A fossilized 78 million year old seagoing animal was about to give birth when it died, according to paleontologists.  The animal, a species of plesiosaur called Polycotylus latippinus, was first found by Charles Bonner on his Bonner Ranch in Logan County, Kansas in 1987, but wasn't thoroughly studied until recently as the fossil was being prepped for display in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  The sixteen foot long female was very much pregnant with a fully-formed baby i...
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Paleontologists announced that they founs a new fossil family of animals in Brazil.  Called Coxoplepectoptera, these insects have also come to be called the Frankenstein Insect because, like the legendary literary creature created from various body parts, its body is a conglomerate of several other insects.  It had the wings and middle body of a dragonfly, the tail end of a mayfly (which has been acknowledged as its nearest living relative), and the head and front legs of a praying mantis.  T...
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A federal prison in Chetumal, Mexico, was the scene of an unusual escape attempt by one of its inmates.  Juan Ramirez was visited by his girlfriend--a conjugal visit---and decided that this was the opportunity he'd been waiting for.  Dressed in just his underpants and socks, he emptied out his girlfriend's suitcase and forced himself into it in a fetal position, hoping to sneak out of jail unseen.  Prison officials got suspicious when the young lady appeared extremely nervous on her way out. ...
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Residents of Phoenix, AZ were stunned to witness the march of a huge sand storm, known by its Arabic name of Haboob, through the city on July 5.  The storm, fifty miles wide and packing winds of over 50 miles an hour, howled its way through with clouds of choking sand hundreds of feet tall, turning late afternoon into night like a solar eclipse.  Residents were forced to retreat indoors, and travellers in their cars pulled over to the side of the streets and highways to wait out the storm.  S...
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Much as last week's announcement about giant fossil spiders, we have to take the word "giant" in context.  Paleontologists revealed today that the have found giant ant fossils--giant when compared to today's ants.  Modern-day giant ants are around an inch long, but this fossil was from about 50 million years ago, and was at least two inches long, making this ant, Titanomyrma lucei, about the size of a hummingbird (see photo).  Found in the Green River section of Wyoming, these ants were most ...
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Paleontologists reported today that they have discovered the largest fossil spider ever found.  Of course, that's a relative term since the 165 million year old arachnid had a body one inch wide with 2 and a half inch legs.  The spider was an early version of the Nephila family, more commonly known as a Golden Orb spider, which today uses its large netlike webs to capture birds and bats.  Most Nephilas today live in tropical climates, so it's safe to assume this prehistoric spider did the sam...
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It seems like Moammar Gadhafi and Japan have been in the news and nothing else is happening elsewhere, right?  Tell you what---let's talk dinosaurs, specifically a brand new one that just came out of some fossil beds.  Paleontologists in Paris have reported via Agence France Presse and the scientific journal Cretaceous Research on April 1 that researchers in China have found a new species of meat eating dino.  Named Zhuchengtyrannus Magnus, or "tyrant of Zhucheng" after the area where it was ...
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As protests and military retaliation against protesters are escalating in Libya, Moammar Gadhafi is losing control of his country and finding that even some of the armed forces are not siding with him.  Estimates that at least 1,000 people, mostly in the Tripoli region, are dead are offset by the growing wave of support for the protesters among the military.  On the western border with Tunisia, soldiers from that area refused to open fire on protesters and chased officers away.  They now guar...
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The growing unrest in the Middle East continues to escalate.  Protesters have toppled the governments in Egypt and Tunisia, and the violence is spreading in Bahrain, but the worst unrest is now in Libya, where young people are calling for an end to the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, who has been in power for 42 years.  Protesters have seized control of Libya's second largest city, Bengazi, where reports that are trickling out say that police are nowhere to be seen and armed youths are directing t...
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Arizona continues to lead the fight against illegal immigration in spite of the fact that the federal government is of the mindset that they can't do it.  You'll recall that last year the state tried to pass sweeping anti-illegal immigration legislation that would have made it safer and save it tons of money by getting illegals out of its borders.  The Feds don't seem to want to stem the flow of illegals into this country and a federal court blocked key points of the Arizona laws.  On Thursda...
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Shortly after nightfall on Friday, February 11, Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman went on national television to make a stunning announcement, saying "In these great circumstances that the country is passing through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave his position as president of the republic.  He has mandated the Armed Forces Supreme Council to run the state."  As one, the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square erupted in cheering, waving Egyptian flags, a...
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Wael Ghonim, a marketing manager for Google, gave an interview today within hours of being released after being detained by police in Cairo for 12 days.  Ghonim says he was accosted on the way to a friend's house twelve days ago by four men who worked him to the ground, blindfolded his, then took him to a secret location where he was interrogated for the better part of two weeks.  He is the overseer for Google marketing in the Middle East and Africa and usually works  from an office in Dubai....
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A popular American newsman was attacked and injured as the protests in Egypt turned ugly on February 2.  Supporters of President Hosni Mubarak took to the streets in large numbers and confronted anti-government protesters.  Mubarak supporters broke lines on horseback and on camels and encroached on areas where protesters gathered.  The protesters, who were more numerous, pulled their attackers off their mounts and beat them bloody.  Things degenerated from there as both sides tore sidewalks a...
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Just a little after midnight Thursday, local time, cyclone Yasi made landfall in Mission Beach, Queensland State, Australia, adding even more grief to a country already devastated by recent flooding.  At least 90,000 homes lost power already as the monster storm moved inland, where it's expected to rage on for at least two days before breaking up.  The Bureau of Meteorology warns that at least 28 inches of rain could fall in a few hours, and when combined with the fact that Yasi is striking a...
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Japanese scientists announced this morning that they are finally launching that project we were first to tell you about last year.  If everything works out fine, they say that we'll see mammoths, those long-extinct prehistoric elephants, walking the Earth in about five years.  The plan involves getting tissue from the preserved carcass of a mammoth in a Russian laboratory.  The Japanese researchers have mastered the process, so they say, of recovering DNA from the tissue of long-dead and froz...
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Canadian radio stations have been warned to censor the 1985 Dire Straits hit "Money For Nothing" after a listener of Newfoundland's OZ FM filed a complaint that the Grammy Award winning song from the album "Brothers In Arms" is derogatory to gay men.  In the song, Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler and fellow rock star Sting make reference to a young man as a "faggot", and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, the local equivalent to the FCC, says that this violates Canada's human rights...
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The torrential rains that have plagued Australia since last November have left devastation in their wake as rivers overflowed their banks across much of that country's northwestern region.  Yet another monster storm over the past few days has caused the Brisbane River to send a 26 foot wall of water, which government officials have dubbed an "inland instant tsunami", through the city of Toowoomba, killing twelve people.  The flood waters have begun to enter Brisbane itself, and yesterday resi...
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Teena Marie, the energetic R & B singer who became one of the few Caucasian acts to be a hit with Motown, has died at age 54 on December 26.  She died in her sleep but cause of death was not officially released.  She was signed to the Motown label in 1979 with the recommendation of her mentor, the legendary Rick James, with who she was romantically linked and had a long friendship.  Her first album, "Wild and Peaceful", did not show her face on the cover because record executives feared the A...
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The total lunar eclipse tonight is such a rare event that it hasn't happened in 372 years.  Sure, we've had lunar eclipses aplenty in the past few centuries, but this eclipse happens on the winter solstice (summer solstice if you live south of the equator), which hasn't happened since 1638.  The eclipse will begin at half past midnight on the east coast, 9:30 PM in the west.  The actual total eclipse will occur at 3:17 AM Eastern, 12:17 AM Pacific, and at that time, a minor meteor shower will...
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Paleontologists have found the most complete skeleton ever of a dimetrodon, the famous animal with a huge sail on its back, in Texas.  Dimetrodons are often mistaken for dinosaurs, but they in fact predated the dinos by a large number of years.  The fossil was unearthed in an ancient sinkhole which has been yielding dimetrodon bones for over 100 years, but never one so complete.  Scientists are still exposing more of the remains as of press time, and the creature has been nicknamed "Wet Willi...
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An unexpectedly heavy snow storm on Tuesday left Paris, France nearly crippled.  The storm was severe enough to completely close the Eiffel Tower.  During the winter, it's not unusual for the Tower elevators to be closed because they are operated with water pressure, and antifreeze can't perform well under the extremely high pressure required for them, but the stairs are usually available.  This time, however, even the stairs were closed off because they were deemed to be too dangerous to use...
