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General Motors revealed in court filings late Tuesday that it will soon ask a federal bankruptcy judge to shield the company from legal claims for conduct that occurred before its 2009 bankruptcy. The automaker’s strategy is in a motion filed in a Corpus Christi, Texas, federal court case, and in other cases across the nation that involve the defective ignition switches that have led GM to recall 2.6 million small cars. The motion asks U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos to delay action on the lawsuit until the bankruptcy court rules and other federal courts decide if the case should...

On the road in a tour bus this week, the U.S. transportation secretary is spreading some bad news: The government’s Highway Trust Fund is nearly broke. If allowed to run dry, that could set back or shut down projects across the country, force widespread layoffs of construction workers and delay needed repairs and improvements. Anthony Foxx kicked off an eight-state bus trip in Ohio to whip up public support for congressional approval of legislation to keep federal transportation aid flowing to states for another four years, and possibly longer. But Congress will have to act fast. The trust fund—the source...

“If I can pretend to have your attention for just a few moments, my ex-husband, my new boyfriend, and their divorce attorney are going to show you the safety features…” http://www.khou.com/video/featured-videos/Too-funny-Another-Southwest-flight-attendant-goes-viral-255175011.html

The phone of the co-pilot of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was on and made contact with a cell tower in Malaysia about the time the plane disappeared from radar, a U.S. official told CNN on Monday. However, the U.S. official — who cited information shared by Malaysian investigators — said there was no evidence the co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, had tried to make a call. The official told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Monday that a cell-phone tower in Penang, Malaysia — about 250 miles from where the flight’s transponder last sent a signal — detected the co-pilot’s phone searching for...

Next week, the city will celebrate its official, 2,767th birthday. According to a tradition going back to classic times, the brothers Romulus and Remus founded the city on 21 April in the year 753BC. But on Sunday it was reported that evidence of infrastructure building had been found, dating from more than 100 years earlier. The daily Il Messagero quoted Patrizia Fortini, the archaeologist responsible for the Forum, as saying that a wall constructed well before the city's traditional founding date had been unearthed. The wall, made from blocks of volcanic tuff, appeared to have been built to channel water...

Vice President Joe Biden is planning to be among the crowds at this summer’s World Cup soccer tournament. The White House announced Monday that Biden would travel to Brazil for the event in June. He also plans to attend a U.S. national team game. …

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — US Airways apologized Monday after a pornographic image was posted on the company’s Twitter feed. The company often responds directly to disgruntled passengers, but was seemingly unaware that one of its replies included a lewd photograph. “@thatkatzkat We don’t like to hear this, Alex. Please provide feedback to our Customer Relations team here,” read the tweet, which also included a link to a photo of a woman with a model airplane protruding out of a body cavity. The airline later removed the tweet and apologized for the incident.

Germans are often considered to be more at one with nature than us prudish Brits. And now residents of the country's third-largest city have been given the go ahead to strip off for all over sunbathing sessions in six designated spaces. According to a report in TheAtlanticCities.com the six Urban Naked Zones are located in parkland, offering privacy, but also only minutes away from the busy city centre. The 'zones' were introduced following the expiry of statewide laws controlling nude sunbathing last year.

A humorous video walks you through the exodus of the Jews as if it happened today.What if Moses had Facebook? That's the question a Jewish group in Israel began formally asking in 2011. And by Monday - on the eve of Passover - more than 2.5 million people had clicked in to watch a YouTube video trying to answer that question, all with a jazzy version of the Passover classic, "Dayenu," set in the background. When Aish.com first publicized the "Google Exodus - Passover Movie," just 50,000 people had seen the clever 2:17-minute clip. Silicon Valley plays a prominent role...

