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TOKYO - Gohan and Aochan make strange bedfellows: one's a 3.5-inch dwarf hamster; the other is a 120 yard-long rat snake. Zookeepers at Tokyo's Mutsugoro Okoku zoo presented the hamster _ whose name means "meal" in Japanese _ to Aochan as a tasty morsel in October, after the snake refused to eat frozen mice. But instead of indulging, Aochan decided to make friends with the furry rodent, according to keeper Kazuya Yamamoto. The pair have shared a cage since. "I've never seen anything like it. Gohan sometimes even climbs onto Aochan to take a nap on his back," Yamamoto said....

Boy invents hamster-powered phone charger A 16-year-old boy invented a hamster-powered mobile phone charger as part of his GCSE science project. Peter Ash, of Lawford, Somerset, attached a generator to his hamster's exercise wheel and connected it to his phone charger. Elvis does the legwork while Peter charges his phone in an economically and environmentally friendly way. He came up with the idea after his sister Sarah complained that Elvis was keeping her awake at night by playing for hours on his exercise wheel. "I thought the wheel could be made to do something useful so I connected a system...

LONDON (AFP) - A frightened hamster was mailed first class to a British address in an act slammed as "utterly cynical" and "very stupid," reports said. A postman picked up a moving parcel, marked 'do not bend' from a post box in Cambridge, eastern England, and fearing it might contain a rat, rushed it to a local vet. "The envelope was a bit gnawed and I just saw the grey fur first," vet Patrick von Heimendahl said in The Sun. "The hamster is fine and I think she will survive," he added on the rodent, now named Postie, before blasting...

Three critically ill patients - including two from the Bay State - died from what they thought were lifesaving transplants because the organs they received were infected by a virus transmitted by the donor's pet hamster, health officials said. ``This is an unfortunate series of events,'' said Dr. Jay Fishman of Massachusetts General Hospital, who treated one of the organ recipients who died. ``It's terrible for the patients and their families. These kinds of things happen, but it is very rare.'' Four people - two from Massachusetts and two from Rhode Island - underwent transplant surgery on April 10 and...

I THINK PRESIDENT W SHOULD THROW EVERYONE WHO CRITISISES HIM IN JAIL! WE ARE AT WAR AND DISSENT LOWERS MORALE SO THEN WE COULD LOSE LIKE IN VIETNAM WHERE JOHN KERRY BETRAYED US! JUST LIKE EVERYONE HERE I AM A LOYAL GOP MEMBER WHO SUPPORTS THE PRESIDENT IN EVERYTHING HE DOES! WHY IS TED KENNEDY NOT IN JAIL? JOHN KERRY IS A TRAITOR! BARBARA BOXER IS A TRAITOR! WE SHOULD THROW THEM IN JAIL! THERE IS A FORUM CALLED DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND THAT IS A PLACE WHERE ACTIONS AGAINST US ARE PLANNED, LET'S ARREST THEM ALL!

Top 10 Signs Kerry has already lost the election 10. Hillary sends email asking for donation to Hillary-2008 9. Gore keeps calling and giving concession speech advice 8. Edwards goes back to work in the Senate 7. Dan Rather calls to ask what he can do 6. Michael Moore calls him "a lousy candidate" 5. Mike Dukakis sends a "Welcome To The Club" FTD basket 4. No more Letterman, has to settle with a spot on Tony Danza's show 3. Is told to "shove it" by Teresa 2. Awarded 4th purple heart by Federal Election Committee And the #1 sign...

