Customs officers at Cairo's airport have detained a man bound for Saudi Arabia who was trying to smuggle 700 live snakes on a plane, airport authorities said.
Perhaps that snake man's next stop on route was Florida.
U.S. federal and state officials are beginning the final phase of a two-year project to eradicate the Gambian pouched rats, which can grow to the size of a cat and began reproducing in the remote area about eight years ago.
"This is the only place in the United States where this is occurring," said Gary Witmer, a biologist with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado.
A former exotic pet breeder, living in a small house, bred the species and allowed the critters to escape.
Without eradication, wildlife officials fear the rats could eventually make their way onto the Florida mainland where they could quickly destroy fragile ecosystems.
"They could cause a lot of damage," Witmer said.
The African rats can weigh 6 to 9 pounds (2.7-4 kg), with body shades ranging from brown to gray. They have large ears, black, beady eyes, hamster-like pouched facial cheeks, sharp teeth and distinctive long, stringy and white-marked tails.
This week, wildlife officials began baiting 1,000 traps laid out in a grid with narrow four-inch (10-cm) openings. Peanut butter, almond extract and anise are the lures.
Most of the rats will die quickly in underground burrows after ingesting the bait laced with toxic zinc phosphide.
LONDON - A thick cloud of bees was sucked into the engine of a passenger plane en route to Portugal, forcing the airline to abandon the trip and grounding passengers for 11 hours, a company executive said Saturday.
David Skillicorn, managing director of Palmair, said the swarm was spotted off Britain's Bournemouth coast shortly before the Boeing 737 left on Thursday. "Some witnesses claimed there were around 20,000 bees," he said.
"The pilot experienced an engine surge about an hour into the flight," Skillicorn said. "He returned to Bournemouth and we found what appeared to be a large number of bees smeared inside the engine."
Around 200 passengers were delayed while the company carried out repairs and eventually replaced the aircraft, Skillicorn said.
I'm glad everyone's safe from that. I can't help feeling for sorry for those bees. Especially if they were honey bees.
Pigs are delicious! I, for one, don't want a dangerous animal so much larger than myself running around on my continent. If I wanted that, I'd go live in Africa.
I don't think anyone's trying to argue that pigs aren't delicious. But it is fairly creepy that the kid feels good about killing things.
If they've only just gotten around to setting traps during the final phase, I wonder what the first couple phases were. I bet phase 2 was dropping giant AOL discs on them.
What the hell were 20000 bees doing off the coast of Britain anyway? There's no way there could be a single hive that large anywhere close to peoplel. Stef, I think you owe us some answers.
What the hell were 20000 bees doing off the coast of Britain anyway?
It must have been a bee cult commiting a mass suicide. This also explains all the bees disappearing, as they all left their hives to go to the cult compound.
Follow-up on the giant pig story. Not really amusing, but INFORMATIVE.
Monster Pig farm-raised, not wild
The Associated Press
Published on: 06/01/07
FRUITHURST, Ala. — Before he became known as "Monster Pig," the 1,051-pound hog shot in Delta was known by another name.
Fred.
Rhonda and Phil Blissitt told The Anniston Star on Thursday evening that, on April 29, four days before the hog was killed, Fred was one of many livestock on their farm.
Late Thursday evening, their claims were confirmed by Andy Howell, Game Warden for the Alabama Department of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries.
"I didn't want to stir up anything," Rhonda Blissitt said. "I just wanted the truth to be told. That wasn't a wild pig."
Added Phil Blissitt:
"If it went down in the record book, it would be deceiving, and we'd know that for the rest of our lives."
The monster hog gained worldwide acclaim after he was harvested by 11-year-old Jamison Stone, a Pickensville native, with a .50-caliber pistol on May 3 at the Lost Creek Plantation, LLC, a hunting preserve in Delta. The big boar was hunted inside a large, low-fence enclosure and fired upon 16 times by Stone, who struck the animal nearly a half-dozen times during the three-hour hunt.
The Blissitts said they were unaware that the hog generating all the media attention was once theirs. It wasn't until Howell spoke with Phil Blissitt that the pieces of the puzzle came together.
