POINT MARION, Pa. - An 85-year-old woman boldly went for her gun and busted a would-be burglar inside her home, then forced him to call police while she kept him in her sights, police said.

“I just walked right on past him to the bedroom and got my gun,” Leda Smith said.

Smith heard someone break into her home Sunday afternoon and grabbed the .22-calibre revolver she had been keeping by her bed since a neighbour’s home was burglarized a few weeks ago.

“I said ‘What are you doing in my house?’ He just kept saying he didn’t do it,” Smith said.

After the 17-year-old boy called 911, Smith kept holding the gun on him until state police arrived at her home in Springhill Township, about 70 kilometres south of Pittsburgh.

The boy will be charged with attempted burglary and related offences in juvenile court, Trooper Christian Lieberum said. He was not identified because of his age.

“It was exciting,” Smith said. “I just hope I broke up the (burglary) ring because they have been hitting a lot of places around here.”

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2008/08/19/6506426-ap.html

HALIFAX - A Halifax-area lake is missing its resident dragon.

Police say the papier mache dragon’s head - affectionately known as Emily - was stolen Monday night from its summer home in Miller Lake.

The creature’s green head and large black eyes can usually be seen peering out of the water along Highway 102.

A dragon has been keeping watch at Miller Lake for years, although various incarnations of Emily have also gone missing in the past.

RCMP Cpl. Joe Taplin says someone would need a boat in order to swipe the dragon.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2008/08/19/6505241-cp.html

Wild dolphins tail-walk on water

A wild dolphin is apparently teaching other members of her group to walk on their tails, a behaviour usually seen only after training in captivity.

The tail-walking group lives along the south Australian coast near Adelaide.

One of them spent a short time after illness in a dolphinarium 20 years ago and may have picked up the trick there.

Scientists studying the group say tail-walk tuition has not been seen before, and suggest the habit may emerge as a form of “culture” among this group.

“We can’t for the life of us work out why they do it,” said Mike Bossley from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS), one of the scientists who have been monitoring the group on the Port River estuary.

“We’re doing systematic observations now to determine if there’s something that may trigger it, but so far we haven’t found anything,” he told BBC News.

Rich culture

In the 1980s, Billie, one of the females in the group, spent a few weeks in a local dolphinarium recovering from malnutrition and sickness, a consequence of having been trapped in a marina lock.

She received no training there, but may have seen others tail-walking.

Now, other females in the group have picked up the habit. It is seen rarely in the wild, and the obvious inference is that they have learned it from Billie.

“This indicates that they do learn from each other, which is not a surprise really, but it does also seem that they exhibit elements of what in humans we would call ‘cultural’ behaviour,” said Dr Bossley.

“These are things that groups develop and are passed between individuals and that come to define those groups, such as language or dancing; and it would seem that among the Port River dolphins we may have an incipient tail-walking culture.”

The “cultural” transmission of ideas and skills has been documented in apes, while dolphins off the coast of Western Australia are known to teach their young to use sponges as an aid when gathering food.

It reminds of when the U.S. sent corn to the Germans after WWII, and they were insulted, because they regarded it as animal feed.  To flip the coin around, if the people in the U.S. were starving someday, and China showed us its mercy by sending us truckloads of rats for us to eat, I’d feel similarly insulted.

Delicacy

Mr Prakash says his proposals to popularise rat meat eating are intended to uplift their social-economic condition.

People now prefer to eat rat meat instead of chicken or goat as it comes cheaper and is more tasty and healthy

Vijay Prakash

“There are twin advantages of this proposal. First, we can save about half of our food grain stocks by catching and eating rats and secondly we can improve the economic condition of the Musahar community,” he told the BBC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lvqeyqnf-o

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7557107.stm

Back to school: Shaky economy hits kids

By LIBBY QUAID, AP Education Writer Mon Aug 18, 6:39 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Hard times and higher fuel prices will follow kids back to school this fall.
Children will walk farther to the bus stop, pay more for lunch, study from old textbooks and wear last year’s clothes. Field trips? Forget about it.

This year, it could cost nearly twice as much to fuel the yellow buses that rumble to school each morning. If you think it’s expensive to fill up a sport utility vehicle, try topping off a tank that is two or even three times as big.

At the same time, costs for air conditioning and heating, cafeteria food and classroom supplies are mounting, all because of the shaky economy. And parents have their own tanks to fill.

The extra costs present a tricky math problem: Where can schools subtract to keep costs under control?

___

In rural Minnesota, one district is skipping classes every Monday to save fuel. On the other days, classes will be about 10 minutes longer.

