True(?)-Weird News stories

1. Police in Wichita, Kansas, arrested a 22-year-old man at an airport hotel after he tried to pass two (counterfeit) $16 bills.
2. A man in Johannesberg, South Africa, shot his 49-year-old friend in the face, seriously wounding him, while the two practiced shooting beer cans off each other's head.
3. A company trying to continue its five-year perfect safety record showed its workers a film aimed at encouraging the use of safety goggles on the job. According to Industrial Machinery News, the film's depiction of gory industrial accidents was so graphic that twenty-five workers suffered minor injuries in their rush to leave the screening room. Thirteen others fainted, and one man required seven stitches after he cut his head falling off a chair while watching the film.
4. The Chico, California, City Council enacted a ban on nuclear weapons, setting a $500 fine for anyone detonating one within city limits.
5. A bus carrying five passengers was hit by a car in St. Louis, but by the time police arrived on the scene, fourteen pedestrians had boarded the bus and had begun to complain of whiplash injuries and back pain.
6. Swedish business consultant Ulf af Trolle labored 13 years on a book about Swedish economic solutions. He took the 250-page manuscript to be copied, only to have it reduced to 50,000 strips of paper in seconds when a worker confused the copier with the shredder.
7. A convict broke out of jail in Washington D.C., then a few days later accompanied his girlfriend to her trial for robbery. At lunch, he went out for a sandwich. She needed to see him, and thus had him paged. Police officers recognized his name and arrested him as he returned to the courthouse in a car he had stolen over the lunch hour.
8. Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message "He's lying" was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing the "lie detector" was working, the suspect confessed.
9. When two service station attendants in Ionia, Michigan, refused to hand over the cash to an intoxicated robber, the man threatened to call the police. They still refused, so the robber called the police and was arrested.
10. A Los Angeles man who later said he was "tired of walking," stole a steamroller and led police on a 5 mph chase until an officer stepped aboard and brought the vehicle to a stop.
11. A fierce gust of wind blew 45-year-old Vittorio Luise's car into a river near Naples, Italy, in 1983. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore -- where a tree blew over and killed him.
12. Mike Stewart, 31, of Dallas was filming a movie in 1983 on the dangers of low-level bridges when the truck he was standing on passed under a low-level bridge -- killing him.
13. Walter Hallas, a 26-year-old store clerk in Leeds, England, was so afraid of dentists that in 1979 he asked a fellow worker to try to cure his toothache by punching him in the jaw. The punch caused Hallas to fall down, hitting his head, and he died of a fractured skull.
14. Two West German motorists had an all-too-literal head-on collision in heavy fog near the small town of Guetersloh. Each was guiding his car at a snail's pace near the center of the road. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together. Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries. Their cars weren't scratched.
15. George Schwartz, owner of a factory in Providence, R.I., narrowly escaped death when a 1983 blast flattened his factory except for one wall. After treatment for minor injuries, he returned to the scene to search for files. The remaining wall then collapsed on him, killing him.
16. Depressed since he could not find a job, 42-year-old Romolo Ribolla, in 1981, sat in his kitchen near Pisa, Italy, with a gun in his hand threatening to kill himself. His wife pleaded for him not to do it, and after about an hour he burst into tears and threw the gun to the floor. It went off and killed his wife.
17. In 1983, a Mrs. Carson of Lake Kushaqua, N.Y., was laid out in her coffin, presumed dead of heart disease. As mourners watched, she suddenly sat up. Her daughter dropped dead of fright.
18. A man hit by a car in New York in 1977 got up uninjured, but laid back down in front of the car when a bystander told him to pretend he was hurt so he could collect insurance money. The car rolled forward and crushed him to death.
19. Surprised while burgling a house in Antwerp, Belgium, a thief fled out the back door, clambered over a nine-foot wall, dropped down and found himself in the city prison.
20. In 1976 a twenty-two-year-old Irishman, Bob Finnegan, was crossing the busy Falls Road in Belfast, when he was struck by a taxi and flung over its roof. The taxi drove away and, as Finnegan lay stunned in the road, another car ran into him, rolling him into the gutter. It too drove on. As a knot of gawkers gathered to examine the magnetic Irishman, a delivery van plowed through the crowd, leaving in its wake three injured bystanders and an even more battered Bob Finnegan. When a fourth vehicle came along, the crowd wisely scattered and only one person was hit, Bob Finnegan. In the space of two minutes Finnegan suffered a fractured skull, broken pelvis, broken leg, and other assorted injuries. Hospital officials said he would recover.
21. While motorcycling through the Hungarian countryside, Cristo Falatti came up to a railway line just as the crossing gates were coming down. While he sat idling, he was joined by a farmer with a goat, which the farmer tethered to the crossing gate. A few moments later a horse and cart drew up behind Falatti, followed in short order by a man in a sports car. When the train roared through the crossing, the horse startled and bit Falatti on the arm. Not a man to be trifled with, Falatti responded by punching the horse in the head. In consequence the horse's owner jumped down from his cart and began scuffling with the motorcyclist. The horse, which was not up to this sort of excitement, backed away briskly, smashing the cart into the sports car. At this, the sports car driver leaped out of his car and joined the fray. The farmer came forward to try to pacify the three flailing men. As he did so, the crossing gates rose and his goat was strangled. At last report, the insurance companies were still trying to sort out the claims.
22. In a classic case of one thing leading to another, seven men aged eighteen to twenty-nine received jail sentences of three to four years in Kingston-on-Thames, England, in 1979 after a fight that started when one of the men threw a french fry at another while they stood waiting for a train.
23. Hitting on the novel idea that he could end his wife's incessant nagging by giving her a good scare, Hungarian Jake Fen built an elaborate harness to make it look as if he had hanged himself. When his wife came home and saw him she fainted. Hearing a disturbance a neighbor came over and, finding what she thought were two corpses, seized the opportunity to loot the place. As she was leaving the room, her arms laden, the outraged and suspended Mr. Fen kicked her stoutly in the backside. This so surprised the lady that she dropped dead of a heart attack. Happily, Mr. Fen was acquitted of manslaughter and he and his wife were reconciled.
24. An unidentified English woman, according to the London Sunday Express was climbing into the bathtub one afternoon when she remembered she had left some muffins in the oven. Naked, she dashed downstairs and was removing the muffins when she heard a noise at the door. Thinking it was the baker, and knowing he would come in and leave a loaf of bread on the kitchen table if she didn't answer his knock, the woman darted into the broom cupboard. A few moments later she heard the back door open and, to her eternal mortification, the sound of footsteps coming toward the cupboard. It was the man from the gas company, coming to read the meter. "Oh," stammered the woman, "I was expecting the baker." The gas man blinked, excused himself and departed.

