Mood:  sad

Wisconsin State Senator (D) Accidentally Runs Over, Kills Granddaughter...

Senator Accidentally Runs Over Granddaughter

GREEN BAY -- A Wisconsin State Senator accidentally killed his granddaughter. It happened in Green Bay. State Senator Dave Hansen didn't see his 2-year-old granddaughter as he backed his car out of his driveway.

Neighbor Sharon Konitzer saw the tragedy first hand.

"I was just sitting in my living room and I ran outside and Dave had his granddaughter over his shoulder and said he just ran her over," Konitzer said.

Konitzer called 911. She says Hansen was frantic.

"He was just sweating and screaming and crying. He said, 'I just ran over my little girl. I just ran over my little girl, my granddaughter,'" Konitzer said.

Elliana Zaidel, who would have turned two next Wednesday, died as a result of the accident.

Senator Hansen's office released a statement. It says, "Ellie adored her grandfather and she was the apple of his eye."

It goes on to say "Senator Hansen is in shock and is currently attending to the needs of his family."

Hansen's office tells us the senator was leaving his house for a meeting around 8:30 a.m.

Elliana ran out of the house and behind the car. Neither Hansen nor his wife saw her.

The Green Bay Police Department called the incident "a tragic unfortunate accident." Police said no criminal charges will be filed.

Todays TMJ4.com ~ Heather Shannon ** Senator Accidentally Runs Over Granddaughter
Also at: Minneapolis / St. Paul Star Tribune ~ Associated Press **
Wisconsin state senator accidentally drives over granddaughter

Too sad of a story to comment much... but no matter whether there's a (D) or an (R) next to his name, this is a nightmare come true. What a tragedy for this poor guy and his family, unreal.

Posted by yaahoo_ at 3:45 AM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 15 July 2007 3:50 AM EDT

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Mood:  vegas lucky

  Money falls from sky in Germany

BERLIN -- A German motorist surprised by euro notes swirling in the air around her car hit the brakes and collected a "substantial amount of money" before turning it over to police, authorities in Worms said on Thursday.

A police spokesman in the small western town said the 24-year-old woman saw the money flying through the air in her rear view mirror late on Wednesday. She pulled over and tried to collect all the notes, unsuccessfully.

When police went with her to the scene they could not find any more cash.

A spokesman at Worms city hall said police were withholding details on the exact sum and location of the find in the hope of learning more about the money's origin.

Reuters ~ Oddly Enough ** Money falls from sky

Posted by yaahoo_ at 10:37 PM EDT

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Mood:  cheeky

Gardener is a real sex pest,

"I'd like to check you for ticks"

A man who sexually assaulted several women by telling them that he was checking their bottoms for insects has been sentenced to three years probation.

Michael F. Knurr who works as a gardener would scare the women saying he had seen a tick them before touching their posterior and in some cases, pulling their trousers down.

In court, his lawyer claimed that Knurr's behavior was apparently rooted in some form of mental illness especially since he insists that he can recall virtually nothing of the encounters that ran him afoul of the law.

"There was some kind of breakdown," Gerald Boisits said.

But one woman who was sexually assaulted by Knurr in her garden regarded his memory loss as a convenient excuse and said he was unbelievably brash, following her into her home.

"After all you did to me you gave me your business card," the woman said in court.

"Unbelievable. You are a disturbed individual. You need to get professional help."

Knurr, 39, a father of two was sentenced after being found guilty of sexual assault and ordered to receive treatment for his mental state.

In one case, a woman, 32, called Knurr for an estimate to remove a tree.

As they were walking, the victim said that Knurr told her about a tick. She told him to get it off and pulled her shorts down slightly.

She felt a pinch on her left buttock.

He said, "I got it."

She looked at his hand and didn't see a tick, but she thanked him.

He said, "Oh no, it was my pleasure."

In another instance, he told a woman asking about having a tree removed that there was a tick on her, and he put his hand down her pants and groped her buttocks.

Prosecutors think Knurr used the routine on at least 16 women although not all of them were assaulted.

Knurr apologized in court and said he hoped his troubled behaviour was a thing of the past.

He said: "I hope nothing will happen.

"I just want to put this behind me and get on with my life."

Associated Metro UK ~ Weird ** Gardener is a real sex pest

Posted by yaahoo_ at 7:10 PM EDT

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Mood:  surprised

$150 Million Found Hidden in Mexico Mansion...

Mexico denies official complicity in drug suspect's cash hoard

By James C. McKinley Jr.

