Gasoline? These don’t need no stinkin’ gasoline!
It could be a combination of 19th-century mechanics, 21st-century technology — and a 20th-century horror movie. A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.
The hosts of the popular KLBJ morning show “The Todd and Don Show” have been yanked off the air for the next two weeks after a backlash to racial comments made about illegal immigrants during a show earlier this week. Station managers on Wednesday said Todd Jeffries and Don Pryor are suspended without pay after Pryor, a co-host, used a derogatory term several times during a discussion about what to call immigrants during a Tuesday morning show.
A technical snafu left some Visa prepaid cardholders stunned and horrified Monday to see a $23,148,855,308,184,500 charge on their statements. That’s about 2,007 times the size of the national debt. Josh Muszynski, 22, of Manchester, New Hampshire, was one Visa customer aghast to find the 17-digit charge on his bill. Adding insult to injury, he had also been hit with a $15 overdraft fee.
A sting captured by security cameras nabbed two sticky-fingered airport workers who swiped electronics planted by authorities, officials said. Brian Burton, 27, and Antwon Simmons, 26, stole a laptop and cell phone from the decoy luggage as it moved through Kennedy Airport, Port Authority officials said.
Dozens of fruitful wells beneath the rich Bakken shale in North Dakota continue to fuel a hunch among oilmen and geologists that another vast crude-bearing formation may be buried in the state’s vast oil patch. Lynn Helms, director of the state Department of Mineral Resources, said recent production results from 103 newly tapped wells in the Three Forks-Sanish formation show many that are “as good or better” than some in the Bakken, which lies two miles under the surface in western North Dakota and holds billions of barrels of oil.
Shacking up before marriage may spell disaster for most when they finally do tie the knot.
Couples who shack up before tying the knot are more likely to get divorced than their counterparts who don’t move in together until marriage, a new study suggests. Upwards of 70 percent of U.S. couples are cohabiting these days before marrying, the researchers estimate. The study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, indicates that such move-ins might not be wise.
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Somebody needs to tell Robert Redford about the previous article, quick.
Robert Redford marries long-term girlfriend. The Hollywood actor Robert Redford and his long-term artist girlfriend Sibylle Szaggars have tied the knot in the German city of Hamburg. “The ceremony was very important to them,” the protestant pastor who married them, Frank Engelbrecht, said.
Is it really such a swell idea for women in their late sixties to be having children?
A Spanish woman who deceived a U.S. fertility clinic about her age and become the oldest woman to give birth has died at 69, leaving behind 2-year-old twins, newspapers reported Wednesday. Maria del Carmen Bousada gave birth in December 2006 after telling a clinic in Los Angeles that she was 55, the facility’s maximum age for single women receiving in-vitro fertilization. Guinness World Records said the 66-year-old was the oldest on record to give birth and the case ignited fierce debate over how much responsibility fertility clinics have over their patients.
Should we get hysterical and consider banning barbecue forks to save lives?
A Seattle man accused of stabbing his wife to death with a barbecue fork has pleaded guilty to murder. Juan Bonilla entered the plea Tuesday, more than 14 months after the April 2008 slaying. Bonilla, 34, was arrested shortly after his wife, Debra, was found critically injured in her Beacon Hill home. The couple’s 5-year-old son reported the attack, rushing to a neighbor’s home screaming, “Daddy stabbed mommy!” according to police.
Birmingham Police officers are investigating a fatal shooting outside the Vineyard Food Market, where a man robbed the store and then exchanged gunfire with a store clerk. The robber suffered multiple gunshot wounds and died at the scene, police said. An owner of the Vineyard Food Market on Crestwood Boulevard told The Birmingham News that the man shot himself dead as he ran from the store.
This creep better hope the cops catch him before a group of pissed off citizens do.
Police believe a Lebanon County, Pa. man who is wanted on charges for raping a little girl is somewhere near Allentown, Pa., officials said. State police are searching for Martin Perez, 28, who sexually assaulted the girl between January and June 2, police told the Morning Call.
An Ocala woman was killed early Tuesday in the Tampa Bay area after striking her head on a row of mailboxes while leaning out of a moving vehicle, according to Pinellas Park police. Angela Gaskin, 20, was pronounced dead at Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg. The driver was her boyfriend, Karl Norman Jeckel, 24, of Clearwater.
Yikes, Wal Mart garden center conceals painful surprise for this shopper.
A Palm Coast man bitten by a snake at the Wal-Mart on U.S. Highway 1 in St. Augustine is in critical condition Wednesday after having a bad reaction to antivenin medication. According to the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office report, a pygmy rattlesnake bit Jeriel Joiner, 27, on the hand as he reached under a display of ferns to retrieve a baby bottle that had fallen.
U.S. Marshall headed to prison for acquiring a firearm for his good buddy, a Crip gangbanger.
A Deputy United States Marshal was convicted in federal court today of illegally obtaining a handgun for a 33-year-old ex-felon and reputed gang member whose prior convictions included aggravated assault and robbery, authorities and court papers said today. Antoine Dobson, 29 of Irvington, used his position as a Marshal to purchase a semi-automatic handgun last year for Larry Langforddavis, a close personal friend from Hillside, according to Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph J. Marra.
AZ woman gets spanked hard over her barking pooches.
Renee Maurer was sentenced to three years’ probation and a $940 fine charge today in Phoenix Municipal Court for allowing her dogs to disturb the peace of her Northeast neighborhood. Several neighbors filed a petition earlier this year to have Maurer prosecuted in court for her barking Pomeranian and miniature poodle. Neighbors testified in court on Monday that the dogs have barked constantly for the last three years.
Quote of the day.
With my academic achievement in high school I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that’s been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that – there are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.
-Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court