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Do you like stargazing?  Are you an amateur astronomer?  If so, then this December will be your month as nature stages two spectacular sky shows.  First on tap will be the Geminid Meteor Shower next week, with the peak days being Monday and Tuesday, when some scientists are estimating you will be able to see between 60 and 100 shooting stars per hour, and quite possibly being the best meteor show in 100 years, cloud cover permitting.  About a week later, on December 20, to be exact, most of t...
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The Cleveland Museum of Natural History announced yesterday that the first ceratopsian dinosaur fossil has been found in South Korea, a region known for dinosaur eggs and footprints, but from where actual prehistoric animals are seldom discovered.  The animal is an entirely new species of Labrador dog-sized ceratopsian and is around 103 million years old, therefore it is an ancestor of the well-known Triceratops.  Named Koreaceratops hwaseongensis in honor of Hwaseong City, where it was disco...
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Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, is getting some powerful help in his time of trouble.  Some Swedish women are accusing Assange of sexual misconduct, and a number of his financial backers, under pressure from America, have either pulled their funding or refused to have their servers used to carry the site's hosting.  Assange has turned himself in to London police while he fights extradition to Sweden, but his supporters fight on.  A group of so-called "hacktivists", operat...
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  The alternate episode that would have brought massive controversy to the season finale of AMC's breakout hit "The Walking Dead", as reported on the Mohawk Radio Show last week, was not used last night.  The network opted for the originally filmed episode, and this may possibly reflect on the fact that the show's head writer fired the entire scripting staff last week (because they didn't want to do this storyline?).  The alternate show would have revealed the fact that we currently have a pl...
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Nikki Sixx, Alicia Keys, Ryan Seacrest, and other Hollywood and music celebrities all have way too much money for their own good, but they have yet one more thing in common.  They are all so much out of touch with regular people that they have signed on for a "digital death" campaign.  While the campaign is for a good cause, it strikes a sour note with many people.  The stars have all agreed to stay off social networking sites until $1 million is raised for the AIDS charity Keep A Child Alive...
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Leslie Nielsen, the ruggedly handsome, Canadian-born leading man who first made an impact as a dramatic actor then later became a comedy star, died on November 28.  His nephew, Doug Nielsen, told TMZ that his uncle passed away due to complications from pneumonia at age 84, stating he just fell asleep and never woke up.  Nielsen got his start on New York TV dramas after a stint as a DJ in Saskatchewan, Canada.  He wanted to get as far away as possible from his abusive father, who was an office...
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A new joke is making the rounds as people are getting fed up with the aggressive pat-downs during airport security checks.  It says "What does TSA stand for?  The Sexual Assailants", and is being spread by people who have stated that they'd probably be better treated by a sexual deviant on the street and that TSA agents should offer them a cigarette after the searches, which include groin groping and breast feeling.  Things haven't been helped by news stories and videos of disabled people bei...
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A rare blizzard has been causing all sorts of problems in the northwestern United States.  After its start in Alaska, it slid down south and east into Washington and Utah with snow, icy rain, blustery wind, and extreme cold.  Early this morning, Sea-Tac Airport recorded a temperature of 14 degrees, a 25-year low.  Several city transit buses crashed in Seattle, and one overturned.  The storm front then moved on to Utah and Wyoming, where a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 80 was closed because of...
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If you're flying anywhere during the Thanksgiving holiday, it may take you much longer to get there.  An Internet protest called National Opt Out Day is gathering a lot of steam and is making airport staffs and federal authorities very nervous. The protest is being planned for Wednesday because the day before Thanksgiving is the busiest day of the year for airlines.  The protest is actually against the much-criticized full body scans which people are calling a strip search as X-rays are used ...
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    If you're tired of the 100 hours or so of football on television Thanksgiving day, Taylor Swift is coming to your rescue.  The singer, whose return to prominence after over a year of obscurity is back on the right track, will perform in a special airing on Thanksgiving night at 8 PM on NBC.  Titled, of course, "Taylor Swift: Speak Out", it will feature nine tracks from her latest album as well as behind-the-scenes footage of the videos from around the country, including New York City's Ce...
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   A new feature on Facebook is aggravating thousands of users, and right now there's no way to "opt out" of it. This new portion, called "See Friendship" allows total strangers to see all about you by merely being a friend of one of your friends.  Let's say someone wants to keep tabs with you without you knowing about it.   All he has to do is become a friend with someone on your list and he can access your information that you share with that friend.  Critics have correctly pointed out that...
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The latest drink fad is extremely dangerous, according to the Food and Drug Administration, because you can't feel its effects affecting your body.  We're talking about the slew of alcoholic, caffeinated energy drinks that are so popular on college campuses and with underage drinkers.  These drinks, sold under such names as Four Loko and Joose, give a double whammy to its consumers so potentionally bad that the FDA has sent warnings to the four major manufacturers, giving them 15 days to eith...
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Fiat is back!  The company, which has taken control of Chrysler Corporation, is under the wing of Laura Soave, a young lady with big ideas.  Fiat unveiled its first model to be sold here since the Italian company abandoned the North American market in 1983 over problems with rust and other quality control issues.  They retreated back to Europe, where they hunkered down and eventually produced a car that was uncharacteristically good---the reinvented Fiat 500.  This peppy little model is incre...
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Two scientists tell us that the future of space exploration and colonization lies in one-way trips.  Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies explain in the latest copy of the Journal of Cosmology that such trips will be the best plan for the colonization of Mars and would be no different from the early settlers to the New World who left Europe for North America with little hope of ever seeing home again.  Mars, they claim, should be easy to colonize because it has surface gravity, an atmosphere, ...
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So, the Feds are finally doing something right in their own slow way.  The Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services earlier today revealed that they are ramping up the fight against smoking with a strategy implemented by Canada in its own country.  Each pack of cigarettes will carry  a new warning label, covering half the pack front and back.  The labels will feature photos of corpses or human body parts damaged by smoking-related diseases.  The one problem...
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A retired Canadian couple did something very unusual with their lottery winnings.  Allen and Violet Large of Nova Scotia won $11.3 million last July but quickly grew unsatisfied with the direction this new wealth was taking them.  It became "a heaache" with associated fear that "crooked people would take advantage of them".  As soon as news of their new-found wealth became known, they started receiving calls from total strangers who wanted money.  The couple, who has been married for 35 years...
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Remember how the people in Star Wars movies communicated with each other via 3D messaging?  We were amazed when we saw Princess Leia plead with Obi-Wan to "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi.  You're our only hope" in 1977.  Arizona scientist Nasser Peyghambarian is saying this is closer than you think.  In fact, he believes his team can make such a feat possible within ten years.  The prospect of 3D viewing without those bulky and clumsy glasses would not only be good for entertainment, it would have ot...
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On Friday, Mount Merapi continued its roar back to life with the largest eruption in a century.  The Indonesian volcano caused clouds of hot gas to shoot down its slopes and caused clothing and even mattresses to fuse with dead bodies from the 1400 degree heat.  All day, the mountain spewed huge clouds of dust and ash that settled back to earth as far away as 300 miles.  The danger zone was expanded again today from 9 to 12 miles.  Residents have been secretly sneaking back in the area betwee...
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As of this week, Deutsch Telecom division T-Mobile has begun new ads in the United States, billing itself as "the nation's largest 4G network", which is both the truth and deceptive.  The claim is valid because in the real world, 4G is commonly recognized as network speed as it refers to Internet connection.  T-Mobile uses an enhanced 3G system that is every bit as fast as the so-called 4G systems used by Sprint and Verizon, but are any of these really 4G?  In press releases, Sprint and Veriz...
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Taylor Swift is back with a vengeance, breaking a record standing for five years.  After an extended period of not releasing any new material, the recording industry, and just about everone else, had pretty much cast her aside, even snubbing her at award shows.  The 20-year old singer's new album was released last week, and it sold 1,047,000 copies, outperforming the current title holder for sales, "The Machine", which was released by 50 Cent five years ago.  Swift shrewdly marketed her lates...