“I think it’s a great opportunity,” said Candice Jaenisch, whose two sons and daughter will be making the switch. “You’re cutting expenses that really don’t affect school.”

The other option for the district — Maccray, an acronym for Maynard, Clara City and Raymond — was to start cutting electives. A shorter week will save at least $65,000 in fuel, superintendent Greg Schmidt said.

There is still a cost. Kids will have to stay awake and alert later in the day, and some parents will need to find day care on Mondays. But it’s a small district, with 700 kids, and many parents are self-employed with jobs in farming or construction.

“I really don’t know that there are that many people with set hours Monday through Friday,” Jaenisch said.

Nationwide, at least 14 other districts are switching to four-day weeks, and dozens more are considering it, according to a recent survey by the American Association of School Administrators.

About 100 districts made the switch years ago, in many cases because of the 1970s oil crisis.

___

Parents have been cutting back all summer. For back-to-school clothes, Heidi McLean shopped at outlets and the Marshalls discount chain for her son and daughter, high school students in Eureka, Calif.

“But this year, I’m forcing the kids to reuse their backpacks,” McLean said. “They each cost $50. They like the special cool ones, and they’re still holding up.”

Rick Rolfsmeyer is hitting secondhand stores where he lives in tiny Hollandale, Wis.

“I’ve got two teenage boys and they like the brand names,” he said. “They shan’t expect that this year. We’re a cheap bunch here at this house, anyway.”

Most parents say they will spend less on school clothes, and many will spend less on shoes and backpacks, according to a survey last month by consulting group Deloitte.

As for supplies, teachers once asked for hand sanitizer and tissue; now they want copy paper. Lenelle Cruse, the state PTA president in Florida, said last year’s budget was so tight, Jacksonville schools actually had a toilet paper drive.

___

Yet parents are being asked to do more even as they try to cut back.

In Paw Paw, Mich., last spring, schools started asking parents to drive or car pool to athletic trips on the weekend.

In Waterford, Conn., parents might have to pay for annual trips to New York or Boston. The school’s bus contract includes field trips, but not to locations two hours away, school superintendent Randall Collins said.

Now, instead of visiting Revolutionary War landmarks in each city, students will probably visit nearby Hartford to see the Connecticut Capitol or the Mark Twain house.

Nearly half of the schools in the school administrators’ survey said they are curtailing field trips.

Montgomery County, Md., is cutting funds for its award-winning mathematics team. The district will still pay the coach’s stipend, but parents will have to step in.

___

In Jacksonville, school lunch prices will rise from $1.30 to $2. “It’s a huge jump,” said LaTasha Green-Cobb, whose sons are in the seventh and eighth grade.

As fuel prices have rocketed higher, the cost of food has zoomed, especially for lunch-tray staples like milk. As a result, most schools will charge more for lunch, the School Nutrition Association said.

Schools will still not break even. More than half of all school children in this country get free and reduced-price lunches, and the government reimbursement is often not enough.

As the cost goes up, nutritional quality goes down. It is not cheap to follow federal guidelines for healthy eating; fresh fruits and veggies and whole grains can cost several pennies more per meal.

___

Districts are trying hard to squeeze every drop of savings from buses and through energy conservation to avoid more drastic cuts in sports, activities or even classes. Schools are also cutting staff, in most cases eliminating positions that are vacant.

In Montgomery County and elsewhere, they are holding off on ordering new textbooks.

In places where the district charges for bus service, such as San Jose, Calif., parents will have to pay more. Hundreds of districts are cutting or consolidating bus routes, expanding the distance kids have to walk.

In Oxford, Ala., the bus has always made stops at every house. But this year, kids in fifth grade through 12th grade will have to walk to neighborhood bus stops.

South Carolina expects to spend nearly $11 million meant for new buses on fuel instead — in a state where the average school bus is 12 years old and some are 22.

In California’s Folsom Cordova district, there will be no high school buses this year.

Smaller, more rural districts require smaller measures: Paw Paw, Mich., is moving to all-day kindergarten, eliminating eight bus runs in the middle of the day.

Continued next post:

A stillborn Israeli baby who was pronounced dead by doctors “came back to life” yesterday after spending hours in a hospital refrigerator.

The baby, weighing only 600 grams at birth, spent at least five hours inside one of the hospital’s refrigerated storage units, before her parents, who had taken her to be buried, began noticing some movement.

“We unwrapped her and felt she was moving. We didn’t believe it at first. Then she began holding my mother’s hand and then we saw her open her mouth,” said 26-year-old Faiza Magdoub, the baby’s mother.

