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Fast food chain McDonald’s has suspended sale of chicken nuggets and some other products in Hong Kong. It said it had imported chicken and pork from Shanghai Husi Food, the Chinese firm that allegedly supplied out-of-date meat to fast food firms. China has suspended operations of Shanghai Husi after local media reports claimed it reprocessed expired meat. McDonald’s had removed nuggets from its menus at its Japanese outlets earlier this week over the same issue. …

Mount Rainier, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the U.S. and in the world, is widely expected to erupt again. The only unknown facing scientists is when the massive stratovolcano, 4,392 meters tall and located 87 kilometers southeast of Seattle in Washington state, will finally explode. Scientists from the United States and Norway recently mapped the electric and magnetic signatures of magma flows beneath Mount Rainier (pronounced “ray-near”). They’ve also discovered a mammoth magma reservoir below the mountain that will fuel any eruption with massive magma flows. The research found out that magma or fluid molten rock is trapped...

It's dog days on Capitol Hill — or, more precisely, dogs have had their day there. Five in particular — all war dog veterans. The canines joined their human advocates at a Capitol Hill briefing Wednesday, "Military Dogs Take the Hill," to spotlight an effort to require that all military working dogs be retired to the U.S. Congress passed a law last year saying the military may bring back its working dogs to the U.S. to be reunited with their handlers, but it does not say they must be brought back. Carlos, one of five war dog veterans at a...

A New York cartoonist named Brittney creates touching comic strips from the point of view of cats who often get overlooked in the shelter. I really think you should take home the animal you fall in love with, regardless of physical qualities or age. An animal is going to love you unconditionally, so why put conditions on them?

Has this ever happened to you? You go to a clean, modern American supermarket and buy some boxes of pasta. You store some of them in you cupboard. And when you cook it, little black bugs are floating in the water. They look like fleas, except that they have snouts. Very gross. And by putting boxes of them in your cupboard, you have now infested your kitchen with them. I was so mad that I e-mailed the company, a popular national brand, and gave them a piece of my mind. I even e-mailed them a close-up photo of the bug...

On Tuesday FiveThirtyEight released the results of a poll of Americans' opinions on the "Star Wars" universe. Not surprisingly, Jar Jar Binks is the most reviled character in the series. As Walt Hickey notes, the Gungan from Naboo posted lower favorability numbers than Emperor Palpatine, "the actual personification of evil in the galaxy."

Budapest Race Date: 27 Jul 2014 Circuit Name: Hungaroring First Grand Prix: 1986 Number of Laps: 70 Circuit Length: 4.381 km Race Distance: 306.630 km Lap Record: 1:19.071 - M Schumacher (2004) Friday Sunny 29C Saturday Partly Sunny 31C Sunday T-Storms 29C

Women were also jailed 10 days in the first sentence of its kind in Saudi ArabiaA Saudi court sentenced two local women to 10 days in prison and ordered them lashed 10 times each after they were found guilty of swearing at each other on WhatsApp. The judge at the court in the western Red Sea port of Jeddah tried to reconcile the two but they refused and insisted on charging each other. “The judge had no choice but to sentence the two and make them write a statement not to abuse each other again,” Arar daily said, adding that...

Married to Muslim in Abu DhabiA woman who had stuck to her religion despite her marriage to a Muslim finally decided to convert to Islam while she was in hospital in Abu Dhabi having treatment for cancer. A day after she converted, the woman died. The woman had been bed-ridden in hospital for months before doctors told her husband that her case became incurable after cancer spread through several parts of her body. A day before her death, her husband called the Abu Dhabi judicial department and asked them to send a woman for his wife to perform her conversion...

I was driving through northern Illinois last night listening to a call-in program on WGN in Chicago. People were calling in all upset about the goat's head sent to Cubs owner Tom Ricketts at Wrigley Field. Some guy called in from Indiana and said, "Why are you all so upset because someone sent a goat's head to Wrigley Field? Aren't you the guys that sent a horse's ass to the White House?" I almost ran off the road!

