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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The Daily Drift

Welcome to the Wednesday Edition of  Carolina Naturally.
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~ Jacob and Bryanna Harris
We can so relate ...!
 
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Autumn Favorite ... !
Today is - National Mulled Cider Day

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Today in History

1399 Richard II is deposed.
1568 Eric XIV, king of Sweden, is deposed after showing signs of madness.
1630 John Billington, one of the original pilgrims who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower, becomes the first man executed in the English colonies. He is hanged for having shot another man during a quarrel
1703 The French, at Hochstadt in the War of the Spanish Succession, suffer only 1,000 casualties to the 11,000 of their opponents, the Austrians of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.
1791 Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is performed for the first time in Vienna
1846 The first anesthetized tooth extraction is performed by Dr. William Morton in Charleston, Massachusetts.
1864 Confederate troops fail to retake Fort Harrison from the Union forces during the siege of Petersburg.
1911 Italy declares war on Turkey over control of Tripoli.
1918 Bulgaria pulls out of World War I.
1927 Babe Ruth hits his 60th homerun of the season off Tom Zachary in Yankee Stadium, New York City.
1935 George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess opens at the Colonial Theatre in Boston.
1938 Under German threats of war, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign an accord permitting Germany to take control of Sudetenland–a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German-speaking minority.
1939 The French Army is called back into France from its invasion of Germany. The attack, code named Operation Saar, only penetrated five miles.
1943 The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps becomes the Women’s Army Corps, a regular contingent of the U.S. Army with the same status as other army service corps.
1949 The Berlin Airlift is officially halted after 277,264 flights.
1950 U.N. forces cross the 38th parallel separating North and South Korea as they pursue the retreating North Korean Army.
1954 The first atomic-powered submarine, the Nautilus, is commissioned in Groton, Connecticut.
1954 NATO nations agree to arm and admit West Germany.
1955 Actor and teen idol James Dean is killed in a car crash while driving his Porsche on his way to enter it into a race in Salinas, California.
1960 Fifteen African nations are admitted to the United Nations.
1962 U.S. Marshals escort James H. Meredith into the University of Mississippi; two die in the mob violence that follows.
1965 President Lyndon Johnson signs legislation that establishes the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities.
1965 The 30 September Movement unsuccessfully attempts coup against Indonesian government; an anti-communist purge in the aftermath results in over 500,000 deaths.
1966 Bechuanaland ceases to be a British protectorate and becomes the independent Republic of Botswana.
1972 Pro baseball great Roberto Clemente hits his 3,000th—and final—hit of his career.
1975 The AH-64 Apache attack helicopter makes its first flight.
1994 Aldwych tube station (originally Strand Station) of the London Underground transit system closes after 88 years.
1999 Japan’s second-worst nuclear accident occurs at a uranium processing facility in Tokai-mura, killing two technicians.
2009 Earthquakes in Sumatra kill more than 1,115 people.

High school student punches out bully who was attacking blind classmate

An apparent bully attacks a blind kid, who is saved by a classmate (Screenshot/YouTube)
“Are you trying to fucking jump a blind kid, bro?” the student asks the attacker as he’s lying on the ground. He then warns him if he tries it again, “I will fuck you up.”

Woman With "The Perfect Bottom" Earns a Living Trying on Jeans

Pictured above is Natasha Wagner--or, more precisely, the part of her body that earns her hefty paychecks. 14 years ago, fashion consultants discovered that Wagner has the ideal butt for testing designs for jeans. She's 5 feet, 8 inches tall and wears a size 6. Her posterior represents the needs of a vast number of women who buy jeans in a wide variety of styles. When fashion designers want to see how their work looks on an ideal set of buttocks, they call Wagner. Vogue talked to designer Julien Jarmoune about Wagner's assets:
“Natasha has the perfect marriage of body types,” clarified Jarmoune. “Because if you fit with someone who is too curvy (tiny waist, big butt), or with someone who has a straight body (no hips), you are limiting yourself to just a certain body type. A jean that is fit on a straight body will never look good on someone who has curves. That’s why Natasha comes into play perfectly. She has the best of both worlds where she’s slim and she still has shape. Additionally, she has great legs that are the perfect length (she fits our standard 30-inch leg inseam flawlessly) so that our jeans will work for someone who is short or tall.”
But Wagner is much more than just her bottom. After doing this kind of work for 14 years, she's become an expert in jeans design:
Wagner, who owns more than 100 pairs of jeans herself, explained her “science of denim” further: “Once I had learned the jean terminology, I began to help designers flesh out details or catch things that may have been overlooked. They’re busy, they’re working on the current season plus a year ahead. I’m just focusing on fit and am able to point out specifics like if the back rise is pulling or if there’s bubbling or roping,” she said. Plus, she knows the jargon. “A lot of the time you’ll get what’s called ‘slippage’ on a jean, where the denim pulls and you can kind of see the weft in the garment. So I can recommend trying a different type of construction or a different side seam. I know how the body should look in the jean, so I’m able to tell them things like, ‘Kick out the back rise,’ or ‘Take a measurement from the top of the rise and add it to the bottom of the rise to give it a nicer butt shape and a lift.’ ”

