A suspected thief who broke into a lion park was "ripped apart" by up to 10 animals. The intruder got through three security fences before reaching the main enclosure when he was ferociously attacked by the wild beasts.
Ian Melass at the Lion Park in Johannesburg, South Africa, said: 'It was late yesterday after the park was closed and the rangers were rounding up the lions to be put in their enclosure overnight.
'They noticed one male lion and two female lions sitting on something and under closer inspection they found it was a human body.
'They got them off the body and found the lions had broken his neck, chewed out his abdomen and ripped him apart.
'He didnt stand a chance - there are 10 animals in that pen. I dont know what he was doing in there. He must have known there were lions because there are signs everywhere.
'Weve had problems with people from informal settlements round here stealing fences. I cant be 100 per cent sure but he was probably trying to steal something or was a small time poacher.'
The police were called but the body had no identification papers.
Mr Melass added: 'I hate to say this but I hope this acts as a deterrent to people thinking of breaking in here. People, including some staff here, forget that these are wild animals and their instinct is to kill...
A homeless woman who sneaked into a man's house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food began disappearing. Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man's closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.
The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months. One of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home Thursday after he had left, and he called police, believing it was a burglar. However, when they arrived, they found the door locked and all windows closed.
"We searched the house ... checking everywhere someone could possibly hide," Itakura said. "When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side."
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man's house about a year ago when he left it unlocked. The closet is part of a Japanese-style room, one of several rooms in his one-story house where the man lived alone -- or so he had thought. She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and apparently even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman "neat and clean."
Police were investigating how she managed to go in and out of the house unnoticed, as well as details of her life inside the closet and whether she had taken anything else besides food.
For weeks, the three wives of Mansa Musa Muhummed and most of their 19 children have been telling a jury countless stories of torture and starvation that they kept to themselves for years.
Muhummed sat in a desert courthouse with a hand over his face, shaking his head in denial as family members described being beaten, strung up by their feet and forced to eat vomit and feces.
"It is the worst case we've ever heard of," prosecutor Julie Baldwin said last week.
The alleged atrocities went undetected by social service agencies, and police now have Muhummed, 55, facing up to seven life sentences if convicted of a raft of abuse charges. Good. Make sure he's chained over a pommel horse the whole time. He can subsist on what his fellow prisoners decide to feed him.
Muhummed, whose given name was Richard Boddie, is on trial at Riverside County Superior Court after more than nine years of legal wrangling in which he changed lawyers four times and represented himself for more than two years.
He has pleaded not guilty to charges of torturing seven of the children, abusing 12 of them and falsely imprisoning two wives. "I was misunderstood!"
The trial delays may have hurt his case because his children -- once reluctant to talk to authorities -- are now telling strangers of extreme deprivation, physical abuse and starvation.
Standing just 4-foot-6 and weighing about 98 pounds, Sharon Boddie, 27, told jurors last week that she had grown and gained weight since her father was arrested nine years ago and the children were sent to foster or group homes.
But she still has scars from beatings and burns. She said she was taken out of school in second grade because she kept running away and teachers no longer wanted her there because she stole other children's lunches. Another failure of the system, but that's beside the point.
"I'd go like a week without eating, not even water," she said in a flat, unemotional voice. She said she would be beaten when she tried to steal food from the refrigerator.
One son caught sneaking food testified that he was forced to eat what he took until he regurgitated. Then he was forced to eat his vomit. Another daughter said she was ordered to hand feed her father while she was denied food.
Doctors said the children were extremely malnourished. A 19-year-old daughter was 4-foot-1 and weighed 56 pounds.
After moving to rural Riverside County, they lived for about three years in a van at a Muslim campground, Sharon Boddie testified. The van had no running water or gas for cooking. Baldwin said Muhummed had no known occupation. I guess muslim fanatic doesn't count as an occupation?
The now-adult children have testified that Muhummed forced them to beat each other when he wasn't doing the hitting. Hey, his hands were sore! What was he to do?
His lawyer has suggested some of the children abused each other and he is challenging testimony as exaggerations. Baldwin said she expects the defense to accuse the wives of being responsible for abuse. Yeah, and the kids and wives would so much like to go back to beating each other that they are making the whole thing up. I don't know if the lawyers are serious or just throwing this up and waiting for it to get shot down so they can claim to have done their job and then try to hide their amusement as he's shuttled off to his new digs in shackles. I hope it's the latter.
Muhummed has told authorities he believed his Muslim religion allowed him to have multiple wives. So what doesn't your "interpretation" of your religion allow?