SANTA ANA (CBSLA.com) — Two women were convicted of voluntary manslaughter Thursday in the beating death of a 23-year-old woman outside a Santa Ana nightclub. Candace Marie Brito, 27, and Vanesa Tapia Zavala, 26, were found guilty of killing Kim Pham during a Jan. 19 melee outside the Crosby Bar and Nightclub. Jurors found Brito and Zavala guilty of assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury. Sentencing was set for Sept. 12. Pham got into a fistfight with another woman, identified by defense attorneys as Emilia Calderon, before falling to the ground and being surrounded by Calderon’s friends....

Art Sherman, a career race tracker who rose to the pinnacle of the sport this past spring when he guided the mercurial colt California Chrome to the edge of racing immortality in a thrilling Triple Crown run, has been named the 2014 recipient of the Laffit Pincay, Jr. Award. Sherman will receive the award and its distinctive trophy Sunday, July 27, in winner’s circle ceremonies at Del Mar between the day’s fourth and fifth races. The Pincay Award, given annually for the past 10 years to those who have served the sport “with integrity, extraordinary dedication, determination and distinction,” will...

Intrigued Londoners looked on today as a smartphone's battery was charged by a strange contraption made of 800 apples and potatoes connected with hundreds of nails and lengths of copper wire. The art installation was created outside the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, essentially just a large-scale version of the classroom science experiment where a single potato is used to power a digital clock. By stringing 800 pieces of fruit and vegetables together with galvanized nails and wire, artist Caleb Charland was able to scale-up the power output so much that it could charge a mobile phone – in...

Pioneering archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who headed the excavations at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, has died at the age of 61. Schmidt had been working on the excavations at Göbekli Tepe, sometimes called Turkey’s Stonehenge, with the German Archaeology Institute since 1995.

“We can artificially induce intolerance to red meat by stimulating the immune system against common bovine proteins,” he says. Liao envisions a medical aid like a nicotine patch that makes you sick if you try to eat red meat. Such a patch might sound like science fiction – and for now it is – but evidence has recently surfaced that people bitten by the lone star tick, native to the southern US, subsequently developed allergies to red meat, forcibly pushing them toward a vegetarian lifestyle.

The Parents Television Council is slamming NBC's Today for airing the first trailer for the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey during its 8 a.m. hour. ... "We're talking about basically the equivalent of a dime-store trashy romance novel [in the Fifty Shades of Grey book]. Essentially, what Today's doing is they're promoting what people refer to as mommy porn. That's what it boils down to. Today is helping to promote mommy porn. That's a pretty poor judgment on their part in terms of their attitude towards their audience." ... The Parents Television Council is not the only organization...

<p>STOCKTON, Calif. (AP) — Prosecutors in Central California have obtained an arrest warrant for a tuberculosis patient who they say is contagious and has refused treatment.</p> <p>San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Stephen Taylor said Thursday that police are looking for 25-year-old Eduardo Rosas Cruz, a transient who comes from a part of Mexico known for a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis.</p>

Explanation: This alluring all-skyscape was taken 5,100 meters above sea level, from the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. Viewed through the site's rarefied atmosphere at about 50% sea level pressure, the gorgeous Milky Way stretches through the scene. Its cosmic rifts of dust, stars, and nebulae are joined by Venus, a brilliant morning star immersed in a strong band of predawn Zodiacal light. Still not completely dark even at this high altitude, the night sky's greenish cast is due to airglow emission from oxygen atoms. Around the horizon the dish antenna units of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, ALMA,...

Explanation: Why does this starfield photograph resemble an impressionistic painting? The effect is created not by digital trickery but by large amounts of interstellar dust. Dust, minute globs rich in carbon and similar in size to cigarette smoke, frequently starts in the outer atmospheres of large, cool, evolved stars. The dust is dispersed as the star dies and grows as things stick to it in the interstellar medium. Dense dust clouds are opaque to visible light and can completely hide background stars. For less dense clouds, the capacity of dust to preferentially reflect blue starlight becomes important, effectively blooming the...