At 500 Years Old, This Butcher Shop is Britain's Oldest Family-Owned Business


They're not precisely sure when their business was founded. But RJ Balson and Son has on file a business license granted in 1515. And for that entire 500-year period, this butcher shop in Bridport, Dorset, UK, has been owned and operated by the same family.
It's survived wars, both foreign and civil, plagues, and economic depressions. RJ Balson and Son has been in its current location only recently--just since the 19th Century. But it's always been serving meat to customers in Bridport. The Daily Telegraph reports:
On sale now is a mixture of novelty and old-fashioned fare. Packs of beef dripping share space with sliced chorizo. There is a freezer of game: some traditional, like venison and rabbit, some exotic, like bison, zebra, crocodile, ostrich and kangaroo.
When the business opened, the kangaroo hadn’t even been discovered. […]
From the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, butcher numbers tumbled from 15,000 to around 6,000, a drop of 60 per cent, according to Meat Trades Journal, though in the last couple of years figures have stabilised.
Balson is clear that he can fight against the supermarkets. “The main thing is personal service. When you come in, you get a nice welcome, you say, 'how’s your mum?’, 'how’s your daughter?’ Most of the people who come in, we’ve served their parents before them, and their grandparents before that and they like to be asked.
"You’re not going to get that personal experience in a supermarket. Who wants to queue up for 20 minutes before you even get to the checkout?”
In any case, if a shop has outlived 23 monarchs and 52 prime ministers, it probably stands a fighting chance of surviving the rise and Tesco and Aldi.










Deadly and Lucrative Kidnapping Business

Terrorist groups like ISIL have profited not only financially but also in propaganda terms from taking hostages. Can anything be done to stop the practice?

Mom buys coffee for women who insulted her to set example for 2-year-old

Dianne Hoffmeyer (Screenshot/WXYZ)
Dianne Hoffmeyer was standing in line at a coffee shop minding her own business when two women behind her started lobbing insults about her looks, calling her a whale and making fun of her hair.

The State that Turns Pregnant Women Into Felons


New York Cops Are Jailing Handymen For Carrying This Common Pocketknife


A half-century-old law, enacted to prohibit the kind of knives that Nazi Germany used to distribute to paratroopers, is instead being used to arrest ordinary workers who carry pocketknives to use on the job.

New Jersey Cop Threatens To Deport Latino Teenagers And Their Families ‘Like Texas’


Quick Hits

'Take what you need and leave the rest': Here's why atheists love Pope Francis
NC restaurant urged to remove statues of snoozing Mexicans that greet customers at door
Senate blocks Republican bill that would strip Planned Parenthood of federal funds
Wine's darkest secret revealed - it's all in the fungi
Putin to America: 'Don't call me a Czar'
US fisheries toss over 2 billion pounds of perfectly edible seafood each year
White House threatens to veto budget bill defunding Planned Parenthood
When blacks get equal medical care, they don’t just live longer — they live longer than whites
Iran criticizes Saudi Arabia after stampede at hajj pilgrimage kills 700
Two injured, horse killed in Nebraska accident involving horse-drawn cart
Study finds birds migrating to Britain because food is better
Arizona's Sheriff Joe faces fresh civil contempt hearings
Baby boy found dead in SUV in Ohio store parking lot
Six killed, seven injured when SUV chased by Texas police rolls over
Archaeologists find bone fragments in hunt for 'real' Mona Lisa

The Evolution of Human Brain

Stem Cell Research Hints at Evolution of Human Brain
The human cerebral cortex contains 16 billion neurons, wired together into arcane, layered circuits responsible for everything from our ability to walk and talk to our sense of nostalgia and drive to dream of the future. In the course of human evolution, the cortex...

