Free Republic

November 20, 2009 (DURANGO, Colo.) -- A person in a chicken costume ruffled the feathers of Durango's city council as its members discussed rules for backyard fowl. At a council meeting Tuesday, someone in a chicken costume quietly entered the council chambers just as the mayor was discussing a recently-passed backyard hen ordinance. The costumed chicken took a few turns, flapped its arms, then took a seat in the nearly empty gallery. Several minutes later, the big bird left -- without identifying itself -- after laying an egg on the floor. [snip]

The past of human evolution is more and more coming to light as scientists uncover a trove of fossils and genetic knowledge. But where might the future of human evolution go? There are plenty of signs that humans are still evolving. However, whether humans develop along the lines portrayed by hackneyed science fiction is doubtful. Clichés dashed An old cliché has the highly evolved humans of the future sporting large heads to hold their advanced enlarged brains, "but that's nonsense, whole nonsense," said paleontologist Peter Ward at the University of Washington at Seattle, author of "Future Evolution." "If you've ever...

It's Barbie In A Burkha: World-Famous Doll Gets A Makeover To Go Under The Hammer For 50th Anniversary [Pics in URL] DAILY MAIL REPORTER 21st November 2009 One of the world's most famous children's toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover - wearing a burkha. Wearing the traditional Islamic dress, the iconic doll is going undercover for a charity auction in connection with Sotheby's for Save The Children. More than 500 Barbies went on show yesterday at the Salone dei Cinquecento, in Florence, Italy.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Wide-eyed children around the world will be hearing from Santa's "elves" at the North Pole after all. During Christmas seasons for decades, these dedicated elves responded to thousands of letters addressed to "Santa Claus, North Pole." All that was ending with a U.S. Postal Service decision to discontinue the program based in the small Alaskan town amid privacy concerns. The elves from Santa's Mailbag vowed to fight the decision, while North Pole residents voiced outrage. A reversal of the Postal Service move was announced Friday. "We never wanted to spoil people's Christmas," said agency spokesman Ernie...

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. (AP) - A 39-year-old Southern California man has been arrested for misdemeanor child annoyance after allegedly paying a teenager $31 to spit in his face. The Ventura County Sheriff's Department says Charles Hersel was arrested Wednesday in a sting operation at a mall in Thousand Oaks. He's free from jail pending a court hearing. A sheriff's statement says Westlake High School students claimed Hersel paid them to yell profanities, spit and slap him in the face. Several also claimed he offered them cash to urinate and defecate on him.

Unless you've just arrived in 2009 on a time machine, you know that smoking isn't good for you. Did you know, that smoking isn't good for your computer, either? It's true, at least according to Apple. Two readers in different parts of the country claim that their Applecare warranties were voided due to secondhand smoke. Both readers appealed their cases up to the office of God Steve Jobs himself. Both lost. Back in April, Derek copied us on his e-mail to Jobs: I took my mid 2007 apple macbook (black) into the Jordan Creek Apple Store in West Des Moines,...

During the big Michigan Week jump, Ohio State University's Mirror Lake and a baby pool have a lot in common. The jump, which will take place tonight, is one of many student traditions. But Ohio State also is a research university, so it was inevitable that someone would apply a little science to this ritual. Last year, students in the College of Earth Sciences tested the water in Mirror Lake before, during and after thousands plunged in to psych themselves up for The Game. "Interesting results from last year's study include a lake-wide temperature increase of approximately 3 degrees Fahrenheit...

Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again, a Florence museum said Friday. Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of the History of Science, said three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth were removed by enthusiastic admirers from the astronomer's body in 1737, 95 years after his death, while his corpse was being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb, opposite the tomb of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. One of the fingers was recovered soon after,...

The two remaining Beatles have teamed up for a duet on Starr's forthcoming solo album, Y Not. It's a band renuion! Sort of ... Paul McCartney appears on two tracks... "Paul was doing the Grammys, so he came over to the house and was playing bass on [new song] Peace Dream," Starr explained. "I played him this other track and Paul said, 'Give me the headphones. Give me a pair of cans'. And he went to the mic and he just invented that part where he follows on my vocal. That was all Paul McCartney, and there could be nothing...

video 1:54

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- California tax officials say an interior designer's false disability claim was uncovered when he was spotted on a home improvement television show. Fifty-six-year-old Ronald Hunt of Los Angeles was sentenced Tuesday to 200 hours of community service and ordered to pay more than $180,000 in restitution, unpaid taxes and fines. He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of fraud.

A Ugandan government official has said that the bodies of people who die from drinking an illicit local gin should be caned six times before burial as an example to the living. District commissioner Edwin Komakech advocated the corpse-punishing on Saturday at a security meeting in the Amuru district. Some who make the local gin, called waragi, have begun distilling it with poisonous methanol. Over 50 people have died in the last two months in Uganda from drinking the gin. Last week, police said they would launch an investigation into the making of the dodgy waragi. In Uganda, the bodies...