MEXICO CITY: The Mexican government vigorously denied this week the accusations of a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is wanted on drug charges here but who asserts that $150 million found hidden in his mansion came from members of President Felipe Calderón's party, including the secretary of labor.

Zhenli Ye Gon, a naturalized Mexican citizen who owns a pharmaceutical company, rocked the political world here recently by suggesting, through his lawyer in New York, that the labor secretary, Javier Lozano Alarcón, had threatened to kill him last year unless he agreed to hide duffel bags stuffed with tens of millions of dollars in his house.

On Tuesday, Lozano Alarcón issued a statement calling the charges "false, absurd, untrue, crooked and perverse." A spokesman for Calderón, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the president had yet to make an official statement, said Zhenli appeared to be making false charges as part of a strategy to broker a deal with prosecutors here.

Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, said in a televised interview Monday that the idea that someone from Calderón's campaign or cabinet would force Zhenli to hide money seemed "ridiculous and fantastic."

"Evidently the man dedicated himself to the illicit importation of pseudoephedrine, and this was sold to drug traffickers," the attorney general said. "This money was the product of that activity."

He said the government had evidence that Zhenli, 44, had illegally imported 19 tons of pseudoephedrine, a decongestant, and intended to sell it to drug dealers who use it to manufacture methamphetamine, a synthetic stimulant known on the street as "ice."

Zhenli denied the charge in an interview with The Associated Press published Saturday; the news agency said the interview was given in the New York office of his lawyer, Ning Ye.

Zhenli said that various party officials had delivered money for him to hide, but he did not provide their names.

The Mexican authorities began investigating Zhenli in December, after discovering an illicit shipment of pseudoephedrine on a boat in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, prosecutors say. The chemical was being shipped to Unimed, a pharmaceutical company Zhenli started in 1997, they said.

On March 15, federal agents raided his home in an affluent section of the capital. There they found about $205 million and $22 million in other currencies and traveler's checks. The money was stuffed in walls, suitcases and closets. They also seized eight luxury cars and seven high-powered firearms.

At the time, Karen Tandy, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, called the raid "the largest single drug-cash seizure the world has every seen."

Zhenli, who was born in Shanghai and became a Mexican citizen in 2002, had disappeared before the raid. Eleven other people, among them several of Zhenli's relatives, have been arrested and charged with drug trafficking in connection with the seizures.

Over the weekend, the Mexican government said Zhenli's lawyers had sent a letter to the Mexican Embassy in Washington threatening to expose an alleged link between the cash found at his house and Calderón's campaign unless prosecutors made a deal beneficial to the accused businessman.

"These lawyers are unscrupulously and uselessly looking to blackmail the Mexican government with absurd and untrue statements," the attorney general's office said Sunday.

In the AP interview, Zhenli said the labor secretary, an important member of Calderón's campaign last year, gave him about $150 million for safekeeping in May 2006, during the heat of the electoral battle.

He also denied that the chemical he had imported was pseudoephedrine, saying it was another chemical used in cough medicines.

International Herald Tribune ~ James C. McKinley Jr. ** Mexico denies official complicity in drug suspect's cash hoard

Posted by yaahoo_ at 5:39 AM EDT

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Mood:  silly

'Furring' is new sex craze for perverts, king of the forest

Forget dogging -- the new sex craze is 'furring'.

The practice sees people dressing up in giant teddy bear or other outfits and meeting in woodlands and forests for sex.

Participants -- sometimes called 'furverts' -- also dress as rabbits, squirrels or cartoon characters.

One furry -- known as 'Paddington' -- regularly takes part in the activity in woods at St Austell, Cornwall.

He said: 'St Austell is fast becoming a hotbed for furries since a new group started up.

'We're a group of people who like things to do with animals. It's great to meet up with fellow furries and enjoy the great outdoors.'

Tina Patterson, owner of the Make Believe fancy-dress hire shop in St Austell, said: 'I wonder where my costumes go sometimes.

Some of my fur suits come back in a right state.

The most popular is Sylvester the Cat.'

Comments
UK Associated Metro ~ Daily Mail ** 'Furring' is new sex craze for perverts  ...Furverts.

Posted by yaahoo_ at 2:38 AM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 1 July 2007 3:03 AM EDT

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Mood:  special

2-Year-Old, "As Smart as Stephen Hawking"...

Two-year-old 'Matilda' becomes youngest ever girl in Mensa

Her parents knew Georgia Brown was bright. After all, she could count to ten, recognised her colours and was even starting to dabble with French.

But it was only when their bubbly little two-year-old took an IQ test that her towering intellect was confirmed.

Georgia has become the youngest female member of Mensa after scoring a genius-rated IQ of 152.

