I like to post videos,crazy news items and jokes..if I make you laugh,I am rewarded in knowing that I made your day better...
Plattsburg, MO -- A dog rescue was caught on video thanks to a tiny camera in an officer's hand held radio, but this is no ordinary rescue with no ordinary ending.
Plattsburg Police posted video on their Facebook page.
Officer Nick Shepherd responded to a call of a dog tangled in a fence. After some work he was able to cut the wire fence to free the dog.
Unsure of whether the dog was injured, the officer then tried to capture it, but he lost sight of the dog.
What happened next was unbelievable. He finally finds the dog in the driver's seat of his police cruiser. The dog must have been so grateful it wanted to stay with the officer.
Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. government built a fleet of cars that were safer than anything on the road. Twenty-five years ago, the government shredded them in secret. Two escaped the crusher. This is their story.
As Congress and the auto industry wrestle with another round of tougher safety standards, nothing on the menu comes close to setting up the federal government's own vehicle design business. Yet that's exactly what Congress did in 1966.
With the furor from Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed still fresh, the original act creating the Department of Transportation also ordered it to build its own experimental vehicles for testing new safety devices, and swap notes with 13 other countries. The young faces at the new agency farmed out the first set to three companies, including General Motors.
The result: Three swamp-monster sedans of more than 5000 pounds apiece that did double-duty as safe transportation and appetite suppressants. The October 1972 issue of Popular Mechanics laid out the details: Roof-mounted periscopes; bumpers wide enough to haul Dom Deluise; and in the GM model, a rear-seat "credenza," so back-seat passengers would be protected in crashes by smacking into a vinyl-covered bosom.
Unsatisfied with the vault-on-wheels solution, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration changed course. It held a bake-off in 1975 for what a safe car in 1985 might look like. Ford and Volkswagen offered ideas, but NHTSA awarded what would become a $30 million contract to two independent engineering firms, Calspan and Minicars.
While Calspan modified French-built Simcas donated by Chrysler, Minicars designed a new model from scratch, aiming to build a four-passenger small car that could protect all its occupants in a 50-mph crash from either the front or side while burning as little fuel as possible. The result looked like an AMC Pacer worked over by the set designers of Battlestar Galactica.
For a piece of American-built iron from the depths of the Carter administration, the 14 Minicar Research Safety Vehicles had a massive amount of technology. The fender and front fascia were plastic composites that could take a 10-mph smack unscathed. Under the plastic body of the most advanced version were run-flat tires, anti-lock brakes with crash-sensing radar and dual-stage airbags. The front seats were attached to the roof with a see-through plastic shield, so they wouldn't collapse in a rear-end collision.
Power came via four-cylinder engines pilfered from 1977 Honda Accords, mounted in a mid-rear layout driving the back wheels through a 5-speed automated manual transmission. Test drives scored about 32 miles to the gallon, but test crashes suggested passengers might walk away from most crashes up to 50 mph with minimal injuries. NHTSA officials claimed thousands of lives a year could be saved if Minicar tech became standard.
And of course it had gullwing doors. Don Friedman, who managed the project for Minicars, said the idea was simply to look as stylish as the concept being cast around the same time by John DeLorean.
By 1979, NHTSA decided to convince U.S. automakers that safety could be sold as effectively as CB radios and Corinthian leathers, putting the Minicar RSV up at auto shows and county fairs to make the point. Ben Kelley, then working as the research director for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, decided to make a public service announcement for the effort, and convinced Lorne Greene to donate a day in his best white suit:
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How The U.S. Government Killed The Safest Car Ever Built
Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. government built a fleet of cars that were safer than anything on the road. Twenty-five years ago, the government shredded them in secret. Two escaped the crusher. This is their story.
As Congress and the auto industry wrestle with another round of tougher safety standards, nothing on the menu comes close to setting up the federal government's own vehicle design business. Yet that's exactly what Congress did in 1966.
With the furor from Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed still fresh, the original act creating the Department of Transportation also ordered it to build its own experimental vehicles for testing new safety devices, and swap notes with 13 other countries. The young faces at the new agency farmed out the first set to three companies, including General Motors.
The result: Three swamp-monster sedans of more than 5000 pounds apiece that did double-duty as safe transportation and appetite suppressants. The October 1972 issue of Popular Mechanics laid out the details: Roof-mounted periscopes; bumpers wide enough to haul Dom Deluise; and in the GM model, a rear-seat "credenza," so back-seat passengers would be protected in crashes by smacking into a vinyl-covered bosom.
Unsatisfied with the vault-on-wheels solution, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration changed course. It held a bake-off in 1975 for what a safe car in 1985 might look like. Ford and Volkswagen offered ideas, but NHTSA awarded what would become a $30 million contract to two independent engineering firms, Calspan and Minicars.
