Weird News Thread ....

[Jolie Rouge]

Potter Author Saved World from Moaning Toilet Seat

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...2.htm&sc=reodd

LONDON (Reuters) - First came the books, then the films and then the merchandise from T-shirts to toys cashing in on all aspects of the planet's favorite boy wizard.

But the world, waiting with bated breath for the publication on Saturday of the fifth volume in the global publishing phenomenon that is Harry Potter, has been saved by author J.K. Rowling from some of the worst merchandising excesses.

"I can only say you should have seen some of the stuff that was stopped. Moaning Myrtle lavatory seat alarms and worse," Rowling said in a BBC television interview broadcast on Thursday.

Moaning Myrtle is a gloomy character who haunts the girl's bathroom in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets -- the second book and film in the series -- having been killed there by a giant snake known as a Basilisk.


Rowling, who has been transformed from struggling single parent to multi-millionaire whose fortune is said to be larger than Britain's Queen Elizabeth, hinted that her boy wizard had begun to develop normal teenage behavior in the fifth book.


"Harry goes through hell every time he returns to school, so I think a bit of snogging (kissing) would alleviate matters," she said, adding: "He is a lot, lot, lot, lot angrier in this book. He really is quite angry a lot of the time."



06/20/03 08:21

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[Jolie Rouge]

Police Find Head of Frankenstein Castle Body

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...7.htm&sc=reodd

BERLIN (Reuters) - German police have found the missing head of a naked male corpse found near castle Frankenstein and arrested the man's partner and two of her children on suspicion of being involved in his death.

A police spokesman said on Friday the headless cadaver was identified from its fingerprints as a 59-year-old Turk with a criminal record. He said the man was shot last weekend, then stripped, beheaded and dumped not far from the castle.

The son of his 53-year-old lover, also Turkish, led police to the head, buried some 70 km (45 miles) from where the body was found in the southwestern town of Darmstadt. The 30-year-old and his sister, 33, are also in police custody.

The corpse was discovered on Tuesday by a couple in a car park near the ruined castle, the birthplace of the notorious German alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel von Frankenstein who many say inspired Mary Shelley's 1818 novel "Frankenstein."


Dippel, who lived from 1673 to 1734, was famous for his interest in creating artificial life and rumored to have experimented with human body parts -- themes later explored by mad scientist Victor Frankenstein in Shelley's gothic romance.


Earlier this week, police dismissed suggestions of a link between the decapitated man and the medieval castle, a popular tourist attraction among gothic thrill-seekers, as absurd.



06/20/03 08:16


{{{See page one of this thread for the original story ...}}}

[Jolie Rouge]

Teen Sues Over 'Lesbian Barbie' Shirt Ban

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...9.htm&sc=reodd

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York teen-ager alleged on Thursday that teachers violated her civil rights when they suspended her from school for wearing a "Barbie is a Lesbian" T-shirt.

Lawyers who filed a lawsuit on her behalf in Manhattan federal court said 14-year-old Natalie Young is openly lesbian and that a teacher laughed at her, calling the garment and its reference to the popular Barbie doll "inappropriate."

Young alleged that the principal held her for three hours in an office at the school in the borough of Queens on April 10, 2002 and refused to allow her to return to class while she wore the T-shirt.

A spokesman for the city education department, a defendant in the lawsuit, declined immediate comment.


Young was suspended for the day and the principal threatened to send her home again if she wore the T-shirt to school in future, the lawsuit alleged.


"Schools cannot legally engage in this type of selective, content-based suppression of speech," lawyer Dan Perez said. "If she had worn a 'Barbie Supports the Troops in the War in Iraq' T-shirt, she would have been called a patriot."


Perez said that on another school day before the T-shirt incident, teachers made Young remove rainbow colored beads from her hair, although she was not suspended then.


The lawsuit, which names the education department, school principal and several teachers as defendants, seeks a declaration from the court that Young's constitutional right to free speech was violated. It asks the department to issue guidelines on students' dress and on dealing with students' expression of their sexual orientation.


The lawsuit, which was filed in the name of the student's mother, Kathleen Hodges, because Young is a minor, also seeks unspecified monetary damages.


"That is not the most important issue here but if a jury decides to contribute to Natalie's college fund, all the better," Perez said.



06/20/03 08:12

[Jolie Rouge]

Murdered Monk Was 'Mafia' Millionaire?

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...5.htm&sc=reodd

BANGKOK (Reuters) - A Thai Buddhist monk shot dead this week had amassed a $5 million fortune in 12 bank accounts from years of extortion and was on a government blacklist of influential "mafia" figures, police said on Friday.