This puts her in the same intellectual league, proportionate to her age, as physicist Stephen Hawking.

According to an expert in gifted children, Georgia is the brightest two-year-old she has ever met.

Parents Martin and Lucy Brown have always regarded their youngest child as a remarkably quick learner.

She was crawling at five months and walking at nine months.

By 14 months, she was getting herself dressed.

"She spoke really early - by 18 months she was having proper conversations," Mrs Brown said.

"She would say, 'Hello I'm Georgia, I'm one'. She was also putting her shoes on and putting them on the right feet."

Georgia was so perceptive that after one outing to the theatre to see Beauty and the Beast she solemnly informed her parents: "I didn't like Gaston (the villain). He was mean and arrogant."

Struck by the similarities between her daughter and Matilda, the title character in the Roald Dahl story about a gifted child, Mrs Brown began to worry about Georgia's future education.

She contacted Professor Joan Freeman, a specialist educational psychologist, for advice.

Professor Freeman applied the standard Stamford-Binet Intelligence Scale test to Georgia and was amazed to find this was too limited to map her creative abilities.

She said: "Even at two she was very thoughtful.

"What Georgia did on some questions was of a higher quality than that which was necessary to gain a mark.

"She swept right through it like a hot knife through butter.

"I would ask her things like 'give me two blocks or give me ten blocks' and she would manage it as easily as you would expect a five-year-old.

"In one test I asked her to draw a circle and she did it so perfectly.

"Most adults would struggle to do that. Her circle was near to being perfect.

"It shows she can physically hold a pen well but also that she understands the concept of a circle."

Georgia, who is at nursery school, was also able to tell the difference between pink and purple - a skill which most children learn at primary school age.

Professor Freeman said: "I said to her, 'What a pretty pink skirt, and you have tights and shoes to match'.

"She said, 'They're not pink, they're purple'. Most children go to school aged five and start to learn colours, let alone knowing the difference between pink and purple.

"I have to keep reminding myself that she is only two."

To the amazement of the family, who live in Aldershot, Hampshire, Georgia scored 152 points on the IQ test, putting her in the top 0.2 per cent of the population. Those with an average IQ would score around 100 points in the same test.

Georgia was then invited to join Mensa, the High IQ society whose members have IQs in the top 2 per cent of the population. Georgia is one of only 30 Mensa members under the age of ten.

Mrs Brown, chief executive of a charity, believes Georgia has benefited by growing up as the youngest of five children.

She has been absorbing information from her older brothers and sisters and father, a self-employed carpenter, while not receiving any special treatment.

"There is always someone around to offer her something," her mother said.

"But she still has temper tantrums, like you wouldn't believe, throwing herself on the floor.

"She doesn't think she's better and cleverer than everyone else. She is a very kind and loving child."

Georgia, who has a "wicked sense of humour" is as busy as any toddler, enjoying a schedule of ballet classes, listening to stories, dancing, singing, sport and even watching the TV.

Comments
UK Daily Mail ~ Duncan Robertson ** Two-year-old 'Matilda' becomes youngest ever girl in Mensa

Posted by yaahoo_ at 4:55 AM EDT

Updated: Saturday, 23 June 2007 5:03 AM EDT

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Mood:  spacey

Mom (Honduras national) accused

of prostituting her 2 daughters

Police say she passed out cards that offered the teen girls for sex

A 16-year-old girl endured being sold into prostitution by her mother but finally went to Houston police after seeing her younger sister also forced to perform sex acts, investigators said Wednesday.

The teenager had complied with her mother -- who even distributed business cards offering her daughters for sex -- but feared that her 14-year-old sister would be hurt, officers said.

Nelsi Yolanda Latuda and her boyfriend, Pedro Espinoza-Escama, both of the 5500 block of Antoine, are charged with two counts each of compelling prostitution of a minor. They were ordered held in lieu of bail totaling $20,000 each.

Latuda, 35, is the girls' mother, but they are not related to Espinoza-Escama, who is 21, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Justin Wood said.

Houston police declined to comment about the investigation or identify the suspects but confirmed that a couple were arrested Sunday on unrelated charges and later questioned about the allegations regarding Latuda's daughters.

"They were interrogated, and they confessed to forcing the juveniles into prostitution," spokesman Victor Senties said.

Wood said the prostitution scheme went on for months and that Latuda and her boyfriend printed and passed out business cards near their northwest Houston home, offering the girls for sex.

The pair arranged meetings and delivered the girls, Wood said.

"I have never dealt with a case where biological children were being prostituted out by their own mother," he said.