While Calspan modified French-built Simcas donated by Chrysler, Minicars designed a new model from scratch, aiming to build a four-passenger small car that could protect all its occupants in a 50-mph crash from either the front or side while burning as little fuel as possible. The result looked like an AMC Pacer worked over by the set designers of Battlestar Galactica.
For a piece of American-built iron from the depths of the Carter administration, the 14 Minicar Research Safety Vehicles had a massive amount of technology. The fender and front fascia were plastic composites that could take a 10-mph smack unscathed. Under the plastic body of the most advanced version were run-flat tires, anti-lock brakes with crash-sensing radar and dual-stage airbags. The front seats were attached to the roof with a see-through plastic shield, so they wouldn't collapse in a rear-end collision.
Power came via four-cylinder engines pilfered from 1977 Honda Accords, mounted in a mid-rear layout driving the back wheels through a 5-speed automated manual transmission. Test drives scored about 32 miles to the gallon, but test crashes suggested passengers might walk away from most crashes up to 50 mph with minimal injuries. NHTSA officials claimed thousands of lives a year could be saved if Minicar tech became standard.
And of course it had gullwing doors. Don Friedman, who managed the project for Minicars, said the idea was simply to look as stylish as the concept being cast around the same time by John DeLorean.
By 1979, NHTSA decided to convince U.S. automakers that safety could be sold as effectively as CB radios and Corinthian leathers, putting the Minicar RSV up at auto shows and county fairs to make the point. Ben Kelley, then working as the research director for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, decided to make a public service announcement for the effort, and convinced Lorne Greene to donate a day in his best white suit:
"The safest automobile ever created," Commander Adama intoned. "There's one slight catch: You can't buy it." Viewers were told to call NHTSA to voice their approval.
About 10,000 did.
The Minicar was far from showroom ready. Gullwing doors of the 1970s were as reliable as Billy Carter the week before St. Patrick's Day. And for all its safety kit, the Minicar lacked one standard: front seat belts.
Airbags weren't new technology, but Detroit automakers were resisting using them in all but the largest or most luxurious models. NHTSA and the RSV teams wanted to show how well their advanced bags could work in small cars, especially if the riders weren't belted. Friedman noted that only 13% of Americans were using seat belts in 1980, and that wasn't expected to change much before 1985.
Armed with data from 59 RSVs from Minicars and Calspan/Chrysler, NHTSA chief Joan Claybrook was ready to press on in 1980 with a new generation of safety vehicles, setting a target of a 2000-lb. car that could seat four and pass a battery of 40-mph crash tests.
All that ended in January 1981, when the "Morning in America" team from the Reagan administration halted the RSV work and promptly fracked the Lorne Greene promos. Two years later, Kelley would tell Congress that by safety standards all new U.S. vehicles were "obsolete the moment they roll off the assembly line." Thanks to Americans' general dislike of buckling up, the government's experts were forecasting 70,000 auto deaths a year by 1990.
The few remaining safety cars moldered away in the Department of Transportation's basement until 1990, when safety advocates such as Clarence Ditlow and the then-Republican controlled agency began a long-running feud over whether tougher fuel economy rules would lead to more deaths from smaller vehicles. After exploring whether the Smithsonian wanted any of the RSV cars (they did), NHTSA revealed under a Freedom of Information Act query that it had quietly sent all remaining cars to be destroyed. On July 1, 1991, the RSV showcar was crashed into a barrier at 50 mph with no dummies inside, and its airbags shut off.
Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who'd overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books.
"Junking those cars was a terrible idea," said Kelley, who now teaches at Tufts medical school. "What is the benefit of keeping anything that's historically important? The future wants to know more about the past, and when you destroy the past, you destroy the future's access to knowing about it."
"I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better," said Friedman.
What the government didn't know was that it had lost count.
When the Reagan crew shuttered the RSV program in 1981, Minicars still had two cars in its shop; one mostly built, the other without an engine. Over the years, the cars were stored and ignored until a California man named Frank Richardson bought them in 1996 from an asset sale he used to set up his own crash-test business.
Last year, Richardson and Friedman revealed to NHTSA that the Minicars still existed, and the agency paid for a refurbish. The one intact Minicar needs a water pump, but otherwise runs.
"If somebody wanted to buy them, the price would be very high," Richardson said.
Like other American inventions such as the VCR, the lithium-ion battery and David Hasselhoff, many of the RSV's technologies only prospered overseas. Anti-lock brakes and air bags were standard on European cars first; Japanese automakers put the first crash-sensing brake system on the market in 2003, nearly 25 years after the RSV sported it. Yet those five-star ratings from NHTSA that have become standard for front crash safety in U.S. cars come from tests at 35 mph, still 15 mph shy of the RSV bar.