Marva Lewis Barfield, 53, the first of Muhummed's three wives and mother of 14 of his children, testified that she beat some of her children with a boat oar at his instructions because she feared he would kill her if she disobeyed. Ever heard of an ice pick?
Barfield said she married Boddie when she was 18 and that she was repeatedly beaten and threatened with death during 26 years of marriage. I'll bet your dad warned you.
Barfield was jailed for 17 months in the case and pleaded guilty to one count of child endangerment as part of a plea bargain to testify against Muhummed.
Another wife, Laura Cowan, said that he took control of her bank accounts and finances. She and other members of the family also collected public assistance.
It was Cowan who finally got the attention of authorities when Muhummed took her with him to a post office and she slipped a 13-page letter about the abuse to a postal clerk. Written in blood on toilet paper probably?
The letter was sent to the county social services agency and to sheriff's deputies, who found the family living in a filthy garage in a gated community. Cowan presented authorities with tapes she secretly recorded of some beatings.
Sharon Boddie said social workers had checked on their welfare before, but her father put food boxes in cupboards before they arrived and the children were taught to lie. I'm not 50 pounds underweight. And I'm not 4'1".
"I told them everything was OK because my dad had coached us what to say," she recalled. "I'd say my dad treated us really good -- that he was the best parent in the world."
When they were removed from his Muhummed's home, most of the children said they could not read or write and had not been to school. Musta fooled the social workers into thinking they could read and write. Understandable.
The brothers and sisters have said they were denied use of a bathroom and could not bathe for weeks at a time or wash their clothes. Sometimes, Boddie took them in the yard and hosed them down.
Sharon Boddie said she was strung upside down by her feet and left in a dark basement for hours at a time.
Baldwin said many of the children were unwilling to talk to authorities when their father was first arrested in 1999.
Even when her father was handcuffed to a car outside their home, Sharon Boddie wouldn't speak because she feared he wouldn't go to jail. She said he once waved a gun around and said, "I can kill all of you and nobody will ever know."
She said she decided to tell her story when her father was behind bars and she realized she was "finally going to have a life."
Could be a good idea to keep a tab on those muslim campground & gated community too, mansa seemed to fit well there, and nobody seemed to be bothered by the family's woes...
A New Zealand man has been convicted for assaulting a teenager with a hedgehog after asking him if he wanted to "wear a hedgehog helmet".
William Singalargh (27) was fined for assault and offensive behaviour by a court in the east coast North Island city of Whakatane after a more serious charge of assault with a weapon -- the hedgehog -- was dropped.
Singalargh claimed he was not the hedgehog hurler, but Judge Ian Thomas preferred the evidence of other witnesses who identified him by the bright orange trousers he was wearing.
The 15-year-old boy was returning home with two friends when he was confronted by four men on the road outside his home, the court was told.
Singalargh was holding a hedgehog and asked the boy: "Do you want to wear a hedgehog helmet?"
After the boy declined, Singalargh threw the prickly weapon, leaving a large red welt and four quills lodged in his hip. When the boy's mother intervened to prevent a second throw, Singalargh pulled down his trousers and exposed his buttocks.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/31/2008 00:00 ||
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Just a guess, but I suspect enormous quantities of alcohol were also involved...
PATNA, India (Reuters) - An elephant named "Osama bin Laden" that has killed more than 11 people and injured dozens over the past few months was shot dead in Jharkhand, officials said on Saturday. The wild male elephant, had been terrorising villagers in two states, destroying their crops and homes.
Forest officials and a police team tracked down the rogue jumbo in Jharkhand late on Friday, where it was shot dead, Ravi Ranjan, a senior government official said. "Yes, Osama has finally been killed and it took us 20 bullets to silence him," Ranjan told Reuters from Jharkhand on Saturday.
Hundreds of villagers gathered on Saturday to catch a glimpse of the dead elephant.
A tourist in Australia is lucky to be alive after being bitten on the penis by one of the worlds most venomous snakes.
The man was having a roadside toilet stop when the deadly brown snake emerged from the bush and lunged at his crotch. It bit him on the end of the penis but did not release a significant amount of toxin through its fangs.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/31/2008 08:21 ||
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Not good to piss on a snake. Better to run over it with your jeep. Anyway, instant amputation would have been the fix.
The price of regular at a Shell gas station in Petworth gleamed defiantly in the midday sun: $3.91 a gallon. But unlike the customers rolling up to the station's pumps this week, resigned to the fact that their wallets were about to take a beating, Rocky Twyman and company had a plan to bring that number tumbling down.
