1469 replies to this topic

[Alias]

[url="http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22461883-2,00.html"]http://www.news.com....61883-2,00.html[/url]

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NELSON Mandela is still very much alive despite a gaffe by US President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader's death in a speech yesterday.

"It's out there," said Achmat Dangor of the Nelson Mandela Foundation of Mr Bush's comment, which received worldwide media coverage.

"All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive," he said.

In a speech defending his administration's Iraq policy, Mr Bush said former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's brutality had made it impossible to find a leader who could unite the country.

"I heard somebody say, 'Where's Mandela?'," he said.

"Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas."

The bizarre gaffe was made in a press conference in Washington yesterday.

Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for preaching racial harmony and guiding the nation into the post-apartheid era.

References to his death – Mandela is now 89 and increasingly frail – are seen as insensitive in South Africa.

[Waris]

All hail Dubya.

And for the God lawsuit: I heard somewhere that He actually replies to it.

Edited by Waris, 22 September 2007 - 13:07.

[Sgt. Nuker]

Waris, on 22 Sep 2007, 9:04, said:

And for the God lawsuit: I heard somewhere that He actually replies to it.

LIES!

The guy is a moron. Doing it to prove a feeble point that won't really matter in daily life.

[Alias]

[url="http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews....MANY-SCREWS.xml"]http://today.reuters...MANY-SCREWS.xml[/url]

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BERLIN (Reuters) - A German factory worker stole over a million screws from his employer and skewed the market with his cheap stolen goods, police said Friday.

"In the end, it became obvious that screws were being sold for much less than they usually cost," said a spokesman for police in the southern city of Wuerzburg.

Over two years, the 33-year-old assembly plant worker smuggled between 2,000 and 7,000 screws out of work each night, and auctioned them on an Internet site, police said. The scheme cost his firm around 110,000 euros ($156,000).

The man confessed after officers raided his home.

[CodeCat]

He just got screwed in the end.

[Dauth]

Now the pain of CodeCat's pun has passed

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Town changes street name over Viagra jibe
Wed Oct 24, 2007 12:45pm BST

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The Dutch town of Breda has decided to rename a new street that was to have been called St. Fiacrius court after people started calling it Viagra court.

The town council changed the street's name to "Hofhage" after people about to move into a planned housing development there complained about the negative associations of living in a street with a name that sounds like the popular impotence drug.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughN...oddlyEnoughNews

[CodeCat]

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Thai cops punished by Hello Kitty

Police chiefs in the Thai capital, Bangkok, have come up with a new way of punishing officers who break the rules - an eye-catching Hello Kitty armband.

The armband is large, bright pink and has a Hello Kitty motif with two hearts embroidered on it. From today, officers who are late, park in the wrong place or commit other minor transgressions will have to wear it for several days.

The armband is designed to shame the wearer, police officials said. "This is to help build discipline. We should not let small offences go unnoticed," Police Colonel Pongpat Chayapan told Reuters news agency. "Guilty officers will be made to wear the armbands in the office for a few days, with instructions not to disclose their offences. Let people guess what they have done," he said. Further offences would be dealt with using a more traditional disciplinary panel, he said.

The cartoon character Hello Kitty was first introduced by Japanese company Sanrio in 1974. The cute round-faced cat has become an Asia-wide marketing phenomenon, with Hello Kitty products such as stationery, hair accessories and kitchen appliances available across the region.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6932801.stm

[TheDR]

Oh no its the Kitty Cops, Run!!

[Soul]

Oh noes, the Hello Kitty punishment O_O .

[Dauth]

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Halloween zombie mistaken for murder victim
BERLIN (Reuters) - Passengers on a German train mistook a Halloween reveller dressed up as a gore-covered zombie for a murder victim and called the police.

The 24-year-old man fell into a drunken slumber on his way home from a Halloween party in Hamburg, police in the northern town of Bad Segeberg said on Monday.

Believing his hands and face were smeared with blood, passengers alerted police after getting no response from him.

A first aid team called to the scene soon cleared up the confusion. Police told the man to remove his make-up after which he was allowed to continue his journey.

"Bad Segeberg is in a rural area and Halloween isn't very well known there," police spokeswoman Silke Tobies said. "So people weren't expecting anyone to be dressed up in the train."

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughN...oddlyEnoughNews

[Strategia]

"May I see your ticket please?"

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Man explodes grenade after ticket request

YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) - A Russian man blew himself up with a hand grenade Tuesday shortly after train inspectors asked to see his ticket.

