Your next traffic accident, or burglary call may have an unarmed civilian respond to the 911 call instead of an armed police officer to save money.

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Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out.
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There are now more Muslims than Catholics in the world according to a statement from the Vatican made on Sunday. Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican’s newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics 17.4 percent.
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Osama bin Laden’s contention that Pope Benedict XVI had played a role in a worldwide campaign against Islam is “baseless,” the Vatican said Thursday.

When Benedict led a Holy Thursday ceremony in Rome’s St. John in Lateran Basilica in the evening, there was no noticeable step-up in already heavy Vatican security for the pontiff’s public appearances.

The Italian Interior Ministry’s anti-terrorism committee planned to analyze bin Laden’s message in a meeting Friday, the ANSA news agency reported. Continue Reading »

he next update of Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 console, slated for later this month, will include features that let users download games, video and ring tones. Though I’m pretty sure I have never received any phone calls on my PS3, it would be nice to customize that feature. Wait, huh?

Sony said Thursday the system update will add Blu-ray Disc Profile 2.0, or BD-Live capability, to the PS3. It will also let users copy photos and music playlists on to their handheld PlayStation Portable, use the PSP as a remote control for playing music on the PS3 and stream linked video files from the Web. Continue Reading »

Serbia’s President Boris Tadic demanded that police find out who is behind calls to boycott Albanian-owned bakeries in response to Kosovo’s declaration of independence. I’m guessing that there is a new militant group, the Veggies, that are vegans out to stop the use of milk products in the bakeries. Since there’s no proof of this, it’s only based on current speculation from the bloodthirsty-ness that vegans must endure. Continue Reading »

Large quantities of inmates at Afghanistan’s main jail, which holds Taliban prisoners, are reportedly on hunger strike with some having sewn their mouths shut, a parliamentarian told AFP Tuesday. For years the Taliban men have been trying to get their women to stop talking, it appears they finally have turned into the women they oppressed.

Afghan media said the strike began after guards arrested visitors to the Pul-i-Charki prison following the escape of some inmates. Authorities have posted extra security outside the prison on the outskirts of the capital. Continue Reading »

One-third of women in the military and 6% of men said they were sexually harassed, according to the latest Pentagon survey on the issue. Truth is that more than two-thirds of women in the military are harassed but the less attractive (and not harassed) one-third makes the complaints.

The figure for women was worse than the previous finding several years ago but better than a similar survey taken in 1995, the Defense Department said in a report Friday. The Defense Manpower Data Center said it compiled the data from a survey of 24,000 people in 2006. Continue Reading »

A California jury has cleared a cardiologist and a radiologist of negligence in the diagnosis and treatment of permanently-retired actor Johnathan Southworth Ritter, who died of a torn aorta on the second anniversary of the Twin Towers bombing (that’s September 11, 2003 dummy).

Since there was no first person testimony by John Ritter, everyone had to pinky swear with no take-backs or crossies when it came time to discuss what Ritter had said. The jurors found that Ritter was advised by the radiologist to follow up with treatment by a physician, but Ritter didn’t follow the order. The radiologist had completed a body scan on him two years earlier. Continue Reading »

It’s hard to make the world move with so many hippies fighting progress in so many different ways. Right now in the Gulf of Mexico there is an area being used for corn production. There are countless quantities of hippies trying to prove that ramping up corn production to make ethanol will make the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico even more lethal.

Run-off from corn fields is all but sure to increase the zone of oxygen-deprivation water in the Gulf that is toxic to fish, says geographer Simon Donner of the University of B.C. and lead author of the report published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Continue Reading »