It was thought to have built by King Offa in the 8th century as border between England and Wales But even though it has been part of the British landscape for centuries, the ancient Offa's Dyke may have to be renamed, after archaeologists discovered it could have been completed 200 years before the great Anglo Saxon leader was born. Experts used radiocarbon dating on the 177-mile dyke and revealed it could have been constructed as early as the 4th century... The group behind the project said it is a 'tremendously exciting discovery' which challenges the accepted history of the ancient...

Officials at NASA and SpaceX were working through the weekend to see whether they could still safely rocket a cargo capsule to the International Space Station on Monday, despite the failure of one of the backup computers in the system that helps dock the pod in space. While workers continued to prepare for a Monday afternoon launch, NASA said a final determination would likely come Sunday afternoon. The deployment of 5,000 pounds of supplies to the space station by SpaceX’s unmanned Falcon 9 rocket has already been delayed a month because of other technical issues. NASA said Saturday that engineers...

The National Archeological Excavation Center has found more evidence of the existence of the Sailendra civilization, believed to have prospered during the 7th century in Ngreco hamlet, Kesongo village, Tuntang district, Semarang regency, Central Java. Previously, a team found pieces of bricks, artifacts and a jaladwara waterway segment, while recently it discovered a foundation believed to have been used for a temple structure. A jaladwara was a water sewage system commonly found in bath houses during ancient times. The tip of the jaladwara is usually the shape of a dragon’s head. The finding is strengthened by the discovery of soil...

As a specialist in prehistoric underwater archaeology, Dr Jonathan Benjamin looks at rising sea levels differently from most people and his fascination with this global phenomenon began when as a PhD candidate at Edinburgh University he came across the work of the Danish archaeologists Anders Fischer and Søren H Anderson. In the 1970s and 1980s, Fischer and Anderson recovered some of the most well preserved material ever seen from sites such as the 6,500-year-old settlement at Tybrind Vig. This was the first submerged settlement excavated in Denmark and from 1977 was the scene of intensive archaeological activity. Lying 300m from...

Known as Vada Volaterrana, it has been identified as a key port system located in present-day Tuscany, Italy, used anciently by the Romans of the city of Volaterrae (today's Volterra) for the import and export of trade goods throughout the Mediterranean. The main harbor was located north of the mouth of the Cecina river, at S. Gaetano di Vada... The ancient city of Volterra, or Volaterrae, which was served by the Vada Volaterrana port system, was first settled by the Etruscans in the 8th century B.C.E. During the succeeding centuries the village had developed into a major city with power...

Researchers at Cambridge University, U.K. finds that after agriculture’s emergence in Central Europe starting around 5300 BC, bones of those living in the Danube River valley became progressively less strong, pointing to a regressive decline in human mobility and loading... Research by Alison Macintosh, a PhD candidate in Cambridge University’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, finds functional adaptation in postcranial skeletal morphology in response to prolonged cultural and behavioural change across ~6150 years of agriculture in Central Europe (~5300 cal BC to 850 AD)... Dr. Ron Pinhasi of the University College in Dublin, Ireland, notes that colonization of Europe by...

Twelve boats, dating from 2,500 BC to the 11th century AD, along with other Viking artifacts have been discovered in Lough Corrib in Connemara, County Galway. Archaeologists have used radiocarbon dating to establish that one of the boats dates from 2,500 BC. Other items that were found include several battle axes and other weapons... The 4,500-year-old log boat settled into the mud when it sank and was covered over time. A mixture of organic sediment and lake water assisted in the preservation process. Even the seats in the boats are preserved... The oldest of the vessels is the Annaghkeen log...