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The island nation of Indonesia appears to be in self-destruct mode these days. On October 26, Mount Merapi, a dangerous volcano, exploded to life, claiming dozens of lives.  Within 24 hours, a 7.7 earthquake struck the region, creating a ten-foot tsunami that killed over 440 people.  The volcano continued to rumble and bleed lava, and this morning, amidst a torrential downpour, it boomed with its biggest eruption, extending the danger zone around it from six to nine miles. At the same time a ...
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James MacArthur, famous for his role as Danno on the original Hawaii 5-0, has died at the age of 72 on Thursday.  His agent reported that he died of natural causes but no official report on the cause of death has been released.  Hawaii 5-0 originally aired from 1968 to 1980, and MacArthur was on every show until the last season.  He left 5-0's cast before the start of the last season, stating that the show had become boring and repetitive, and no longer challenged him as an actor.  Born on De...
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Nepal, south Asia's poorest nation, just took a gigantic step in the world of communications.  NCell, a company owned jointly by local investors and telecom provider TeliaSonera, just installed a new 3G facility 17,388 feet up the slope of Mount Everest and today made the highest-based video call in the world from that location.  What this means is that climbers will now be able to keep up with their families as they ascend the world's tallest peak or even call for help using a regular cell p...
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An unusual donation will be very helpful to a group of nuns and their ministries.  The brother of a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Baltimore left all his possessions to the religious order when he died earlier this year, and his lawyer informed the nuns that part of this donation was a very rare and much-desired baseball card picturing Pittsburgh Pirate shortstop Honus Wagner.  Wagner played 18 seasons and was one of the original Baseball Hall of Fame inductees.  The card was p...
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Parts of Indonesia were badly battered late Monday and Tuesday by the combination of a 7.7 earthquake and its 14 aftershocks and the explosion of a major volcano which together took over 300 lives.  The massive quake triggered a 10-foot tsunami that washed away almost 80 percent of poorly built homes in the Mentawai island chain before the aftershocks, including a 6.2 and a 5.8, struck.  Not enough people were left to handle burying the dead, and bodies littered the beaches.  On Tuesday, the ...
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It was announced around 8 AM on Wednesday (Pacific Time) that James Cameron will begin work on the scripts for two Avatar sequels early next year and actual production will begin in late 2011.  Executives at 20th Century Fox expect to have the first one in theaters in December 2014 and the second in December 2015.  This relatively soon date for the second film is being expected because Cameron has expressed the possibility that he may pull what Disney Studios did with Pirates of the Caribbean...
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Broadcast television greed has once again reared its ugly head.  You may have noticed that there are now fewer TV shows to watch online.  That's because a few weeks ago broadcasters blocked access to a lot of their shows online in order to boost their profits.  The greedy bastards who run the networks believe that if they delay when their shows go on the Web, they will secure more viewer retention and stem the flow of the audience who are ditching cable and satellite TV for the Internet.  Whi...
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New Zealanders love their movies, love Peter Jackson, and have sided with Jackson against film-related trade unions who were protesting working conditions for the shooting of a proposed two-film series about Hobbits.  Jackson filmed the original Lord of the Rings trilogy in New Zealand, but when the unions gave Jackson a hard time this time around, he declared that he would take his production off the island nation.  When New Zealanders made their displeasure known, the unions backed down, an...
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In a disgustingly ugly turn of events that sounds like a horror movie, the nation of Uganda is suffering from the symptoms of an epidemic that causes human body parts to rot away.  In only two months, at least twenty people have died from it and over 20,000 have the disease in lesser degrees.  The disease, tungiasis, is caused by jiggers, tiny insects that look like fleas and usually enter the body through bare feet.  Once they attach themselves to a human host, they suck their victim's blood...
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The Cars are out of the shop and are running again.  The 1980s new wave group has reunited and is working on a new album, their first in 23 years, and may even tour to promote it, according to Billboard.com.  Last week they put a 73 second teaser of a new song titled "Blue Tip" on their Facebook page, but no further information has been released.  Singer Ric Ocasek, guitarist Eliot Easton, keyboard player Greg Hawkes, and drummer David Robinson are original members who have reunited.  Bass pl...
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Every year, the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-off crowns a champion for the largest pumpkin. In this Halloween season, we keep track of these things.  The Half Moon Bay competition this year declared a California pumpkin the winner for the first time in eleven years.  Citrus Heights resident Ron Root's winning squash was 410 inches over the top and weighed 1,535 pounds.  He was awarded $9.210 for his huge gourd, which works out to $6 a pound plus a $1,000 bonus for the largest pump...
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Doom mongers and scientists who have been telling us about the Mayan calendar and the upcoming apocalypse in 2012 may have to cool their heels a while longer.  According to a new book titled "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time In the Ancient and Medieval World", scientists used a Latin formula to convert the Mayan calendar, and that formula lost something in the translation.  The book's author reveals that the Latin and Mayan calendars are a bit out of sync, which means that our calcu...
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Taylor Swift's new album, "Speak Now" is little more than a digital confessional session as she sings tracks dedicated to the men who either broke or messed with her heart.  For a young lady who's only 20 years old, this is an impressive array of lovers, and will no doubt cast her in a new light to men who will see her as what used to be called an "easy" girl, maybe even a willing target for their advances.  Speaking of targets, as the tracks are being released, we've seen Kanye Wesy and "Twi...
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Ready for this? According to the Vatican, Homer Simpson is Catholic.  The official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano ran a story over this past weekend with the heading "Homer and Bart are Catholic".  Show producer Al Jean was amused by this since he says the program has "pretty clearly shown that Homer is not Catholic".  Indeed, even the church he attends on the show isn't Catholic.  It makes you wonder: is the Catholic church so shaken by the large number of its members who are leavin...
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Northeastern U.S. television provider Cablevision has put its foot down as far as Fox's greed is concerned.  The company was forking over a sum of $70 million a year to carry Fox programming, and when the News Corporation said they now wanted to raise the fee to over $150 million, Cablevision said no, and has allowed Fox TV, National Geographic, and Fox Business and Sports to go dark.  As you know, Dish Network is also refusing to play Fox's mind games and has already dropped Fox Sports, FX, ...
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America has a new engineering wonder close to the Hoover Dam.  Opened earlier this month, the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge stretches over the Colorado River at a height of 890 feet and is part of a project to allow commercial traffic to reach the Las Vegas area without taking the narrow, hairpin curved two lane highway that runs along the top of the dam.  This will speed traffic and allow tourists faster access to the region, which draws millions every year.  After 9/11, the F...
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Anything bad that happens to Wal-Mart is good news, and this one had me rolling on the floor.  Earlier this year, the retailing giant passed a series of large price cuts, known in Wal-Martese as "rollbacks".  Wally M hoped that this would generate a higher customer count in stores, and it did, but not with the expected results.  Savvy shoppers walked in, bought the "rollback" items, then went on to their regular stores for the rest of their grocery shopping, leaving Wal-Mart bleeding heavily....
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Tokyo's Mandarin Oriental hotel is trying to set a new world record price by offering the highest price ever for a hotel in a deal to commemorate its fifth anniversary.  The offer will allow use of the entire hotel, including its nine restaurants and all 178 rooms for $671,000 a night, each period going from three in the afternoon to noon the next day, and the hotel will apply for the record as soon as a night is booked at this price.  The catch?  You can only rent it on a day when there are ...
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Artist and photographer Sally Davies took on a challenge from a friend who claimed that any hamburger would rot and mold within two or three days of being left out in the open.  Davies tok that bet and started what is now called The Happy Meal Project.  She bought a McDonald's Happy Meal and left it on a kitchen counter back in April.  Now, almost six months later, the burger has yet to even grow mold.  She says the Happy Meal stopped emitting any odors after 24 hours and is now as hard as a ...
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A British study has confirmed something that parents have known all along: too much TV or computer use is harmful to kids.  Researchers used 1.013 kids aged 10 and 11 for this study, measuring how much time they spent on the computer and watching the boob tube.  The subjects also wore an accelerometer around their waists for a week to measure their physical activity and down time.  In addition, the children filled out questionnaires about their behavior patterns, emotional difficulties, and h...
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Microsoft is dead serious about returning to the mobile phone business after their first failed attempt.  Earlier today the company, in partnership with AT&T, showed off three of its new WP7 phones---the Samsung Focus, LG Quantum, and HTC 7 Surround, all of which will sell for about $200, the same as the latest iPhone.  T-mobile will offer the HTC HD7 and HTC Mozart in November.  The WP7 platform will allow access to the Zune music system and, in collaboration with EA Games, the ability to us...