Last year, traffic deaths fell to their lowest level since 1961 at 33,963, after remaining stuck at roughly 40,000 for decades, in part because a modern car has more in common with the RSVs than ever before. With smaller cars, tougher fuel rules and bigger worries about oil on the horizon, that 1985 target date for the program may have been set about 30 years too early.
"I don't think that RSV had much influence in its time," says Friedman. "It is a precursor of the performance we're going to see in the future
Some people fall on their heads and wake up with their memories wiped out. A few revive with their personalities totally changed. Others die. Robin Jenks Vanderlip fell down a stairwell, smacked her head and woke up speaking with a Russian accent.
Vanderlip has never been to Russia. She doesn't remember ever hearing a Russian accent. She lives in Fairfax County, was born in Pennsylvania and went to college on the Eastern Shore. Yet since that fall in May 2007, the first question she gets from strangers is: "Where are you from?" "They say your life can change in an instant," she said in what sounds like a thick Russian accent. "Mine did."
For 42 years, Vanderlip, whose case is being studied at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland, spoke with what NIH neurologist Allen Braun called a typical mid-Atlantic American accent. But since the fall, her clipped way with consonants - dropping the final "s" from some plural words, saying "dis" and "dat" for "this" and "that" or "wiz" instead of "with" - and her formation of vowels - "home" sounds more like "herm," "well" sounds like "wuhl" - identify her more like a transplant from Moscow. The more fatigued she becomes, the thicker her accent grows.
What she has, Braun and other doctors say, is Foreign Accent Syndrome - a legitimate though rare and little understood medical condition that can follow a serious brain injury. "It does sound strange," Braun said. "It certainly does sound like someone has a foreign accent." The syndrome was first described by a neurologist in the closing days of World War II, when a Norwegian woman injured by a shrapnel hit to the head fell into a coma and woke up speaking - most unfortunately for her - with a German accent. (Fellow Norwegians ostracized her as a result, according to the medical literature.) Since then, fewer than 60 cases have been reported worldwide.
What began as a bid to cover up a nasty skin condition has resulted into a Guiness World Record for an American who has been named the most tattooed woman in the world.
Julia Gnuse - nicknamed the 'illustrated lady' - has 95 per cent of her body covered in ink, ranging from jungle scenes and cartoons to her favorite actors.
Miss Gnuse, from California, started getting tattoos on her legs after developing a skin condition called porphyria, which causes the skin to blister when exposed to sunlight.
She then turned her attention to her stomach, arms and back and before long was addicted to body art.
In an interview, Miss Gnuse said although the ink did not stop her skin from blistering, it covered up the scars and allowed her to be exposed to the sun.
'I did this for the reason of covering scarring from the blisters. They get as deep as three degree burn,' she said.
'I had a friend who is a plastic surgeon, who suggested tattooing my skin the same color to the scarring that I had, seeing if we can match my just pale-looking skin that I had.'
'That didn't work. We tried it. It was very difficult to match that. So I had the idea of a colorful tattoo, then I got hooked. I got addicted.'
Miss Gnuse said there was medication available for her condition, but said taking it could have placed her at risk of blindness.
Miss Gnuse, who unveiled her tattoos at a BookExpo in New York yesterday, said every one of her designs had been created by the same tattoo artist.
Maybe you've seen this but not being a tv watcher, this is new to me
First there was Iron Man..then came IRON BABY..a superb effort by the maker's of Iron Baby's uncle..brought to you by Huggies, strong enough even for Super Heroes
The driver of a Pepsi semi-truck is cut off by an out-of-control Nissan Sentra, overturned and then thrown across the median into oncoming traffic Wednesday morning in Dallas.
Video from the North Texas Tollway Authority shows an insane crash occurring on the northbound lanes of the Dallas North Tollway just after 10:00 am on Wednesday. In the video it appears as if the Nissan Sentra doesn't make the turn and hits the truck, bounces off and then over-corrects, causing the Sentra to then reconnect with the semi, sending the unladen truck into the southbound lanes.
http://jalopnik.com/5550345/video-car-hits-pepsi-truck-causes-catastrophic-wreck?skyline=true&s=i
Paddy and Mick were both laid off, so they went to the unemployment office. When asked his occupation,
Paddy answered, 'Knicker Stitcher. I sew DA 'lastic onto ladies' knickers and tongs.'
The clerk looked up Knicker Stitcher on his computer and, finding it classified as unskilled labour, he gave him 80 pounds a week unemployment pay.
Mick was next in and when asked his occupation replied, 'Diesel Fitter.'
Since a diesel fitter was a skilled job, the clerk gave Mick 160 pounds a week.
When Paddy found out he was furious. He stormed back into the office to find out why his friend and co-worker was collecting double his pay.
The clerk explained, 'Knicker Stitchers are unskilled labour and Diesel Fitters are skilled labour.'
'What skill?' yelled Paddy. 'I sew DA 'lastic on DA knickers and tongs, then Mick puts 'em over his head and says: 'Yep, diesel fitter.'
