A British postman escaped a jail sentence by blaming his repeated mail theft on a rollercoaster. An August ride on Disney’s Thunder Mountain prompted flashbacks of a childhood schoolbus accident that killed eight and hospitalized the future mail carrier, his lawyer told the court. The flashbacks led to post-traumatic stress…
Continue reading …The UN Court trying suspects of the 1994 Rwanda genocide found a female former government minister and her son guilty of war crimes today and gave both life sentences, marking the first time a woman has been convicted of genocide. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, Rwanda’s former minister for family and women affairs,…
Continue reading …Be careful what you blog about in Taiwan. One woman, identified only as Mrs. Liu, learned that lesson the hard way recently, after she complained on her little-read blog about the Sichuan Flavor Beef Noodle Restaurant in Taichung. The place, she wrote, was full of cockroaches, the owner was a…
Continue reading …With the Souris river expected to shatter the previous record for its worst flood ever , Minot, North Dakota is scrambling to finish dikes protecting the one bridge still connecting the two halves of the city, the Jamestown Sun reports—and Mayor Curt Zimbelman doesn’t think they’re going to make it….
Continue reading …Some of the earliest Americans turn out to have been artists. A bone fragment at least 13,000 years old, with the carved image of a mammoth or mastodon, has been discovered in Florida, a new study reports. While prehistoric art depicting animals with trunks has been found in Europe,…
Continue reading …An estimated 240,000 people in America have HIV without knowing it, but that figure is dropping after three years of targeted testing among high-risk populations, the Washington Post reports. The $111 million program, carried out in ERs, venereal disease clinics, and drug-treatment centers around the US found 18,000…
Continue reading …A nationwide debate about circumcisions for newborn boys, combined with cash-strapped public health budgets, has Colorado taking sides with 17 other states that no longer fund Medicaid coverage of the once widely accepted procedure. For years, Colorado lawmakers considered doing away with funding for circumcisions under Medicaid—a move that…
Continue reading …If Osama bin Laden had lived much longer, al-Qaeda might have pulled a Blackwater and renamed itself. In one of his last letters, the arch-terrorist lamented that al-Qaeda had gotten a bad name from killing so many Muslims, the AP reports. Sounding like nothing so much as a CEO in…
Continue reading …Stephen Colbert continues to bolster his rock-star credentials: After having performed with Jimmy Fallon and Alicia Keys, he’s now releasing a single with the help of Jack White. Colbert performed “Charlene II (I’m Over You),” a comedy rock tune about a stalker, last night as part of this week’s music…
Continue reading …Activists say they plan a major protest during U2′s performance at England’s Glastonbury festival today, accusing the group of dodging tax taxes in Ireland. Bono “is well known for his anti-poverty campaigning,” but has avoided paying Irish taxes at a time when the country desperately needs money, says a member…
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