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Johnny Depp paid a surprise visit to a school in London this morning in response to a fan letter from one of the students.  Beatrice Delap, eight years old, sent Depp a letter stating that she and her fellow students were having a hard time at Meridian Primary School of Greenwich in their attempt to have a mutiny against their teachers.  The actor is currently filming "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" in nearby Old Naval College, a picturesque 17th century seafaring center, so he ...
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He's at it again! Obnoxious Ryan Seacrest, America's most over-employed troll, is looking to take on ever more jobs for himself by starting his own TV network.  The annoying munchkin is in preliminary talks with talent company CAA, whose requirements for talent are obviously low, and entertainment company AEG. which apparently has no idea what talent is, to finalize plans for the new cable TV network.  Mohawk Radio sources say that the channel would be based on music, pop culture, and lifesty...
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After several similar attempts in other states, New York City is trying to control what you can't buy with food stamps.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor David Paterson made a joint announcement yesterday that they have petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the right to add sodas, packaged tea drinks, sports drinks, and any other drinks sweetened with sugar (except milk, soy products, and fruit drinks with no added sugar) to the list of things you can't buy with food stamps, s...
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Question of the day: does a parent's pain (physical or mental) override someone else's right to "free speech"?  The Supreme Court started looking at that today in the case of Albert Snyder.  You may recall that Snyder's son was killed in Iraq, and that at his funeral, protesters from Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas parked themselves across the street from the cemetary and protested the event with chants and signs that read "God Hates America" and "Thank God For Dead Soldiers".  They loudly ...
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That's the word out of the Philippines, where the lower house of government just voted unanimously (196 to 0) to enact a bill that would prevent people from doing their own version of the national anthem, "Lupang Hinirang" (Beloved Land), and doing other "unpatriotic acts".  The senate is getting ready to vote on that same law before the end of the week.  The bill's majority author, Salvador Escudero, says he's tired of artists and singers changing the beat, melody, and even words in the nati...
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There is apparently a growing number of people who are choosing to end their lives by committing suicide in public places, and authorities are having to deal with ways to prevent it.  An eighteen-year old boy and a restaurant chef who had appeared on the TV reality show "Kitchen Nightmares" both recently opted to cut their lives short by jumping off the George Washington Bridge linking Manhattan Island to Fort Lee, New Jersey.  Earlier this year, a Yale student took a leap off the 86th floor ...
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The term "laptop computer" is not to be taken literally because it can be dangerous.  Keeping your laptop in your lap for extended periods can lead to a problem known as "toasted skin syndrome". While this may sound like a new menu choice at a fast food restaurant, it's actually a mottled skin condition resulting from long periods of heat exposure, and anyone who uses a laptop can tell you that the battery compartment gets hot.  In one recent case, a 12-year old boy's sessions of computer gam...
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In what will prove to be extremely beneficial for education, British Education Secretary Michael Gove said he is going to abolish the "no touch" rules that prevent teachers from restraining and comforting children.  Gove told reporters that while "I don't believe you should be able to hit children, I do believe that teachers need to know they can physically restrain children, they can interpose themselves between two children that may be causing trouble and they can remove them from the class...
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Just minutes before we went off the air live on Friday night, we received word that a terrible train crash took place in Indonesia as a train from the capital, Jakarta, slammed into another train that was idling as it took on passengers in the city of Petarukan.  Bodies were still being extricated from the mangled cars at press time, and no official victim count or cause of the crash had been released.  Horrified onlookers and local residents quickly jumped in to begin rescuing the people tra...
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As we predicted and told you last week, Fox TV's "Lone Star" was indeed the first show to be cancelled this season, but don't feel bad for the show, because it has company, and may soon get more in the television graveyard.  ABC announced earlier today that it gave the ax to "My Generation", a show with a cast almost as numerous as its small audience.  This program had a terrible initial outing, and when its audience shrank by 31 percent in its second week, including a dismal 1.1 rating in th...
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Shortly on the heels of George Lucas announcing that he will reissue all of the "Star Wars" films in 3D, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Lightstorm Entertainment said they wanted in on this action by saying that the former leading money-making film, "Titanic" will be re-released in 3D in April 2012, shortly after "Star Wars Episode 1--The Phantom Menace" hits theaters in 3D.  The Titanic conversion will cost between 5 and 10 million dollars.  This id being viewed as an unwise and risky move ...
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Stephen J. Cannell, the man responsible for such TV shows as "The A-Team" and The Rockford Files", died last night in his Pasadena. California home from complications with melenoma at age 69.  During the decades that hia shows aired, he was consistently associated with gunfire, squealing-tire chases, and tough guys beating each other up.  In an era when people behind the scenes were rarely seen, Cannell became a popular face, thanks to his ID at the end of each show, where he would be at his ...
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Tony Curtis, who played everything from a dramatic lead to a cross-dressing comic, died at his Henderson, Nevada home just northwest of Las Vegas last night from cardiac failure.  He was 85.  He began his career with bit parts in such forgettable fare as the film "Francis", about a talking mule, but quickly moved into the spotlight with roles in "Flesh and Fury" and "Houdini".  He was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar in 1958 for his turn in "The Defiant Ones" opposite Sidney Poitier.  He wa...
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Late last night as we go to press, the senate passed a bill to make sure those TV commercials don't jolt you out of your sleep.  Called the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, it says that commercials will have to be broadcast at the same level as the show they're in.  The bill makes the FCC adapt these regulations within a year of the bill's passing, and enforce them within a year after that.  Charles Shumer (D-NY), one of the bill's co-sponsors, stated "TV viewers shoul...
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Astronomers have revealed that they've found for the forst time a so-called "Goldilocks Planet", one which orbits its sun at a distance not too far, not too close, but just right for life as we know it to possibly develop.  Tagged as Gliese 581g, it orbits its sun at a distance of about 14 million miles and makes that trip in 37 days.  It has an atmosphere, but further checks needs to be done with spectrographs to determine the composition of that atmosphere.  It's roughly 20 light years away...
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The Obama administration wants to hear from you---without you knowing it---in new ways.  It's drafting a bill right now, to be introduced early next year, which will enable the Feds to tap into your E-mail over the Internet and when you use wireless phones.  For a number of years, our government has been spying on us as we make phone calls over landlines with a device called Carnivore, but it's unable to break the encryption codes used by the Internet, so they want Internet providers and cell...
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The owner of the Segway company was found dead at the bottom of a cliff in England yesterday, one of his firm's trademark two-wheeled scooters near the body.  Jimi Heselden, 62 years old, apparently accidentally rode off the cliff.  Police say there is no evidence of foul play and are treating the event as a tragic accident.  Heselden was a former miner who quit school at 15 and eventually became a millionaire industrialist.  One of England's richest people, his estate is valued at around $26...
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The Doobie Brothers are back in the limelight some 40 years after their debut.  The group, famous for such hits as "China Grove", "Black Water", and "Long Train Running" is releasing its first album since 2000's "Sibling Rivalry".  The rockers include founding guitarist Pat Simmons, founding vocalist Tom Johnson, drummer Michael Hossack, and multi-instrumentalist John McFee, and they were "surprised and amazed" that their new music, which they played at recent concerts, got such great respons...
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Eddie Fisher, the 50s pop singer who's more famous for marrying Elizabeth Taylor and being the father of actress Carrie Fisher, died at his California home on Wednesday.  His passing was reported by daughter Tricia Leigh Fisher late Wednesday.  He was 82, and he died of complications from hip surgery.  While his records sold in the millions, it's known that Fisher's manager helped the cause by spending tons of money to hire young girls to scream and swoon during his live performances, somethi...
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Paleontologists are putting together the remains of a newly found ceratopsian, or horned, dinosaur, and this beast took being horny to the max.  Known as Kosmoceratops richardsoni, this creature had a multitude of horns,  A short stubby horn sat on its nose, and it had one more over each eye and at each cheekbone, plus ten more at the rear edge of its frill.  It was about fifteen feet long and must have weighed around 5,500 pounds.  While it's been speculated that ceratopsians used their horn...