The inspectors thought they saw a hand grenade in the man's pocket and asked him to get off the commuter train at Asha station, in Chelyabinsk in the South Urals region.

He refused and instead demanded that the train go to Vladivostok, thousands of kilometers away on Russia's Pacific coast, said Liana Ergasheva of the local prosecutor's office.

"Inspectors wanted to check the papers of passengers who looked drunk, but he took out a grenade. He demanded the train should go to Vladivostok," Ergasheva said.

Passengers were evacuated and negotiations with the police had started before Mikhail Ershov, 43, triggered the explosion, blasting out windows in the train carriage.

"Ershov had taken the pin out, he then tried to put the pin back in the grenade, but instead it exploded," the prosecutor said.

The explosion did not kill or injure anyone else.

[Strategia]

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Cannon explodes during salute, killing two

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A 200-year-old cannon wheeled out by Indian villagers to greet a visiting minister exploded after being overstuffed with gunpowder, killing two men, a newspaper reported Thursday.

Residents of Badoli village in western India's Rajasthan state had planned the gun salute Tuesday evening to welcome Kirodi Lal Meena, a state minister, the Times of India reported.

The minister left immediately after the accident, which also injured six other people.

A, shall we say, resounding welcome, no?

[CodeCat]

http://news.yahoo.co...sc/chimp_memory

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Young chimp beats college students

NEW YORK - Never mind that TV show that asks if you're smarter than a fifth-grader. Is your memory better than a young chimp's?

Maybe not.

Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in two tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.

That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

"No one can imagine that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age of 5 — have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement.

Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology.

One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.

They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.

One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.

This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch these squares in the proper sequence.

When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a second, Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly about 80 percent of the time.

But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.

That indicates Ayumu was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance, the researchers wrote.

"It's amazing what this chimpanzee is able to do," said Elizabeth Lonsdorf, director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. The center studies the mental abilities of apes, but Lonsdorf didn't participate in the new study.

She admired Ayumu's performance when the numbers flashed only briefly on the screen.

"I just watched the video of that and I can tell you right now, there's no way I can do it," she said. "It's unbelievable. I can't even get the first two (squares)."

What's going on here? Even with six months of training, three students failed to catch up to the three young chimps, Matsuzawa said in an e-mail.

He thinks two factors gave his chimps the edge. For one thing, he believes human ancestors gave up much of this skill over evolutionary time to make room in the brain for gaining language abilities.

The other factor is the youth of Ayumu and his peers. The memory for images that's needed for the tests resembles a skill found in children, but which dissipates with age. In fact, the young chimps performed better than older chimps in the new study. (Ayumu's mom did even worse than the college students).

So the next logical step, Lonsdorf said, is to fix up Ayumu with some real competition on these tests: little kids.

[Strategia]

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UFO debate invades politicians' space

TOKYO (Reuters) - A debate over flying saucers has kept Japanese politicians occupied for much of this week, ensnaring top officials and drawing a promise from the defense minister to send out the army if Godzilla goes on a rampage.

"There are debates over what makes UFOs fly, but it would be difficult to say it's an encroachment of air space," Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba told a news conference Thursday.

"If Godzilla were to show up, it would be a dispatch for disaster relief."

His remarks came after the top government spokesman was asked Tuesday about an opposition politician's demand that the government confirm the existence of unidentified flying objects.

"Personally, I definitely believe they exist," chief cabinet secretary Nobutaka Machimura said, drawing laughter from reporters.

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda took a more guarded stance later in the day, saying he has yet to confirm their existence.

The debate started Tuesday when the cabinet issued a statement in response to the opposition lawmaker's question, saying it could not confirm any cases of UFO sightings.

Not all lawmakers are enthralled.

"Give me a break," ruling party lawmaker Toshihiro Nikai was quoted as saying by the Yomiuri newspaper. "There are many (other) things politics has to respond to."

(Reporting by Yoko Kubota and George Nishiyama; Editing by Mike Miller)

HAT IN THE HELL

[Dauth]

You beat me to it Strategia, Have to say it's one of the weirder ones politicans have had to speculate about.

[Dauth]

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Japan new-borns visit relatives as cuddly rice bags



TOKYO (Reuters) - New-born babies in Japan who can't make it round to visit all their relatives can now send them proxies instead - cuddly bags of rice.

A small rice shop in Fukuoka, southern Japan, has been swamped with orders for "Dakigokochi" rice-filled bags shaped like a bundled baby and printed with the new-born's face and name.