Protesters of a statewide ban to keep people dressed as chickens from coming closer than 100 feet to polling places are crying "fowl."
It seems Secretary of State Ross Miller's ban did not stop some peeps from flocking to vote Wednesday.
Clad in a bright yellow chicken suit, Michael Ginsburg voted at the Rainbow Library despite the ban, claiming the debate has transformed into a free speech issue rather than a jab at any one particular candidate.
"The concern is they could ban something else," said Ginsburg, an at-large board member for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. "I understand the chicken outfit has become synonymous with a certain campaign, which we weren't actually discussing or out in opposition to. This really just interferes with someone's First Amendment rights."
For weeks, chicken jokes have permeated the news, with pundits chiding Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sue Lowden for her remarks suggesting people could barter with doctors for medical care.
But Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said the Election Department cannot stop someone from voting as long as they are not interfering with the process.
"This whole thing is ridiculous," Lomax said. "You've got a state with a $3 billion deficit, a country that's bankrupt, and that's what we're dealing with. We instructed our workers to let them vote. They can vote.
"Then we get them out of there as quickly as possible."
Immediately after voting, Ginsburg was escorted from the polling place.
Miller has refused to lift his ban, saying state law prohibits "electioneering" or campaigning for or against a candidate closer than 100 feet to polling places.
But he also acknowledged that local election officials have discretion when it comes to voter dress at the polls.
The law that Miller cites as giving him authority to prohibit people in chicken suits from being in polling places does not specifically mention what people can or cannot wear.
Instead, it states people cannot buy, sell, wear or display "any badge, button or insignia which is designed or tends to aid or promote the success or defeat of any political party, candidate or ballot question."
Miller said it would not be unlawful for people to show up at polls dressed as Uncle Sam or even Freddy Krueger of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" fame as long as it did not interfere with other voters.
Miller said that despite the ban, people in chicken suits are showing up at polls and standing more than 100 feet away.
"Obviously, some people are trying to get publicity out of this issue," he said. "Their protest of my ban laid an egg."
Everyone knows that the chicken suit wearer is sending a message against one particular candidate, Miller added.
"I know they aren't at the polls to vote for Colonel Sanders," he quipped.
VINCENT Liew waited five years for the kidney that was supposed to change his life. Instead, the organ ended it.
The kidney came from a woman who had uterine cancer, but she and doctors didn't know it. Once her disease was discovered after the transplant, Mr Liew's doctors highly doubted it could spread to him.
But in seven months, Mr Liew was killed by cancer that his autopsy linked to the transplant. His death, the subject of a medical malpractice trial in which closing arguments were scheduled for today, is believed to be the only reported instance of uterine cancer apparently being transmitted by transplant, medical experts say.
The case has reignited questions about the sometimes hidden risks carried by transplanted organs, risks that transplant experts say they have worked to minimise but can't eliminate - but are worth taking for many patients.
Mr Liew, a 37-year-old from Singapore who worked in the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in New York, didn't know the chance he was taking with the February 25, 2002, transplant that held the promise of freeing the diabetic from three-times-a-week dialysis.
"He was very excited, very happy," his widow, Kimberly Liew, testified last week, according to the Daily News. But, she said, he ended up with "a bomb in his body."
Donor Sandy Cabrera had died of a stroke about a day earlier. The 50-year-old had seemed healthy until she collapsed while checking e-mail at her Newburgh, New York, home, and she and her loved ones had no clue about her cancer, said her boyfriend, Michael Daniels.
"I feel real bad for the guy who got the kidney, but I'm telling you, no one knew she had cancer," Mr Daniels said in a telephone interview.
The doctors who treated her at St Luke's Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh didn't know either, until an autopsy found the uterine cancer days after her death, according to testimony.
The news didn't reach Mr Liew's New York City transplant surgeon, Dr Thomas Diflo, until April 17, 2002, according to testimony. It's unclear why the information didn't travel faster; St Luke's declined to comment, and the organisation that arranged the transplant, the New York Organ Donor Network, didn't immediately return a call yesterday.
A gag order has prevented all the parties from speaking about the case outside court.
Dr Diflo testified that he told Mr Liew the safest plan was removing the kidney, but the odds of Mr Liew developing the cancer were slim, given its origins in the female reproductive system.
"It would be extremely unusual for a man to get cancer of the uterus," Dr Diflo testified he told Mr Liew, according to the Daily News.
Mr Liew decided to keep the organ, and Dr Diflo said he respected his patient's choice. Tests from May to August found no indication of cancer in the kidney, according to testimony.
Suffering from back pain, Mr Liew had Dr Diflo remove the kidney on August 29, 2002. Tumours were readily apparent, according to trial testimony, and Mr Liew died within a month.