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Every year, TV shows come and go, but it's still pretty rare that a show gets axed after only one showing.  This is probably the case for Fox TV's new show "Lone Star".  Fox had big hopes for the drama about a man who juggles two lives and women in Texas because of his nebulous activities.  To give it more chances of survival, it was shoehorned into the schedule after established show "House".  At the end of House, Fox had 11.5 million people tuned in, but they evaporated at 9 PM.  By 9:15, o...
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Hip-hop singer Wyclef Jean has now officially pulled out of the race for president of Haiti.  In a statement he released through his publicist, he said that he is dropping out of Haitian politics to promote a new album.  This is a subtly concealed admission that the country's electoral council has left him off the ballot as of last month, and although no official reason was revealed, it's pretty well known that Wyclef did not meet residency requirements for elected officials because ever sinc...
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After watching only the pilot episode of NBC's "The Event", I pretty much think I have the whole thing figured out.  It seems that the United States is "detaining" a group of humanoids with tremendous mental powers.  These people have ventured here from a parallel existence to try to stop an upcoming disaster (the Event of the title) but have instead been rounded up by the military and are being pressured about explaining their origin, powers, and the exact nature of The Event.  There seem to...
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Everyone knows, or at least has heard, that Wal-Mart is the greatest enemy of retailing across the globe.  They try to throttle the competition, are now planning their own cell phone service, and have even tried to open their own banks so they can control your money from the time you're paid to when they've got it all.  Their latest ploy is now under way as the giant company is aggressively buying up small urban properties, about 20,000 square feet each, in urban areas for the creation of "ba...
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More trouble for the Vatican, but this time it's a financial matter, not a sexual one.  Italian officials have siezed a bit over $30 million from the Vatican Bank's funds early this morning as part of an investigation of its two most powerful people into moey laundering.  Police seized the money from the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano Spa and relocated it to JP Morgan in Frankfurt, Germany and Italy's Banca del Fucino.  It appears that the Vatican can't supply the source of the money to inv...
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Space tourism may be just around he corner, according to Boeing executives, but their just announced partnership with Space Adventures Ltd. is unlikely to bring prices down.  It currently costs about $35 million to go in space via the seats Space Adventures is selling aboard Russian built Soyuz craft, and Boeing doesn't have any ships built yet.  The proposed craft, called CST-100, won't even be ready until 2015.  Once they are availale, the CST-100 will have one advantage.  The time spent on...
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Oprah Winfrey's announcement on the opening show of her 25th season that she would take all 300 of her audience members to Australia wasn't exactly welcome in the Land Down Under.  The Aussie federal government and the state of New South Wales are footing part of the bill to the tune of three million dollars, and many people think that with the country's current economy, it's a waste.  The Australian Tourism Minister, however, believes that this could be money well spent since Oprah's show is...
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Think Americans have a love affair with their cell phones?  Move over, friend, because South Korea has us beat.  In a country with 48.8 million people, South Korea's Communications Commission reports that there are over 50 million cell phones in use.  This means, theoretically, that there are some 1.2 million people wandering around with at least two phones, but if you factor in young children and people without a cell phone, the number is greater.  Just like in some Arab nations and Japan, m...
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If you have a sweet tooth and want to be a part of history, you may want to head for Yerevan, Armenia, next month.  That's when the world's largest chocolate bar will be broken up and handed out to candy aficionados in the capital's main square.  The oversized item was made by the Grand Candy factory of all natural ingredients, including a 70 percent cocoa content.  The bar is 224 inches long, 110 inches wide, and 10 inches thick.  It weighs 9,702 pounds and was certified as the world's large...
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At last night's MTV Video Music Awards, Lady Gaga won eight Moonman awards, including Video of the Year, but she failed to set a new record.  In fact, all she did was tie a record set twenty four years ago by the Norwegian group A-ha when they got eight awards in 1986 for "Take On Me", a quirky mix of live action and animation which was cutting edge at the time.  The next year, 1987, Peter Gabriel set the new, still unmatched record of nine MTV VMAs for his live and stop-motion turn with "Sle...
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Tomorrow is September 11, the ninth anniversary of the so-called "attacks" on America, and extremists on both sides of the issue are aiming their slings and arrows at the wrong target.  Muslim extremists are mad at the American people, and American extremists are singling out Muslims as hate mongers.  As we here at Chief Jack Radio have been saying since the original 9/11, there is only one entity responsible for all this: the United States government and George Bush.  Bush has many friends i...
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A study just completed by The Neilsen Co. showed a surprising trend.  It seems that nearly fifty percent of people have a negative view of 3D television, and that view was worse in people who actually attended test showings of the medium.  Test subjects who took part in a 30 minute 3D TV test cited a number of concerns.  In a world where no one concentrates on what they're watching on TV because they're too busy talking on their smartphones while updating their Facebook status at the same tim...
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If you're a James Bond fan, you'll soon have the chance to own the biggest piece of the secret agent's memorabilia.  RX Auctions is auctioning off the Aston Martin DB5 that Sean Connery drove in the 1964 hit film "Goldfinger" during Automobiles of London event on October 27.  Auction organizers say it could bring at least $5 million, which would be the highest amount ever paid for a piece used in a movie.  Everything in the car is functional, including the retractable machine guns, rotating l...
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You probably never noticed it, but an asteroid slipped by the Earth between us and the moon's orbit at about 3:51 AM PT on September 8, and a second asteroid will be making a flyby later on, at around 3 PM Pacific Time.  The first and larger space rock, named 2010 RX 30, is about 33 to 65 feet wide and slid by at a distance of 154,000 miles away.  The second one, 2010 RF 12, is estimated at between 20 and 46 feet in diameter and will pass at about 49,000 miles from Earth, which in cosmic term...
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That 7.1 quake that struck New Zealand over the weekend continues to bring more problems to theis island nation that's been struggling to break out of an 18 month recession.  Officials have revealed that as many as 100,000 buildings out of 160,000 have suffered some sort of structural damage, and as many as 80 aftershocks, some as big as 5.4, have continued to rock the area.  Many roads and railroad lines have been broken and twisted out of shape, and over parts of the affected area, the temb...
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An ever-growing number of people are getting fed up with Google as its search engine continues to give preferential treatment to its own sites over the competition.  European nations have a number of investigations under way because of complaints against the company.  It's already common knowledge that the government of China and Google are far from being friends.  In America, several lawsuits have been filed that also allege Google's search engine is biased.  On Friday, Texas announced that ...
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Funk band War and PepsiCo just can't be friends.  Some of the band's original members are suing Pepsi for over $10 million, saying that the soft drink company never negotiated with them to use their song "Why Can't We Be Friends" in its commercial for Pepsi MAX.  Naturally, Pepsi says the suit has no merit, stating that "Pepsi has a long history of partnering with iconic celebrities and musicians, and we value our relationship with the music and entertainment industry".  The statement doesn't...
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The conflict between the Australian Taxation Board and Paul Hogan has taken a turn for the better.  Early this morning, both parties reached an agreement that will allow the "Crocodile Dundee" actor to return to America.  The tax office claims that Hogan used offshore banks to conceal earnings he made after his low budget film became an international hit in 1986, but he says he did nothing illegal.  The total amount owed remains a mystery, although some speculation exists on it, because both ...
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Someone reported two goats on a railroad bridge between Helena and Roundup, Montana about two days ago, but the location over a little-used road was so vague that sheriff's office agents couldn't find it.  Early this morning, someone else reported the same thing, but remained on location and helped humane society officials find the place.  The two young female goats were stuck on a six-inch ledge on the side of the bridge and remained on that ledge most of the time, only wandering on a large ...
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Romania is known for its vampire and werewolf legends, and your typical velociraptor is well-known thanks to "Jurassic Park", so how do this European country and the sci-fi movie tie in together?  A paleontological expedition has unearthed a new type of velociraptor in Romania.  Known as Balaur bondoc, or "stocky dragon", this new dinosaur has a number of previously unseen features.  As opposed to other raptors, this one had short, stout, and powerful legs, showing it wasn't built for chasing...
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If you have a name like Frankenstein, you just have to expect trouble.  Police in Cincinnati say a man named Forrest Frankenstein went crazy on August 27 at a Toby Keith concert, and after he was arrested, he threatened them and deliberately banged his own head on the inside of a police cruiser.  At his arraignment, he told the judge he had been drinking and doesn't remember a thing about that night.  He is being held on $80,000 bond for menacing, disorderly conduct, and vandalizing.  By a we...