They would ask God to do it.
"Our pockets are empty, but we're going to hold on to God!" Twyman, a community organizer from Rockville(MD), said as he and seven other people formed a semicircle, held hands and sang, pleading for divine intervention to lower fuel prices.
It was the latest demonstration by Twyman's movement, Pray at the Pump, which began in April. Since then, he has held group prayers at gas stations as far away as San Francisco, garnering international media attention and even claiming success in at least a couple of cases.
Some would say the proof of whether Twyman has the ear of the Almighty is in the result. On the first day of the movement, April 23, the national average price of a gallon of unleaded was $3.53, according to AAA. As of yesterday, it was $3.96. Proving once again that God does not perform according to the WaPo timetable.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/31/2008 05:37 ||
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Speaking as a fully paid up athiest, were God involved in this then I am sure he would be concerned with more important things like the (short, medium and long term) consequences of dependence on energy from sources controlled by 'unbelievers' and the massive funding it provides to them.
Our father, which art in Houston,
gallons we need same;
thy tanker come;
thy tanks be one,
in Dothan as it is in Houston.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our other loss leaders,
as we forgive them that hammer our gascaps.
And lead us not into Segways;
but deliver us from walking.
[For gas in the wagon,
is the power, and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.]
Supplicants start their engines.
VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
Posted by: George Smiley ||
05/31/2008 9:25 Comments ||
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The Church of Green says thou hast violated Gaia and thou must supplicate thou Urban Assault Vehicle and big screen TV to purge your sins. These are the prices wages of sin. Do not look upon thy bounty and use thy brain and brawn to wrestle the fruit of Gaia from her bosom. Get thee to thou hovel and darkness and praise the priests and priestesses of Gaia for their righteousness. Only by rendering upon the true believers and lords of Gaia may your soul be saved. /sarcasm off
#4
Seriously, If the GOD (Judeao/Christian) Existed, Muslims would all be dead as "Unbelievers" their lands(And oil beneath) the propety of whichever Jew/Christian wanted them.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
05/31/2008 14:19 Comments ||
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Actually, RJ, God would turn ZPE extraction mode on and Soddies could drink oil then.
Who knows, maybe he did, but we may be a bit dense to get it work... in the industrial scale, that is, not just a handful of prototypes that show minute results but have scalability issues.
Some more details to help fill out the story released yesterday.
Brazil's government agreed to release stunning photos of Amazon Indians firing arrows at an airplane so that the world can better understand the threats facing one of the few tribes still living in near-total isolation from civilization, officials said Friday. Anthropologists have known about the group for some 20 years but released the images now to call attention to fast-encroaching development near the Indians' home in the dense jungles near Peru. They're toast.
If the goal is to leave them unthreatened and unspoiled so that they can live the way they've always lived, perhaps one shouldn't buzz them with low-flying airplanes ...
"We put the photos out because if things continue the way they are going, these people are going to disappear," said Jose Carlos Meirelles, who coordinates government efforts to protect four "uncontacted" tribes for Brazil's National Indian Foundation.
Shot in late April and early May, the foundation's photos show about a dozen Indians, mostly naked and painted red, wielding bows and arrows outside six grass-thatched huts.
Meirelles told The Associated Press in a phone interview that anthropologists know next to nothing about the group, but suspect it is related to the Tano and Aruak tribes. I wonder if they can communicate with them if they had to.
Brazil's National Indian Foundation believes there may be as many as 68 "uncontacted" groups around Brazil, although only 24 have been officially confirmed. Anthropologists say almost all of these tribes know about western civilization and have sporadic contact with prospectors, rubber tappers and loggers, but choose to turn their backs on civilization, usually because they have been attacked.
"It's a choice they made to remain isolated or maintain only occasional contacts, but these tribes usually obtain some modern goods through trading with other Indians," said Bernardo Beronde, an anthropologist who works in the region.
Brazilian officials once tried to contact such groups. Now they try to protectively isolate them.
The four tribes monitored by Meirelles include perhaps 500 people who roam over an area of about 1.6 million acres (630,000 hectares). He said that over the 20 years he has been working in the area, the number of "malocas," or grass-roofed huts, has doubled, suggesting that the policy of isolation is working and that populations are growing.
Remaining isolated, however, gets more complicated by the day. Loggers are closing in on the Indians' homeland Brazil's environmental protection agency said Friday it had shut down 28 illegal sawmills in Acre state, where these tribes are located. And logging on the Peruvian border has sent many Indians fleeing into Brazil, Meirelles said.