Ponderisms

Can you cry under water?



How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?



Why do you have to "put your two cents in".. But it's only a "penny for your thoughts"? Where's that extra penny going to?



Once you're in heaven, do you get stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity?



Why does a round pizza come in a square box?



What disease did cured ham actually have?



How is it that we put man on the moon before we figured out it would be a good idea to put wheels on luggage?



Why is it that people say they "slept like a baby" when babies wake up like every two hours?



If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing?



Why are you IN a movie, but you're ON TV?



Why do people pay to go up tall buildings and then put money in binoculars to look at things on the ground?



Why do doctors leave the room while you change? They're going to see you naked anyway.



Why is "bra" singular and "panties" plural?



Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp, which no decent human being would eat?



If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a stupid song about him?



Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the carpool lane ?



If the professor on Gilligan's Island can make a radio out of a coconut, why can't he fix a hole in a boat?



Why does Goofy stand erect while Pluto remains on all fours? They're both dogs!



If Wile E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that ACME crap, why didn't he just buy dinner?



If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from?



If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?



Do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune?



Why did you just try singing the two songs above?



Why do they call it an asteroid when it's outside the hemisphere, but call it a hemorrhoid when it's in your butt?



Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him for a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?

The perfect Girl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbnE6jb4VUM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flub8vnfFiI

FUnnnyyyy

Life without danger is a waste of oxygen.


I fought the lawn, and the lawn won!


Life in a vacuum sucks


You'll get what's coming to you ... Unless mailed


Two wrongs are only the beginning.


You're only young once; you can be immature f'ever.


"Suicide Hotline...please hold."


All work and no play, will make you a manager.


As I said before, I never repeat myself.


A diplomat thinks twice before saying nothing..


Computer Lie #1: You'll never use all that disk space.


Don't confuse me with facts, my mind's already made up.


Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.


Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.


I'm a nobody, nobody is perfect, therefore I'm perfect.


Just what part of "NO" didn't you understand...?


hAS ANYONE SEEN MY cAPSLOCK KEY?


Sign on baby's bib: SPIT HAPPENS.


ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI!


A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.


Conserve energy... fart in a jar


Girl laid in tomb may soon become mummy..


I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow
isn't looking good either.


There are 3 kinds of people: those who can count and those who can't.

LISTEN UP!!!!

There are 3 kinds of people in this world...those you want things to happen, those that make things happen, and those who just wonder what the hell happened!

WHICH one are you? WHICH one do you want to be?

Suicidal Dreams

Caught inside A web called life The only way To get out soon
is suicide.

You'll never be alone again
You'll never die again
You'll never be born again
And forever be,
Stuck here in eternity


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Welcome to the 'Suicidal Dreams'. I'm not sure if I'm glad you have come, but you're here so please don't leave this page right now. And I have a surprise for you : I will not filter your brains with all those reasons why shouldn't you suicide. My aim is to reveal the truth. And the truth is that WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AFTERLIFE. This page is devoted to all, who don't want to listen to kind and carefull guys. They don't know what do you feel, their feelings differs, their only aim is to keep you alive, noone wants to change your soul, you'll stay alive with the pain, you'll try to suicide again and again and again and one day they will find you Dead. So what are you waiting for? Do it right now. Am I evil? Nope! I want you to feel free in this world.


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1. Who told you suicide is a very bad thing? You're alone in the world, it's the only truth. How many people do you love with all your heart? Two, maybe three, maybe ten.. How many of them do you understand? Not more then 5, and how many can understand you? One? And that one is you. You're alone, nothing connects your with the world, misundestang of it don't allow your to leave.

2. I don't want to interfere into 'holy' problems, but there's no evidence of Christ's existing, moreover, if he lived on the Earth, HE SUICIDED (think about it), and suiciding is the best way to attract an attention. The last chance.

3. Who know what's right and what is wrong? If the afterlife exists, your afterlife probably depends on you age, most of humans die when they're old. Mental condition of a person depends on his age, and maybe the young ones will feel better on the other side. Who knows....

4. Life after death is the greatest mystery of all times. Curiosity is the only reason for suicide for some people. Curiosity is THE FIRST human's instinct, we cannot live without it, and our aim is to know as much as possible. So revealing of the greatest mystery is our aim?

5. We live for pleasure, if you're wise enough you know it. When we're getting pleasure we're turning into beasts without thought and all we need is more and more pleasure, right? So our aim is to turn into beasts. (Now you have to re-read last 2 or 3 sentenses and make conclusions).And then, if God do not exist and after death we dissapear forever, we HAVE to suicide because it's our aim to forget everething, to throw out all the thoughts and stay in darkness and patience and silence. Death is the best drug?



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What do you want to do now? Still want to suicide? Or maybe you just Start thinking about it?

Please take a look at these pages before you leave this world.


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Have your own thoughts about this problem? Please fill out THIS FORM.

This page is a part of "Iced Beams of Life".

Created by Alex Voronin ,1997

-Best wishes.

Can blind people see in their dreams?

nothingintense.blogspot.com

Asked by Cindy Webster of Palmerston North, New Zealand

Most researchers believe that people who are blind from birth or who become blind in infancy do not see in their dreams. They do not retain visual imagery because it was never acquired in the first place.

However, those blinded in childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, or afterwards usually do see in their dreams. "They often retain visual imagery in their waking life and in their dreams," according to Drs Nancy Kerr of the Department of Psychology at Oglethorpe University and G. William Domhoff of the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

They write in the December 2004 issue of Dreaming that "individuals blinded before the age of about five report no visual imagery in dreams as adults, whereas those blinded after about the age of seven are likely to retain visual imagery in dreaming".

This conclusion is based upon four sleep laboratory studies conducted between 1966 and 1999. According to the Royal National Institute of the Blind in London: "Dreams are experienced in the same way as life is lived. If someone loses their sight, they will dream of events during the days when sight was available in visual terms. If dreams are about recent events when sight was not used, sensations will be in terms of sound, smell, texture, and so on." A person dreams as they live.