...archaeologists at the University of York are challenging the traditional view that Neanderthal childhood was, in Hobbesian terms, difficult, nasty, brutish and short, fraught with continual fear and danger of violent death... The research team say there is evidence that Neanderthals cared for their sick and injured children for months and often years. A study of child burials, meanwhile, reveals that the young may have been given particular attention when they died, with generally more elaborate graves than older individuals. Neanderthal groups, believed based on fossil findings to have ranged throughout Europe, Asia Minor and into central Asia, were typically...

but he 'was abruptly cut off'The co-pilot of missing flight MH370 made a call from his mobile phone as the aircraft flew low over the west coast of Malaysia. Investigators have learned that the call was made from Fariq Abdul Hamid's mobile phone as the Boeing 777 flew low near the island of Penang, on the north of Malaysia's west coast. The New Straits Times reported today that it was understood the aircraft, with 239 people on board, was flying low enough for the nearest telecommunications tower to pick up Fariq's signal. The call ended abrupty, however it has been...

Archaeologists have uncovered the earliest evidence of the presence of humans in Scotland with an assemblage of over 5,000 flint artefacts which were recovered in 2005-2009 by Biggar Archaeology Group in fields at Howburn, South Lanarkshire. Subsequent studies have dated their use to 14,000 years ago. Prior to the find, the oldest evidence of human occupation in Scotland could be dated to around 13,000 years ago at a now-destroyed cave site in Argyll, northwest Scotland. Dating to the very earliest part of the late-glacial period, Howburn is likely to represent the first settlers in Scotland. The flint tools are strikingly...

The canoe, made from a hollowed tree trunk by some of the earliest American Indians to live on the lake and in the state, was initially dated to about 1750. But recent radiocarbon testing now dates it to between 1025 and 1165 — making it one of the oldest watercraft finds in the state... The canoe was discovered in 1934 as a family was building a dock on the shore of Lake Minnetonka’s North Arm in Orono. Severe drought had dropped the lake below normal water levels, and one of the dock posts hit what family members thought was a...

A message in a bottle that was thrown into the ocean in 1913 and recently found by a fisherman off the coast of Germany was returned to the sender's granddaughter. "It was very surprising," said Angela Erdmann, 62, to The Guardian. "A man stood in front of my door and told me he had post from my grandfather. He then told me that a message in a bottle was found and that the name that was on the card was that of my grandfather."

A pilots’ strike in Germany last week has highlighted the power comparatively small groups of employees have to lay low key areas of the economy in pursuit of their own interests. And the German government is looking to draw up legislation later this year to prevent this from happening again. “One company, one wage agreement” is the motto behind a proposed “Tarifeinheit” or unified wage-bargaining mechanism masterminded by Labour Minister Andrea Nahles. Over three days last week, the cockpit pilots’ union effectively grounded the country’s biggest airline Lufthansa in a dispute over pay and early retirement entitlements. …

For thousands of years, different groups of people have lived in the Negev desert, building stone walls and cities that survive to this day. But how did they make their living? The current thinking is that these desert denizens didn't practice agriculture before approximately the first century, surviving instead by raising animals, said Hendrik Bruins, a landscape archaeologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. But new research suggests people in this area, the Negev highlands, practiced agriculture as long ago as 5000 B.C., Bruins told LiveScience. If true, the finding could change historians' views of the area's inhabitants, who lived...

For many of us, enjoying a glass of wine or pint of beer is the perfect way to unwind after a hard day’s work. But it seems having a drink in a pub or restaurant could be about to get a lot less relaxing. Campaigners are calling for lines to be printed on glasses to show drinkers how many units of alcohol they are really consuming—and potentially to shock them into cutting down. The plans, put forward by the Drinkaware charity, would see unit measure lines added to glasses, based on average-strength drinks—a 4 percent beer, 13 percent wine and...

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 flew around Indonesian airspace apparently to avoid detection after vanishing from radar screens on March 8, a media report said today, suggesting the possibility of a more sinister reason behind the jet's disappearance..... After reviewing radar data provided by neighbouring countries, investigators have now found that the jetliner curved north of Indonesia before turning south toward the southern Indian Ocean, CNN quoted a Malaysian official as saying. The official also suggested the possibility of a more sinister reason behind MH370's disappearance a month ago. The plane's flight path clearly showed that someone on the plane was...

