collapsed, said Howard Saffan, a co-owner of the SportsCenter of Connecticut facility.

Crowell was wearing the required chest protector and other gear, but the puck apparently struck an unprotected part of his torso just below the pad, Saffan said.

Here’s a whoops with a capital W.

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the “strictest confidence.”

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.

An Australian who went for a drunken dip in the sea got more than he bargained for when he dived into the jaws of a large crocodile.

Matt Martin was camping alone near a beach in northern Queensland when he decided to go for a dusk swim, despite having drunk what he later admitted was “half a slab”, or 12 cans of beer.

When the 35-year-old construction worker dived into a wave, he butted heads with a submerged saltwater crocodile.

“I thought I was dead. It was sort of like when you hit rocks but the rocks had give and movement in them,” he told The Cairns Post.

IN HIS 24 years as a traffic officer, Chief Inspector Donald McMillan has chased errant dogs, pigs, horses and, once, a wild boar – but never a chicken.

Until yesterday that is, when, at the crack of dawn, he had to contend with 3,000 of them, all terrified and shrieking, after falling from a lorry that had jackknifed on a dual carriageway.

Mr McMillan arrived at the scene – the A80 Glasgow-Stirling road, near Castlecary – at about 6:30am to find chickens everywhere.

In a bizarre mishap that conservationists describe as “heartbreaking,” an estimated 10,000 wildebeest have drowned while attempting to cross Kenya’s Mara River during an annual migration.

The deaths, which occurred over the course of several days last week, are said to account for about one percent of the total species population.
The drownings created a grotesque wildlife pileup, after part of the migrating herd tried to ford the Mara at “a particularly treacherous crossing point,” according to Terilyn Lemaire, a conservation worker with the Mara Conservancy who witnessed the incident.

The U.S. Navy will spend as much as $600,000 to modify the appearance of a barracks complex in Coronado that resembles a swastika from the air.

Navy officials said the spending for changes to the four L-shaped buildings were approved after satellite images from Google Earth revealed the swastika-like shape.

“We don’t want to be associated with something as symbolic and hateful as a swastika,” Navy spokesman Scott Sutherland told the L.A. Times.

One has to wonder if anyone in authority bothered to look at the blueprints before the thing was built…

Two single-engine war planes at an experimental air show collided while landing Friday, killing one of the pilots and injuring the other, officials said.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the collision between the two P-51 Mustangs happened at 3:17 p.m. after the planes finished a performance at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture show.

A police chase through the streets of downtown Phoenix turned into a midair tragedy Friday afternoon when two television news helicopters covering the action collided and crashed to the ground in smoke and flame, killing all four people on board.

KTVK-TV said photojournalist Jim Cox and pilot Scott Bowerback were killed. KNXV-TV identified its crew as photographer Rick Krolak and pilot Craig Smith.

The helicopters collided as the stations were covering the police pursuit of a stolen white truck towing a trailer. Assistant Chief Mark Angle of the Phoenix Fire Department said wreckage from both helicopters then landed in a downtown park.

Aerial footage from another station covering the chase, KPNX-TV, showed large plumes of black smoke and flames coming from the wreckage.

Wednesday evening, Atlanta — It all started about 24 hours ago, when I found a plain cardboard box on my doorstep. I was surprised to see my name on the label, as I wasn’t expecting anything this week. My surprise increased exponentially when I opened the package to find a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows within.

With no disrespect meant to J. K. Rowling’s innumerable devotees, I’m not a particularly big Harry Potter fan. But I’d read two or three of the early books, and being as susceptible as the next guy to the hype for the last book in the series, I placed an order a few weeks ago at DeepDiscount.com, the store that was offering the lowest price. Ironically, I didn’t even spring for expedited shipping.

Town firefighters learned a different kind of lesson when they punched holes in a house as part of a training exercise: Make sure you have the right address.

And now the owners of the house they damaged want the Fire Department to pay up.

“They made the mistake,” said Clayton Luu, whose family had lived in the four-bedroom white Victorian since the 1980s until an electrical fire last year heavily damaged it. “They will have to pay for it.”