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Curled up & shivering under a bridge one ear frozen the other, speckled brown with frost Where is home?

So, a house of ill repute - in DC - On K Street, no less, collapses. How many congressmen were injured?

Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim has challengers, but it remains to be seen if any of them are a threat to his office. The least likely challenger is 20-year-old ODU junior Ryan Cooper, who plans on running in the May 4 mayoral election. AltDaily spoke via email to the ambitious young man about his chances of winning, how he plans on fighting crime, and how being a door-to-door salesman prepared him to be the next mayor of Norfolk. AltDaily: Let’s start with the blunt, obvious question: You’re a 20-year-old ODU student taking on an incumbent of some 16 years. Do you...

PORTLAND — When Gary Moody pleaded no contest to trespassing in 2005 for hiding in a pit toilet on White Mountain National Forest property in New Hampshire, a judge urged him to seek help for whatever had driven him to climb down there. According to a new complaint, Moody didn't get the message. The 49-year-old Pittston man is charged again – this time in federal court – with climbing into a pit toilet in the White Mountain National Forest. Authorities say a 9-year-old boy saw Moody climbing out of a toilet at the Hastings Campground on Memorial Day and two...

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials Tuesday canceled deals several area cities were set to make to sell their shares of federal stimulus funds to the highest bidder. MTA board members, who had allocated a minimum of $500,000 in stimulus funds to every city in Los Angeles County, had never intended to let cities sell their shares of funding to other cities for cash, board member Richard Katz said. "That was a misunderstanding on somebody's part," Katz said. "It is our intention that all of the stimulus money be for transportation purposes and transportation only." MTA CEO Roger Snoble said in a...

THERE are pubs with no beer and now there is a town with no toilet paper. Atherton residents are anxiously waiting to wipe after floods cut off deliveries of essential goods and left the town without toilet paper. The town has been carefully rationing their dunny rolls for the past few days as they wait for deliveries to make it through on the flooded Bruce Highway. Residents have been turning up to barren shelves at Woolworths for the past four days looking for the bare essentials. Relief is on the way with fresh supplies on board a barge that was...

A LANDLORD down to his last two customers in the credit crunch has put up signs outside his pub begging for more. Publican Tim Gibson, 43, failed to attract drinkers with meal deals and flyers stuffed in letterboxes. So he stuck blackboards on the pavement outside the Royal Oak in Blean, Kent, pleading for business. One reads: “Wanted. Customers. No experience needed as full training will be given. Please apply within.” He put up another aimed at wives which says: “Free husband creche. Is he getting under your feet? “Leave him here while you shop — just pay for his...

I think the fix to illegal immegration is the same as that for vote fraud - national ID cards. In both cases, without knowing who is a US citizen, and where they live, it is almost impossible to verify eligability to drive, work, rent a house, or anything else. Of course, national ID cards are, in effect, an internal passport - something Americans reject strongly. That is problem #1. Also, as with the "no fly list", what recourse do you or I have, when some government flunky makes a typo, and labels you or I as an illegal alien in...

This morning, I was waiting with my five-year old daughter at the bus stop, for her daily commute to Kindergarten on the cheese wagon. Our golden retriever waited with us, being her usual hyperactive self. While we waited, two things of note happened - first, there was a spectacular car wreck at the light a block down the street. Cops arrived in mere moments, the ambulance a few minutes later, as they should. Good for us - we have excellent city services. Prayers for all involved - I hope their injuries are not too serious. Then, a city work crew...

A flurry of public concern in the City of Falls Church over reports published in the Washington Post last week that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) may terminate the City’s “George” bus system appears unfounded. The fact is that Metro doesn’t fund “George” in the first place. The City does. “Including ‘George’ and other locally-funded bus routes in the WMATA report was flat out a mistake,” said F.C. Acting City Manager Wyatt Shields. He said that WMATA has acknowledged what was probably a clerical error by “someone way down in the organization,” Shields said, but he has not...

