Paul Michael Callahan, 32, was arrested in Boston in August after, according to police, a short career as a bank robber, which started badly when Callahan tried to hold up the copy shop at Boston University, believing it was a bank.  (The clerk asked, "Do you know you're in a copy store and all we can give you is copies?") 

Callahan fled but allegedly robbed a Fleet Bank branch a few minutes later (getting less than $200) and then a Citizen's Bank branch, clearing about $2,500.  However, the red-dye pack from Citizen's exploded, distracting him, and then his getaway car got a flat tire, and police found him hiding in a gas station.

-News of the Weird

 

 

HARARE (Reuters) - Villagers have taken revenge on a lion that killed their livestock by barbecuing and eating it, Zimbabwe's state-owned Sunday Mail says.

"It ate our animals, so it is only fair that we eat it too," a villager said. The paper said on Sunday some believed they would get lion-like bravery and strength from the meat.

The lion -- part of a pride that terrorised the Zimbabwean village for more than six months -- was shot dead by parks authorities. In an unusual move, villagers demanded the carcass.

 

Asia Faces Living Nightmare from Climate Change

Mon Nov 29, 8:42 AM ET

By David Fogarty

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - In the decades to come, Asia -- home to more than half the world's 6.3 billion people -- will lurch from one climate extreme to another, with impoverished farmers battling droughts, floods, disease, food shortages and rising sea levels.

Global warming and changes to weather patterns are already occurring and there is enough excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to drive climate change for decades to come.

This image shows how black carbon can change rainfall patterns over the northern and southern regions of China. The blue colors indicate regions in which the simulations yield a tendency for increased rainfall by as much as 10 inches over the summer. Other regions (brown colors) have decreased rainfall by as much as several inches or more.

  

According to predictions, glaciers will melt faster, some Pacific and Indian Ocean islands will have to evacuate or build sea defenses, storms will become more intense and insect and water-borne diseases will move into new areas as the world warms.

All this comes on top of rising populations and spiraling demand for food, water and other resources. Environmental degradation such as deforestation and pollution will likely magnify the impacts of climate change.

 

The deforestation is occurred in the area around the Ashio copper processing plant in Japan. The processing plant used fuel woods, which was collected from the forest around the plant

Japan was hit by a record 10 typhoons and tropical storms this year, while two-thirds of Bangladesh, parts of Nepal and large areas of northeastern India were flooded, affecting 50 million people, destroying livelihoods and making tens of thousands ill.

The year before, a winter cold snap and a summer heat wave killed more than 2,000 people in India.

India, with a population of just over 1 billion people, is one of the areas most threatened by climate change.

Millions were made homeless by 1998 flooding in Bangladesh

 

Rising sea levels will also bring misery to millions in Asia, causing sea water to inundate fertile rice-growing areas and fresh-water aquifers, making some areas uninhabitable.

India and Bangladesh will have to draw up permanent relocation plans for millions of people.

By 2050, China will have built sea defenses along part of its low-lying, storm-prone southeastern coast, while the North of the country faced increasing desertification.

 

The Gobi Desert in China expanded by 20,230 square miles between 1994 and 1999, creeping closer to the capital Beijing.

About 15 percent of the country would be under water if sea levels rose by a yard in the next century.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Asia in the future will be the shortage of clean water. Asia accounts for 60 percent of the world's population but has only 36 percent of the globe's fresh water.

Indian tribal women fill drinking water in their pitchers. According to U. N. estimates, around 2.3 billion people in some 50 nations in the world will be saddled with severe water shortages by 2020 because of global warming. 
 

Rapid melting of glaciers poses a major threat to the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of China.

Seven major rivers, including the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra and the Mekong, begin in the Himalayas and the glacial meltwater during summer months is crucial to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people downstream.

Mount Everest  should be put on a United Nations danger list as global warming threatens the Himalayan region, environmentalists said on November 16, 2004. Friends of the Earth said melting glaciers had swollen Himalayan lakes and could create floods. 

But many of these glaciers are melting quickly and will be unable to act as reservoirs that moderate river flows. This means less water in the dry season and the chance for more extreme floods during the wet season.