His autopsy attributed his death to cancer that derived from the transplant and had genetically female cells, though it didn't specify the form of cancer. Dr Robert Gelfand, a NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Centre cancer specialist who reviewed the records for Mr Liew's widow, concluded Mr Liew died of uterine cancer.
DALLAS, Texas -- A 30-year-old mother of three said she was refused entrance into Six Flags Over Texas because of her tattoo.
Samantha Osborn, a Texas girl through-and-through, has two six-shooters surrounded by yellow roses tattooed on her chest.
"I got it because I love Texas," she said. "I thought of cowboys and six-shooters and the yellow rose of Texas."
But a Six Flags employee stopped her at the entrance gate when she and her husband, Matt, went to the Arlington amusement park to celebrate his birthday.
"We tried to enter, one employee grabbed me and said my chest tattoo was offensive and that I may not be allowed into the park," Osborn said. "I was flabbergasted."
She said the employee told her Six Flags was a family-friendly place. Osborn told the employee she was the mother of three girls.
"She said it was as offensive as a swastika and that she would sell me a $5 shirt to cover myself up and that they didn't let people with swastikas into Six Flags, and that my tattoo condoned violence," Osborn said.
Six Flags' dress code says park management can deny customers entrance if their clothing is deemed inappropriate or vulgar. The code does not mention tattoos.
The Osborns, determined to celebrate the birthday, eventually entered the park through another line without being bothered, but the damage had been done.
"It just soured the whole experience, and we left," Samantha Osborn said.
Osborn, who has several tattoos, said she has never been harassed about them. Her husband's tattoos are much more visible than hers and cover about 70 percent of his body.
"I've never been denied access or even asked to cover up entering any public place, ever," he said.
Samantha Osborn complained to Six Flags about what she called unfair and discriminatory treatment. She later received a letter of apology by e-mail from Cindi Brickett, Six Flags guest services supervisor.
"We are dedicated to providing a fun-filled day that goes beyond your expectations," the e-mail said. "On behalf of the entire management team, I sincerely apologize that we did not meet that goal and hope that you will not allow this experience to diminish your impression of our park."
Brickett also promised the employee would be dealt with appropriately.
"I received an e-mail, which wasn't a phone call. I would have really liked to speak to a person," Osborn said.
The Osborns said they don't plan on returning to Six Flags.
Would-be bank robbers in Germany miscalculated the amount of explosives needed to open the front door and instead leveled an entire building, Die WeltOnline reports.
The safe and the ATM machine survived intact, however, and the robbers apparently fled without taking any money from the bank branch in Malliss.
Police initially thought one of the robbers might have been buried in the rubble, but search dogs turned up nothing, Die Welt reports.
In addition, police found a stolen delivery van on fire outside the building. They surmise that the thieves brought it along to use to cart off the ATM machine.
*****************************************************************************
This reminds me of the classic line in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" after Butch tried to blow up a safe on a Union Pacific railroad train and blew up the safe, the rail car and all the money..Sundance says to Butch.."use enough dynamite there Butch?"
CROSBY, Minn. -- Pain is the operative word in the unfortunate story of 14-year-old David Gibbons. It is a pain he has endured both physically and emotionally after being punched in the groin by another student as he changed classes at Crosby Ironton High School.
"One o'clock in the morning he woke me up and told me he was in excruciating pain," recalls Christy Gibbons, David's mom. Not long after, David was in surgery at St. Joseph's Hospital in Brainerd having his right testicle removed.
"This may be called a game, but it's not a game. It's dangerous and it needs to stop," said Christy.
It's a notion seconded by Dr. Scott Wheeler, a Brainerd urologist.
"It's just gotten way out of control," said Wheeler, who now performs "three to four surgeries a year" on boys with ruptured testicles and other complications of being groin punched - with dozens more coming in with less severe injuries. "It's high school, junior high, elementary school," said Wheeler.
Dubbed "sack tapping" by some students, the practice is now featured in dozens of homemade videos on YouTube.
"We're gonna see who our first victim is," says a student in one video before punching an unsuspecting male student in the groin as he walked down a school hallway.
It is painful to watch and Dr. Wheeler says increasingly common. "All parents, you need to have this talk with your kids not to do it. It's lost its humor. It's not a game anymore. People get hurt."
"I don't know how to stop it," said David, who says he's been the recipient of similar attacks in the past. His parents pulled him out of school and are now planning a move to a different school district.
Jamie Skjeveland, superintendent of Crosby Ironton schools, says the investigation of the incident involving David is complete, but he declined to comment on any disciplinary action for privacy reasons.
On Wednesday morning the Gibbons are scheduled to meet with Crow Wing County Attorney Don Ryan to learn if criminal charges will be filed against the other student.
"This kid doing that, he should definitely be held responsible for that," said Denny Gibbons, David's dad.
Doctors have told David that even though he lost a testicle in the attack, he should still be able to have children someday.