Good grief!

Authorities are searching for an armed robber who was carrying a child when he attacked a man in Norwalk, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The suspect allegedly approached the victim outside a store in the 11000 block of Rosecrans Avenue on Oct. 28. The suspect, who was carrying a 4- to 6-year-old boy, demanded the victim's wallet and alcohol he had just purchased. The robber was last seen getting into a dark-colored vehicle.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- Authorities say a severely overweight South Carolina man stayed in his recliner without moving for eight months until shortly before his death. Firefighters had to cut Tillmon Webb from the chair after his mother called paramedics because he was in pain. Greenwood County deputies say the 33-year-old weighed about 800 pounds when he died Wednesday at a hospital....

Posted on 11/19/2009 9:29:16 AM by Eleutheria5 I saw this on Reuters as I sat down just now, but then Reuters went down before I could get more details, possibly due to excess traffic caused by the event. But apparently, two people were injured at the upstate New York mall, one a US army recruiter, the perp is in custody, possibly hospitalized, and that's all I know. I can't find anything more just yet, though I did look. Anyone with more info, please contribute. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=7613002

What a cat-astrophe! A ferocious feline turned her owners into a pair of scaredy cats in their Midtown apartment yesterday, holding them hostage at claw-point until the cops came to their rescue. Rosa Davila and her son, Victor Marte, 27, cowered behind a bedroom door at their pad on West 42nd Street about a half an hour while the raging Russian blue held them at bay.

The Senate has stalled action on a $175 million spending bill that would fund tax incentives to encourage cremation, and discourage traditional burial of the deceased.

A terra cotta warrior and horse is seen during a media preview for the exhibit "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor" at the National Geographic in Washington on November 17, 2009. The exhibit, which opens November 19, features 15 terra cotta figures. UPI/Kevin Dietsch

The answer to the question of whose curveball breaks harder — that of the Yankees' A.J. Burnett or the Phillies' Cole Hamels — may be neither. Zhong-Lin Lu, professor of cognitive neuroscience at USC, along with colleagues from USC and American University, developed a simple visual demo that suggests a curveball's break is, at least in part, a trick of the eye. Their demo won the Best Visual Illusion of the Year prize at the Vision Sciences meeting earlier this year. Try it here:The break of the curveball 2009 First prize A related press release is here. The curveball's effect...

UFO fever is sweeping through Germany, no doubt about it. The entire year has been pretty much one long UFO flap with around 500 sightings submitted to various UFO reporting agencies. Sightings have occurred throughout the country and a number of these have been the subject of serious government investigations. These two short films were allegedly taken in the last few days. The first of these (below) comes from the quiet town of Scheuditz in the Saxony district. The witness writes that he ‘I looked out my window and saw a UFO!’ and that he filmed it with a hand-held...

– Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes might have thought twice about naming their daughter Suri if they'd known that it means "pickpocket" in Japanese, "turned sour" in French, and "horse mackerels" in Italian. Today Translations, a London-based translation company, is offering parents-to-be -- particularly celebrities -- the chance to check the meaning of prospective baby names in other languages. For 1,000 pounds ($1,678), the company's linguists will carry out a "basic name translation audit" of names, checking their meaning in 100 languages, or more for an additional cost. While open to everyone, the firm said it expects the service to...

In an article in American Vogue magazine in which Mr Miliband was described as "tall and dashing", the interviewer joked about developing a crush on the 44-year-old Foreign Secretary after hearing his British accent on the telephone. "Well, if you saw him it would be a big crush. I mean, he is so vibrant, vital, attractive, smart," said Mrs Clinton, 18 years Mr Miliband's senior. "He's a really good guy. And he's so young!" Mr Miliband is rarely cited as a political heartthrob. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spokesman, reflected the prevailing mood when he nicknamed him Brains after the...

Russian guys makes knives made of sapphire.

An overgrown lawn could cost a homeowner $1,000 a day. A plan to quadruple the penalty from the current maximum of $250 per day for a first violation is scheduled for consideration at Tuesday night's town council meeting. A repeat violation by the same person would be boosted to $5,000 a day maximum from $500 per day. If the code enforcement board finds that the violation is irreversible — the unapproved removal of an historic tree, for example — the violator would face a maximum fine of $15,000. The current maximum penalty is $5,000. "That's outrageous," said Stefan Harzen, a...

Police Say Alcohol Likely Played Role SEATTLE -- Seattle police say a man who thought he was ninja was impaled on a metal fence when he tried to leap over it. An officer who was looking for an assault victim nearby Monday night heard the man screaming for help. Police supported him to prevent further injuries until medics arrived and took him to a hospital, where he was in serious condition in intensive care on Tuesday. Police spokeswoman Renee Witt wrote in a department Web site posting that officers thought the man might have been involved in the reported assault,...

