WOODLAND, Calif. (AP) - A dentist accused of fondling the breasts of 27 female patients is trying to keep his dental license by arguing that chest massages are an appropriate procedure in certain cases. Mark Anderson's lawyer says dental journals discuss the need to massage the pectoral muscles to treat a common jaw problem.
(AP)
Now that scandal-tinged Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has reneged on a pledge to resign this fall, his fellow Republican senators act as though they hardly know him. They want voters to forget him, too.
But they privately acknowledge that an earlier strategy to drive Craig from office has backfired, sticking them with an open-ended ethics investigation likely to keep the issue before the public for months.
(Washington Post)
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Lipsticks tested by a U.S. consumer rights group found that more than half contained lead and some popular brands including Cover Girl, L'Oreal and Christian Dior had more lead than others, the group said on Thursday.I'm just mentioning, is all. Not that I've got much to worry about, myself, or anything like that.
(Reuters via Yahoo! News)
The new exhibit, Shibboleth, by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo consists of a 167 metre-long crack in the floor of the cavernous Turbine Hall.A crack in the floor? Bunky! That ceiling in my bedroom must be worth a fortune!
(AFP via Raw Story)
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration today promised to protect air travelers' privacy as TSA personnel peer through their clothes.
(Information Week)
WASHINGTON — The latest problem with the trouble-plagued new U.S. embassy complex in Iraq is that the sprinkler systems meant to contain a fire do not work, according to officials in Congress and the State Department.According to State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, "Obviously, with any large complex construction project, especially one that is happening in a difficult security environment, there is the possibility that the schedule will slide to the right."
The previously undisclosed problem in the $592 million project was discovered several weeks ago when the fire-safety systems were tested and pipe joints burst, State Department representatives recently informed Congress.
The embassy complex, being built by First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting Co., has been marred by repeated problems. In May, when kitchen facilities at a guard camp that is part of the embassy complex were tested, the electrical system malfunctioned and wires melted. A subsequent inquiry showed that First Kuwaiti had used counterfeit electrical wiring that did not meet specifications, according to testimony at a congressional hearing in July.
(McClatchy)
Lynne Cheney jokes, Sometimes Dick will 'bite the head off a live chicken'
(Raw Story)
ConAgra Foods Inc. is refusing to recall Banquet-brand and other potpies tied to a national salmonella outbreak, rejecting direct pleas by Oregon and Minnesota health officials.
The state officials say the company needs to recall all of its potpies because the source of the salmonella has not been identified. Doing anything less, they say, allows potentially dangerous food to remain on the market and confuses consumers.
The company says a recall is unnecessary. It contends that contamination is limited to its poultry potpies. Risks can be eliminated, the company says, by instructing consumers to cook the pies thoroughly enough to kill salmonella bacteria.
(The Oregonian)
TOKYO (AP) - With steely arms sprouting cables and wires, the WAO-1 robot looks nothing like a relaxation device.
But researchers at Tokyo's Waseda University hope the contraption will soon be deployed to hospitals and spas across Japan to give therapeutic facial massages....
"This technology can be applied very widely," Nishimura said. "I'm looking forward to a time when this robot will give beauty facials at spas."
(AP)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration Wednesday lobbied heavily against a House resolution that labels the killings of Armenians in Turkey during World War I as "genocide," saying it would hurt relations with a key U.S. ally.Some day they're gonna bite their own tails. It'll be totally cool.
(CNN)
...allows the government to eavesdrop without a court order on communications conducted by a person reasonably believed to be outside the U.S., even when the communications flow through the U.S. communications network — or if an American is on one end of the conversation — so long as that person is not the intended focus or target of the surveillance. The Bush administration said this was necessary because technological advances in communications had put U.S. officials at a disadvantage.So basically it extends the so-called "emergency" bill Congress passed before they went on vacation in August (ahem, this year). But Commander Guy is threatening to veto it.
President Bush said Wednesday that he will not sign a new eavesdropping bill if it does not grant retroactive immunity to U.S. telecommunications companies that helped conduct electronic surveillance without court orders.(Emphasis, of course, mine.)
Seeking to increase the pressure on the Democratic-controlled Congress, Bush said the update has already been effective, with intelligence professionals able "to gather critical information that would have been missed without this authority."And turn it over to Faux News, no doubt.
German Ertl wins Nobel for chemistry
(Reuters)
Google Inc. occasionally features light-hearted doodles on its colorful home-page logo to commemorate special occasions. But now they are drawing criticism from conservatives for not being more patriotic.
(LATimes)
TOKYO - Cute, communicative and cubic seem to be the fashion statement as far as offerings from Japan's "Big Three" automakers Toyota, Honda and Nissan, debuting at the Tokyo auto show later this month....
Behind the offerings is the growing view among Japanese automakers that more must be done to fight the image of cars as culprits of pollution, global warming and traffic accidents.
Their answer: Transform the car into a friendly companion — not just a machine for getting around....
In a preview presentation to reporters, Honda compared the aesthetics of Puyo, whose name is based on the Japanese word that describes floating or soft objects, to cute things like a bunny and balloon.
(AP via Yahoo! News)
AVIGNON, France (AFP) - French prosecutors Tuesday requested a hefty fine and a civics course against a woman who planted a lipstick-red kiss on the pure white canvas of a two-million-euro artwork by US artist Cy Twombly....
"I just gave it a kiss," the young woman told the court. "It was an act of love, when I kissed it, I wasn't thinking. I thought the artist would understand."
(AFP via Yahoo! News)
Linguistics - A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.
Aviation - A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. (AP) - An Oregon man won the annual pumpkin weigh-off here, presenting a gigantic gourd that came it at 1,524 pounds.
(AP)
A rodent head found by a Lehi woman in a can of green beans would be safe to eat, the company's spokesman said Thursday....
"There's no way that product could have hurt her," Allen Canning spokesman James Phillips said in a telephone interview. "This rodent was rendered commercially sterile. We cook each can individually at a temperature up to 265 degrees."
(The Salt Lake Tribune)
This picture of my first computer - my first "real" computer, not counting a dedicated word processor - the Radio Shack Model 100, from Progressive Review, which notes its four AA batteries would keep it running for 20 hours. That screen is 40 characters wide (a standard typewriter line is 80 characters) and four lines deep. The best thing about the Model 100 was its bulletproof, 300-baud modem which would connect to just about anything, even over an acoustical coupler. But 300 baud - 30 characters per second - although state of the art in 1979, was so slow that when I downloaded text files from CompuServe I could read them as they came in. Downloading one megabyte, a pretty small file by today's standards, would have taken nine hours and cost, at the prevailing $6.00/hour rate, $54.
Meeting for the first time since the 1940s, World War II veterans who had been charged with top-secret interrogations of Nazi prisoners of war lamented "the chasm between the way they conducted interrogation during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects."I was once interrogated by a WWII interrogator myself, in a training exercise, and I believe what they say.
John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a foreign service and ambassador to Denmark, told the Washington Post, " We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice." Another World War II veteran--one of the few who interrogated the early 4000 prisoners of war, most of them German scientists and submariners, who were brought in to Fort Hunt, Virginia for questioning for days and weeks--spoke of how "during the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone. We extracted information in a battle of the wits." He added that he was proud that he "never compromised my humanity." Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist, told the Post, " We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or ping pong than they do today, with their torture."
(The Nation via Yahoo! News)
A car repair firm has been taken to court accused of infringing musical copyright because its employees listen to radios at work.
The action against the Kwik-Fit Group has been brought by the Performing Rights Society which collects royalties for songwriters and performers.
(BBC)