The baby was pronounced dead several hours earlier, after doctors at Western Galilee hospital in northern Israel were forced to abort her mother’s pregnancy because of internal bleeding.

Ms Magdoub was 23 weeks into her pregnancy.

“We don’t know how to explain this, so when we don’t know how to explain things in the medical world we call it a miracle, and this is probably what happened,” hospital deputy director Moshe Daniel said.

The baby was then taken to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit for further treatment, but doctors were not sure how long she would live.

Motti Ravid, a professor of internal medicine, told Israel’s Channel 10 that the low temperature inside the cooler had slowed down the baby’s metabolism and likely helped her survive.

SYDNEY, Australia - Australian media say a lost humpback whale calf has bonded with a yacht it seems to think is its mother.

The 1- to 2-month-old calf was first sighted Sunday in waters off north Sydney, and on Monday tried to suckle from a yacht, which it would not leave.

Rescuers towed the yacht out to sea, and the calf finally detached from the boat but still swam nearby, Australian Broadcasting Corp. and Channel 10 television news reported.

The calf appears exhausted but rescuers hope it will continue out to sea and search for its mother or another pod of whales.

“The outlook is not good, but we are giving the calf its only option. It can’t be fed, and in fact we wouldn’t know what to feed it” because it is not weaned, National Parks and Wildlife regional manager Chris McIntosh told ABC radio.

Not looking good.

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/105444/9-Reasons-Your-Salary-Isn't-Higher

9 Reasons Your Salary Isn’t Higher
by Liz Wolgemuth
Friday, July 25, 2008provided byUSNews.com

Forget working hard for the money. Some factors that influence salary are beyond your control

It’s a rare individual who wouldn’t like to make a bit (or a boatload) more money each year. It’s not as if most people don’t try: They work hard. They endeavor to boost their performance—and, it seems to follow, their pay—with training programs and career coaches and workplace mentors. They even schedule weekly tête-à-têtes with their bosses to measure their progress and reassess benchmarks.

The truth is that some factors correlated to higher pay are impossible for a person to control. Studies show that taller people make more money, but can people increase their height? Similarly, can a man become a lefty after decades as a right-handed man? Can a woman become a man? What’s more, there are factors in how you behave outside the office that are associated with higher pay. For example: If you like rum in your Coke, you’ll make more money. (It is, at least, a good argument against prohibition.)

Men seem particularly affected by salary advantages and disadvantages that aren’t related to work performance. Consider the premium paid to some lefties. While researchers at Lafayette College and Johns Hopkins University found no wage difference between left-handed and right-handed women, left-handed men who have some college education average about 13 percent more than right-handed men. Lefty males who are college graduates average as much as 20 percent more than their right-handed counterparts.

A report from the Reason Foundation found that while male and female drinkers make more than nondrinkers, men who hit the bar at least once a month—thereby satisfying the definition of social drinkers—seem to make even more.

Married men tend to make more than men who have never been married. Researchers at the Federal Reserve of St. Louis found there may be a few reasons for this. For one thing, employers may have a bias in favor of married men because marital status might signify a man’s stability or responsibility. Old-fashioned or not, another possibility is that marriage frees men up to focus on work, rather than on household tasks. The most likely reason, however, is that the observable qualities that appeal to an employer are similar to those that appeal to a mate—characteristics such as background, education, and appearance.

Men who choose to go into Christian ministry will find that they dominate the field but make less than their female counterparts. A survey of church employees conducted by Christian Today International’s Your Church ministry found that women made up only 6.3 percent of full-time solo pastor positions, but they reported 10.4 percent higher total compensation.

Women are generally acknowledged to be underdogs in the compensation world, but a report from American Association of University Women Education Foundation noted that women choose college majors that pay less—majors such as education, psychology, and healthcare. Men choose more lucrative majors, like engineering and mathematics.

The pay difference has, however, undergone a surprising shift in some metropolitan areas. Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College, found that New York women in their 20s earned an average of $7,000 less than their male counterparts in 1970 but were making about $5,000 more in 2005.

A 2007 study from University of Northern Iowa looked at 2000 census data and found that cohabitating lesbians earn about 10 percent more annually than married women. They also earn more than cohabitating, unmarried, heterosexual women.

Perhaps the research that suggests the most potential for control over pay has to do with hours logged. Two MSN-Zogby polls found 37 percent of workers with household incomes of $100,000 or more report working between 41 and 50 hours a week, while only 8 percent of those with household income less than $25,000 work as many hours. Of course, there’s plenty that could explain this, as illness, old age, and disability can affect a worker’s hours. But there may be some hope that putting in the time will pay off.