Phil Blissitt recalled Howell asking him about the now-famous hog.
"Did you see that pig on TV?" Phil Blissitt recalled Howell asking him. "I said, 'Yeah, I had one about that size.' He said, 'No, that one is yours.'
"That's when I knew."
Phil Blissitt purchased the pig for his wife as a Christmas gift in December of 2004. From 6 weeks old, they raised the pig as it grew to its enormous size.
Not long ago, they decided to sell off all of their pigs. Eddy Borden, owner of Lost Creek Plantation, purchased Fred.
Attempts by The Star to reach Borden were unsuccessful.
While Rhonda Blissitt was somewhat in the dark about the potential demise of her pet, Phil Blissitt said he was under the understanding that it would breed with other female pigs and then "probably be hunted."
Many other of their former pigs — like their other farm animals — had been raised for the purpose of agricultural harvest.
As the Blissitts recounted the events of the last two days, they told stories and made many references to the gentleness of their former "pet."
From his treats of canned sweet potatoes to how their grandchildren would play with him, their stories painted the picture of a gentle giant. They even talked about how their small Chihuahua would get in the pen with him and come out unscathed.
"But if they hadn't fed him in a while," Rhonda Blissitt said, "he could have gotten irate."
Phil Blissitt said he became irritated when they learned about all the doubters who said photos of Fred were doctored.
"That was a big hog," he said.
The information of the pig's previous owner came out on the same day that officials from the Fish and Wildlife concluded their investigation of the hunt. They concluded that nothing illegal happened under the guidelines of Alabama law.
Allan Andress, enforcement chief for the Alabama Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries Division, said they learned the hog's origin as the investigation unfolded.
"We were able to determine that he came from a domesticated environment," he said. "So, he was not feral to start with. Therefore, he would not violate our feral swine trapping and relocating rule."
Mike Stone, Jamison's father, contends that he was unaware of the origin of the pig. Before, during and after the hunt — and until late Thursday night, when contacted by The Star — Mike Stone was under the impression that the hog was feral.
"We were told that it was a feral hog," Mike Stone said, "and we hunted it on the pretense that it was a feral hog."
By ALAN COWELL
Published: June 7, 2007
LONDON, June 6 — It was said to provoke epileptic seizures. Someone compared it to a broken swastika or “some sort of comical sex act between ‘The Simpsons.’ ” The mayor was not amused.
The rollout of London’s new logo for the 2012 Olympics, in other words, has not been an unalloyed triumph.
Two days after it was introduced on Monday, the logo — a composition of subway-graffitilike, jagged-edged cutouts roughly denoting the figures 2012, in pink and yellow — has become front-page news. One newspaper, The Sun, ran a competition to discover whether amateur designers — two of whom it identified in its pages as a monkey and a blind woman — could do better.
An online petition gathered 35,000 signatures to protest the logo and demand that it be replaced. But perhaps the brouhaha evoked some other considerations, most notably concerning Britons’ ambivalent attitude not just to winning the right to stage the Olympics, but also to dealing with innovation, design and success itself.
The logo “is not simple, it is not memorable, it is not beautiful,” the columnist Magnus Linklater wrote in The Times of London. “It is bound to be a success.”
To the 2012 Organizing Committee, “the new emblem is dynamic, modern and flexible.”
An animated version on a Web site was withdrawn after advocacy groups representing people with epilepsy said that flashing lights provoked more than 10 seizures among the estimated 23,000 people vulnerable to a photo-sensitive form of epilepsy.
The display was withdrawn, but the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who had reportedly refused to endorse the logo, also took issue with the $800,000 tab for designing it without a study of its impact.
“If you employ someone to design a car and it kills you, you’re pretty unhappy about that,” he said. “If you employ someone to design a logo for you and they haven’t done a basic health check, you have to ask what they do for their money.”
On Web sites, critics registered sharp opposition. “It resembles a swastika and looks like graffiti — two things London is not about and should not aspire to,” said an opponent, Peter Donovan.
The organizing committee insisted that it would not withdraw the logo. Indeed, Sebastian Coe, the committee chairman, called it “an invitation to take part and be involved.”