Can people have the same dream at the same time?
It is called simultaneous dreaming. This occurs when two or more people have the same dream. The dream need not occur at the same time to qualify as a simultaneous dream. But sometimes this happens too. There are no scientific studies of simultaneous dreaming.

However, there are a few anecdotal reports of simultaneous dreaming on the internet. It is usually mentioned in relationship to lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one's state while dreaming with the intended effect of having clearer dreams and to be able to control, focus, and utilise dreams to improve one's life.

Are humans the only animals that dream?
Besides humans, other animals probably dream too. According to Dr Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, writing in the August 2003 issue of Discover: "Although it cannot be proved, it is reasonable to suppose that many animals see, hear, feel, and run in their sleep just as we do."

Most researchers agree that brain activity during dreaming functions to help keep body temperature stable during sleep. Body temperature stability during sleep is also necessary in mammals besides humans. There is also evidence that dreaming helps solidify memories. This would have a survival advantage in both humans and non-human animals. For these and other reasons, Dr Hobson concludes that it is logical to conclude that at least some animals probably do dream. Too bad they cannot tell us and remove all doubt. Perhaps they might some day? Dream on!

Interesting facts about death

(1) More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes.
(2) More people are killed each year by coconuts than sharks. Approximately 150 people are killed each year by coconuts.
(3) You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.
(4) Fleas have the distinction of killing more people than all the wars man has ever fought. The "Black Death" plague killed 1/4 of Europe's population in the 14th century, caused by germs transmitted from rodents to humans by fleas.
(5) The animal responsible for the most human deaths worldwide is the mosquito.
(6) The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off.
(7) A hundred years ago, the average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.
(8) Today, only one in two billion people will live to be 116 or older.
(9) Your statistical chance of being murdered is 1 in 20,000.
(10) There are 5 times as many deaths due to the negligence of doctors as there are deaths due to firearms.
(11) On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
(12) Robert Hershey, of Hershey Chocolate fame, died when he fell into a vat of chocolate and drowned.
(13) Dr. Alice Chase, who wrote "Nutrition for Health" and numerous books on the science of proper eating, died of malnutrition.
(14) Adolph Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.
(15) When Mahatma Gandhi died, an autopsy revealed that his small intestine contained five gold Krugerrands.
(16) When Thomas Edison died in 1941; Henry Ford captured his last dying breath in a bottle.
(17) In 1845, President Andrew Jackson's pet parrot was removed from his funeral for swearing.
(18) Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was present at the assassinations of three presidents: his father's, President Garfield's, and President McKinley's. After the last shooting, he refused ever to attend a state affair again.
(19) When Mark Twain was born on Nov 30, 1835, Halley's comet was visible over Florida, Missouri. Mark Twain predicted in 1909 that he would die when it returned. He was right. When he died on April 21, 1910, Halley's comet was once again visible in the sky

Math prodigy now a £130 hooker claim

Monday March 31, 2008

PETALING JAYA: Sufiah Yusof, the child Maths genius who won a place at Oxford University when she was just 13, has been found to be working as a prostitute, according to a report in London’s News of the World.

Sufiah, now 23, whose father Farooq is a Pakistani and mother Halimathon is from Johor, was reported to have entertained an undercover reporter in her flat in Manchester.

Claiming that she had posted her services for £130 (RM829) on the Internet, the newspaper said she had called herself Shilpa Lee on a hookers’ website. She is said to have advertised herself as “a sexy, smart student” who preferred “older gentlemen”.


Better times: File pic of Farooq with Sufiah when she was Oxford-bound.
The story in the newspaper comes just days after her father was jailed for sexually assaulting two 15-year-old girls as he home-tutored them in Maths.

Sufiah passed the Maths A-Level she needed for entry into Oxford at the age of 12.

Three years into Oxford, she sparked a massive police hunt after running away.

At the time her father bizarrely claimed Sufiah had been kidnapped and brainwashed by an organisation seeking the key to her intelligence.

But Sufiah sent an e-mail to her family describing her life under her father as a “living hell”.

She was found in an Internet cafe in Bournemouth where she had been working as a hotel waitress.

She refused to go back to her parents and instead was taken into the care of social services.

By then Farooq was in jail for three years for his part in a £1.5mil (RM9.57mil) mortgage swindle.

Sufiah returned to Oxford to complete the final year of her Masters in Maths but failed to finish the course after meeting trainee lawyer Jonathan Marshall.