Fears of mass migration have already prompted the Pentagon and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, among others, to study the risk from climate-induced mass migration.

"As global and local carrying capacities are reduced, tensions could mount around the world," it said. This could lead some wealthier nations becoming virtual fortresses to preserve their resources.

"Less fortunate nations, especially those with ancient enmities with their neighbors, may initiate struggles for access to food, clean water, or energy."

 

 

 

-New Yorker

 

 

PRESIDENT'S PLEA: FIND NESSIE

By Toby Mcdonald

Then-US president Bill Clinton gave the go-ahead for his Psychic Spying Unit to find Nessie as part of a £15million operation.

Operation Nessie was launched to establish whether psychic contact could be made with alien life forms.

The spies' activities were kept secret from regular army top brass with reports going directly to Washington.

 It was led by General Albert Stubblebine, Chief of Intelligence for the US Army, and Major Ed Dames. The unit had begun investigating UFOs and the possibility alien races - particularly Martians - were living among humans.

The major believed that Martians had been resettled on Earth thousands of years ago by leaders of the Galactic Federation - an ancient race who had been visiting the planet since the age of the dinosaurs.

"He had targeted the Loch Ness Monster for psychic contact. He spent a long time trying to reach the monster but he could only find a faint trace of her. Based on his work he decided she must be the ghost of a dinosaur.

 Stubblebine was relieved of his position after he started to believe he could levitate and pass through walls.

He frequently sported black eyes and bruises because of his habit of running at walls full tilt

 

 

Hospital in Germany Treats 21,000 GIs

Mon Nov 29, 2:40 PM ET BERLIN - About 21,000 American soldiers, most of them from units sent to Iraq have been treated at the biggest U.S. military hospital outside the United States since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, the hospital said Monday. The Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany handles many U.S. combat casualties, but it did not break down the figure into battlefield and noncombat patients. Landstuhl doctors treated 17,878 U.S. soldiers from Iraq and 3,085 from Afghanistan through Sunday, hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw told The Associated Press. The patients were treated for anything from gunshot wounds to noncombat ailments such as kidney stones, she said.

 

 

Blind car thief strikes again

Police have arrested Romania's blind car thief for stealing a car and crashing into a tree for the second time in one month.

But this time, Alin Prica, 24, managed to drive the stolen car 25 miles before crashing into a tree.

Prica allegedly stole the car with another blind pal and a sighted friend in the passenger seat telling him which direction to drive.

Earlier this month, Prica stole a car and managed to drive it for almost a mile by himself before smashing into a tree and knocking himself out.

 

 

 

140 YEARS AGO TODAY

Nov 29 1864

At dawn on November 29, 1864, approximately 700 U.S. volunteer soldiers commanded by Colonel John M. Chivington attacked a village of about 500 Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory.

John M.Chivington was ordained in 1844. He accepted whatever assignment the church gave him. For a time in 1853 he assisted in a Methodist missionary expedition to the Wyandot Indians in Kansas.

In 1860, he was made the presiding elder of the Rocky Mountain District of the Methodist Church and moved to Denver to build a church and found a congregation.

Colonel John M. Chivington

When the Civil War broke out, Colorado's territorial governor, William Gilpin, offered Chivington a commission as a chaplain, but he declined the "praying" commission and asked for a "fighting" position instead.

After the defeat of the Confederacy's Western forces, Chivington was a leading advocate of quick statehood for Colorado, and the likely Republican candidate for the state's first Congressional seat.

Kiowa and Cheyenne leaders pose in the White House conservatory with Mary Todd Lincoln (standing far right) on March 27, 1863, during meetings with President Abraham Lincoln, who hoped to prevent their lending aid to Confederate forces. The two Cheyenne chiefs seated at the left front, War Bonnet and Standing In the Water, would be killed the next year in the Sand Creek Massacre. -Archives of THE WEST

 

Under the terms of the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, Cheyenne and Arapaho territory included much of the front range of Colorado. But major gold strikes in the mountains west of Denver in 1858 and 1859 precipitated a tide of Euro-American immigration.