Police said Latuda and her daughters are from Honduras and have lived in Houston for about two years. The girls are staying with relatives, Wood said.

Officials with Harris County Children's Protective Services would not confirm whether they are investigating the case.

On Wednesday evening, no one answered the door at the apartment complex where the family lives. Neighbors said they often saw the girls playing outside the apartment but didn't know them or their mother.

Children of the Night, a California-based advocacy group for abused teenagers, estimates that 300,000 juveniles are working as prostitutes in the United States. The ages typically range from 11 to 17, the group reports.

Espinoza-Escama is scheduled to appear in court today. Latuda is due for a court hearing Friday.

Latuda pleaded guilty in 2006 to possession of less than 1 gram of a controlled substance and was sentenced to 10 days in jail.

dale.lezon@chron.com , mike.glenn@chron.com
Houston Chronicle ~ Dale Lezon, Mike Glenn **
Mom accused of prostituting her 2 daughters

No mention in the story as to whether or not this so-called, scumbag "mother" is an illegal immigrant, so goes the lamestream media.

No matter, they need to lock their asses up for this. There's no excuse for what they did.

Posted by yaahoo_ at 4:43 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 14 June 2007 4:57 PM EDT

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Mood:  sharp

I just know I've read this somewhere before...

Origin of Deja Vu Pinpointed

By Dave Mosher -- LiveScience Staff Writer, LiveScience.com

The brain cranks out memories near its center, in a looped wishbone of tissue called the hippocampus. But a new study suggests only a small chunk of it, called the dentate gyrus, is responsible for “episodic” memories—information that allows us to tell similar places and situations apart.

The finding helps explain where déjà vu originates in the brain, and why it happens more frequently with increasing age and with brain-disease patients, said MIT neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa. The study is detailed today in the online version of the journal Science.

Like a computer logging its programs’ activities, the dentate gyrus notes a situation’s pattern—it’s visual, audio, smell, time and other cues for the body’s future reference. So what happens when its abilities are jammed?

When Tonegawa and his team bred mice without a fully-functional dentate gyrus, the rodents struggled to tell the difference between two similar but different situations.

“These animals normally have a distinct ability to distinguish between situations,” Tonegawa said, like humans. “But without the dentate gyrus they were very mixed up.”

Déjà vu is a memory problem, Tonegawa explained, occurring when our brains struggle to tell the difference between two extremely similar situations. As people age, Tonegawa said déjà-vu-like confusion happens more often—and it also happens in people suffering from brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. “It’s not surprising,” he said, “when you consider the fact that there’s a loss of or damage to cells in the dentate gyrus.”

As an aging neuroscientist, Tonegawa admitted it’s a typical phenomenon with him. “I do a lot of traveling so I show up in brand new airports, and my brain tells me it’s been here before,” he said. “But the rest of my brain knows better.”

• Video: Brain-Healing Bridges
• Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind
• Blind Man Has Déjà Vu, Busting a Myth
• Original Story: Origin of Deja Vu Pinpointed

Visit LiveScience.com for more daily news, views and scientific inquiry with an original, provocative point of view. LiveScience reports amazing, real world breakthroughs, made simple and stimulating for people on the go. Check out our collection of Science, Animal and Dinosaur Pictures, Science Videos, Hot Topics, Trivia, Top 10s, Voting, Amazing Images, Reader Favorites, and more. Get cool gadgets at the new LiveScience Store, sign up for our free daily email newsletter and check out our RSS feeds today!
Yahoo News ~ Live Science.com - Dave Mosher ** Origin of Deja Vu Pinpointed

Posted by yaahoo_ at 3:17 AM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 10 June 2007 3:21 AM EDT

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Mood:  special

All You Need is Water: Dutch Students Make Alcohol Powder

AMSTERDAM -- Dutch students have developed powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors.

The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gram packets that cost 1-1.5 euros ($1.35-$2).

Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.

"We are aiming for the youth market. They are really more into it because you can compare it with Bacardi-mixed drinks," 20-year-old Harm van Elderen told Reuters.

Van Elderen and four classmates at Helicon Vocational Institute, about an hour's drive from Amsterdam, came up with the idea as part of their final-year project.

"Because the alcohol is not in liquid form, we can sell it to people below 16," said project member Martyn van Nierop.

The legal age for drinking alcohol and smoking is 16 in the Netherlands.

In Germany, alcopops -- sweet drinks containing alcohol and in powder form -- caused quite a stir when launched on to the market. Alcohol powder, classified as a flavouring, was sold in the United States three years ago.

The students said companies interested in making the product commercially could avoid taxes because the alcohol was in powder form. A number of companies are interested, they said.