Nearly 70 years ago, on Aug. 1, 1944, Lieutenant General George S. Patton took command of the American Third Army in France. For the next 30 days they rolled straight toward the German border. Patton almost did not get a chance at his summer of glory. After brilliant service in North Africa and Sicily, fellow officers — and his German enemies — considered him the most gifted American field general of his generation. But near the conclusion of his illustrious Sicilian campaign, the volatile Patton slapped two sick GIs in field hospitals, raving that they were shirkers. In truth, both...

A Middle Township High School teacher turned himself in to the Cape May County Prosecutor's Office on sex assault charges related to crimes against a minor student over the course of a year, Prosecutor Bob Taylor announced today. Joseph Towns, 34, of North Cape May was charged with sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child, criminal sexual contact, official misconduct, possession of child pornography and obscenity of persons under 18.

This recount, found on The Meta Picture, tells the story of one restaurant’s quest to find out why they kept getting bad reviews despite serving the same number of customers on a daily basis. It took a look into their past to discover exactly what has changed in the last ten years – and their findings tell more about how we as a country have changed – possibly, for the worse. Now, although this particular instance may or may not be true, it tells a story that is all too common today in America. We are so engrossed in ourselves...

A substitute teacher was arrested for allegedly engaging in sex acts with a 16-year-old girl in a BMW in Hesperia early Sunday, officials said. The pair were discovered by a deputy checking on the black BMW, which authorities said appeared to be suspicious, parked near the intersection of Ivy Avenue and Alder Street. The teacher, 40-year-old Rakshannah Ranney, was engaged in some kind of sexual activity with the girl in the car, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.

BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. -- A southwest Florida waitress has dubbed the trio of naked hamburger thieves who broke into a southwest Florida eatery "dumb, dumber and dumbest." In fact, waitress Nancy Sansevieri is still laughing after police released surveillance video Wednesday showing the college-aged men — two naked and one clad in underwear — stealing 60 hamburgers from Doc's Beach House in Bonita Beach. Police say the men broke in early Sunday and left a trail of red peppers on the beach. Doc's general manager Lou Bangert told the News-Press of Fort Myers (http://newspr.es/1pevKLk ) that he's never witnessed such...

SUGAR LAND, TX (KTRK) -- A former Sugar Land teacher has been arrested for allegedly uploading child pornography to the internet. Chad Cole, 40, was arrested at a home on a charge of promoting that pornography. Investigators with the Houston Metro Internet Crimes against Children task force say they traced the files back to Cole's computer.

As the quest for tax reform sweeps the nation, policymakers are faced with the dilemma of how to best build a tax code that promotes fairness, removes roadblocks to economic growth and maintains enough revenue to provide the proper amount of public services. As ALEC has pointed out Rich States, Poor States and other publications, low tax rates and smart tax choices are the path to prosperity because they increase a state’s competitiveness and are the least hurtful to productivity. However, in the effort to lower rates and make the tax code less of a burden, there is another impediment...

LifeNews recently published an article by Mark Leach about what happened when his baby was born with Down syndrome. Leach describes how he and his wife felt abandoned by the medical establishment and how the hospital gave them outdated and scant information about Down syndrome. In response to his experience, and the experiences of many other Down syndrome parents, he has become the bioethics specialist at the National Center for Prenatal & Postnatal Down Syndrome Resources, and works to get positive, life-affirming information into the hands of new Down syndrome parents and those who go through prenatal testing for Down...

A Goldman Sachs managing director has died following an apparent kiteboarding accident, police said. The body of 39-year-old Nicholas Valtz was found floating off Lazy Point in Napeague Harbor, Long Island, on Sunday. The amateur kiteboarder was still attached to his kite, while his gear was scattered in a grassy area of the harbor. The East Hampton Star reported the Brooklyn resident went kiteboarding early in the morning. When he failed to return by 2pm, relatives he was staying with at a Bridgehampton home called police. 'We’re deeply saddened by this tragedy and our thoughts are with Nick’s family,' Goldman...

An inventor from Stamford in Lincolnshire has embarked on a project to build the world's biggest fart machine - and then aim it straight at France. Colin Furze plans to place the machine on top of the white cliffs of Dover so that the French can hear it 21 miles away.