They were married in 2004 but her parents and siblings failed to turn up. They divorced a year later.

The report, which carried grainy photographs of a semi-nude woman it claimed was Sufiah, said the girl met the reporter who posed as a client wearing a tiny skirt, leather boots and a tight T-shirt. She was carrying three mobile phones.

She also told the reporter that she was studying for a Masters degree in Economics.

Sufiah gave no indication of any sadness at the jailing of her father the previous day. On Wednesday, Farooq, 50, was sentenced to 18 months at Coventry Crown Court for touching two 15-year-old girls when he was home tutoring them.

The report quoted her friend as saying: “Sufiah has suffered so many knocks in her life. I just hope she can drag herself out of this life she has got herself into.

“She deserves a much better life than this. Her gift has been a curse.”

Early Birds, Night Owls: Blame Your Genes

James Owen
for National Geographic News

January 28, 2008
Those who struggle to get out of bed in the morning may be able to hold their genes responsible, new research suggests.

Scientists have discovered that a person's waking habits are mirrored by body cells that are equipped with their own daily alarm clocks.

"One of the big surprises was that so much of our daily behavior was genetically encoded," Brown said.

"The idea that skin cells are telling us anything about our behavior was, for me, quite fascinating," he added.

The study investigated the circadian rhythm—the brain-controlled phenomenon that governs various body functions over a 24-hour period—of extreme late and early risers.

Suitable volunteers were recruited by the study team using TV advertisements shown between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.

"We got both our early types and our late types that way," Brown said. "Some had not yet gone to bed, while others were already up."

Skin cells taken from the volunteers were cultured in the lab and injected with a bioluminescence gene found in fireflies.

These altered cells lit up or dimmed according to an individuals sleeping patterns, according to the study, which appears in today's online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

No Pristine Oceans Left, New Map Shows

Mason Inman in Boston, Massachusetts
for National Geographic News

February 14, 2008
No areas of the world's oceans remain completely untouched by humanity's influence, according to a new study.

Every area of the oceans is feeling the effects of fishing, pollution, or human-caused global warming, the study says, and some regions are being affected by all of these factors and more.

RELATED
Oceans Supersite: Photos, Video, Fast Facts, More
Ocean "Thermostat" May Be Secret Weapon Against Warming (February 8, 2008)
Warming Oceans Put Kink in Food Chain, Study Says (January 30, 2007)
A team led by Ben Halpern of the University of California, Santa Barbara, created the first global map that shows the various kinds of damage being done to marine ecosystems.

The team assigned scores to 17 human impacts and tallied them up for every ocean region to reveal the overall effect people are having on marine life.

"The ocean is so big, I figured there would be a lot of areas that we hadn't gotten to or that people rarely get to," Halpern said.

"But when you look at the map, there are huge areas that are being impacted by multiple human activities," he said. "It was certainly a surprise to me."

The project revealed that more than 40 percent of the world's marine ecosystems are heavily affected.

Major hot spots include the North Sea off the northern coast of Europe and Asia's South China Sea and East China Sea.

The study will be published tomorrow in the journal Science.

Acid Oceans, Melting ice

Of all the human effects on marine ecosystems, climate change is having by far the largest overall impact, the researchers estimate.

Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are warming up the atmosphere and, more slowly, the oceans, the scientists explain.

Sharks Travel "Superhighways," Visit "Cafes"

Anne Minard in Boston, Massachusetts
for National Geographic News

February 19, 2008
Sharks follow well-traveled "superhighways" among feeding hot spots, new research suggests. The discovery should allow scientists to create better conservation strategies for the fish.

Some great white sharks travel predictable pathways, spending long winters in two areas near Hawaii, according to research led by Salvador Jorgensen of Stanford University in California.

Peter Klimley of the University of California, Davis, for example, has noticed that scalloped hammerhead sharks in the Gulf of California use islands as stepping-stones, spending six to ten months at a time at certain islands before moving on.

Understanding shark migration routes can be key to saving the declining fish, experts say.

Many shark species are listed as endangered on the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List. And that doesn't count hundreds of vulnerable, deep-water species which are the hardest to study.

"We should concentrate [on] protection [of shark-rich] islands," said Klimley, who has received funding from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration and Expeditions Council. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

The researchers presented their findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, Massachusetts.

