Blog Heap o'Links for November 2008

MUMBAI - Prashant Mangeshikar could be dead, one of more than a hundred victims of militant attacks across Mumbai landmarks, if it had not been for an employee at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Mangeshikar,

A Carroll woman who was caught having sex in the men's room at an Iowa Hawkeye football game in Minneapolis last weekend says she'd had so much wine before kickoff that she doesn't remember walking into the restroom, the man she had sex with in a stall, or when the police opened the door.

Eleanor Rigby: fact or fiction? That question, which has bedeviled Beatles' fans for decades, may be answered in part by a 1911 hospital payroll sheet to be auctioned in London on Thursday. The document, sent by Paul McCartney in 1990 to the director of a music charity who had asked for funding, contains the signature of a scullery maid named "E. Rigby" who worked in a Liverpool hospital. The director of the company auctioning the document believes the woman who signed the payroll is the same Eleanor Rigby buried in 1939 in a Liverpool graveyard next to the church where McCartney met the young John Lennon.

One of the oldest women in Britain, aged 106, has been celebrating her birthday on the wrong day for more than a century, it has emerged.

TV bosses are facing a £10,000 lawsuit after filming a passer-by on the street for a documentary about obese people.

Monday's death-defying jet-pack flight across Colorado's Royal Gorge was only the beginning, says an official with the company behind the feat. Eric Scott of Jet Pack International (Jet P.I.) used a standard hydrogen peroxide-fueled jet pack to get across the 1,250-foot-deep gorge south of Denver, breaking his own record by traveling 1,500 feet horizontally. But his entire flight lasted only 20 seconds. The maximum flight time for a hydrogen-peroxide pack is about 45 seconds, though one company in California has recently extended that to 75 seconds by mixing in a little kerosene.

A new study suggests that all most all fast foods contain chemical elements or ingredients derived from corn either in forms of meat, oil or others.

A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions. The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a "wish" granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California. ... Wishes granted at TED envision ways to better the world and come with a promise that Tedizens will lend their clout and capabilities to making them come true.

The central issue in the legal battle over Proposition 8 is whether the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage is a state constitutional amendment, which can be passed by initiative, or a constitutional revision, which can't. From another perspective, the question is whether the scope of a minority group's rights in California should be decided by the voters or the courts.

A new Irish film claims that climate change guru Al Gore is an alarmist and that those who think they are saving the planet are only hurting the poor IF THE ADVANCE publicity is anything to go by, Not Evil Just Wrong will do for Al Gore what Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 did for George W Bush.

As the U.S. military garners increasing counterinsurgency experience in America's long-standing war in Afghanistan, soldiers are questioning one military restriction that has long been the norm within the U.S. armed forces: the prohibition against beards.

McKinney police inspected McKinney High School students after school officials detected the smell of marijuana on a school bus. ... police officers responded to the stopped bus and conducted a search of the bus and the students. Alex Green, a McKinney High School student, said everyone on the bus could smell it. "We were just driving down the road and started smelling pot," ... Another student who asked not to be identified said he was sitting in front of the two students who brought the marijuana on the bus. He said they weren't smoking it, just burning it. "The bus driver's assistant smelled it and they were just burning it,"

Eight people have been arrested in the slaying of an Oklahoma woman who was killed Sunday in southeastern Louisiana during a Ku Klux Klan initiation

Nicolaus Copernicus's idea that Earth was just one of many planets orbiting the sun - and so occupied no exceptional position in the cosmos - has endured and become a foundation stone of our understanding of the universe. Could it actually be wrong, though? ... According to Ellis and others, our uncertainty about galaxy distances allows an interesting possibility. The distribution of matter could look the same in all directions, but vary with distance from us. In particular, we might be sitting in the middle of a "void" - a vast spherical bubble in an otherwise homogeneous universe. This bubble is not devoid of matter. In fact, most of the stars and galaxies we can see from Earth would be contained within it. It's just that everywhere beyond it, which is too far away to see, the density of stars and galaxies is much higher.

A Bartlesville man is being held on $25,000 bond after his arrest Friday for the alleged molestation of an 11-year-old girl.