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Country singer Miranda Lambert definitely has something to smile about this morning as it was announced that she was nominated for nine CMA awards, the most ever for a female.  Others who were nominated for multiple awards include Lady Antebellum with five, Lambert's new fiance Blake Shelton with four, and the Zac Brown Band, also with four.  Miranda's total fell one short of the record 10 by Alan Jackson in 2002.  The only other artist to get nine nominations is Merle Haggard, so Lambert is ...
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California's legislature had a long night on August 31 as just before midnight it rejected a measure brought before it to ban the use of plastic shopping bags.  Part of the conflict involved a heated debate over how much California wants to control people's personal choices.  Already on the books in the state are such laws as forcing the caloric content of food to be displayed prominently and the banning of soft drink vending machines on school grounds.  Part of this proposed plastic bag ban ...
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You say you love unusual food?  Then this may be just what the doctor ordered.  The seventh annual Testicle Cooking Championship is currently going on in Serbia's city of Ozrem.  Local chef Ljubomr Erovic is the organizer of this offbeat festival that features both old and new recipes derived from the, well, scrotum.  In the Balkans, testicles are believed to accentuate a man's libido, and in Serbia they are commonly called "white kidneys".  High on the list this year are boar, camel, ostrich...
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Legendary French singer Charles Aznavour plans yet another tour next year, but this may very well be his last.  Aznavour, who appears to be French music's version of Brett Favre, is 86 now, and his career has covered 55 years.  He said he was retiring on 1999 and 2000, did a farewell tour in 2006, then another in 2007, but kept plugging away.  This time, though, he plans to make a stop in Paris' famous Olympia theater for he first time in thirty years.  Aznavour told Europe 1 radio early on A...
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A team of British scientists led by Neil Hall revealed that they have cracked the genetic code for wheat. Wheat is the most widely grown cereal on the planet, yet politics has caused the price of foods made with wheat to skyrocket. The discovery was hailed as a landmark because it will help us create new strains of the grain that could be drought resistant and yield larger crops. The biggest hope is that it will lead to wheat that can fend off diseases, including wheat's biggest enemy---stem ...
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When overweight bags show up at airports, they get sent to the X-ray machine.  This was the case on Monday when a lady's bag at Thailand's Bangkok International Airport weighed more than it should.  X-rays revealed what appeared to be a live animal inside, and when the bag was opened, authorities found a baby tiger, about a month old, among several stuffed toy versions of the animal.  The woman was headed for Iran with the drugged cub, but she denied ownership of the bag, saying someone asked...
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The Egyptian government announced early on August 25 that they have found the remains of an ancient settlement on the grounds of an oasis about 90 miles south of Cairo.  The 3,500 year-old town, Umm el-Mawagir, fortifies the existence of a well-established trade route that originally stretched from the Mediterranean to what is now the Darfur region of Sudan.  Of importance is the discovery of massive bakery facilities in the town, which were probably used to feed an army---literally.  Back in...
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Paul Hogan, known to millions as Crocodile Dundee from his movies, is being prevented from leaving Australia.  The America-based Aussie returned to Sydney last Friday for the funeral of his 101-year old mother, and as soon as he landed, the Australian Taxation Office slapped him with a departure prohibition order until he either pays or makes arrangements to pay back taxes on his income.  The ATO says that Hogan had income of $37.6 million from movie royalties that he invested in offshore tax...
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If you have a large family, maybe this should be a rallying cry: TLC wants you.  It appears The Learning Channel has an obsession with multi-kid families.  These are the people who brought us Jon & Kate Plus 8 (now without the Jon) and 18 (now 19) Kids and Counting, and now they are getting ready to assault us with more of the same.  TLC has ordered eight episodes of "Sextuplets Take New York", a show billed as showcasing America's first Latino sextuplets and how the family deals with raising...
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The Obama administration is very much in support of stem cell research, but U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lambreth put a monkey wrench in the gears of this research on Monday.  Taking into consideration the fact that such research could result in cures for such diseases as diabetes and Parkinson's, it's hard to fathom why anyone would want to halt funding for this.  Current federal legislation forbids the use of tax money to fund stem cell research as an offshoot of laws that prevent federa...
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So, big deal, a traffic jam, but we'll bet you've never seen one like this.  The Beijing-Tibet expressway has been anything but "express" since August 14 as a higher than normal amount of heavy cargo trucks heading into Beijing and some road maintenance work have combined to create a traffic jam 100 kilometers long.  In America, the worst traffic jams occur on the 405 freeway heading into Los Angeles, but they've never been that bad.  Local Chinese merchants have capitalized on this traffic n...
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Movie studios are curently spending about 70 percent of their advertising budget on television, and right now that may seem to be a bad idea.  A recent study by cable giant Comcast shows that 62 percent of respondents no longer watch television on the networks' schedule and use DVRs to record shows and watch them at a later date, or use online services like Hulu if they don't have a DVR.  For movie studios, this situation can prove disastrous since the average time between recording shows and...
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When Dr. Frank Ryan died on August 16, he was actually doing something illegal as he drove his 1995 Jeep Wrangler on the Pacific Coast Highway.  Ryan was using his cell phone to post on his Twitter account, and his last tweet was about his dog, which survived the accident, and included a photo of the dog.  While he was tweeting, Ryan lost control of the Jeep and went off a cliff, landing top first on the rocks below and dying from multiple trauma to the head and body.  Ryan was the plastic su...
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You've seen this in many movies--parasites that take over people's minds and bodies and force them to do their bidding.  Well, that stuff of science fiction actually has a basis in fact.  Carpenter ants carry a parasite that turns them into zombies, and as they die, the parasite, known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, forces them to bite the underside of leaves and attach themselves to them.  The parasite then grows a stalk from the ants' heads which release spores that infect other ants.  Sci...
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Remember the good old days when your beer came in bottles that you returned so they could be reused?  Not just beer, but also soda was sold in such bottles, and you knew they were because they bore the marks of many trips through the washing process--marks left on the outside of the bottles by the rollers used to push them through the washer.  The family-owned Straub Breweries of St. Mary's, Pennsylvania, is now asking people to find any of their bottles that are out there and return them to ...
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Forget Arizona--if you want to see real anti-Mexican behavior, the place to go is Port Richmond on New York City's Staten Island.  In the past decade, the Hispanic population there has grown by 40 percent, and that growth has reignited hostilities between blacks and Spanish speaking people.  Mexicans say that they are being targeted by blacks because illegal day laborers head home with cash every day after being paid "under the table".  African Americans contend that it's actually drug abuser...
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Had Elvis Presley been alive today, he would have been 75.  The King died on August 16, 1977 at age 42, and his home, Graceland, was the site of the annual vigil to mark his passing.  It began last night and lasted until this morning, but the celebration of his life was a weekend-long affair for which fans came and braved 100-degree heat.  Elvis lovers came from as far away as Australia and the Netherlands to be part of the event, and so many people were there last night lining Elvis Presley ...
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A new survey reveals that the median age for TV audiences is at a record high of 51, higher than the national median age.  This is actually bad news for the networks because it means that the average TV viewer is actually older than advertisers' target demographic.  That's not entirely surprising since younger people have been abandoning network TV in growing numbers in the past decade.  The growth of video and game rentals shows that younger Americans are no longer willing to set their lives...
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Iran's first nuclear plant will get fuel next week, courtesy of Russia.  The fuel will be loaded into the Bushehr Reactor on August 21 in spite of United States protests.  We want Iran to assure the world that it won't use the plant for military use, yet our fears are unfounded since the uranium will only be enriched about 3.5 percent,  Uranium must be enriched at least to 20 percent for weapons grade, and an atomic bomb needs at least 80 percent enrichment.  The fueling and start up will tak...
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President Obama signed a $600 million border security bill this morning in the Oval Office with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano at his side.  If there ever was a more clueless couple in this world, I've yet to hear about it.  The bill calls for hiring 1,000 new Border Patrol Agents and more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.  I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  We don't need more Border Patrol agents.  We need armed guards sitting atop a 30 foot wall betwe...