Essay by Dr. Tim Ball (Elaboration of my Heartland Climate Conference Presentation) We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge. Rutherford RogersSo-called climate skeptics, practicing proper science by disproving the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing global warming, achieved a great deal. This, despite harassment by formal science agencies, like the Royal Society, and deliberate neglect by the mainstream media. It combined with an active and deliberate Public Relations campaign, designed to mislead and confuse. Most people and politicians understand little of what is going on so the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strategy of using created science for...

A Clifton Police detective accidentally shot himself after a pit-bull charged at him in the Township of Bloomfield. Yesterday, at 3:40 p.m. two Clifton Police detectives were investigating an incident that occurred in Clifton and led them to the 100 block of Harrison Street in Bloomfield. As the detectives knocked on the door of the location an occupant open the door of the house when a pit-bill ran out of the house and charged at the detectives . One of the detectives (a 16 year veteran of the Clifton P.D.) fired one shot from his service weapon striking his hand...

Governments can’t change the weather. One day people will marvel that turn of the century governments thought they could control the climate, and needed to issue decrees about how much “change” in the weather they would allow.From different continents come two articles with a similar theme. It’s time to dump the EPA and pointless “Climate” policies.The US should get rid of the federal EPA Alan Caruba and Jay Lehr tell us how it is. The EPA is a rogue tool of liberal activitists. For years now I have been saying that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must be eliminated and...

"If you’re anti-Israel, then you’re anti-America. It’s the only democracy over there, it’s the only friend we have who’s willing to fight and stand up for what’s right." Stern: People forget history. Jews were being executed and killed, and they went over to Israel, this little sh*thole, which was a desert—it had nothing going on.

On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA. ... Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because...

Manchester United made an impressive debut under Coach Louis van Gaal on Wednesday night, with Wayne Rooney scoring twice late in the first half of a 7-0 victory over the LA Galaxy. Ashley Young and unsung defender Reece James scored two second-half goals apiece as United opened its summer tour with a surprisingly polished win over MLS’ overmatched Galaxy in the Guinness International Champions Cup.

Rep. Tom Latham's (R-Iowa) "Lean and Responsive Government Act" requires agencies to use continuous process improvement measures for better efficiency and effectiveness. Latham, who introduced the bill July 16, said the methods require agencies to "set clear, measurable goals, analytically evaluate overly bureaucratic systems and reduce Washington red-tape in a sustainable manner," according to a press release. Many major corporations, as well as small businesses, commonly practice continuous process improvement methods, the bill stated, and have successfully reduced costs and improved goods and services. In addition to the private sector, the Defense Department, along with several other agencies, has implemented...

They served in the Civil War. They were there for American soldiers during both world wars. One was even on SEAL Team Six, the military team that killed Osama Bin Laden. But military dogs do not always get to go home with their military handlers after serving together in war. During a Capitol Hill event on Wednesday, legislators argued it should be easier for these veterans to reunite with their dogs.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sales of new U.S. homes plunged in June, a sign that real estate continues to be a weak spot in the economy. New home sales fell 8.1 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 406,000, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The report also revised down the May sales rate to 442,000 from 504,000. (snip)

News reports today and irate witnesses at the scene report that a pregnant woman in labor was not allowed to cross the street to go to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for 30 minutes because ObamaÂ’s motorcade was expected to drive through the area.The woman sat on a bus bench until ObamaÂ’s motorcade drove through.People at the scene quickly used Twitter and the hasthag #ObamaBabyWatch and posted pictures of the woman and commented about her plight.Because the Obama motorcade prevented her from getting to the hospital, workers at the medical facility went across the street to attend to her...

California man, 80, guns down pregnant home invader: ‘I shot her twice, she best be dead’ Tom Greer killed the woman after she and a man jumped him and robbed his Long Beach house Tuesday night. The couple fled after he showed his revolver, but the woman was killed as she tried to run away. BY SASHA GOLDSTEIN They came to the wrong house. An 80-year-old California retiree shot dead a pregnant woman as she and a male accomplice tried to flee Tuesday night after breaking in and robbing the man’s home in Long Beach. And Tom Greer has no...