The Los Angeles Fire Department reported at least 500 mobile homes were destroyed at the Oakridge Mobile Home Park.

The Cambodian Buddhist community in Rochester is abuzz over what they believe is a miracle: a wasp nest in the shape of a seated Buddha built in the eaves of their temple.

Seventy-seven million years later, scientific detective work conducted by University of Calgary and Royal Tyrrell Museum researchers used this unique fossil nest and eggs to learn more about how nest building, brooding and eggs evolved. But there is a big unresolved question: Who was the egg-layer?

If you're going to make New Year's resolutions, here's a list that are not only achievable, but guaranteed to increase your sunflower profit potential. A good share of the recommendations are courtesy of Duane Berglund, extension agronomist at North Dakota State University.

Mitch Mitchell, drummer for the legendary Jimi Hendrix Experience of the 1960s and the group's last surviving member, was found dead in his hotel room early Wednesday. He was 61.

Commuters nationwide found out during Wednesday's morning rush hour that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had ended. Global warming, health care spending and the economy's problems were on their way to solutions too. Some 1.2 million copies of a spoof of The New York Times, dated July 4, 2009, were handed out by the liberal pranksters the "Yes Men."

Internet service providers have not focused much effort on rolling out Web connectivity to some of America's more rural areas. IBM and International Broadband Electric Communications plan to address that by providing service via existing power lines. The project could finally bring the Web to more remote locations, but the technology is unlikely to soon become a competitor to more traditional means of Internet service.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn said Tuesday he has not decided whether to seek re-election in 2010, despite the recent activation of a "Coburn for Senate" Web site. "I'm not going to make that decision until February or March,"

Afghanistan's Taliban called on US president-elect Barack Obama to repudiate the "war-mongering" policies of President George W. Bush to repair the country's image abroad, a group that monitors Islamist websites said.

The Obama administration will launch a review of the classified files of the approximately 250 detainees at Guantanamo Bay immediately after taking office, as part of an intensive effort to close the U.S. prison in Cuba, according to people who advised the campaign on detainee issues.

President-elect Barack Obama could reverse some of President Bush's most controversial executive orders, including restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, shortly after taking office in January.

Two U.S. military Humvees are missing after suspected Taliban militants attacked a transport convoy carrying equipment destined for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, U.S. military and local officials said Tuesday. U.S. military officials in Afghanistan did not have much detail about Monday's attack in northwestern Pakistan, but said the supply convoy was carrying at least two Humvees and numerous water tank trailers.

Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Islamic kingdom that forbids the public practice of other religious faiths, will preside Wednesday over a two-day U.N. conference on religious tolerance that will draw more than a dozen world leaders, including President Bush, Israeli President Shimon Peres and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

KJRH.com: The Sapulpa Daily Herald did not report that Barack Obama won the Presidential election in its Wednesday edition. One paragraph on the front page did report the majority of Creek County voted for McCain.

Obama says in his first post-election press conference that he's spoken to all the former presidents — Carter, Bush, Clinton, as well as the current Bush — and, looser than he's been in months, dares a joke at the expense of the widow of a deceased one. "I have spoken to all of them who are living," he says. "I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances," he says.

In another clip from the same January 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in which Barack Obama promised to bankrupt anyone foolish enough to build coal-burning power plants, he also made an interesting admission about his entire energy plan. Obama told the editors that his policies would make energy prices "skyrocket" as the energy industry passed along the exorbitant costs of his cap-and-trade policy:

Osama bin Laden is planning an attack against the United States that will "outdo by far" September 11, an Arab newspaper in London has reported. And according to a former senior Yemeni al-Qaeda operative, the terrorist organisation has entered a "positive phase", reinforcing specific training camps around the world that will lead the next "wave of action" against the West.

The original construction plans believed used for a major expansion of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1941 have been found in a Berlin flat, Germany's Bild newspaper reported on Saturday. The daily printed three architect's drawings on yellowing paper from the batch of 28 pages of blueprints it obtained. One has an 11.66 metre by 11.20 metre room marked "Gaskammer" (gas chamber) that was part of a "delousing facility".