In 2004, UPS announced a new policy for its drivers: the right way to get to any destination was to avoid left-hand turns. Even if that means following this route that a UPS driver described to an incredulous press member: "We're gonna make a right turn onto 135th to Western. We'll make another right on Western down to 139th. Righ turn on 139th and go down to the end of the block and we'll make another right turn." When better tracking systems emerged in 2001, the package delivery service took a closer look at how trucks performed when delivering packages....

Peter Matthiessen, a roving author and naturalist whose impassioned nonfiction explored the remote endangered wilds of the world and whose prize-winning fiction often placed his mysterious protagonists in the heart of them, died on Saturday at his home in Sagaponack, N.Y. He was 86... Mr. Matthiessen was one of the last survivors of a generation of American writers who came of age after World War II and who all seemed to know one another, socializing in New York and on Long Island’s East End as a kind of movable literary salon peopled by the likes of William Styron, James Jones,...

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road... "Ancient wheat and broomcorn millet, recovered in nomadic campsites in Kazakhstan, show that prehistoric herders in Central Eurasia had incorporated both regional crops into their economy and rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, pushing back the chronology of interaction along the territory of the 'Silk Road' more than 2,000 years," Frachetti said... ...several strains of...

KISSIMMEE, FL, April 4, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Planned Parenthood is spending $2 million to open a new 10,000 square foot abortion facility in Kissimmee – the largest yet in Central Florida – and local residents are begging city officials to stop them. “We do not want a death factory in our back yard,” one resident said at a Tuesday city commission meeting, which attracted hundreds of citizens to protest the facility’s planned May opening. Another begged, “Do not let one of our attractions be baby-killing.” But Kissimmee Mayor Jim Swan told residents that local zoning laws leave the city with...

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has accused the Malaysian government of deliberately hiding key information relating to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which could help in solving the mystery of the plane's disappearance. In an interview with the Telegraph, the opposition leader, a distant relative of MH370's pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, has said that Malaysia's military radar should have detected the Beijing-bound jetliner as it started deviating from its original route and turned back. The "sophisticated" Marconi radar system failing to detect the airliner is "not only unacceptable, but not possible, not feasible," he said. Anwar said: "Unfortunately the manner...

Walt Disney World has spent more than a year rolling out a $1 billion system that changes how visitors do everything from enter their hotel rooms to ride Space Mountain. But a few weeks ago a front desk agent at one of Disney’s marquee hotels was still wrestling with the technology. “Behave, you naughty thing,” a Wilderness Lodge reservations clerk muttered at the malfunctioning management system. Scolding didn’t work, but a computer reboot finally did. So it has gone with MyMagic+, an ambitious effort to make Disney World more profitable by making its 30 million annual visitors happier. The multifaceted...

The remains of a man buried 3,800 years ago in a richly decorated California grave bear some unusual but unmistakable features — a protruding brow, a lantern jaw, thick leg and arm bones, and teeth so crowded together that at one point they erupt in rows three deep. According to a new study of the ancient skeleton, they are signs of acromegaly, a rare disorder of the endocrine system that’s similar to gigantism. The California man is among the very few examples of acromegaly ever found in the archaeological record, and it’s the oldest ever identified, according to Dr. Eric...

To describe the ancient Saharan diets, the researchers are measuring the levels of chemical entities called isotopes in the remains. Biological tissues are reservoirs for elements such as carbon and oxygen, which arrive in the body through the food we eat and the environment we live in, and which have variants (isotopes) that can be measured. "Tooth enamel is formed in the very early years of life and the chemical fingerprints within it don't change throughout life," explained O'Connell. "So whatever isotope signals the teeth contain are a result of the geographical area where individuals spent their childhood and the...