NEW YORK - Pigeons come in many shades in New York City - but purple is typically not one of them.

That’s why animal lover Joe Mora was stunned when he saw a pigeon at a Queens playground that had been painted a violet hue.

The pigeon was taken Friday to licensed wildlife rehabilitator Bobby Horvath.

He says the bird can’t fly because the feathers are completely rigid from the paint. But he adds it’s lucky the bird’s mouth or eyes didn’t get stained.

American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals spokesman Joseph Pentangelo says if the bird was intentionally painted it “certainly” qualifies as animal cruelty.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2008/08/16/6470296-ap.html

Son fights to clear name of executed ‘seductress spy’

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)—She was “The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America,” a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea.

In late June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in on this panicked city, Kim Soo-im was executed by the South Korean military, shot as a “very malicious international spy.” Her deeds, thereafter, only grew in infamy.

In 1950s America, gripped by anticommunist fever, one TV drama told viewers Kim’s “womanly wiles” had been the communists’ “deadliest weapon.” Another teleplay, introduced by host Ronald Reagan, depicted her as Asia’s Mata Hari. Coronet magazine, under the “seductress” headline, reviled her as the Oriental queen of a vast Soviet “Operation Sex.”

Kim Soo-im and her love triangle are gone, buried in separate corners of a turbulent past. But in yellowing U.S. military files stamped “SECRET,” hibernating through a long winter of Cold War, the truth survived. Now it has emerged, a half-century too late to save her.

The record of a confidential 1950 U.S. inquiry and other declassified files, obtained by The Associated Press at the U.S. National Archives, tell a different Kim Soo-im story:

Col. John E. Baird had no access to the supposed sensitive information. Kim had no secrets to pass on. And her Korean lover, Lee Gang-kook, later executed by North Korea, may actually have been an American agent.

The espionage case, from what can be pieced together today, looks like little more than a frame-up.

Her colonel could have defended her, but instead Baird was rushed out of Korea to “avoid further embarrassment,” the record shows. She was left to her fate—almost certainly, the Americans concluded, to be tortured by South Korean police into confessing to things she hadn’t done.

Historians now believe the Seoul regime secretively executed at least 100,000 leftists and supposed sympathizers in 1950. This one death, for one American, remains a living, deeply personal story.

Wonil Kim—son of Kim Soo-im and Col. Baird—is on a quest to bury the myths about his mother, a woman, he says, “with a passion for life, a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned.”

The son, a theology professor at California’s LaSierra University, was the first to discover the declassified U.S. documents. Now he has also found an ally, Seoul movie director Cho Myung-hwa, who plans a feature film on Kim Soo-im.

“He betrayed her,” Cho said of Baird. “He could have testified. But he just flew back stateside to his American family.”

The soft-spoken theologian, 59, and the veteran moviemaker, 63, both say that to grasp the Kim Soo-im story one must understand that young, educated Koreans of the 1930s and 1940s largely favored recasting their feudal country in a leftist mold once rid of their Japanese colonial rulers. But the U.S. Army’s Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, taking charge in southern Korea at World War II’s end, vowed to “stamp out” the communists.

Kim Soo-im, born in 1911, was among the educated elite. An orphan, she was schooled by American missionaries, eventually graduating from Seoul’s prestigious Ewha women’s college.

In 1936, as a female office administrator, she was featured in a Seoul magazine article on the new generation of liberated young women. Smart and fashionable, with a circle of sophisticated, politicized friends, she later met an older married man, Lee Gang-kook, a German-educated intellectual active in Seoul’s leftist movement.

She became his lover, and Lee rose to political prominence after Japan’s defeat. But within a year of the U.S. takeover, he faced arrest as an alleged security risk and fled to communist-run northern Korea.

Kim Soo-im’s fluent English, meanwhile, had made her valuable to the U.S. occupation. She was hired as an assistant by Baird, the Americans’ 56-year-old, Irish-born military police chief. Baird secured a house for her and took to spending nights there, according to Korean and American witnesses in the declassified record.

“She had a baby by Col. Baird,” Kim’s friend Nancy Kim would later tell U.S. interrogators. “We all knew. He slept in the house many times. The baby looks like the father.”

When the U.S. occupation army withdrew in 1949, succeeded by an advisory corps, Baird shifted to assisting the national police, and his American wife joined him in Korea.

Finally, on March 1, 1950, Kim, no longer U.S.-employed, was arrested by South Korean police, joining thousands of others ensnared in President Syngman Rhee’s roundups of leftists.

*** more at link ***