The reviews are in... "It's the FEELGOOD movie of the Summer!"--Alexandra Kerry "Four paws up!"--Licorice "Shove it!" - Teresa Heinz-Kerry

A mass e-mail from the Republican National Committee is questioning whether or not Democratic nominee John Kerry actually saved his daughter Alexandra's pet hamster, Licorice, from drowning during a family boating trip as she has claimed he did. advertisement The e-mail, with a subject line reading "Kerry Hamster Story --We Smell a Rat," was sent to more than 2,000 news outlets just hours after Alexandra Kerry charmed the Democratic national convention with her tale of the Senator's hamster heroism. In the e-mail message, the GOP quotes an unnamed witness who claims that not only did Kerry not save the rodent's...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR My name is Licorice, and I am a hamster. I have never shared my story before because, frankly, sometimes all a hamster has is his privacy. Thursday night, however, Alexandra Kerry described the circumstances of my rescue by her father after I had fallen off a pier in Massachusetts. I have come forward now to set the record straight. I was the hamster of Alexandra's sister, Vanessa, and she, on balance, was a good person, although a bit of a tickler. On this occasion, as the family gathered on the pier to depart for a vacation, somebody -...

Listen to Rush... (…play the new Kerry update theme song and discuss wet hamsters)Windows Media Format (.asx)BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I got an e-mail, just now received it. It's from Diane Rich in Woburn, Massachusetts. "Hello, Rush, I just thought I would share this thought with you. It seems the Kerry slogan from last night, "Help is on the way," if you listen to that it reminded me of Mighty Mouse and his slogan, "Here I come to save the day!" TRANSCRIPT BREAK A little audition here, ladies and gentlemen, wasn't enough time to audition this during the commercial break....

No longer tucked away in a brown paper bag, the hamster that stopped Metra trains in Aurora on Friday evening is safe and sound — with a new home and a new name. "Scratchy" is now in the hands of a daughter of an Aurora canine officer. His original owner, who apparently left the hamster behind on a Chicago-to-Aurora commuter train, has not come forward to claim him. Aurora fire and police departments, along with the Kane County Sheriff's Bomb Squad, were called to the Aurora Transportation Center on Friday evening to investigate a suspicious brown paper bag found on...

Hampster Blast - This is a parody of the hamster dance. Now you can shoot them. Just move your mouse over a hampster. Requires Shockwave plug-in. http://www.newgrounds.com/assassin/hamster/

In a prime time address to the Democratic National Convention and millions of Americans at home, Alexandta Kerry stepped to the microphone Thursday night with a mission: Help humanize her father, a man plagued with descriptives such as 'aloof' and 'distant.'The younger Kerry told how, when they were youngsters, her sister Vanessa has insisted on taking her pet hampster on the family vacation.While the family was on the dock waiting for a boat to pick them up, the family's golden retriever became tangled in its leash and bumped the hampster cage, knocking it into the water.As the cage sank beneath...

If you have raised kids (or been one), and gone through the pet syndrome, including toilet-flush burials for dead goldfish, the story below will have you laughing out LOUD! Overview: I had to take my son's hamster to the vet. Here's what happened. Just after dinner one night, my son came up to tell me there was "something wrong" with one of the two hamsters he holds prisoner in his room. "He's lying there looking sick," he told me. "I'm serious, Dad. Can you help?" I put my best hamster-healer statement on my face and followed him into his bedroom....

Hi I Am SmokeyWelcome to my establishment!

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I am very shocked by the current propaganda against France and, in a minor extent, Germany and the EU, which is developing on the American web and media. As we are some "old Europe" countries, let me tell you that some elements of this propaganda remind me of the atmosphere that existed between European peoples of 1914-18 : the Frenchman is the USA's Jew, the traitor, the coward, which plants knives in the back. These are paranoid ideas. Bush has declared "you are with us or you are against us"… your enemies are "evil's axis"… A deeply thought political theory...

Police Investigate Rodent in a Roadster Sun Sep 8, 9:56 AM ET LONDON (Reuters) - British detectives are investigating the mystery of a hamster found driving a toy racing car along a promenade at a northern seaside resort, newspapers said on Saturday. The hamster, nicknamed Speedy, was handed in by a member of the public who found him cruising through Cleveleys, near Blackpool in the modified toy, which he powered by a treadmill. "It is a model hotrod racing car with large wheels at the back and small ones at the front," the Daily Express quoted Constable Quentin Allen...