Man Threatens To Kill Mother With Prosthetic Arms

AKRON, Ohio -- Police said Robert McMullen, 33, was threatening to kill his mother with his prosthetic metal hooks. McMullen's father tried to fend off his son by hitting him with a board, then locked him outside the house after calling 911 

McMullen fired a rifle at two officers who responded to the disturbance call. McMullen shot one of the officers in the torso underneath the bullet-proof vest. The other officers returned fire, killing McMullen.

McMullen reportedly lost his arms from the elbows down in a 1996 accident in which he detonated a homemade grenade after a five-mile chase with West Virginia state troopers over a traffic violation.

GUINEA-PIG COOKS GET SKEWERED

October 17, 2004 --The New York City Parks Department cracked down on vendors serving skewered guinea pigs at an Ecuadorian festival in Flushing Meadows, leaving festival organizers feeling burned.

According to an internal Parks Department memo, the agency gave out three summonses and closed down two vendor booths at the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park festival on Aug. 9 because vendors were selling cuy, an Ecuadorian delicacy.

Costing $40 per plate, the dish featured salad, potatoes, rice and skewered guinea pig.

Computer problems reported at Broward early voting sites

By Jean-Paul Renaud & Sarah Halasz
sun-sentinel.com
Posted October 18 2004, 3:50 PM EDT

As long lines gathered at polls, early voters at nine of Broward County's 14 sites ran into computer-generated problems on Monday.

All 14 of the branch offices had problems with the database connection. Some reported waiting in lines up to 2-1/2 hours to vote.

Voters at several sites said poll workers told them the problems started 20 minutes to 30 minutes after the early polling stations opened at 8:30 a.m.

At the Tamarac branch public library, where voting stopped after the computer glitch, Sally Zwanger, a poll watcher, said at one point there were 63 people in line, most of whom had gone home without voting by 11 a.m.

She also said waiting voters were told at 8:30 a.m. that every voting location in Broward County was closed. But she found out after calling the Broward County Elections Office headquarters that the Plantation location and four others were still open.

Susan Emert waited for two hours - starting at 8:20 a.m. -- before she finally had to leave for work.

Most of the voters waiting in the line were seniors, and many shared Emert's frustration. They repeatedly uttered phrases such as, "This is ridiculous," and "This is so frustrating."

Lucien Gennaro, a police aide in Coral Springs, waited for an hour at a public library to cast his vote Monday morning, before he had to leave for work.

In Palm Beach County,  a state legislator said she wasn't given a complete absentee ballot when she asked not to use the electronic touch-screen machines.

 State Rep. Shelley Vana, D-Lantana, said the paper absentee ballot she received was missing one of its two pages, including the proposed amendments to the state constitution. She said election workers were indifferent when she pointed out the oversight.

In Orange County, the computer system that lists voters crashed, paralyzing voting in Orlando and its immediate suburbs.

Wanna get up close and gross with animals?

By The Associated Press
(10/18/04 - CHICAGO, IL) — "Animal Grossology," the new exhibition at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, is the work of Advanced Exhibits, a division of Advanced Animatronics 

Animal smells are left to the visitor's discretion; in small squeeze-bottle atomizers. The chemical used by one cockroach variety to recognize fellow species members has a tang of maraschino cherries, and the musk deer's sexual attractant is a common perfume ingredient. The fox urine (for territorial marking) and the skunk scent (for defense) are a bit more intense

 The "Blood Slurpers" display has large scale models of a tick, mosquito and leech sitting on a huge mock-up of a human arm. Using hand pumps, visitors can fill them with stage blood. Videos and audio tapes, meanwhile, give lessons on Lyme disease, West Nile virus and the medical use of leeches.

In another display, an outraged robot penguin finds the "calling cards" of several other zoo denizens on his otherwise clean ice and asks the viewers to help him match each pile with the perpetrator, using such clues as size and diet.

"The Slime Game" features a sea cucumber, snail and hagfish eel competing in a television game show for the title of world's slimiest creature.

Another display shows a life-size cow, chewing her cud, while a clear plastic bubble in her side reveals a mechanized model of her four-stomach digestive tract.