David's mom mostly wants other parents to be aware. "I seen the pain he was in. I seen what he went through every day, and it just breaks my heart and I don't want any other child to have to go through this."
DAHLONEGA, Ga. - A North Georgia teacher is on administrative leave and could lose her job after she allowed four students to don mock Ku Klux Klan outfits for a final project in a high school class Thursday, administrators said.
The sight of people in Klan-like outfits upset some black students at the school and led at least one parent to complain.
Catherine Ariemma, who teaches the advanced placement course combining U.S. history with film education, could face punishment ranging from suspension to termination, Lumpkin County School Superintendent Dewey Moye said Monday. Ariemma has spent nearly six years teaching in the rural county about 75 miles north of Atlanta.
She said Monday that students were covering an important and sensitive topic but one that she might handle differently in the future.
"It was poor judgment on my part in allowing them to film at school," Ariemma said. "... That was a hard lesson learned."
The incident happened at Lumpkin County High School. Ariemma said her students spend the year viewing films and later create their own films to watch in class. She said the students brainstorm and pick topics to cover. This particular class decided to trace the history of racism in America.
She said the class has 15 students of multiple races, but no blacks.
A group of five students took on the subject, which included covering the history of the notorious white supremacist group which had large chapters in Stone Mountain, Ga. and Tuscaloosa, Ala. One student filmed and did not wear sheets, she said.
"The kids brought the sheets in, they had SpongeBob party hats underneath to make it shaped like a cone," Ariemma said. "They cut out the eyes so they could see."
Ariemma said she led the students through a cafeteria to another location where they shot the scene. Later, she said another teacher approached her.
"That's when I heard there were a couple of students who were upset," she said.
Ariemma said she wasn't able to find those students to explain the project to them.
Monday, student Cody Rider told Atlanta's WSB-TV that his cousin was among those who saw the group in white sheets and was frightened.
"I got mad and stood up and I tried to go handle it," he told the TV station.
Moye said a black parent went to the school to complain that evening.
Ariemma has no history of missteps at the school, Moye said, but administrators of the roughly 90 percent white school system are taking the incident seriously.
"This stuff happened in history. Do you ignore it? No," he said. "But you certainly don't walk the hallway in the garb."
Ariemma says administrators will review the film and decide if it will be shown in the classroom. She said the students who wore the sheets were shaken when they realized that other students were upset.
An Italian, a Scotsman, and a Chinese fellow are hired at a construction site. The foreman points out a huge pile of sand and tells the Italian guy that he is in charge of sweeping. He tells the Scottish man that he is in charge of the shoveling, and the Chinese guy is in charge of supplies. The foreman goes away for a couple of hours and when he returns the pile of sand is still there untouched.
He asks the Italian guy. Why haven t you swept any of the sand?
The Italian guy says, I no hava a broom. You said the Chinese fella wasa ina charge-a of supplies, but he hasa disappeared and I no coulda finda him no where.
The foreman then turns to the Scottish man and says, you were supposed to shovel this pile of sand.
The Scottish man says, Aye, boot ah could nay get meself a shoovel. Ye left th Chinese gadgie in charge of supplies, boot ah could nay find him either.
The foreman is really angry and storms off toward the pile of sand. He is looking for the Chinese guy.
Just then, the Chinese guy leaps out from behind the pile of sand and yells, SUPPLIES!
When you think of an 87-year-old, do you think of someone running a 100-meter dash? How about making a double play? Can you imagine an 87-year-old pole vaulting? Adolph Hoffman does all that and more.
When the softball team for 75-year-olds takes the field, the second baseman is a bit out of his league.
"Adolph is probably the oldest guy in the league," says 75-year-old coach Jim Robertson.
It's not his heart on his sleeve, it's his age on his back. Hoffman's uniform bears the number 87. The octogenarian plays plays softball and hardball.
"I can't play on an older team, 75 is the oldest hardball team." laughed Hoffman.
Hoffman played ball when he was young, but then came World War II. After that was family and work.
"And then I picked it up again at 80," Hoffman laughed.
He did it to get in shape.
"But then there's the competition and you're beating everybody and it's inspiring to no end," Hoffman explained.
Hoffman says he never drank or smoked. But he hasn't been without health problems. He had a triple bypass in 2001.
As amazing as it is to see an 87 year old heading for first base it's even more incredible when you see Hoffman sailing through the air pole vaulting.
Hoffman competes in the Senior Olympics. He rattles off all of the events in which he competes.
"I pole vault, high jump, long jump, discus, shot, javelin, hammer throw and run. I run the 100 meter and 200 meter," Hoffman said.
Last year at the age of 86, Hoffman won seven medals out of 9.
Now he's in training for the 2011 games. He's working out alongside high school athletes.