A 79-year-old motorcyclist is dead after he hit a moose near Gibbons on Sunday night. Morinville RCMP were called to the collision on Highway 28A south of Gibbons around 7:30 p.m. along with paramedics and firefighters. By the time police arrived, EMS were already attempting to resuscitate the unresponsive man. Police say the victim, from Fort Saskatchewan, was driving his Honda Gold Wing motorcycle when he hit a moose, fell off the bike and onto the road. A car that had been driving behind the man also hit the moose, then the motorcycle. The victim was pronounced dead at the...

Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi gave a speech to 100 young Italian women recruited by a model agency and urged them to convert to Islam, newspapers reported on Monday. The young women selected for Kadhafi's speech in Rome late Sunday each had to be at least 1.70 metres (five feet seven inches) be "pleasant" and "well dressed" but low cut tops and mini-skirts were banned, the newspapers said. Each woman was paid between 50 and 60 euros and was hired by the Hostessweb agency, the reports said. The women were told to got to a luxury hotel in the Via Veneto,...

A posh palace is being built on the bank of Istrin water reservoir in the Moscow region. It’s a mansion looking like a huge 18th century palace, which is already informally named “Istrin mansion�. Its appearance, quick development and approximate cost were recently debated in Russian blogs. But still having some guesses about who could own such a luxury, no one has an official confirmation on who the lucky man really is. The thing is that this building together with its adjacent lands was earlier presented in Google Maps, but now there are no any marks of it. To be...

What could be the only footage of an actual human headshrinking ceremony in South America--which shows heads being boiled and dried--may be real, says an explorer in a new documentary. Warning Video contains graphic images In its special, author and explorer Piers Gibbon set out to find out if the film is genuine. The film was made in 1961 by Polish Explorer Edmundo Bielawski, who, with a team of seven, set out to explore and document the worlds largest rain forest: The Amazon. Head-shrinking was only practiced by one portion of the Amazon jungle-dwelling population- the Shuar. Headshrinking was a...

A PYGMY hippopotamus has been shot dead during a pig hunting expedition in the Northern Territory. The hippo is normally native to the swamps of west Africa, in particular Liberia. The Northern Territory News reports, Nico Courtney, 27, was out spotlighting for pigs with his mate Rusty on a station in the Douglas Daly district 200km south of Darwin on Saturday night. "It was about 1am and running away from us - from the tail end it just looked like a big pig," Mr Courtney said. "We got out, had a look at it, and thought 'that's not a pig,...

The latest object to shoot high-def video from the edge of space is…an arm chair. To promote its REGZA SV LCD TVs (LED backlight, local dimming), Toshiba trekked into the Black Rock Desert with a helium balloon. Watch the result: Click here to go to page with video. This is the first part of the ad. The second half for their Satellite T Series ULV laptops will come out next year. [Toshiba UK via Engadget] Facts about the shoot: • The shots were taken at a staggering 98,268 feet above the earth using Toshiba's own cameras • To reach the...

OTTAWA — Canada’s newly armed border guards have claimed their first victim: a hapless moose. The creature was felled by the duty sidearm of a border officer in late August, newly disclosed documents show. The incident — marking the first time a border-guard sidearm has been discharged on duty — occurred about 25 kilometres west of Creston, B.C., as an unidentified intelligence officer with the Canada Border Services Agency was driving on official business to Nelson, B.C. The officer was behind an RCMP vehicle when both drivers spotted an injured moose struggling in the westbound lane of Highway 3. The...

SUSPECTED cannibals killed a young man, ATE part of him and then sold other bits to a KEBAB house. Cops also believe the 25-year-old victim's body parts may have been used to fill PIES too. The trio of homeless men were arrested in Russia - accused of murdering the man with knives and a hammer. Prosecutors revealed: "After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up - part of it was eaten and part of it was sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies." Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2730715/Butchered-man-used-for-kebabs.html#ixzz0WxueLNEc

Several airline pilots have reported sighting a shining unidentified flying object (UFO) near the south-eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, a newspaper reported yesterday. The first sighting was reported by a Xiamen Airlines pilot on Monday, who said he saw a light blue object hovering past his plane while 80km north of Nanjing, the Wen Wei Po daily reported. At the same time, pilots of a Shandong Airline aircraft, which was some 120km away from the Xiamen airlines plane, also reported a similar sighting. They described the UFO as being a white-blue skateboard-shaped craft. A pilot from another airplane, about 300km...

Ever seen a fight cat ? This cat is training for a big fight !