A computer game allows viewers to dissect owl pellets and identify the owl's prey by pulling out the tiny bone fragments and reassembling them. There's also a display on cat hairballs and a huge animatronic housefly that sits on an enormous cookie and discusses (in the character of the late Rodney Dangerfield) his habit of regurgitating on his food to liquefy it.

A smaller separate display is devoted to the odd egg-protection behavior of certain species of frogs. There is also a 60-foot tapeworm.

"How can Kerry be flip-flopping all the time and maintain his position as the No. 1 liberal in the Senate? You can't have it both ways."

-Michael Moore

SANTA FE, N.M. (Reuters) - A happy colony of New Mexico prairie dogs hit pay dirt in a cemetery full of historic skeletons, causing grief for town officials who want to protect the final resting place of the state's notables.

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Nurse pleads guilty to raping disabled girl

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER NEWS SERVICES

SPOKANE -- A registered nurse pleaded guilty to raping a severely disabled 12-year-old girl in his care.

Raymond C.Carl Hughes, 35, was supposed to be caring for the quadriplegic girl at her north Spokane home when he raped her last April, prosecutors allege.

Hughes pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree child rape and one count of second-degree rape.

Hughes faces a minimum sentence of 6 1/2 to 8 1/2 years in prison, with a possible maximum of life in prison as a serious sex offender.

The girl, who is dying of complications from cerebral palsy, can't speak or move.

by Dr. Glen Harold Stassen  

Abortion was decreasing. When President Bush took office, the nation's abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4% decline during the 1990s. This was an average decrease of 1.7% per year, mostly during the latter part of the decade.

Enter George W. Bush in 2001.

I found three states that have posted multi-year statistics through 2003, and abortion rates have risen in all three: Kentucky's increased by 3.2% from 2000 to 2003. Michigan's increased by 11.3% from 2000 to 2003. Pennsylvania's increased by 1.9% from 1999 to 2002. I found 13 additional states that reported statistics for 2001 and 2002. Eight states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6% average increase), and five saw a decrease (4.3% average decrease).

Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

I see three contributing factors:

First, two thirds of women who abort say they cannot afford a child  With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed.

Second, half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate.  As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises.

Third, women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency, abortion increases.

Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow without health care, health insurance, jobs, child care, and a living wage.

Glen Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary

HEY EVERYBODY!  When you sign in, please be careful that you sign in to www.xanga.com, instead of xagna.tk.  That's the location of a current Xanga virus.  In fact, if you go there now, you will see a login screen.  They WILL steal your password and modify your site.

HOW THE VIRUS WORKS:  If your site is infected, it replaces all of your links with links to xagna.tk.  When someone tries to add a comment, it redirects them to the page.  It looks exactly like the normal login page, so they submit their username and password.  With the username and password, xagna.tk logs into their site and adds the malicious code to the bottom of Website Stats.

TO SEE IF YOU'RE INFECTED:  Go to your Look & Feel page.  Go to Website Stats, scroll down to the bottom, and see if there are a bunch of blank lines followed by something that looks like a flooble chatterbox with id=bob.  If you see it, DELETE IT and CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD.

From joe_x

PUBLIC ANNOUCEMENT
There’s been recent word of an evil script placed in the Look & Feel section of everyone’s Xanga. It seems to spread when you visit a site that has been affected by the script, placed there by a hacker who has nothing more to do than mess with people’s journals. Check your look & feel section for anything suspicious, particularly at the very end of your input boxes. It is usually disguised as a bunch of blank lines followed by a script that says: “flooble chatterbox” with "id=bob." Simply erase the entire script and change your password immediately.

**Reminder: it can be placed in more than one input box so make sure you check all of them. 

From MissJSerenity

H.P. Lovecraft

        The daemon said that he would take me home
        To the pale, shadowy land I half recalled
        As a high place of stair and terrace, walled
        With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,
        While miles below a maze of dome on dome
        And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.
        Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled
        On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.

        All this he promised, and through sunset's gate
        He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame,
        And red-gold thrones of gods without a name
        Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.
        Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:
        "Here was your home," he mocked, "when you had sight!"

From Fungi From Yuggoth by H.P. Lovecraft