"On the Brazilian side we don't have logging yet, but I'd like to emphasize the 'yet,'" he said.
A new road being paved from Peru into Acre will likely bring in hordes of poor settlers. Other Amazon roads have led to 30 miles (50 kilometers) of rain forest being cut down on each side, scientists say.
While "uncontacted" Indians often respond violently to contact Meirelles caught an arrow in the face from some of the same Indians in 2004 the greater threat is to the Indians. "First contact is often completely catastrophic for "uncontacted" tribes. It's not unusual for 50 percent of the tribe to die in months after first contact," said Miriam Ross, a campaigner with the Indian rights group Survival International. "They don't generally have immunity to diseases common to outside society. Colds and flu that aren't usually fatal to us can completely wipe them out."
Survival International estimates about 100 tribes worldwide have chosen to avoid contact, but said the only truly uncontacted tribe is the Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel island off the coast of India and shoot arrows at anyone who comes near. Well, why not send Obama to impress them then?
Last year, the Metyktire tribe, with about 87 members, was discovered in a densely jungled portion of the 12.1-million-acre (4.9-million-hectare) Menkregnoti Indian reservation in the Brazilian Amazon, when two of its members showed up at another tribe's village.
This idea is just another double-edged sword, if you ask me!
Well, it was bound to happen. The high-tech arms race has escalated once again. No, we're not talking about military weaponry.
We're talking about the tech-driven cat-and-mouse game between law-enforcement agencies and motorists when it comes to setting and avoiding speed traps.
Sen. Arlen Specter woke at 4 a.m. one day last week with an excruciating headache, a side effect of chemotherapy. Ninety minutes later, he was on the squash court, playing a partner less than half his age. That's the way Specter faces cancer and chemo. Borrowing a phrase from Winston Churchill, he calls it the "never-give-in" approach.
As he battles a recurrence of Hodgkin's disease, Specter, 78, a Pennsylvania Republican, plays squash nearly every day, as he has for decades. He calls the games "deposits in the health bank." He also continues his rigorous work schedule.
"Doc," he told CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, "I don't have time to think about Hodgkin's."
Continued on Page 49
#1
I feel for him as a person, but I'd also rather he'd have used his "never give in" for things like conservative distric and appelate judges (instead of showing he has all the spinal stiffness of a slinky), and restraining himself from being a moronic RINO busybody (Congressional investigations of the NFL? LMAO!).
. . . The first near-kill of the Run to the South occurred at 16:00, when a 12-inch salvo from Lützow wrecked the midships "Q" turret on Beatty's flagship Lion. Dozens of crewmen were instantly killed, but far larger destruction was averted when the mortally wounded turret commander, Major Francis Harvey of the Royal Marines, promptly ordered the magazine doors shut and the magazine flooded. This prevented a massive magazine explosion at 16:28, when a flash fire ignited ready cordite charges beneath the turret and killed everyone in the chambers outside "Q" magazine. Lion was saved.
Indefatigable was not so lucky; at 16:02, just 14 minutes into the slugging match, she was smashed aft by three 11-inch shells from Von der Tann, causing damage sufficient to knock her out of line and detonating "X" magazine aft. Soon after, despite the near-maximum range, Von der Tann put another 11-inch salvo on Indefatigable's "A" turret forward. The plunging shells probably pierced the thin upper armour and seconds later Indefatigable was ripped apart by another magazine explosion, sinking immediately with her crew of 1,019 officers and men, leaving only two survivors.
Hipper's position deteriorated somewhat by 16:15 as the 5th Battle Squadron finally came into range, so that he had to contend with gunfire from the four battleships astern as well as Beatty's five remaining battlecruisers to starboard. But he knew his baiting mission was close to completion as his force was rapidly closing with Scheer's main body. At 16:25 the battlecruiser action intensified again when Queen Mary was hit by what may have been a combined salvo from Derfflinger and Seydlitz; she disintegrated when both forward magazines exploded, sinking with all but nine of her 1,275 man crew lost.
Shortly after, a salvo struck on or around Princess Royal, which was obscured by spray and smoke from shell bursts. A signalman promptly leapt onto the bridge of Lion and announced "Princess Royal's blown up, Sir." Beatty famously turned to his flag captain, saying "Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today." . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
05/31/2008 00:00 ||
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WWI would probably have never happened had the Germans not starting building Dreadnoughts in 1904 (I recall). Britain didn't give a damm about continental Europe as long as their naval superiority wasn't challenged (and the low countries weren't used as a base for an invasion of Britain).