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The surging wildfires in Russia seem to be getting the upper hand right now during the hottest summer in the country's history.  The fires are spreading to the Bryansk region, where in 1986 a nuclear reactor exploded and sent radioactive clouds over a wide area.  Scientists are afraid that the dust that settled in the Chernobyl area could be redistributed by smoke from the fires to a larger region and pose a threat to the population.  Russian officials claim that they have this situation unde...
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Award-winning actress Patricia Neal passed away after battling lung cancer on August 8.  She died at her home in Edgartown, Massachussetts, surrounded by her family, at age 84.  She was born in Kentucky but grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee.  She made her first major motion picture appearance in 1949's "Fountainhead" and co-starred in the 1951 science fiction masterpiece "The Day The Earth Stood Still".  She won the Academy Award as best actress playing opposite Paul Newman in "Hud" in 1963.  L...
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The massive rain in China and Pakistan has caused death and devastation throughout the area.  As of late on August 9, local time, at least 337 people are known dead and over 1,150 are missing in China, where entire villages were swept away and many cities are still chest deep in brackish water and mud from landslides.  The situation is even worse in Pakistan, where, according to United Nations estimates, as much as 13.8 million people have been directly affected by the worst flooding in that ...
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In the last few years, nations have viewed America's invasions of weaker countries and the installation of puppet governments friendly to the United States in them as a hostile move, but there was little they could do about it.  Some countries, such as Iran and North Korea, are developing nuclear capabilities to hold us at bay, but now the largest threat may be coming out of China.  They are developing a new weapon called the Dong Feng 21 D, which is being called an aircraft carrier killer.  ...
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When it comes to buying generic products, there are at least five categories that you can buy with confidence because they are indeed as good as the name brands.  1) Cereal--if you take, for example, a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and a box of, say, Kroger Corn Flakes, you will see that both have the same ingredients and nutritional content.  You're paying as much as $3 more for a fancy cartoon mascot on the box.  2) Prescription drugs--if there is a generic available, it's because the exclu...
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So what if he is?  Does it matter?  Of course not, but some digging has been done in Chief U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker's past by gay-bashing people.  The San Francisco Chronicle has run an article questioning the judge's sexual orientation and some sources say that Walker's membership in a powerful men-only club that once denied membership to blacks is further proof of him being gay.  Walker has also ruled in favor of gays on several lawsuits, and this is stoking the fires of tose who opposed ga...
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It was reported after our press time on Monday that famous musician, conductor, and television icon Mitch Miller died on July 31 after a brief illness at New York's Lennox Hill Hospital.  Miller's death at age 99 was revealed by his daughter.  Miller was a powerful figure at Columbia Records at the time that rock 'n' roll was beginning to steamroll the charts.  He helped the careers of Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, and Johnny Mathis blossom, but was also known for a few major mi...
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Okay, on Monday we told you about that young snot Justin Bieber's plans to release a book of his "memoirs" in October of this year.  Pardon us while we puke, but now comes word from Paramount Pictures, MTV, and Island Def Jam Records that that same muppet will be starring in as well as producing a 3D "feature film" about his life and career.  What will that be, a ten minute infomercial?  Somebody needs to tell this kid that we already have an annoying, over-employed gnome who wants every job ...
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Remember last January when we told you Wyclef Jean had a secret agenda where Haiti was concerned and there were a lot of suspicions about his relations with Haitian officials following the devastating earthquake?  It appears he's about to give substance to our story as he's expected to announce on July 5 that he's running for the presidency in Haiti.  This has been pretty much corroborated by former deputy Pierre Eric Jean-Jacques, who has himself had his hand in the cookie jar when it comes ...
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Toyota is recovering very nicely, thank you, from its financial troubles over the last year, bolstered by two events.  First off, a general global recovery is now stimulating the economy, and secondly, a report has surfaced recently that revealed a lot of the so-called defects that resulted in accidents were driver-induced and not mechanical defects, in truth attempts by people to squeeze money out of a company that has it.  Toyota posted a $2.2 billion profit for its latest quarter, and expe...
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Collectors will be able to buy another piece of music history on August 15 when auction house Bonhams hosts the sale of items from Abbey Road Studios in London.  Included in the lot will be an upright Challen Company piano from Abbey Road's famous Studio Three.  The battered old instrument is marked with coffee stains and cigarette burns, yet is still expected to bring as much as $250,000 because of its history.  The piano was featured on Pink Floyd's album "Dark Side of the Moon", and was us...
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When the Corning Corporation came up with "Gorilla Glass" in 1962, there just wasn't a market for it.  In fact, the company's first customer for the specialty glass didn't show up until 2008, when it was used as a protective cover for cell phone and other mobile devices' screens.  Although Corning won't publicly reveal the buyer, Mohawk Radio sources tell us it was Apple, which used it for their iPods, iPhones, and iPads.  Gorilla Glass is expected to become a major hit for Corning when telev...
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Okay, we'll bite.  How could a sixteen-year old possibly have enough to say about his career to fill a book?  HarperCollins is betting the farm that Justin Bieber does, and will be publishing his memoir.  Titled "Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever: My Story", it will document the young singer's "amazing journey to stardom" in his own words.  Does that mean it will be a leaflet?  Seriously, how much does a kid have to say about his own life?  No doubt only pre-teen girls currently swooning ov...
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The Black Eyed Peas just keep rolling along and setting new records.  It was announced on July 30, and confirmed by Neilsen SoundScan, that their hit #1 song "I Gotta Feeling" has officially sold 6 million downloads, the first track to ever reach that milestone.  The now iconic feel-good song, said band frontman will.i.am, was successful because it gave people hope in a time of downturn.  He further stated that what's more impressive about this event is that only legal downloads are counted b...
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Discount store chain 99 Cents Only announced a price hike in September of 2008 to 99.99 cents per item, and now a class action suit has been filed against them.  The suit claims that the price hike means that people are unaware that they are paying one dollar per item instead of 99 cents.  This is patently untrue because the chain spent a fortune in advertising the new price, and even today, their ads and in-store signage clearly states the price of 99.99 cents.  It makes me wonder why these ...
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Popular writer Anne Rice, most famous for her book "Interview With A Vampire", announced in a posting on her Facebook page that she is no longer a Christian.  The post, worded like a prayer and ending with "amen", confirmed her growing feelings of doubt with Christianity.  Rice, who lives near Palm Springs, California and is 68 years old, says she has begun to doubt the church in the wake of the sex scandals and its lack of action about them.  In addition, she says that she is shocked that a ...
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A Pakistani Airblue plane crashed into a hillside early this morning as it was coming in for a landing, killing all 152 people aboard.  The plane, an AirbusA321, was ending a two-hour flight between Karachi and Islamabad in rainy, foggy weather when the control tower lost contact with it.  Local residents say the plane's flight was erratic before it crashed into a hillside, strewing plane and human body parts all over the area.  Red Crescent rescue workers were able to recover enough body par...
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Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio says his tough enforcement will continue when the new Arizona anti-illegal immigration law goes into effect on July 29.  He says he will arrest any protesters who disrupt the community and throw them in jail.  Arpaio is famous for keeping inmates under rough but not inhumane conditions.  There is no air conditioning for inmates his department holds captive, most of them living in tents.  He also has those inmates dress in pink outfits to make them stand out ...
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Even before the new Arizona immigration law goes into effect, it's having the desired results.  It's estimated that over 100,000 illegal immigrants have fled the state over the last few weeks.  This past weekend, Hispanic residents in Phoenix and Tuscon were holding sidewalk sales to turn their belongings into cash that they intend to use to leave Arizona.  Unfortunately for California, a large portion of illegals say they intend to move to San Francisco and Orange County's Santa Ana, both kn...
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Scientists announced on July 24 that they have discovered the remains of the largest rat that ever lived in a cave in Southeast Asia's East Timor.  Carbon dating shows that the animal lived as recently as 1,000 years ago.  The most likely cause of its demise is overclearing of the rain forest for agricultural projects, although rat is still a staple of the human diet in this part of the world, and a rat that's larger than a house cat would have been a welcome treat to hunters.  It's believed ...
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India continues to be the leader in low price technology.  The country known for $2000 open heart surgery and the $2100 Nano car is adding a new feather in its cap.  In 2005, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed a prototype computer that it said could be sold for $100 and would be a boon to developing countries.  India, whose low wages have caused companies in the United States to migrate there, said that this price was too high, especially when the proposed MIT unit turned out ...