Forensic Archaeology

Russia is exhuming Tsar Nicholas and Alexandra as part of a re-investigation of the circumstances around the death and burial of the imperial family.
Researchers continue their attempt to solve the mystery behind the identity of one of the world's most famous models.

New Method Studies Human Lateralization With Stone Tools

Stone Tool Makers
Researchers from the University of the Basque Country have developed a new method for determining if individual flint flakes were produced by right- or left-handed knappers. “We focus on the butt of the flake which is where part of the percussion platform has been preserved. The fractures that appear on the platform are oriented according to the direction of the impact made on it by the percussor. Once the direction of the impact is known, it is possible, with a high degree of reliability, to determine whether it was produced by the left hand or the right hand,” Eder Dominguez-Ballesteros said in a press release. Studying the origins and development of laterality, or the preference for one side of the body over another, helps scientists to understand the evolution of the organization of the human brain. Earlier methods of determining laterality required the study of more than one flake for comparison. For more, go to "Neanderthal Tool Time."

Stealth Dark Matter

New theory of stealth dark matter may explain universe’s missing mass
Lawrence Livermore scientists have come up with a new theory that may identify why dark matter has evaded direct detection in Earth-based experiments. A group of national particle physicists known as the Lattice Strong Dynamics Collaboration, led by a Lawrence...

Some Lucky Ants Get the Job of Doing Nothing

In our fast-paced society, it's difficult to imagine a reality where somebody's job is to do nothing.According to University of Arizona researchers, however, laziness could be a specialization in and of itself for certain ants that live in a large colony. While observing five ant colonies over a three-week period, entomologists noticed that half of each colony's members were consistently doing nothing. That inactivity, researchers say, was not related to resting or circadian rhythms -- instead, it seems that some ants' job is simply to do that: nothing.
In a newly published paper, University of Arizona entomologist Anna Dornhaus and graduate student Daniel Charbonneau throw out several possible explanations for the purposefully lazy insects' behavior.
The laziest ant stands alone
"The inactive ants could be reserve workers," Charbonneau posits in a news release. "It makes sense to have reserves to meet the peak of those fluctuations -- it's better to have too many workers during the down times than not enough during the peaks."
Lazy ants could also have stomachs full of food that they had previously gathered for other members of the colony. The so-called "living refrigerators" may regurgitate the food to feed their peers, a process known as trophallaxis.
Of course, some ants could just be lazy. Per the response-threshold model, Charbonneau explains, certain creatures may have higher thresholds "at which they will start doing work," leaving the lazy ants to put off working until their services are absolutely necessary.
Whatever the case, Charbonneau and Dornhaus say that they are continuing to explore the implications of the inattentive ants, particularly in the fields of computer science and robotics.
Charbonneau and Dornhaus' research is published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

PETA Sues To Give Monkey The Rights To Selfie Photos


In 2011, photographer David Slater was in Indonesia when a crested black macaque grabbed his camera and took some pictures, including this awesome selfie. It was a viral sensation. But who owns the copyright? Wikipedia argues that no one does. The war for the rights to this picture continue to this day, as now People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has filed suit to grant the rights to the monkey, identified as 6-year-old Naruto.
Last year, the U.S. Copyright Office issued an updated compendium of its policies, including a section stipulating that it would register copyrights only for works produced by human beings. It specified that works produced by animals, whether a photo taken by a monkey or a mural painted by an elephant, would not qualify.
However, Jeffrey Kerr, a lawyer with PETA, said the copyright office policy "is only an opinion," and the U.S. Copyright Act itself does not contain language limiting copyrights to humans.
Slater said he is “very saddened” by PETA’s lawsuit.

Baby Elephant Tries to Intimidate Tourists

Safari tourists drove through Kruger National Park in South Africa. They stopped to watch an elephant family. The baby wanted to act big and tough, like a full-grown elephant should. So he charged the tourists and trumpeted. Sorry, little guy. You'll have to grow up a bit more before you can scare the humans.

Animal News

The crustaceans have developed a form of ritualized combat that lets individuals compete without bludgeoning each other to death.
With conditions harsh enough as it was, Australia's first human inhabitants had to keep an eye out for nearly 20-foot apex predators.
Living descendants of the last wild horses number only 2000, but DNA research sheds light on these animals.

Animal Pictures


Tuesday, September 29, 2015

The Daily Drift

Welcome to the Tuesday Edition of  Carolina Naturally.
Our latest comment: 
Love it.
~ John Harrison
It is also National Biscotti Day ...!
 
