Monday, July 10, 2006
Another meteorite hits Norway
meteorite weighing around two kilos landed right in the yard outside Bjørn Herigstad's home in coastal Jæren, western Norway, over the weekend. It's the second meteorite-landing in Norway in a month, and experts are calling the incident sensational.
Bjørn Herigstad says he found the meteorite just outside his house at Orre, in the Jæren district just south of Stavanger in Rogaland County. When he went outside Sunday morning, he found a crater on his property, about 25 centimeters deep.
"I couldn't understand why there was such a hole and just started filling it in," Herigstad told local newspaper Jærbladet.
But then he found an unusual stone a few meters from the crater. "It's the oddest stone I've ever seen," he said.
Herigstad said he took it into his kitchen and washed it off, then weighed it. "You could see that it had melted and that it's burned on one side," he said. "What if it had hit our house? It would have gone right through the roof. I wonder whether our insurance would have covered it."
Right to breast-feed, nudity law on agenda
Breast-feeding mothers will be exempt from local anti-nudity laws if the Wichita City Council accepts a proposed change to the law at its meeting Tuesday. The proposal would bring Wichita's obscenity laws in line with a new state law that protects a woman's right to breast-feed "in any place she has the right to be." According to the current city law, display of the female breast -- specifically the center of the breast -- is considered nudity, and, consequently, off-limits in public. Violations are punishable by a $2,500 fine and a year in jail. The proposed change would add "a mother breast-feeding her child" as an exemption. Other exemptions include |children under 10 and people modeling nude for an art class. The law also does not apply to "any theatrical production that has serious literary, artistic, scientific or political value. "Not that nursing mothers have ever really had to worry, said breast-feeding experts. Brenda Bandy, professional liaison for La Leche League of Kansas, said that, to her knowledge, "nobody in Kansas has ever been arrested for indecent exposure" for breast-feeding a baby. She said communities are likely just amending their ordinances to align with the state law, which was approved by the Kansas Legislature last session. "Our intention was to clarify and protect that right, which already exists," Bandy said. "Now it's just that much clearer, that a woman has the right to breast-feed wherever she is."
Porn on martial arts website...
AN international martial arts association has filed a police complaint against a Bahrain webmaster for allegedly linking its Internet home-page to porn sites.
The World Khan Do Kwan Federation, which is recognised by the Bahrain Martial Arts Association (BMAA), has lodged the complaint at the Gudaibiya Police Station.
It claims the web-hosting and developing company deliberately linked one of its six Internet web pages to adult sites.
The federation's Bahrain-based vice-president Ashraf Ali Ghansar told the GDN that the company, which is part of a group based in Cochin, Kerala, India and has offices in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, was appointed as web hosts and developers for the federation's six official Internet sites in June last year.
"Since I heard that this company was good, I took our business there to develop the websites, which include the Grand Master Khan's Fighting Arts Academy (MKFAA), two of the World Khan Do Kwan Federation's websites, the founder Javed Khan's website and the US-based International Progressive Taekwondo Federation's website," he said.
The MKFAA, under the World Khan Do Kwan Federation, has been conducting regular martial arts classes in Bahrain since February this year.
Art or porn? The Tate's two hours of non-stop sex
She is one of Britain's pre-eminent artists, a Turner Prize nominee who has reduced male Hollywood stars to tears. Sam Taylor-Wood has constantly pushed the boundaries, but for some her latest work goes too far - it is a pornographic film.
The two-hour movie Destricted, to be premiered at Tate Modern in September, has the lengthiest explicit scenes ever passed for a mainstream audience. Almost the entire duration of the film is devoted to images or discussions of sex acts and it reopens the debate about where the boundary lies between art and porn.
"Well, my brief was porn and I think I made porn so therefore it should be porn," said Ms Taylor-Wood. "But it's so nice and it's so beautiful it feels sort of different to porn. I think if you rented my movie as a porn film you might be a little bit disappointed."
It is the most extreme example of a trend for real sex scenes to be included in 18-rated films, rather than restricted to the hardcore R18 certificate movies that are available only through licensed sex shops. While previous films passed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) with sex scenes have been relatively brief and integral to the story, Destricted has no plot. And where last year's 9 Songs featured real sex between actors, the new film, a collection of seven short films by different artists and directors, has performances almost exclusively by porn stars.