"Most folks Adolph's age are not pole vaulting. They're under the ground instead of above the ground. He's inspiring," said Hoffman's pole vaulting coach Cris Allison.
He''s not worried about hurting himself now.
"It should have been high school. We went 12 foot and only had sand to fall into," Hoffman said.
Hoffman and his brother held the state record for pole vaulting 70 years ago.
Now, he's trying to set it again. The world record in his age group is eight foot. Hoffman is hitting seven and half regularly.
Here's another record for which he's aiming. The most senior player in the Senior World Series.
The man who makes Hoffman's uniform changes his number every year.
"He's going to supply me until I'm 99 and he said someone else is going to have to take over when you hit 100," Hoffman laughed.
video:
http://www.kens5.com/home/87-year-old-aiming-for-pole-vaulting-record-94771634.html
A large woman, wearing a sleeveless sundress, walked into a bar in Dublin. She raised her right arm,revealing a huge, hairy armpit and, as she pointed to all the people sitting at the bar she asked, "What man here will buy a lady a drink?"
The bar went silent as patrons tried to ignore her.
But down at the end of the bar, an owly-eyed drunk slammed his hand down on the counter and bellowed,"Give the ballerina a drink!"
The bartender poured the drink and the woman chugged it down. She turned to the patrons and again pointed around at all of them, revealing the same hairy armpit, and asked, "What man here will buy a lady a drink?"
Once again, the same little drunk slapped his money down on the bar and said, "Give the ballerina another drink!"
The bartender approached the little drunk and said, "Tell me, Paddy, it's your business if you want to buy the lady a drink, but why do you keep calling her the ballerina?"
The drunk replied, "Any woman who can lift her leg that high has got to be a ballerina!"
Justin Bieber is everywhere. And if you're like so many others over the age of 15, you've seen enough. Luckily, a new Firefox add-on lets you remove all mentions of Bieber from the Web in one fell swoop.
The tool, dubbed Shaved Bieber, evaluates any page a person is browsing and censors all mentions of the teen idol. It works on every site, from Twitter to Google to Wikipedia. People can even go to his personal home page and watch as every mention of Bieber is blocked out.
Shaved Bieber is available in two versions: an add-on, which does all the Bieber removal itself, or a bookmarklet, which requires a person to click on it before it hides mentions of the pop star. The tool also censors photos labeld "Bieber" or "Justin Bieber," so users don't even have to look at him.
The anti-Bieber tool was developed by Greg Leuch, a developer for Free Art and Technology Lab. The organization is "dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media," the site claims.
Emily Chang, CNN
I first encountered Xiao Bao at a Beijing dance studio. He was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, zooming around the room, passing out lollipops and bottles of Cokes his parents had brought for our CNN crew. He seemed just like any other four-year-old, incredibly cute, giggly and overwhelmingly energetic.
Then he made a quick change, throwing on a black and gold costume and sunglasses, and suddenly he was China's youngest Michael Jackson impersonator.
As soon as the music started playing he started hip-hopping, pop and locking and moonwalking -- like a pro. My favorite part was that he moved his mouth to the English lyrics to "Dangerous," without actually saying them out loud or understanding what the lyrics mean.
At the end of his routine, he held his last pose an extra few seconds to get the appropriate amount of applause and ooh-ing and aww-ing. He definitely basked in the attention. When asked to tell us his favorite singer, Xiao Bao said in his limited English, "My-co Jay-ke-sun!" Then he collapsed into a fit of giggles.
Wang Yiming, famously known as Xiao Bao (which means "little treasure" in Chinese), first started performing when he was two years old, in a provincial children's talent competition. By the time we met him he had already danced his way through national competitions and television shows. These days, the aspiring "prince" of pop has gone global.
Earlier this year, Xiao Bao rocked out on the "Ellen" show in Los Angeles. Ellen Degeneres, a dance-lover herself, seemed quite impressed.
The attention and travel has been more than his parents could have ever hoped for. Xiao Bao was born extremely premature, weighing just over two pounds.
"The doctor told me they couldn't guarantee anything," his mother Bian Aiqin says. "It would be a miracle if Xiao Bao survived."
Their doctor advised them to assist Xiao Bao in doing physical exercises to build his strength.
"But he was too small for exercises," his mother recalls. "So we decided to play music for him, hoping he'd move to the beat."
And he did.
"To our surprise he was so attracted to the music. He stopped crying the moment he heard the melody," Bian says. When he got bigger he started dancing.
Xiao Bao's parents admit he has not led a normal childhood. After they discovered his love for dancing, the family moved from neighboring Hebei Province to Beijing so Xiao Bao could practice at China's best hip-hop dance studio six times a week.
Their little YouTube sensation continues to appear on television and most recently performed at the Shanghai World Expo. He's met celebrities from NBA superstars to Mickey Mouse himself (during a trip to Disneyland courtesy of "Ellen").