A Swedish man who saved a woman from assault has been sentenced to prison rather than being applauded for performing a civic duty. In a case which has provoked outrage across the country, Per-Anders Pettersson was found guilty of aggravated assault despite the would-be Samaritan’s claims he was acting in self-defence on behalf of 66-year-old Gard Forsgren who was being attacked in her car. Forsgren, now 69, was assailed in 2006 while inside her vehicle near Nas in the central Swedish county of Dalarna when Pettersson intervened. He dragged the woman’s attacker from the car and hit him two times...

PHOENIX (AP) -- A high school librarian in Phoenix says a former student at the school returned two overdue books checked out 51 years ago along with a $1,000 money order to cover the fines. Camelback High School librarian Georgette Bordine says the two Audubon Society books checked out in 1959 and the money order were sent by someone who wanted to remain anonymous.

The FDA's website lists the Swine Flu H1n1 vaccines ingredients which include mercury, squalene and formaldehyde. Research the ingredients for yourself. Click here to find out what scientists have discovered about damaging effects of mercury on the brain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSKvDQ9OkNM Although Dystonia is a less prevalant disorder, autism rates in America's children have skyrocketed. 1 in 150 children in America are diagnosed with autism. Mercury has been proven to cause nonsocial and uncontrollable behavior in primates. Scientific studies has proven mercury poisoning causes neurological damage... Dystonia is a neurological movement disorder in which sustained muscle contractions cause twisting and repetitive movements...

Just take a look at this astonishing -- and, yes, creepy -- video, shot in Denmark, of a massive swarm of starlings. Details here . Follow the You Tube link below to view....Click on "here" above to read a report...

Human species 'may split in two' Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a...

Pennsylvania SPCA workers had the unwelcome task yesterday of sifting through the remains of five animals that apparently had been sacrificed, officials said. A passer-by found the beheaded animals - a dog, a cat and three chickens - near a bike path on Bingham Street near Roosevelt Boulevard in Olney about 1 p.m., said George Bengal, the PSPCA's director of investigations. "It looks like the act was done somewhere else, and the remains were left here in the park," Bengal said. PSPCA officials often see a rise in animal sacrifices at this time of the year, Bengal noted, because it...

While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the...

LOS ANGELES – For NASA's stuck Mars rover, the Spirit may be willing, but the wheels could prove too weak. The space agency on Thursday outlined a rescue plan to try to free the rover Spirit, which has been bogged in a sand trap on the red planet for half a year. The risky operation is expected to last several months. "If it cannot make the great escape from this sand trap, it's likely that this lonely spot straddling the edge of this crater might be where Spirit ends its adventures on Mars," said Doug McCuistion, who heads the Mars...

We have a stunning update to a story News Channel 4 first brought you earlier this week. On Monday we told you about a deadly house fire. We now know the identity one of the victims. 21-year-old Brooke Phillips starred in "Cathouse," an HBO reality television show that followed the lives of prostitutes at a brothel in Nevada. The young woman was also a mother and had recently found out she was expecting another child. The Bunny Ranch website boasts one of its newest workers, 21-year-old Hayden Brooks. Her legal name is Brooke Phillips; a Moore, Oklahoma native who died...

Glenn Beck clips purged from YouTube today?

Calling him the oldest tagging suspect they have ever captured, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies arrested a 74-year-old Los Angeles man for allegedly putting "slap tags" on the inside of Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses. For the last seven months, deputies assigned to the Special Problems unit of the Sheriff's Transit Bureau have been trying to determine the identity of an "older" vandal who had been placing orange and black "Who Is John Scott?" stickers on buses in Baldwin Hills and other areas concentrated on the Westside of Los Angeles. Deputies involved in a saturation patrol this morning at the downtown...

This jaw-dropping UFO footage was sent to us by a reader who didn't have much information on it. The film is believed to have been taken in the city of Ocana in Colombia. The clip shows a very clear UFO hovering over a statue of what appears to be Jesus and before zapping it with some kind of laser beam. We are relying on the reader who sent the UFO video insisting that it is new material and hasn’t already been doing the rounds of various UFO forums and websites. We ourselves have never seen it before. UFO researchers will...

The amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, were designed to protect the basic rights of U.S. citizens, guaranteeing the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and exercise of religion; the right to fair legal procedure and to bear arms; and that powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved for the states and the people.

The Colorado parents accused of pulling a spectacular hoax by reporting their son was aboard a runaway balloon pleaded guilty Friday to charges that could bring some jail time and probation. Richard Heene pleaded guilty to knowingly and falsely influencing Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden, a felony, in the episode that sent law enforcement scrambling to rescue 6-year-old Falcon until he was found safe at the family home. Mayumi Heene pleaded guilty to knowingly filing a false report with emergency services, a misdemeanor. Richard Heene told judge Stephen Schapanski he understood that he could have to pay restitution for the...