Investigators said the monk, Phra Kru Nanthapiwat, murdered execution-style by an unidentified assailant on Tuesday, had been earning as much as one million baht ($24,030) a week by embezzling temple funds and running illegal motorcycle taxi gangs.

The monk, who had been at the temple on the outskirts of Bangkok for 36 years, also promoted himself as a spiritual medium who could dispel bad luck in exchange for money, police said.

"It was quite unexpected," one of the investigators in the case, Police Colonel Kamrob Panyakaew, told Reuters, referring to the findings of an investigation.


"At first we were not aware of the full extent of his involvement in the motorcycle gangs and exactly where his money came from, but we knew he was taking from the temple."


Thai Buddhist monks live on food donations from the local community and are supposed to only use money for the upkeep of temples.


Kamrob said the monk was on a Thai government blacklist of "dark influences," targets of a crackdown on the mafia launched at the beginning of May.


The government drew up a similar blacklist for drug traffickers and dealers when it launched a 90-day anti-drugs crackdown in February that claimed the lives of about 1,600 people.


Statements by members of the local community to police said the monk had frequently violated monastery rules, including luring female followers to his living quarters.



06/20/03 08:11

[Jolie Rouge]

Murdered Monk Was 'Mafia' Millionaire?

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...5.htm&sc=reodd

BANGKOK (Reuters) - A Thai Buddhist monk shot dead this week had amassed a $5 million fortune in 12 bank accounts from years of extortion and was on a government blacklist of influential "mafia" figures, police said on Friday.

Investigators said the monk, Phra Kru Nanthapiwat, murdered execution-style by an unidentified assailant on Tuesday, had been earning as much as one million baht ($24,030) a week by embezzling temple funds and running illegal motorcycle taxi gangs.

The monk, who had been at the temple on the outskirts of Bangkok for 36 years, also promoted himself as a spiritual medium who could dispel bad luck in exchange for money, police said.

"It was quite unexpected," one of the investigators in the case, Police Colonel Kamrob Panyakaew, told Reuters, referring to the findings of an investigation.


"At first we were not aware of the full extent of his involvement in the motorcycle gangs and exactly where his money came from, but we knew he was taking from the temple."


Thai Buddhist monks live on food donations from the local community and are supposed to only use money for the upkeep of temples.


Kamrob said the monk was on a Thai government blacklist of "dark influences," targets of a crackdown on the mafia launched at the beginning of May.


The government drew up a similar blacklist for drug traffickers and dealers when it launched a 90-day anti-drugs crackdown in February that claimed the lives of about 1,600 people.


Statements by members of the local community to police said the monk had frequently violated monastery rules, including luring female followers to his living quarters.



06/20/03 08:11

[Jolie Rouge]

Texas 'Sleeping Lawyer' Inmate Gets Life Sentence

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...9.htm&sc=reodd

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas man whose death sentence was overturned because his lawyer slept through parts of his trial agreed to a plea bargain on Thursday that will keep him off death row, but behind bars for life.

Calvin Burdine, whose case raised questions about the quality of justice in Texas, the nation's most active death penalty state, pleaded guilty to capital murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and felony possession of a weapon and will serve life sentences for each.

He was set for a new trial in August after the U.S. Supreme Court last year upheld a lower court ruling that he had had inadequate legal representation.

Burdine, 50, originally was sentenced to die for stabbing his gay lover to death even though witnesses said his attorney, the late Joe Cannon, fell sleep at least 10 times during the 1984 trial.


Despite numerous legal questions raised by Cannon's behavior, Texas prosecutors argued that it had not affected the trial's outcome and therefore Burdine should be put to death.


Death penalty opponents said the case showed the unfairness and harshness of the justice system in Texas, which leads the nation with 305 executions since 1982. The next closest state is Virginia with 88 executions.


Lawyers for Burdine said they negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors because a new trial would put him at risk of being sentenced to death again.


"Today, the so-called 'sleeping lawyer' case was finally put to rest. For so long, justice has been asleep in this matter -- today, justice woke up," attorney Danalynn Recer said in a statement.



06/20/03 08:07

[Jolie Rouge]

Call it the ultimate act of spontaneous generosity. When Nancy Moss of Crosby, Texas hit the $1 million jackpot a few days ago while playing the Wheel of Fortune slot machine at the President Casino in Biloxi, Miss., she immediately gave $25,000 of her first $50,000 payment to the on-duty cocktail waitress, Natalie Johnson, reports The Associated Press.