Professor Michael Hicks, an expert on Richard III and professor of history at Winchester University, is cited saying he is not convinced that the car park remains are those of the Yorkist monarch, arguing that they could just as well belong to one of many other victims of the Wars of the Roses, and that evidence from DNA testing and radiocarbon dating cited to bolster the claims that Richard had been found places the bones at somewhere between 1450 and 1540, and thus is not specific enough to pin down an exact date. Therefore it can’t be relied upon to...

...The facial reconstruction was done by Caroline Wilkinson from Dundee University, one of the country’s foremost reconstructors... Caroline said, ‘oh my, you realise you’ve got a sub-Saharan African here?’ Our osteo hadn’t picked that up, but Caroline subsequently had it looked at by two more experts who agreed, without being prompted, that this individual showed so many traits of being a sub-Saharan African person... The radiocarbon dating came back with a firm Roman date – around 200 or 250 AD. That was a relief. It’s not without precedent to find Africans from this date in Britain, such as the famous...

Could all the pharaohs read and write? Only 1-3 percent of the inhabitants of ancient Egypt mastered this exceptionally difficult art. Evidence of literacy of the rulers of Egypt are perhaps not numerous, but clear, argues Filip Taterka, Egyptologist, a doctoral student at the Institute of Prehistory, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. In ancient Egypt, there were several types of handwriting. Currently, the best known are classical hieroglyphics, carved in stone on the walls of temples and tombs... As it turns out, Egyptian written sources tell us very little about the literacy of the kings of Egypt. Poznań scientist tried...

...This wall, built between 900 and 850BCE contains eastern Mediterranean compartmented rooms within the main excavated structure, following a typical Phoenician pattern of internal architecture. The organisation and the size of the colony itself is one that is replicated in other such pioneer settlements, and the type of defence found here has close parallels in the Near East with sites such as Hazor or Qeiyafa in Israel, as can be clearly seen in the aerial images... The peaceful abandonment of the settlement occurred around 700 BCE and, pending further research, may be due partially to the gradual silting up of...

A tomb newly excavated at an ancient cemetery in Egypt would have boasted a pyramid 7 meters (23 feet) high at its entrance, archaeologists say. The tomb, found at the site of Abydos, dates back around 3,300 years. Within one of its vaulted burial chambers, a team of archaeologists found a finely crafted sandstone sarcophagus, painted red, which was created for a scribe named Horemheb. The sarcophagus has images of several Egyptian gods on it and hieroglyphic inscriptions recording spells from the Book of the Dead that helped one enter the afterlife. There is no mummy in the sarcophagus, and...

More men are steering clear of Broadway, and not even this spring’s ultimate bro show — “Rocky,” the new musical about the beloved boxing underdog — has found a way to fill seats with them. While men have been hanging back for years, their current scarcity, at a time when overall Broadway attendance is down, is particularly stark. Only 32 percent of audience members last year were men, or 3.7 million, compared with 42 percent (or 4.2 million) in 1980. This season is not providing any relief. Yankees fans skipped the baseball-themed “Bronx Bombers,” which flopped fast. John Grisham guys...

FULL TITLE: Spot the predator: Would YOU be able to tell if a snow leopard was stalking you? Try to find the animal in these photographs These rare photographs of wild snow leopards reveal just why the elusive animal is so hard to spot. Pictured strolling across the face of a mountain, the endangered big cat is barely visible against a background of rock and shale. Experienced wildlife photographer David Jenkins, 41, braved temperatures of over minus 20 degrees centigrade in an effort to get a glimpse of the creature. Scroll down for video But after two weeks enduring the...

Above: El Presidente is shocked -- shocked -- that the U.S. doesn't want his poorest and most criminally-minded citizens.by John Urban | Top Right News Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he is "indignant" at the United States' deportation of Mexican migrants and described U.S. lawmakers as demonstrating a "lack of conscience" in failing to pass immigration reform.Translation? Mexico's head Conquistador is sore that the peasants they have worked so hard to export to the chumps in El Norte are being sent back to them. There I said it.Mexico does everything it can to rid itself of its poorest and brownest...