EVANSTON, Ill. - A 90-year-old woman well-liked by her neighbors apparently has been living in a house with the bodies of three siblings, one of whom may have been dead since the early 1980s

A British engineer has invented a fan-powered flying car - and to prove the Skycar works, he's off to Africa in it

Oct. 29, 1981: A 2-year-old girl was bitten on the head by a 250-pound Siberian tiger while the animal was being filmed for a commercial in downtown Oklahoma City . The girl required plastic surgery from injuries sustained when adults tried to pull her from the animal's jaws. Dec. 6, 1986: An 11-year-old boy was fatally mauled by a 300-pound black bear

He was a farmer in Billings, Oklahoma, at the time of his election as governor. He served from January 4, 1963, to January 9, 1967. He was elected U.S. Senator in 1968 and again in 1974, the first Republican in state history to be re-elected to the U.S. Senate. He chose not to run in 1980. However, he was elected to his second term as governor on November 4, 1986. He served from 1987 to 1991. He chose not to run in 1990.

1962 The Democrats' stranglehold on the Governor's Office was broken after 55 years of Oklahoma statehood by Henry Bellmon. So firmly did Democrats dominate state politics up to that time that there were few Republican primary elections, and people said they had to register as Democrats in order to have a real vote. Many Republicans became "registered" Democrats and voted in the primary for the weakest candidate so the Republicans would have a chance for victory in the general election.

The proportion of infants arriving at school not knowing whether they are right or left-handed has trebled in the past decade, researchers say. The situation has been made worse by excessive parental fears, driven by cot death, about letting them lie or crawl on their front. Children of four and five are struggling to make advances in writing because of their stunted dexterity, made worse by shortening attention spans.

On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says. Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

Nathan Scott Watson is charged in Washington County District Court with felony child abuse after admitting to police that he spanked too hard and too often a 20-month-old toddler whom he was baby-sitting while her mother was at work. ... reportedly spanked the toddler for taking an outlet cover off of the outlet and sticking her fingers in it. He also spanked her because she refused to go to bed ... sent a text message to the child's mother while she was working saying he was concerned that he had spanked the toddler too hard.

In his Tuesday night acceptance speech, President-elect Barack Obama appropriately offered "thank-yous" to his family, campaign aides and voters who supported the Democratic ticket. Now he may be dashing off thank-you notes to others who helped bring about his electoral college landslide.

Most historical observations about Barack Obama's victory in the US presidential election on Tuesday have focused on his race. But by many measures it would have been a singular political achievement, whatever the colour of his skin. For a start, in terms of the popular vote it was the best performance by a Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. ... It was also the highest share of the vote by a nonincumbent president or vice-president from either party since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.

Republican John McCain lost Tuesday's presidential election because he could not overcome a hostile economic environment, distance himself from an unpopular president or convince voters he could lead them out of the crisis.

Now you are thinking that we cannot expect much progressive thought out of a county best known for its cow-chip throwing contest (two tries if you lick your fingers after the first). But I have been to Beaver county and met good people and don't understand how 89.2% decided Sarah Palin should be vice president of the United States. It's not just our friends in Beaver scouring the landscape for aerodynamic cow patties. Twenty-one counties fell below 25 percent for Obama and 39 counties, more than half of the 77, fell below 30 percent.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain got his biggest victory margin in Oklahoma on Tuesday, winning every county in the state in results that mirrored those of 2004.

Mapping the election results county-by-county across America, most states reveal a quilted pattern of red and blue, with a few solid blue patches in the Northeast. Only one state turns solid red. "Inside the room, the noise was all positive" at the Republican watch party on election night in Oklahoma City, state GOP chairman Gary Jones said Wednesday. "Outside of Oklahoma, things were different."

With its creation of the U.S. Bureau of Efficiency in 1916, Congress sought to bring the principles of "scientific management" to the federal government. Although this first staff agency in the executive branch lasted only a relatively short time, it was the first central agency in the federal government dedicated to improving the management of the executive branch. Mordecai Lee offers both a chronological history of the agency and a thematic treatment of the structure, staffing, and work processes of the bureau; its substantive activities; and its effects on the development of both the executive and the legislative branches.