It was an invitation that British newspapers accepted with glee.
Most newspapers said Wednesday that their readers had sent in their own versions. The Sun published a display of five alternative designs, one painted by a macaque monkey named Katie. Another was reported as having come from Deborah Jones, 36, who was said to be blind.
As a columnist, Jane Moore, wrote in The Sun, the Olympic organizers say, “It’ll grow on us.”
“So does foot fungus,” she added.
But might the response have said more about a conservative nation’s resistance to newness? Or could the reaction have touched also on a deep-seated and curmudgeonly reluctance to play host to a venture like the Olympics without forecasting its doom well in advance?
“When something is so swingingly attacked as the 2012 logo has been, it tells you more about the people doing the attacking, and their taste, than about the design in question,” said Michael Wolff, the co-founder of Wolff Olins, the branding agency that designed the logo. “Prejudice is comfortable and lazy.”
Mr. Wolff, who has since formed a separate company, went on to say in The Evening Standard, “I think this petulant reaction will subside and pride will take its place.”
A NEW York man has sued the makers of a health drink, saying it has given him a permanent erection for the last two years.
Christopher Woods said he drank the vitamin-enriched Boost Plus, made by the Swiss-based Novartis pharmaceutical company, on June 5, 2004.
He woke up the next morning "with an erection that would not subside" and sought treatment of the condition, called severe priapism, court papers say.
Mr Woods, 29, had a penile implant to move blood from one area to another, acccording to the Associated Press.
The lawsuit filed yesterday said Mr Woods later had problems that required him to have blood vessels in his penis closed off, a procedure that lessens the likelihood of an erection.
Novartis's Boost Plus website described the drink as "a great-tasting, high calorie, nutritionally complete oral supplement for people who require extra energy and protein in a limited volume", in vanilla, chocolate and strawberry.
Mr Woods' lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, names Novartis Consumer Health Inc as a defendant.
A spokeswoman for Novartis said the company was aware of the lawsuit but would not comment.
Good Lord.... THAT THING WAS ANIMATED???? That things friggin UGLY as it is, if the colors were flahing, it'd look like a 4th graders blog about his pet rat named "GRAGADSFOINCOIADJFJFMASIDFASODI!".
EDIT: 2 things:
1. I can say confidently that he won't take this lying down.
2. Takeru's new avvy makes him look french... *eyes narrow* a little too french.
Yea, you get caught drunk driving, then do it again while still on probation for the first one and you're all butt hurt that you have to go to some froofy white collar county jail for a month. (I mean, there's no way they put her in a Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison.) Any non-insanely rich person would likely be in for at least a year, quit yer whining and QUIT DRUNK DRIVING. How warped does one's mind have to be to not get that they're endangering peoples lives... repeatedly... and something has to be done about it.
Comments
Perhaps that snake man's next stop on route was Florida.
Florida tries to wipe out cat-sized African rats
Swarm of bees turns back British plane
I'm glad everyone's safe from that. I can't help feeling for sorry for those bees. Especially if they were honey bees.
If they've only just gotten around to setting traps during the final phase, I wonder what the first couple phases were. I bet phase 2 was dropping giant AOL discs on them.
What the hell were 20000 bees doing off the coast of Britain anyway? There's no way there could be a single hive that large anywhere close to peoplel. Stef, I think you owe us some answers.
EDIT: If John Basedow was on the plane, I think I may have proved it already.
Also? I don't see how a company could stay in business charging $800,000 for logos. But if people buy 'em, maybe I should look into that...
It looks like oral sex.
I wonder if it'll stand up in court? (Sorry)
and, I'm not going to lie. Takeru's new avatar is pretty kick ass.
Good Lord.... THAT THING WAS ANIMATED???? That things friggin UGLY as it is, if the colors were flahing, it'd look like a 4th graders blog about his pet rat named "GRAGADSFOINCOIADJFJFMASIDFASODI!".
EDIT: 2 things:
1. I can say confidently that he won't take this lying down.
2. Takeru's new avvy makes him look french... *eyes narrow* a little too french.
I really don't understand how anyone could find her attractive.