Nine-year-old gives birth
A nine-year-old girl of the Apurina tribe in Brazil's Amazon rainforest gave birth to a baby earlier this week and doctors said on Friday police were investigating whether she was raped.
"We know of early pregnancies in some tribes, but I have never heard of a nine-year-old getting pregnant and giving birth before," said Christiane da Costa, a doctor in the hospital where the girl underwent a Caesarean section on Wednesday in Manaus, the capital of the Amazon state.
A spokesman for the local healthcare administration said they had no reports of such cases in the Amazon state "at least for several decades".
Police have asked anthropologists from the National Indian Foundation to help investigate Apurina tribal customs regarding sex with young girls.
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Michael Jordan look-alike sues real MJ?
An Oregon man sues basketball superstar Michael Jordan because, according to him, they look too much alike.
Allen Heckard said he has been mistaken as MJ nearly every day for the past 15 years and he's tired of it. He is suing Jordan and Nike founder Phil Knight for $932 million dollars. His claim alleges defamations, permanent injury and emotional pain and suffering.Jordan has not commented on the suit.
He drove till arm tore off, police charge
Police say he dragged his wife down a dirt road, her arm tangled in the seatbelt strap through the open door of his pickup, until the limb ripped clean from her body.
His lawyer says he's a hero, rushing his injured wife to the hospital before she bled to death.
Stephen Humphrey, 39, of Romulus was arraigned Thursday in 1st District Court in Monroe on charges of third-offense drunken driving causing serious injury and operating a vehicle with a suspended license, also causing serious injury.
If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison. He's being held in the Monroe County Jail on $100,000 bond.
"I'm saying he's a hero," John Gonta, Humphrey's lawyer, said Thursday. "He made sure his wife survived. Whatever happened before that, I don't know, but I'm glad he took her to the hospital."
Police, too, aren't entirely sure what led to 34-year-old Brenda Humphrey's arm being ripped off about 1 a.m. Sunday. After days of searching, police still haven't found the crime scene or the arm.
'Rewired brain' revives patient after 19 years
A study of the "miraculous" recovery of a man who spent 19 years in a minimally conscious state has revealed the likely cause of his regained consciousness.The findings suggest the human brain shows far greater potential for recovery and regeneration then ever suspected. It may also help doctors predict their patients’ chances of improvement. But the studies also highlight gross inadequacies in the system for diagnosing and caring for patients in vegetative or minimally conscious states. In 1984, 19-year-old Terry Wallis was thrown from his pick-up truck during an accident near his home in Massachusetts, US. He was found 24 hours later in a coma with massive brain injuries. Within a few weeks he had stabilised in a minimally conscious state, which his doctors thought would last indefinitely. It did indeed persist for 19 years. Then, in 2003, he started to speak. Over a three day period, Wallis regained the ability to move and communicate, and started getting to know his now 20 year old daughter – a difficult process considering he believed himself to be 19, and that Ronald Reagan was still president.
Brain rewiring
To try and find out what was going on inside Wallis's brain, Nicholas Schiff and colleagues from the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City, used a new brain imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). The system tracks water molecules and so reveals the brain’s white matter tracts – akin to a wiring diagram. They combined this with more traditional PET scanning, to show which brain areas were active.The team's findings suggest that Wallis’s brain had, very gradually, developed new pathways and completely novel anatomical structures to re-establish functional connections, compensating for the brain pathways lost in the accident.
Axing sex, swearing from films violates copyright: court
Deleting swearing, sex and violence from films on DVD or VHS violates copyright laws, a U.S. judge has ruled in a decision that could end controversial sanitizing done for some video-rental chains, cable services and the internet.
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by 16 U.S. directors — including Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and Martin Scorsese — against three Utah-based companies that "scrub" films.
Judge Richard P. Matsch decreed on Thursday in Denver, Colo., that sanitizing movies to delete content that may offend some people is an "illegitimate business."
The judge also praised the motives of the Hollywood studios and directors behind the suit, ordering the companies that provide the service to hand over their inventories.
"Their objective ... is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," the judge wrote. "There is a public interest in providing such protection."