Chivington took advantage of tensions between Colorado's burgeoning white population and the Indians by blasting the territorial governor and others who counseled peace and treaty-making with the Cheyenne. In August of 1864, he declared that "the Cheyennes will have to be roundly whipped -- or completely wiped out -- before they will be quiet. I say that if any of them are caught in your vicinity, the only thing to do is kill them."

A month later, while addressing a gathering of church deacons, he dismissed the possibility of making a treaty with the Cheyenne: "It simply is not possible for Indians to obey or even understand any treaty. I am fully satisfied, gentlemen, that to kill them is the only way we will ever have peace and quiet in Colorado."

Chivington led a regiment of Colorado Volunteers to the Cheyenne's Sand Creek reservation, where a band led by Black Kettle, a well-known "peace" chief, was encamped.

Black Kettle and other Cheyenne chiefs conclude peace talks at Fort Weld, Colorado, in September 1864.

 

 Federal army officers had promised Black Kettle safety if he would return to the reservation, and he was in fact flying the American flag and a white flag of truce over his lodge, but Chivington ordered an attack on the unsuspecting village nonetheless.

Using small arms and howitzer fire, the troops drove the people out of their camp. While many managed to escape the initial onslaught, others, particularly noncombatant women, children, and the elderly fled into and up the bottom of the dry streambed. The soldiers followed, shooting at them as they struggled through the sandy earth. At a point several hundred yards above the village, the people frantically excavated pits and trenches along either side of the streambed to protect them.

A modern view of the Sand Creek site.
(National Park Service) 

Some attempted to fight back with whatever weapons they had managed to retrieve from the camp, and at several places along Sand Creek the soldiers shot the people from opposite banks and presently brought forward the howitzers to blast them from their scant defenses. 

 After hours of fighting, the Colorado volunteers had lost only 9 men in the process of murdering between 200 and 400 Cheyenne, most of them women and children. After the slaughter, they scalped and sexually mutilated many of the bodies, later exhibiting their trophies to cheering crowds in Denver.

 

Chief Black Kettle Moke-Tavoto

Chief Black Kettle survived the attack on his peaceful camp in 1864 by Chivington only to have the same kind of bad luck on the Washita River in Oklahoma at the hands of George A. Custer four years later.  Black Kettle died along with his wife Medicine Woman (who was wounded several times in the Sand Creek Massacre).

Chivington was widely praised for the "battle" at Sand Creek, and honored with a widely-attended parade through the streets of Denver. Soon, however, rumors of drunken soldiers butchering unarmed women and children began to circulate, and at first seemed confirmed when Chivington arrested six of his men and charged them with cowardice in battle.

The six, who included Captain Silas Soule, were in fact militia members who had refused to participate in the massacre and now spoke openly of the carnage they had witnessed. Shortly after their arrest, the U.S. Secretary of War ordered the six men released and Congress began preparing for a formal investigation of Sand Creek.

 

Captain Silas S. Soule 

Soule himself could not be a witness at any of the investigations, because less than a week after his release he was shot from behind and killed on the streets of Denver.

Although Chivington was eventually brought up on court-martial charges for his involvement in the massacre, he was no longer in the U.S. Army and could therefore not be punished.

 In 1883 Chivington re-entered politics with a campaign for a state legislature seat, but charges of his guilt in the Sand Creek massacre forced him to withdraw. He worked as a deputy sheriff until shortly before his death from cancer in 1892.

-http://www.sandcreek.org/massacre.htm

-http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/chivington.htm

-http://www.donvasicek.com/kettle.html

-The Search for the Site of the Sand Creek Massacre

 

 

Orissa snake charmers issue 'venomous' threat

November 24, 2004 17:01 IST

Snake charmers in Orissa, angered by the restrictions imposed on them on catching serpents and displaying them in public, have threatened to let loose hundreds of snakes in the state capital and, if they have their way, also inside the state assembly, if the 'harassment' does not stop.

"Our livelihood depends on catching snakes and displaying them in public, but if it is stopped, what will we do?" Chittaranjan Das, a snake charmer, asked .

"If our problems are not addressed we'll have no option but to release hundreds of snakes in the state capital and also inside the state assembly." 

Wildlife personnel and the police have been cracking down on snake charmers in Orissa, confiscating snakes from their possession.