Why ?

Moss said the waitress made it a point of talking to her while she was playing. In fact, while the two were chit-chatting as Moss played the slots during a middle-of-the-night pit stop she made while driving to Georgia to visit her father, she told Johnson that if she won, she would give her half. And then she hit the $1,009,960.55 jackpot. It doesn't end there. The waitress kept $19,000 and shared $6,000 of the tip with her co-workers.


Joe Giardina, a spokesman for President Casino, told Gambling Magazine that such gifts following jackpot wins are actually rare. At one Biloxi casino a few years ago, a man hit a $3.2 million jackpot "and didn't give anybody anything."

[Jolie Rouge]

Woman delivers conjoined twin girls -- and a boy
Monday, June 23, 2003 Posted: 7:24 AM EDT


http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americ....ap/index.html Doctors hold the conjoined twin girls and their brother in Argentina.


BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) -- An Argentine woman gave birth to twin girls who were born fused at the head and sharing a heart and other vital organs, officials said. The woman also delivered a healthy baby boy.

The birth occurred Saturday in the provincial city of San Juan, some 1,000 kilometers (640 miles) west of Buenos Aires, Doctor Gonzalo Medina told the Todo Noticias cable news channel.

Medina said the girls were born joined from the chest to mid-abdomen and shared other lower parts of the body.

He said the twins, born as part of triplets with the boy, were in stable condition.

Initial assessments indicated the conjoined twins "were incompatible with operations that could separate them," Median said. But he added that his staff was consulting with surgical teams in other countries.

The mother, who was not identified, was in stable condition, Median said.

Conjoined twins occur when a single fertilized egg splits to form twins, but the separation is incomplete. They occur about once in every 200,000 live births and are three times more likely to be girls than boys.

[Jolie Rouge]

Looking For a Job? Then Don't Say THIS :

Jobs are hard enough to find. You don't need to sabotage yourself. That's exactly what unwitting job candidates and some employees are doing when they post information about themselves on various Web sites that contradicts what they're saying in job interviews. The London recruitment company Media Contacts revealed some of these cases late last week with this warning to job candidates: Employers are scouring the Web looking for the real you. Be careful what you say!

None of these people got the job after they posted these comments on the Web using their real names:

--Admitted "lying through his teeth" during an interview.

--Admitted he only planned to stay on the job a few months before embarking on a world tour.


In these cases, the current employer found negative comments posted on the Web and fired the employees who wrote them:

--Called her boss a "b1tch from 'ell."

--Described her employer as "a bunch of cowboys."

--Admitted he lied during the interview and his resume was "a masterpiece of fiction."


"People should think carefully what they say about employers--past and present--and what they say about themselves in any public domain," Media Contacts' recruitment consultant Gordon Cherrington told Reuters. "Having fun...is a good thing, though negativity in any form, rarely reflects well on the writer."

[Jolie Rouge]

Man Gets Telephone Line After 27 Years

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...83.htm&sc=1120

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) - After being kept on hold for 27 years, Mohammad Ismail has finally got his dream - a telephone connection to his home in the Bangladeshi capital, a newspaper reported Monday.

Now 60 and retired, Ismail applied and paid the connection fee for a telephone line in May 1976, Manabzamin reported.

But the state-run monopoly Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board lost his application and over the years his repeated requests for a line to be connected fell on deaf ears.

The telephone company suddenly ``found'' his application after Bengali-tabloid Manabzamin reported his plight last week. The company promptly connected his line on Saturday and even threw in a free telephone set.


``I am so happy. But I am a bit sad, also. When I applied, I was a young man of 33 and had dreams about owning my own telephone. Now all those dreams are gone. My children will use the phone now,'' Ismail told the newspaper.


A phone company official told the Manabzamin they had not previously been able to give Ismail a telephone connection because of ``technical reasons.''


Less than 10 percent of Bangladesh's 130 million people have telephones, mostly due to insufficient phone lines, costly fees and often cumbersome connection procedures.



06/23/03 08:47

[Jolie Rouge]

[Sci Fi Channel Wants U.S. to Probe UFOs
By DAVID BAUDER


NEW YORK (AP) - In an unusual step for a television network, the Sci Fi Channel is campaigning to persuade the government to be more forthcoming and aggressive in investigating UFO sightings.

Sci Fi has hired a Washington lobbyist, received support from former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, sponsored a symposium on interstellar travel and is considering a court effort to declassify documents related to a 1965 incident in Pennsylvania.