Xiao Bao is currently home schooled, but his mother says she hopes to put him back into regular school when his schedule allows for a normal routine. But they insist they're doing this only because he wants to.
His teacher agrees. "It's normal that when he's not practicing he's just moving around," says hip-hop coach Yang Ling. "Dancers need that kind of desire to perform whenever, wherever."
"He's still a child and there's a long life ahead of him," Xiao Bao's mother adds adds. "Nobody knows what will happen. So all I want is for him to be happy now."
His father, Wang Xiaojun, agrees, "His happiness is dancing."
As we finished our shoot and departed the studio, Xiao Bao still clad in his Michael Jackson costume gave each of us a kid-sized goodbye hug.
No less energetic than when we met him, he bounded into his mother's arms for another afternoon of MJ tunes as China's little Prince of Pop.
Eighteen-year-old Aaron Williams is facing a felony assault charge for allegedly stabbing his own mother over a cheeseburger.
The incident took place at around 1 a.m. Friday at an apartment complex on West Bancroft in Toledo,Ohio police said. Vergie Williams said her teen son was all tough with his big butcher knife before she pulled out a knife of her own and he took off out the front door.
Taking a deep drag on his cigarette while resting on the steering wheel of his truck, he looks like a parody of a middle-aged truck driver.
But the image covers up a much more disturbing truth: At just the tender age of two, Ardi Rizal's health has been so ruined by his 40-a-day habit that he now struggles to move by himself.
The 56 pound Indonesian toddler is certainly far too unfit to run around with other children and his condition is set to rapidly deteriorate.
But, despite local officials' offer to buy the Rizal family a new car if the boy quits, his parents feel unable to stop him because he throws massive tantrums if they don't indulge him.
His mother, Diana, 26, wept: 'He's totally addicted. If he doesn't get cigarettes, he gets angry and screams and batters his head against the wall. He tells me he feels dizzy and sick.'
Ardi will smoke only one brand and his habit costs his parents �3.78 a day in Musi Banyuasin, in Indonesia's South Sumatra province.
But in spite of this, his fishmonger father Mohammed, 30, said: 'He looks pretty healthy to me. I don't see the problem.'
Ardi's youth is the extreme of a disturbing trend. Data from the Central Statistics Agency showed 25 per cent of Indonesian children aged three to 15 have tried cigarettes, with 3.2 per cent of those active smokers.
The percentage of five to nine year olds lighting up increased from 0.4 per cent in 2001 to 2.8 per cent in 2004, the agency reported.
A video of a four-year-old Indonesian boy blowing smoke rings appeared briefly on YouTube in March, prompting outrage before it was removed from the site.
Child advocates are speaking out about the health damage to children from second-hand smoke, and the growing pressure on them to smoke in a country where one-third of the population uses tobacco and single cigarettes can be bought for a few cents.
Seto Mulyadi, chairman of Indonesia's child protection commission, blames the increase on aggressive advertising and parents who are smokers.
'A law to protect children and passive smokers should be introduced immediately in this country,' he said.
A health law passed in 2009 formally recognizes that smoking is addictive, and an anti-smoking coalition is pushing for tighter restrictions on smoking in public places, advertising bans and bigger health warnings on cigarette packages.
But a bill on tobacco control has been stalled because of opposition from the tobacco industry.
The bill would ban cigarette advertising and sponsorship, prohibit smoking in public, and add graphic images to packaging.
Benny Wahyudi, a senior official at the Industry Ministry, said the government had initiated a plan to try to limit the number of smokers, including dropping production to 240 billion cigarettes this year, from 245 billion in 2009.
'The government is aware of the impact of smoking on health and has taken efforts, including lowering cigarette production, increasing its tax and limiting smoking areas,' he said.
Mr Mulyadi said a ban on advertising is key to putting the brakes on child and teen smoking.
'If cigarette advertising is not banned, there will be more kids whose lives are threatened because of smoking,' he said.
Ubiquitous advertising hit a bump last month when a cigarette company was forced to withdraw its sponsorship of pop star Kelly Clarkson's concert following protests from fans and anti-tobacco groups.
However, imposing a non-smoking message will be difficult in Indonesia, the world's third-largest tobacco consumer.
Tubagus Haryo Karbyanto, a member of the National Commission of Tobacco Control, said Indonesia must also address the social conditions that lead to smoking, such as family influence and peer pressure.
'The promotion of health has to be integrated down to the smallest units in our society, from public health centres and local health care centres to the family,' he was quoted as saying by the Jakarta Globe on Friday.
Health Minister Endang Sedyaningsih conceded turning young people off smoking will be difficult in a country where it is perceived as positive because cigarette companies sponsor everything from scholarships to sporting events.
'This is the challenge we face in protecting youth from the dangers of smoking,' she said in a statement on the ministry's website.