SIERRA VISTA — Artificial flowers and flags are being pulled at the Southern Arizona Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery. It’s not that they are prohibited, it’s that they are being pilfered and Cemetery Administrator Joe Larson cannot fathom why people are stealing them from in-ground burial sites. Apparently the thefts happened Saturday night and it wasn’t until a woman let Larson know on Monday that the artificial flowers from her loved one’s grave were taken, noting they were not there on Sunday. “We’ve had a number of other complaints this week about the stealing of artificial flowers and flags, but no real...

Pope Francis has met privately with a Sudanese mother in Rome who was put on death row for refusing to renounce her Christian faith and become a Muslim. The Vatican said Pope Francis had 'a very affectionate' meeting with Meriam Ibrahim, 27, her husband and their two small children. Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the pope 'thanked her for her faith and courage, and she thanked him for his prayer and solidarity' during the half-hour meeting. He blessed Ms Ibrahim as she held her baby daughter Maya in her arms whom she gave birth to in prison two...

A pencil-necked geek harasses thugs in the ghetto who in response gets beat up. This insane individual then does it again and again and again, despite how often and severe he gets beat up.

A Colorado Springs man woke up to find a strange woman cooking breakfast in his kitchen Wednesday morning. ... Police say the woman got into the apartment through an unlocked door. She left before police arrived. While officers were responding to the call, they received a report of a woman trying to break into a house in the 900 block of Hutchinson Dr. The owner of the home detained the woman until police arrived. Josefina Gonsalez-Nieves, 27, was arrested.

After more than 30 years on the charts, comedian-singer "Weird Al" Yankovic earns his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, as "Mandatory Fun" debuts atop the list. The album is the first comedy set to top the chart since 1963, and logs the largest sales week for a comedy album since 1994. "Mandatory Fun" was released July 15 through Way Moby and RCA Records, and sold 104,000 copies in the week ending July 20, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It was promoted by a well-receiveddaily viral video campaign that launched Monday, July 14. Starting with his parody of Pharrell's...

There’s plenty of bad news already coming over the transom today and we’ll get to all of it, but one story we’ve followed here has a happy ending. Meriam Yahia Ibrahim, the woman sentenced to death in Sudan for her Christian faith, has left Khartoum and landed in Rome, greeted by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the airport. Italy helped the US mediate her release with Sudanese officials in a quiet effort launched a few weeks ago:

Things are going well for NASCAR's top team, Hendrick Motorsports, which includes some of the sport's top drivers, including Jeff Gordon, Kasey Kahne, Jimmie Johnson, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. But a closer look at the value and profit of the other top teams reveals a sport that is trending in the wrong direction. According to Forbes.com and its valuations of NASCAR's top nine teams, the current value of Hendrick Motorsports ($348 million) is relatively unchanged since 2010 ($350 million). However, the average team has seen a 31.1% drop in profit since 2010 which has translated into an average team value...

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer ordered a review of the state's execution process after a convicted double murderer gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half before his death Wednesday. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne's office said Joseph Rudolph Wood was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m. local time, one hour and 57 minutes after the execution started. Wood's lawyers had filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court while the execution was underway, demanding that it be stopped. The appeal said Wood was "gasping and snorting for more than an hour." In ordering the review, Brewer said...

Change Blindness: In visual perception, change blindness is a normal phenomenon of the brain which show in light that the brain does not have a precise representation of the world but a lacunar one, made of partial details. Despite the name, this phenomenon does not affect the eyes but the brain, and as such is bound to happen to all the human senses. This phenomenon is still in research, but results suggests that the brain estimates the importance and usefulness of information prior to deciding to store them or not. Another issue is that the brain cannot see a change...

A curious 4-year-old in Monroe, Conn., is going to have to get his doughnuts elsewhere after asking a Doughnut Inn customer the wrong question. Justin Otero's mother says the boy asked the customer if she had a baby in her belly and was told no. "My response was, 'Oh my goodness, I'm so embarrassed, I'm so sorry,'" the mom tells WFSB. But she says that while the customer was forgiving, managers refused to allow her in the store with her son, saying, "'He's not allowed in here, he's rude.'" The mom says she plans to get doughnuts somewhere else with...