Carolina Naturally is read in 205 countries around the world daily.   
  
Coffee Beans ... !
Today is - International Coffee Day

You want the unvarnished truth?
Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told

Some of our readers today have been in:
The Americas
Argentina - Brazil - Canada - Colombia - Ecuador - Puerto Rico - United States
Europe
Austria - Bosnia/Herzegovina - Bulgaria - England - France - Georgia - Germany - Hungary 
Iceland - Ireland - Italy - Latvia - Mexico - Moldova - Netherlands - Norway - Poland - Portugal  Romania - San Marino - Scotland - Serbia - Slovakia - Slovenia - Spain - Sweden - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
Bahrain - China - India - Indonesia - Iran - Korea - Malaysia - Mauritius
Africa
United Arab Emirates
The Pacific
Australia - Philippines
Don't forget to visit our sister blogs Here and Here.

Today in History

1197 Emperor Henry VI dies in Messina, Sicily.
1399 Richard II of England is deposed. His cousin, Henry of Lancaster, declares himself king under the name Henry IV.
1493 Christopher Columbus leaves Cadiz, Spain, on his second voyage to the new world.
1513 Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa discovers the Pacific Ocean.
1789 Congress votes to create a U.S. army.
1833 A civil war breaks out in Spain between Carlisists, who believe Don Carlos deserves the throne, and supporters of Queen Isabella.
1850 Mormon leader Brigham Young is named the first governor of the Utah Territory.
1864 Union troops capture the Confederate Fort Harrison, outside Petersburg, Virginia.
1879 Dissatisfied Ute Indians kill Agent Nathan Meeker and nine others in the "Meeker Massacre."
1932 A five-day work week is established for General Motors workers.
1939 Germany and the Soviet Union reach an agreement on the division of Poland.
1941 30,000 Jews are gunned down in Kiev when Henrich Himmler sends four strike squads to exterminate Soviet Jewish civilians and other "undesirables."
1943 Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf is published in the United States.
1950 Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev repeatedly disrupts a UN General Assembly meeting with his violent outbursts over intervention in the Belgian Congo, US U2 spy planes, and arms control.
1960 General Douglas MacArthur officially returns Seoul, South Korea, to President Syngman Rhee.
1962 Canada launches its first satellite, Alouette 1.
1962 The popular Argentinian comic strip Mafalda beings publication, in the weekly Primera Plana; focusing on a six-year-old girl (Mafalda) and her friends, it has been called the Argentinian Peanuts.
1966 Chevrolet introduces the Camaro, which will become an iconic car.
1971 Oman joins the Arab League.
1979 John Paul II becomes the first pope ever to visit Ireland.
1990 The YF-22, later named F-22 Raptor, flies for the first time.
1992 Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello impeached for corruptions; he was the youngest president in the nation’s history, taking office at age 40 in 1990.
2008 Dow Jones Industrial Average plummets 777.68 points in the wake of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual bankruptcies, the largest single-day point loss in Wall Street history.
2009 An 8.1 earthquake causes a tidal wave that claims 189 lives in Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga.

If You're Going To Sit For A Long Period Of Time, It's Better To Fidget Around


Autumn's Colors

Autumn's upon us, so journey around the globe for the most stunning fall foliage.

Autumn

The equinox may herald the arrival of fall, but summer is very much going to be in effect for most of the U.S. through the end of this month.

How a Concentration Camp Survivor and an American Huckster Created the Magic Crystals of Miracle-Gro

We are surrounded by everyday consumer products and rarely think about how they came about. Some of the origin stories behind them involve people with fascinating histories, but you’d never know until someone digs into their background. Miracle-Gro plant fertilizer was brought to market by Otto Stern and Horace Hagedorn.
But first, Otto Stern had to escape Nazi Germany. Stern, a German Jew, had been arrested during Kristallnacht, deserted by his non-Jewish wife, and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He held on, dreaming of a post-war life. When he was released from the camps after Hitler's downfall, he left Germany, bouncing from Cuba to America and finally ending up in Geneva, New York. If Gloversville was a glove town, and Danbury a hat city, Geneva was (and is) a plant capital, home to federal and state agricultural agencies, and a capitalist Eden of for-sale trees, flowers and other green stuff. There, Stern began to grow a new life for himself, starting up his own nursery and setting it apart with what was then a novel idea: order from his shop, and he would ship the plants anywhere in the country. You could come home to find a rosebush waiting for you on your porch.
Stern also sold fertilizer to go along with his mail-order plants. But his business didn’t really take off until he met a radio adman who wanted to grow bigger tomatoes. They spent a lot of time together because Stern had such a thick accent that he was uncomfortable talking on a phone, and their conversation often veered from advertising into their mutual interest in gardening. The story of how that led to to phenomena of Miracle-Gro is told at Atlas Obscura