The network will premiere a documentary, ``Out of the Blue,'' Tuesday at 9 p.m. (Eastern and Pacific time zones) that methodically lays out an argument that there's something out there.

Most TV networks are reluctant to spend money for anything other than self-interest. The few public interest efforts are hardly controversial: Lifetime promoting breast cancer research, for example, or MTV's Rock the Vote campaign to encourage young people to register.


But by fighting for UFO probes, Sci Fi is wading into an area that invites not only dissent, but also ridicule.


``It's very, very tough for people to take this subject seriously,'' said Ed Rothschild, a lobbyist for the Washington firm PodestaMattoon. ``We thought the only way it was going to be seriously addressed is to have serious people talk about it, scientists.''


Rothschild won't even identify the members of Congress he's talked to about leaning on the government for more openness about UFOs. He's afraid they'll never help if their names come out and they're laughed at.


Even believers are reluctant to talk about the issue.


After hearing that former President Carter once saw a UFO, ``Out of the Blue'' filmmaker James Fox repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, asked Carter's representatives for an interview. Undaunted, Fox essentially ambushed Carter with a camera one day at a book-signing. Carter confirmed the incident but his brevity and forced smile indicated he wasn't happy to be answering.


Given the ``giggle factor'' that surrounds UFOs, Sci Fi is taking a chance with its reputation, Fox said.


``I don't think there's a risk because the questions need to be asked,'' said Thomas Vitale, Sci Fi's senior vice president of programming. ``Even somebody who is the biggest skeptic in the world ... still wants the questions answered. And who better to do it?''


The mission isn't entirely altruistic, of course. The Sci Fi Channel, which is seen in about three-quarters of the nation's TV households, polled viewers on the topic. Evidence of keen interest is also seen in the ratings.


Last November's documentary on the celebrated, suspected 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, N.M., was the highest-rated special in the network's 11-year history. It was seen by nearly 2.4 million people, or about 2 1/2 times Sci Fi's usual prime-time audience.


``Our main goal is not to find a UFO,'' Vitale said. ``The goal is finding the truth. We're expanding and exploring the blurry line between what is science fiction and what is science fact.''


Vitale wouldn't say how much Sci Fi is spending on this. The network sponsored an archaeological excavation at Roswell, will debut a public service announcement Tuesday and has two new UFO specials in the works.


It is backing an effort to get U.S. Air Force records released on a 1965 incident in Kecksburg, Pa., where some witnesses believe a UFO crashed. This may end up in court, Rothschild said.


Fox, a San Francisco-based journalist, never thought much about UFOs until a visit nine years ago to Nevada, when he and his friends watched a saucer-shaped object hover silently in the sky then dart away.


``When I got home, I was met with laughter,'' he said. ``No one believed me, even my family. I thought, if my own family doesn't believe me, who does?''


Intrigued, he began looking into other UFO incidents. He sold a 1998 documentary to the Discovery Channel and shopped ``Out of the Blue'' to the same network, but said he was told Discovery no longer buys pro-UFO films. (A Discovery spokeswoman denied this.)


So he went to Sci Fi. Fox considers 95 percent of reported UFO incidents bunk, either hoaxes or easily explained conventional phenomena. And don't count him among people who believe aliens already live among us.


But that still leaves a significant number of mysterious cases. ``Out of the Blue'' outlines several, concentrating on the most reputable of witnesses - former astronauts, military and government officials, topped off by an ex-president.


Fox's storytelling is sober, not sensational. Summing up incidents at the end of the film, Fox gives the official government explanations of what happened, and they're often more ridiculous than the sightings themselves.


``You get to a point where you can no longer dismiss each and every episode,'' he said.


Fox and Rothschild can think of several reasons why the government doesn't want to talk about UFOs:


The military doesn't want to spend time or money on something that isn't perceived as a threat.


Officials may also like the secrecy; it keeps other governments guessing about what kind of new weapon technologies might be in the works.


It could also be embarrassing, since it can expose what they don't know and the limitations of human technology.


And who wants to set off a ``War of the Worlds''-type incident?


Fox envisions the public announcement that could come with such an event: ``We don't know where they come from, we don't know what they're doing. We can't stop them if they become hostile and they can fly rings around all of our aircraft.


``Thank you, and good night.''


On the Net:


http://www.scifi.com


http://www.freedomofinfo.org


EDITOR'S NOTE - David Bauder can be reached at dbauder``at``ap.org



06/22/03 12:39