Fox News.com ~ Reuters ** All You Need is Water: Dutch Students Make Alcohol Powder

Posted by yaahoo_ at 2:07 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 6 June 2007 2:47 PM EDT

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Mood:  spacey

Hubble Reveals Ghostly Ring of Dark Matter

Hubble Reveals Ghostly Ring of Dark Matter

Astronomers have discovered an enormous, ghostly ring of dark matter 5 billion light-years away--the most blatant evidence to date for the existence of a mysterious substance hidden throughout the universe.

Dark matter makes up a vast majority of gravity-exerting mass in the universe, while only about 10 percent is matter we can see and touch. If dark matter didn't exist, scientists say, galaxies like the Milky Way would have already flown apart from a severe lack of gravitational "glue."

Researchers pointed the aging but powerful Hubble Space Telescope toward a cluster of galaxies known as cluster ZwCl0024+1652. At first glance, the then-unknown ring looked like a ripple in a pond over the twinkling galactic cluster.

"I was annoyed when I saw the ring because I thought it was an artifact," said Myungkook James Jee of Johns Hopkins University.

But it wasn't a glitch, astronomers announced at a NASA press conference today.

The more Jee and others tried to remove the ring by tweaking the data, the more the ring-like anomaly stuck out like a sore thumb. "It took more than a year to convince myself that the ring was real," Jee said. "I've looked at a number of clusters and I haven't seen anything like this."

Because so much dark matter resides in the ring, astronomers said, it bends the light around it to create the ripple effect--dark matter's calling card. The complete findings will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The ring, 2.6-million light-years wide, formed when two huge clusters of galaxies slammed together in a head-on collision 6 to 7 billion years ago, puffing the mysterious matter outward, the astronomers figure. If the galactic hit-and-run had occurred outside of Earth's line-of-sight, the result might look more like the "Bullet cluster"--another cosmic impact site that astronomers view as strong evidence for dark matter.

Richard Massey, a Caltech astronomer not connected to the study, said that the finding is extremely important, especially combined with the Bullet cluster evidence. But he warned that the discovery still faces skepticism from other astronomers. "A lot of things can go wrong in producing an image," he said, explaining the shape could be produced within Hubble's camera itself.

Also, he said, the failure of Hubble's most powerful camera four months ago doesn't help. "Just as we were getting to the point to learn how to find dark matter, it breaks," Massey said.

Richard White, an astronomer with Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said he also was initially skeptical about the ring of dark matter. "But it shows up in another Hubble camera's data as well," he said. "It's not as clear, but it's still there. We argue the ring has been seen twice now."

Unlike other dark matter discoveries, the ring is the first collection of dark matter that differs greatly from the distribution of ordinary matter.

In addition to using gravity to visualize the dark matter itself, the team also created computer simulations showing what happens when galaxy clusters collide. When the two clusters smashed together, they think, dark matter fell to the center and then sloshed outward. As it did so, gravity eventually slowed it down and condensed it into a large ring detected by astronomers.

"By studying this collision, we are seeing how dark matter responds to gravity," said Holland Ford, another Johns Hopkins astronomer on the team. "Nature is doing an experiment for us that we can't do in a lab, and it agrees with our theoretical models."

Finding dark matter is not easy because it doesn't shine or reflect light. So astronomers rely on gravity, which can bend the light of distant stars when enough mass is present, much like a lens distorts an image behind it. Thanks to the laws of physics, knowing how much light is bent tells astronomers how much mass is there. By mapping the gravity's "footprint," astronomers were able to create a picture of how the dark matter ring is distributed in the cluster.

In the image of the cluster, Jee said, "the background galaxies behind the ring show coherent changes in their shapes due to the presence of the dense ring. It's like looking at the pebbles on the bottom of a pond with ripples on the surface."

• See the Video: Dark Matter Ring
• Tiny Galaxies Hide Dark Secret
• The Top 10 Strangest Things in Space

• Original Story: Hubble Reveals Ghostly Ring of Dark Matter

Visit SPACE.com and explore our huge collection of Space Pictures, Space Videos, Space Image of the Day, Hot Topics, Top 10s, Multimedia, Trivia, Voting and Amazing Images. Follow the latest developments in the search for life in our universe in our SETI: Search for Life section. Join the community, sign up for our free daily email newsletter, listen to our Podcasts, check out our RSS feeds and other Reader Favorites today!

Yahoo News ~ Space.com - Dave Mosher ** Hubble Reveals Ghostly Ring of Dark Matter

Posted by yaahoo_ at 4:38 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 21 May 2007 4:47 PM EDT

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