Each rice bag is tailor-made to weigh as much as the new-born and shaped so the rice fills the bag up. Holding the round-edged bag would feel like holding a real baby.

"Other rice shops sell bags printed with baby photos, but they use regular bags. People say they aren't good for holding," said Naruo Ono, owner of the rice shop, Yoshimiya.

"Rice for small babies would be stuck at the bottom of the bag, and the baby's photo would be scrunched at the top."

It is customary in Japan to give people gifts or money on occasions such as births, and the recipient then responds with other gifts, often worth half the amount they received.

The rice bags have made perfect "half-return" gifts, Ono said, although relatives face a dilemma once they are done with the cuddling.

"People say they have a hard time opening them up and eating the rice," Ono said.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughN...oddlyEnoughNews

[Waris]

LULZ

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Clarkson stung after bank prank
Jeremy Clarkson found himself unexpectedly donating to charity

TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost money after publishing his bank details in his newspaper column.

The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people's personal details on two computer discs.

He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing.

But Clarkson admitted he was "wrong" after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.

Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address.

"All you'll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I've never known such a palaver about nothing," he told readers.

But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column.

"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account," he said.

"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.

"I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake."

Police were called in to search for the two discs, which contained the entire database of child benefit claimants and apparently got lost in the post in October 2007.

They were posted from HM Revenue and Customs offices in Tyne and Wear, but never turned up at their destination - the National Audit Office.

The loss, which led to an apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, created fears of identity fraud.

Clarkson now says of the case: "Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."

[Soul]

UK McDonald's boss blames video games for obesity.

Just click the link and read it since I'm too lazy to quote it all.

[Dauth]

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What are you doing here? - man asks wife at brothel
WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment's employees.

Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

"I was dumfounded. I thought I was dreaming," the husband told the newspaper on Wednesday.

The couple, married for 14 years, are now divorcing, the newspaper reported.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughN...oddlyEnoughNews

[Soul]

Gamer Builds Nuclear Reactor in Home; FBI Pays a Visit

And no it wasn't Nuker .

[Hobbesy]

This just in! Queen Elizabeth pwns at Wii Sports!

[Strategia]

Høbbes, on 11 Jan 2008, 3:50, said:

This just in! Queen Elizabeth pwns at Wii Sports!

Gotta love Great Britain

[Sgt. Nuker]

God Save the Queen! :rotfll:

[Dauth]

Well done your Maj.

Now all we need is to get HRH playing ZH/SHW

[Alias]

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Twins who were separated at birth and raised by different families met later and married but were forced to break up when they discovered their true identities, a British legislator said on Friday.

"It's a tragedy for the couple who are involved, a terrible tragedy. Everyone's hearts will go out to people caught up quite unwittingly in a case of incest of this kind," David Alton, a member of Britain's upper House of Lords, told BBC radio.

Alton first raised the case during debate on a proposed new law on in vitro fertilisation (IVF). He says it highlights the need for children to know who their parents are.

He fears that under the new law, the biological identity of one parent of a child born as a result of IVF could be removed from the birth certificate, creating the potential for similar tragic mistakes to occur.

Alton told parliament last month he had heard about the twins from a High Court judge who had dealt with the case.

"It involved the normal birth of twins who were separated at birth and adopted by separate parents," said Alton, who has no party affiliation. "They were never told that they were twins."

"They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction" and they got married, he said.

"When they did come to know their true identities it led to their having to separate and also to a lot of heartbreak," Alton said on Friday. News reports said their marriage was annulled.

No further information was available about the twins or where they were from.

"This isn't a regular occurrence but it could become one with large numbers of people now being born by IVF and not knowing their true identities," Alton said.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, now working its way through the British parliament, recognises same-sex couples as legal parents of children conceived through the use of donated sperm, eggs or embryos.

"The government ... have not accepted the argument that you should have the right to know who your biological father is on the birth certificate," Alton said.

"It would be a terrible act of deception, with the state colluding in that deception, to remove the biological identity of your father from the birth certificate," he added.

Pam Hodgkins, head of a group that helps adults affected by adoption, said the story of the twins was very tragic.

"It is a lesson that we need to learn and apply to the situation of donor-conceived children," she told Sky News.

"Whilst ... nowadays it would be most unusual for siblings to be separated ... the risk of secrecy affecting the lives of people born as a result of egg and sperm donation is exactly the same as the risks that have affected adopted people in the past," she said.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/unwitting...9988626998.html