#2
Jackie Fisher predicted the year the location and the British admiral commanding in 1910(?)
Posted by: George Smiley ||
05/31/2008 9:28 Comments ||
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The complex web of mutual defense pacts didn't help much either. And as far as Jutland goes, the RN battlecruisers should of never been in the battle line as that was not what they were really designed for in the first place. People assumed that since they carried the firepower equivilant to a battleship they were equal of one. What they were really meant to be was a scouting force and cruiser killers
They turn out in their hundreds in Stetsons and boots as hits such as the Crazy Foot Mambo and the Cowboy Strut echo around their village halls. They are drawn by a love of American culture - although definitely not American politics - and a passion for line dancing, which enables them to swing but avoid all human contact.
Now country and western has become so big in France that the country's bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control.
The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training courses will be put in charge of line dancing lessons and balls. The rules, which come into force next year, come after the rapid spread of country and western in France, where an estimated 100,000 people line dance several times a week. Jean Chauveau, the chairman of the country section of the French Dance Federation, said: It's growing at a crazy rate. There are thousands of clubs and more are springing up all the time.
He said the French shunned the square dancing that is popular among country and western fans in the United States because it involved physical contact. They don't want to take anyone by the hand or anything like that, he said. But they were passionate about line dancing, where participants follow the steps without touching anyone else. I think this corresponds to the individualism of our times, Mr Chauveau said.
Village associations boast dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of members; competitions are flourishing, and a country music festival is expected to draw 150,000 people this summer, he said. Britain caught the line dancing bug a long time before us, but now we are really going for it, Mr Chauveau said. It's complete madness here.
The majority of enthusiasts in France are women, who leave their husbands and boyfriends in front of the television while they go out for le country. They often spend several evenings a week perfecting steps to the sound of Every Cotton Pickin' Morning, Country Walking or Irish Spirit.
Yannick Bigard, who has been line dancing for four years, told Sud Ouest, her local daily: I couldn't imagine going without the costume or at least the boots and the hat. I spend my time imagining new choreographies.
Mr Chauveau said the trend illustrated France's complicated and ambiguous relationship with the United States. We love American magic and the American dream, he said. But we hate Americans when we confront the hard reality of their behaviour throughout the world. We go for the cowboy hats but not George Bush.
In a peculiarly Gallic approach to the phenomenon, French civil servants say line dancing should be submitted to the same rules as sports such as football and rugby. This means imposing training courses for line dancing teachers and a state-approved diploma for anyone who wants to give lessons or run clubs. Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, the mechanics of the human body and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly.
The cost of the courses, about 2,000 (£1,570) for the professionals and 500 for the amateurs, will be largely met by taxpayers. Mr Chauveau said the regulations highlighted the French state's obsessive desire to organise all public activity. France is the only country in Europe apart from Greece where sport is controlled through the state, he said. Line dancing is now considered a sport, so it is being controlled, too.
Democrat Barack Obama paid an unscheduled late-night visit to Mount Rushmore Friday, visiting the national memorial at closing time and joking that his ears were too big to ever be included in such a display.
Asked by a reporter if he ever envisioned himself carved into the mountain, he said, "I don't think my ears would fit. There's only so much rock up there."
Obama said it was his first visit to the landmark.
He did express curiosity about the filming of a chase scene in "North by Northwest," Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 classic starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint that included a death-defying scramble over Rushmore's presidential faces.
"How did they get up there in the first place?" he asked ranger Wesley Jensen.
"They didn't. It was a movie set," Jensen told him.
"Pretty spiffy, isn't it," said the Illinois senator, summing up his overall impressions.
KATHMANDU - Nepal's government said Friday it has started an audit of palace property and sent an official letter telling King Gyanendra to leave after an historic assembly abolished the monarchy. The ousted Hindu "god-king', given a two-week eviction order, has kept a studied silence behind the high walls of his pink-hued Narayanhiti palace, although the royal flag has come down from over the heavily guarded complex.
"An official letter has been dispatched from the government asking Gyanendra Shah to vacate the palace," Information Minister Krishna Bahadur Mahara told AFP. "A high-level committee has been formed to prepare the details of the property inside the palace. All the property will be transferred to national property," he added.
An estimated 1,500 soldiers guard the king, but Nepal's army -- seen as a bastion of royalists -- said they will comply with the decision, which also involves turning the royal palace in Kathmandu into a museum.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/31/2008 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A New Zealand man has been convicted for assaulting a teenager with a hedgehog after asking him if he wanted to "wear a hedgehog helmet".