People who have large noses, a stocky build and a beetle brow may indeed be a little Neanderthal, according to a genetic study. But the good news is that other research concludes that Neanderthals were much more like us than previously thought. People of European descent may be five per cent Neanderthal, according to a study published in the journal PLoS Genetics, which suggests we all have a sprinkling of archaic DNA in our genes. "Instead of a population that left Africa 100,000 years ago and replaced all other archaic human groups, we propose that this population interacted with another...

Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty (Боевая Машина Пехоты) – Pravda “The Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty, or BMP-1, has long been recognized as the first true infantry fighting vehicle. Combining elements of an armoured personnel carrier, a light tank, and an armoured reconnaissance vehicle, the BMP is capable of a variety of missions. In it, troops may be transported in relative safety to the forward edge of the battle area, regardless of terrain or inclement weather conditions. Enemy forces may be engaged either with the infantry forces mounted, utilizing the nine firing ports provided, or dismounted, with the vehicle providing support from an overwatch...

KORVEL ODD was in the Twilight Zone. For two months, from mid-November 2004 to mid-January 2005, Odd languished in the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, trying to figure out why he was there, and desperately trying to convince somebody - anybody - to set him free. Odd, 42, was jailed at the request of a Philadelphia assistant district attorney - not as punishment for a crime, but to ensure his testimony as a witness in a murder case. Yet, even after the murder charges were dismissed, no one bothered to release Odd from prison. Odd - who finally obtained his freedom after...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Monty Coles was 3,000 feet in the air when he discovered a stowaway peeking out at him from the plane's instrument panel — a 4 1/2-foot black snake. Coles had left Charleston earlier for a leisurely flight over the West Virginia countryside last Saturday in his Piper Cherokee and was preparing to land in Gallipolis, Ohio, when the snake revealed itself. "Nothing in any of the manuals ever described anything like this," the 62-year-old Cross Lanes resident said. But the advice given 25 years earlier from his flight instructor immediately came to mind: "No matter what happens,...

The Middle Times were ending, and the heavens were filled with fire, and The Lord did fight to throw The Daemon out of the heavens. And the fight was fierce, and the sky was filled with bright flashes of fire, and debris did rain down on the people, and they were frightened. And The Lord did seem to cast The Daemon out. And The People did wear clothing, and such armor and helms as they had, to protect them, all painted in the various colors of the desert, so The Daemon might not see them. And The Daemon did come,...

In the Organ Mountains, above Wite Sands National Monument, there exists a Magic Tree. This is not a normal tree - no, it is something very special. I think it was put there, to tell us something. If you go to see it, in the high desert, go early in the morning. You will see a two-hundred foot pine, standing in a cleft in the mountains. It is a magic tree. How can this tree exist, in the desert? It is a harsh environment - the temperature was 108 degrees today, no rain. But I held my little daughter, and...

Puerto Rican government shutdown drags on BY FRANCES ROBLES frobles@MiamiHerald.com SAN JUAN - Nearly 100,000 people were forced out of work Monday when the Puerto Rico government ran out of cash to pay them, and lawmakers refused to approve a loan that would fund their paychecks. ''How much patience does Puerto Rico have?'' asked Isidro Negrón, mayor of the southwestern city of San Germán. Puerto Rico's capitol building took on the air of a street fair as about 100 out-of-work public employees descended on the building to demand an end to the island's fiscal crisis. Flags waving and music blaring,...

The lights may soon be going out in part of the Lake District after health and safety officers said workmen must not climb ladders to replace bulbs. In the past contractors have gone aloft to repair and maintain street lights in Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale. But now Amey, the company that carries out the work for South Lakeland district council, has ruled that its staff will no longer be using ladders on certain lampposts. This means that local officials must either abandon the maintenance work, leaving residents in the dark, or buy £1,000 lampposts equipped with folding columns that can...

A STUNNED Italian actor had to stub out the cigarette he had lit up on stage after a spectator complained, forcing the theatre to change the script of an Arthur Miller play to make it smoke-free. "This had never happened to me in more than 300 performances," the actor, Sebastiano Lo Monaco, said. Italy has banned lighting up in all enclosed public places since January this year. Lo Monaco was smoking, in line with the script, while playing the main character in Miller's A View from the Bridge at a theatre in the northeastern city of Mestre, when a woman...