Why a Looming Fight for Syrian Border Town Could Be Game Changer for ISIL's Grip on Power

Kurdish plans to recapture a vital town on Syria's border with Turkey could transform the fight against the jihadists.
Syrian Kurdish leaders plan to capture the last border crossing point between Syria and Turkey held by Isis, making it impossible for jihadist volunteers from Europe and elsewhere to reach Isis-held territories.
The seizure of the frontier town of Jarabulus on the Euphrates River is certain to anger Turkey, which is already alarmed by the rise of a Syrian-Kurdish state-let in northern Syria, aided by US air strikes and fielding strong military forces.
The loss of Jarabulus would isolate Isis, bringing to an end its ability to bring in thousands of fanatical Islamic fighters who have been crossing from Turkey into Syria without significant hindrance over the last four years. ISIL has frequently used these foreign volunteers as suicide bombers driving vehicles packed with explosives as an essential element in its military strategy.
“We have plans to liberate Jarabulus,” said Idris Nassan, the vice-minister for foreign affairs of Kobani, the Kurdish enclave where the YPG (People’s Protection Units) defeated ISIL, told The Independent. He pointed out that “Jarabulus is the last Daesh [Isis] border crossing with Turkey” since the YPG seized its only other border crossing point at Tal Abyad, east of Kobani, in June.
Mr Nassan quoted the overall commander of the YPG, General Sipan Hamo, as saying the attack on Jarabulus would “be in coordination with the US because we are part of the international coalition. They fight in coordination with us”. This may present the US with a dilemma because in July it did a deal with Turkey whereby it uses Incirlik airbase in Turkey for air strikes against Isis. But the Turks want to stop the YPG advancing west of the Euphrates. The Syrian Kurds already control half of Turkey’s 550 mile-long border with Syria.
The Syrian Kurds are confident they can defeat Isis, which dominates the rest of eastern Syria, after they withstood a four-and-half-month siege of Kobani by ISIL that ended in January. The success of the YPG came because its fighters fought ferociously against the Islamic militants and, since October last year, its commanders have been able to call in US air strikes.
It was the support of some 700 US air strikes that helped the YPG win the battle for Kobani, though it reduced this small city to a seascape of shattered concrete where buildings have been pounded into rubble by the force of the bomb blasts. In between the ruins there are individual shops and houses that survived intact, but 70 per cent of the city is destroyed and construction workers are only slowly making an impact.
Victory at Kobani boosted the self-confidence of the YPG, which is the only ground force in Syria or Iraq that has regularly defeated Isis. After the end of the siege, the YPG won back the rest of Kobani canton, including 380 villages. And in June it captured the border town of Tal-Abyad which Isis had held for more than two years. This linked up the two main Kurdish cantons. Its capture was also important because it is only 100km (62 miles) north of Raqqa, the Isis de-facto capital in Syria.
Important though Tal Abyad was to Isis, it did not commit many fighters to holding the town, having apparently decided that it was indefensible. YPG forces were advancing from west and east towards the road linking it to Raqqa. A 21-year-old YPG fighter called Misro Munzer, hit in the knee by a machine gun bullet in a later battle and interviewed in a military hospital in Kobani, said that he had fought at Tal Abyad where “Daesh [Isis] did not fight hard”.
He explained that the more battle-hardened Isis men had retreated leaving only a remnant of 25 men without much combat experience who were demoralised and confused by US air strikes.
There is no doubt that YPG light infantry backed by US air power are highly effective and ISIL cannot hold fixed positions against a combination of the two. ISIL suffers heavy casualties when it tries to do so. But this does not mean that it cannot hit back as became evident on the drive east from Kobani, on what was meant to be an entirely safe road going to al-Qomishli, the capital of the largest Syrian Kurdish enclave.
There were some early signs that the road was not quite as secure as we had been told. As we entered an Arab village called Qayyil, 15km west of Tal Abyad, we were stopped by a large detachment of YPG troops who said they were conducting a search. One of them told us that “we have information that four or five Daesh [ISIL] fighters have penetrated the village and we are looking for them”. Other YPG fighters were guarding crossroads and entry points into Qayyil.
We drove on to Tal Abyad, a town which locals said had once had a population that was half-Arab and half-Kurdish, Turkoman and Armenian. Three months ago it had been in the hands of Isis. We wanted to look at the closed border crossing with Turkey and the police agreed to take us there.
But, as we followed a police vehicle down the street, a Kurdish woman in a black robe rushed out of a house shouting that she needed the police and our escort stopped to help her. She said that she and her daughters had been sitting in the courtyard of her house when “a man dressed in black with a beard who looked like Daesh had climbed over a wall and run past us”. The police said that there were still Isis hiding in the many abandoned houses in Tal Abyad.
These two incidents were not too surprising since Tal Abyad and nearby villages had only recently been captured by the Kurds. But the next town on our route, Ras al-Ayn, had been held by the YPG for two years. But, soon after we had entered, there were two bangs that sounded like gunshots close together, but then we saw a cloud of dense smoke rising from a checkpoint just ahead. Kurdish security men blocked the road in front of us within a couple minutes, turning back vehicles and news soon spread that there had been a suicide car bomb which killed at least five people.
It also emerged that there had been a suicide bombing just behind us at a checkpoint at the entrance to Ras al-Ayn that we had just driven through. A man on a motorbike had blown himself up but had failed to kill or injure anybody.
These incidents are all probably an attempt by Isis to show that it is still to be feared despite its recent defeats. In June it sent a detachment into Kobani disguised in Kurdish and Free Syrian Army uniforms that killed over 200 men women and children.
ISIL has in the past launched diversionary raids to keep its enemy’s troops dispersed before the main assault on a single target. But if the YPG tries to capture Jarabulus and cut ISIL’s last exit to the outside world, the Islamic militants will probably have to fight.