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Statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought a harsh response from North Korea.  Clinton urged Asian nations to impose new, stronger sanctions against North Korea in the wake of that country's sinking of a South Korean warship in March.  The North countered with a statement that such a move would draw a "physical response" against a joint U.S.-South Korea military drill.  The United States wants to curb North Korea's nuclear development because any nation with nuclear capabilities...
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Romantic comedies are harmful to your marriage, at least according to an Australian survey.  The poll, released by Warner Home Video to mark the release of the film "Valentine's Day" on DVD, states that almost half the people who took the survey said that the happy endings in romantic comedies have ruined their view of an ideal relationship.  One in four people said they are now expected to know what their partner is thinking.  One in five said these movies made their partners expect gifts an...
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Ice T, who has played NYPD detective Fin Tutuola on NBC's "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" was himself arrested on July 20 by New York cops.  He was stopped at the intersection of West 40th Street and 11th Avenue because he wasn't wearing a seat belt while driving a 2009 Cadillac.  Police say that when they ran a check, they discovered his license was suspended.  The rapper/actor was ticketed and then released, but he used his Twitter account to deny the claim, stating he has a valid New...
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About 2 A.M. local time, two trains slammed together July 19 at a station in Sainthia as one was pulling out and another sped in.  The impact was so horrific that part of one train wound up on an overpass above the tracks.  As of press time, at least 61 people are known dead and 125 injured.  Shortly after the crash, local residents rushed over to begin pulling out survivors with their bare hands.  Government rescuers arrived about three hours later, according to residents, although the gover...
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Two paleontologists have concluded a 10-year study of two ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs) and reached a startling conclusion.  John Scannella and Jack Horner have been poring over in excess of 50 specimens of Triceratops and the lesser known Torosaurus and revealed that Torosaurus, rather than being a different dinosaur, was actually the adult stage of Triceratops.  The scientists pointed out that skull changes as ceratopsians got older is normal, and the skulls of Triceratops and Torosaurus ...
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After thoroughly studying the site for several years, paleontologists in Australia revealed yesterday that they have found a large cave in the Outback filled with a rare find.  Fossilized remains, many of them complete skeletons of 15-million-year old marsupials known as Nimbadons, were recovered.  Nimbadons were a sheep-sized animal with many features similar to wombats, such as large claws most likely used to climb trees.  The highlight of the fossil find was that quite a few of them showed...
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Pink, whose concert tour is now in Germany, was injured Thursday night when a stunt went wrong.  While performing her hit "So What", she attempted to get in a harness that would lift her over the crowd, as she did on the Grammy Awards show.  She was improperly secured and the harness catapulted her offstage and into a barrier.  As seen in a YouTube video posted by someone at the concert, she climbed back on stage, but the show was prudently stopped so she could be taken to a nearby hospital f...
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Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry was injured Thursday afternoon when he was rear-ended in Middleborough, Massachusetts.  He was riding his 2009 Ducati Monster 696 motorcycle when he was struck from behind by an automobile drived by 62-year old Linda O'Brien.  Damage to both vehicles was minimal because both were moving at slow speeds, but Ms. O'brien was cited for following too closely.  Perry was taken to a local hospital, where he was treated and released within two hours.  Hospital officials ...
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It wasn't the shakeup many people want to happen in the nation's capital, but a moderate earthquake struck Washington D.C. at 5:04 Friday morning.  The quake was a 3.6 and was centered in Rockville, Maryland at a depth of 3.1 miles.  It was the strongest event recorded in the area since records started being kept in 1974.  People reported feeling it as far away as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the Web site of the United States Geological Survey stated that because of geological conditio...
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Great Britain is getting set to become a "great humiliation", according to a New York state representative.  The European nation is hosting a lacrosse world championship competition, but they are refusing to let the Iroquois Nationals Team enter the country to compete.  This is because, the British government says, their Iroquois Confederacy passports lack the security measures of those of other nations, and they say that the Nationals won't be allowed in unless they get either a U.S. or Cana...
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The new Arizona immigration law that President Obama is trying to squash is gaining support by leaps and bounds.  Cities and counties across the U.S. are voting to back the western desert state, much to the chagrin of those who are here illegally, and now a powerful group of entire states is lining up in Arizona's corner.  Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox filed a legal brief on July 14 on behalf of his state and partners Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota...
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World famous oracle Paul is retiring from the prediction game in spite of a perfect record.  As you should know, Paul is an octopus at the Oberhausen Sea Life aquarium, and he correctly picked the results of Germany's World Cup team games by eating food from one of two containers bearing the German flag and those of ts opponents.  He capped this feat off by choosing Spain over Holland in the World Cup final game on July 11.  Officials at the aquarium failed to say if this decision had anythin...
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The Swiss government freed Academy Award winning director Roman Polanski on June 12 after deciding that the United States failed to provide confidential testimony relating to the charge that he had sex with a minor in 1977.  Probably just as important to this decision is the fact that the then 13-year old girl has refused to testify, saying that this event was in the past and she doesn't want to pursue the case.  This will probably kill the United States' efforts to have Polanski extradited t...
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What do you name a new dinosaur unlike anything else ever seen before?  Usually, dinos are named after some trait of their body or their discoverer with a handle that's hard to say.  Nicholas Longrich, a paleontologist at Yale University, found a new species in Canada and wanted a unique name to match the creature's unusual feature, so he met a few fellow scientists over a few beers and they bantered possibilities.  Longrich jokingly mentioned "mojoceratops" and all conversation stopped as th...
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The former Soviet republic of Georgia has a long history of claiming a large number of old people, and that trend continued yesterday as the Associated Press filed a story about Antisa Khvichiva of Sachire, Georgia, who is said to be 130 years old, born on July 8, 1880.  Unfortunately, a lot of documents were lost in that country because of revolutions and the civil war that raged when the Russian Empire collapsed.  Antisa's working papers have survived, however, and they show she retired fro...
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President Obama has no idea what his country wants, and that has never been more clearly revealed than by his stance about Arizona's proposed immigration enfoecement law.  That law, due to become effective later this month, makes it a crime to be in Arizona if you are an illegal immigrant, which is a federal law anyway.  Obama's administration is filing suit against Arizona to block implementation of that law despite the fact that across the country there is growing support for the state's st...
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It was a warm afternoon and an idyllic setting, but the quiet was shattered on Wednesday in Southern California by a moderately strong earthquake that was felt in most of the area.  The temblor hit at 4:53 PM, and most people reported a similar experience.  A rumbling  was heard, followed by a wavy motion which lasted ten to fifteen seconds.  The event was centered about 28 miles south of Palm Springs, near the San Diego County town of Borrego Springs.  The US Geological Survey initially repo...
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The American Idol summer tour is suffering from the same malaise that the TV show has had over the last few years: lost audiences.  While Live Nation, the tour organizer's spokesperson, Liz Morentin declined to give a reason for the cancellation of seven shows, Mohawk Radio sources managed to get a look at the ticket sale reports for the tour, and in the places where the shows were cancelled, American Idol was being outsold by local events at a rate of as much as two to one.  In one venue, le...
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More problems have surfaced for the expected Messiah of cell phones, the iPhone4, which in the two weeks since its release has had more defects than Toyota.  Who can forget the biggest hitch in that product, the fact that when the phone is held in a certain manner, you cut yourself off from your call?  Detractors, which are legion, had a field day with that and jokingly called it "The Death Grip".  Apple countered by saying that any phone with a built-in antenna will do that.  Funny, but my f...
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Summit Entertainment is a bit disappointed at the performance of "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" after the July 4th weekend.  It pulled in $82.5 million to lock in the #1 spot, but studio officials were hoping that the weekend run would be the equal of what the film made since its opening on Wednesday.

Last November, when "New Moon" opened, it took in $142.8 million.  Summit, in ever-popular studio excuse mode, stated that this is not due to "Twilight fatigue", but rather a result of families par...

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There's no rest for the dead, apparently, in some cases.  Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion who died in 2008 at age 64, is involved in a paternity suit and authorities in Iceland exhumed his body to get DNA samples early on June 5. 
Marilyn Young, who lives in the Philippines, says that she was in a relationship with Fischer and that her 9-year old daughter, Jinky, is a product of that relationship.  If she expects to get money out of this, she may have a very long wait.

Bobby was an ...
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