The fish are threatened mostly by overfishing. Demand for shark fins and meat, recreational shark fishing, and tuna and swordfish fishing that ensnares unwanted sharks are particular concerns.

Climate Change Driving Mongolians From Steppe to Cities

Stefan Lövgren in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
for National Geographic News

February 21, 2008
Lifelong herder Namdag lives in a traditional felt tent home—or "ger"—among some half dozen cars in various states of disrepair, an informal junkyard against the towering, snow-capped mountains that surround the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator).

"I miss my old life," said the 71-year-old, now a world removed from the sweeping steppes he once called home. "But life out there is too difficult."


World's Largest Trout Thrives in Mongolia -- For Now (November 14, 2007)
Namdag, who like many Mongolians uses only one name, is one of the hundreds of thousands who in recent years have abandoned their nomadic herding lives for an urban existence.

The former herders crowd into sprawling townships on the periphery of Ulaanbaatar, which has doubled its population in the past two decades. (See a video of Mongolian nomads and their fading lifestyles.)

While there are many reasons for the migration, observers say climate change is increasingly a driving force behind Mongolians' move toward the cities.

Landlocked between Siberia (Russia) and China, Mongolia is feeling the impact of global warming more than most regions in the world.

Over the past 60 years the average temperature in Mongolia has risen by 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit (1.9 degrees Celsius). In contrast, the average temperature around the world has climbed only about 1 degree Fahrenheit (about 0.6 degree Celsius) in the past century.

The warmer temperatures are drying up Mongolia's grasslands, which provide food for the country's livestock.

"The Mongolian herding way of life is under threat from global warming," said Azzaya, director of the Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology in Ulaanbaatar.

Soil Moisture

With its hot summers and cold winters, Mongolia has one of the most extreme climates anywhere on Earth.

It also ranks as the world's least densely populated nation. On the vast steppes (see photo) that stretch across northern Mongolia, miles often separate individual gers, which are moved by their nomadic inhabitants up to four times a year according to the seasons.

.......

Man gets 50 years for killing, cutting up wife

MOUNT CLEMENS, Michigan (AP) -- A man who killed and dismembered his wife was sentenced Thursday to serve at least 50 years behind bars by a judge who called his actions "demonic."


Stephen Grant choked his wife to death and cut up her corpse.

1 of 2 Stephen Grant choked his wife, Tara, to death, then cut up her corpse in a machine shop. After the killing, he tearfully told reporters he wasn't involved in her disappearance.

"Stephen Grant is evil personified," Prosecutor Eric Smith said.

Grant, on the advice of his lawyer, did not speak during the sentencing.

A jury found him guilty in December of second-degree murder. Prosecutors had sought a first-degree murder conviction, but the jury could not unanimously agree that Grant's actions were premeditated.

The defense was seeking a sentence of 15 to 25 years. But Macomb County Circuit Judge Diane Druzinski agreed with the prosecution recommendation of a sentence of 50 to 80 years for the killing.

The judge called Grant's actions "demonic, manipulative, barbaric and dishonest." Grant also received six to 10 years for mutilating the body, to run concurrently with the longer sentence.

Grant, 38, showed little emotion during the hearing, although he looked troubled as Alicia Standerfer, Tara Grant's sister, described how the couple's two young children are struggling with the loss of their mother at the hands of their father.

"He's so much of a coward, he doesn't even look me in the eye in the courtroom," Standerfer said afterward.

Grant contacted the Macomb County sheriff's department on February 14, 2007, and said he had not seen his 34-year-old wife, an operations manager for a large construction firm, since they argued February 9 about her frequent business trips overseas.

On March 2, after allowing deputies with a search warrant inside his home, Grant borrowed a friend's pickup truck and drove away. The deputies found Tara Grant's torso in a container in the garage.

Authorities picked up Grant's trail by tracking cell phone calls that led them to Wilderness State Park, more than 200 miles north. He was found hiding under a tree and wearing only a shirt, slacks and socks in 14-degree weather.

During the trial, a jury heard a graphic, three-hour recorded confession Grant gave while being treated for frostbite and hypothermia at a hospital. They also heard testimony from the Grants' nanny, who said she had sex with Grant the night before he strangled his wife

I dont have a title for this, it just evokes emotion

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love." - Neil Gaiman