Trans inmate taunted and held in solitary for 66 days while prison decided whether she was female

A trans woman named Sandy Brown spent 66 days in solitary confinement at a Maryland detention facility, during which she was subjected to taunting and humiliation by the staff.

Tennessee school won’t allow gay teen to bring another boy to homecoming dance for ‘logistical reasons’

An all-boys Tennessee school won’t allow a gay student to take another boy to his homecoming dance.

Alabama Valium

In Alabama, anti-drug fervor and abortion politics have turned a meth-lab law into the country’s harshest weapon against pregnant women.

Ziggy

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'Witchcraft' Island

A Stone Age site where cave rituals may have been performed some 9,000 years ago has been discovered in Sweden.

Oldest Decapitation

The 9,000-year-old skull was recovered in Brazil with two severed hands covering the face.

Intoxicated man celebrating his birthday didn't realize he'd been shot twice until returning home

Police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are looking for the person who shot a passenger in a car on Monday night. Police said the victim was intoxicated after celebrating his birthday.
He didn't realize he'd been shot until he arrived home with his brother and friend and discovered the pain in his left shoulder was actually a gunshot wound.
They called police who found two bullet holes in the car he'd been riding in, one in the rear window and the other in the trunk. The victim, who was not identified, was taken to a Tulsa hospital to be treated for the wound.
Doctors located a second gunshot wound with a bullet lodged in the victim's buttocks. The victim and the two others in the car told officers they heard multiple "popping" noises while driving on I-44 and saw a maroon Toyota Camry exit at Highway 75. Police said the victim was not seriously injured.

Demons burning down the house

A man from Ephrata Township, Pennsylvania, who testified that demons and aliens were responsible for burning down his family’s home, will spend up to 20 years in prison. Judge Donald Totaro on Monday sentenced Joshua A. Witman, 34, to 5 to 20 years in state prison for setting fire to the house on June 15, 2014, according to the Lancaster County District Attorney’s office. Witman lived at the home with his mother. He was also was ordered to pay $91,000 in restitution for costs to rebuild the home.
Witman told police at the time there were aliens living in walls of the home and a portal for demons in the basement, where he ignited a box of chopped firewood with a lighter and transmission fluid, according to testimony. First Assistant District Attorney Christopher Larsen said Witman endangered the lives of every firefighter who worked to extinguish the blaze.
Witman has a history of heroin abuse and a criminal record that dates to 1999, Larsen said. He was seen riding a bicycle away from the home, minutes before neighbors saw smoke billowing from it. Totaro convicted Witman of a felony arson charge after a one-day, non-jury trial. The fire seriously damaged the home’s basement and first floor. It also killed a cat. Witman had lived in the home for 25 years. His mother wasn’t home at the time of the fire.