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (CNN) -- They were words heard around the world as investigators searched for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. Weeks ago, Malaysian authorities said the last message from the airplane cockpit was, "All right, good night."... There's only one problem. It turns out, it wasn't true. On Monday, Malaysia's Transport Ministry said the final voice transmission from the cockpit of Flight 370 was actually "Good night Malaysian three seven zero." Malaysian authorities gave no explanation for the discrepancy between the two quotes. And authorities are still trying to determine whether it was the plane's pilot or copilot who...

You should be able to drive across the Northwestern part of the United States a little more quickly in the coming months. Idaho and Wyoming have just passed laws to raise some interstate speed limits to 80 miles per hour. The Idaho law goes into effect on July 1, but there could be a delay because the Idaho Transportation Department is still conducting safety surveys to decide where to raise limits. It might be late summer before drivers actually see a change. According to a report from local television news station KMVT, the department actually opposed the bill, but it...

Grieving relatives of the Chinese nationals on board flight MH370 have been told divert their anger away from the Malaysian government and focus instead on making funeral arrangements. In a hard-hitting editorial, a Chinese state-run newspaper urged the families to accept evidence that the Malaysian Airlines plane had crashed in the sea with no survivors.... 'Public opinion should not blame the Malaysian authorities for deliberately covering up information in the absence of hard evidence.' Earlier, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott confirmed that all hope is lost for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight by declaring all 'evidence' points to the plane...

Transport authorities in northern France laid off a driver “as a protective measure,” after he sprayed a teenage lesbian couple with water after they kissed in front of him last week. The driver stopped in front of a high school near Nancy to pick up students around 5:30 pm on Friday when the young couple shared the kiss. The driver allegedly uncapped a bottle of water he had with him and let its contents fly on the teenage girls. …

While some of the danger involved in riding motorcycles can be attributed to poor driving skills or intoxication, there are facts that do not lend themselves to interpretation. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) noted that during its last review of data in 2012, motorcycle fatalities increased over 7 percent, while states without helmet laws showed ten times more fatalities than those that mandated helmet use when riding a bike. About 15 percent of all highway deaths were from motorcyle riders, making motorcycle riders around 30 times more at risk than car and truck drivers — and about 50...

A team of researchers working in Hungary has proposed that a sun compass artifact found in a convent in 1948 might have been used in conjunction with crystals to allow Vikings to guide their boats even at night. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences, the team describes theories they've developed that might explain how Viking sailors were able to so accurately sail to places such as Greenland. Since the discovery of the sun compass fragment, researchers have theorized that Viking sailors used them to plot their course—at least when the...

This happened to me on SR 41 in Tampa on Monday March 24th. This pathetic excuse for a human being tailgated me for about three minutes. After about a minute, and me shaking my head, I pulled out my phone and started recording. I couldn't move over because there were trucks in the right lane, and I sure as heck wasn't going to speed on a rainy day with the roads being as slick as they were. I was turning left in about a half-mile when this happened. Now bear in mind, that this guy had already passed a truck...

A plane has spotted objects in the Indian Ocean of the first day of searching a new location for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but officials say it will take until tomorrow to determine whether they are related to the lost plane. The search area moved 680 miles to the north east earlier today, and a New Zealand military plane, one of nine aircraft involved in the hunt, found the objects, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said on Twitter. Amsa said the find needs to be confirmed by a ship which is expected to arrive in the area tomorrow. The search...

Couples in Denmark are being encouraged to travel to help boost the country’s falling birth rate in a hilarious new advert. The Do It For Denmark! clip explains how getting away from it all boosts men and woman's libidos – with a therapist claiming nearly half of couples have more sex when on holiday. And the tongue-in-cheek video says 10 per cent of all Danish children are conceived while abroad – with the producers Spies Travel offering a free holiday to anyone who conceives on one of its ‘ovulation discount’ trips.