Spanish woman stakes ownership of the sun opening herself to lawsuits from anyone “harmed” by her property

>A canny Spanish woman from Galicia - a sun-drenched region on the border with Spain and Portugal - has decided that she owns the star, and has the registration papers to prove it.

>Angeles Duran, 49, says that the sun officially belongs to her now, having had the celestial body registered in her name at a local notary office.

>Ms Duran told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our solar system.

>There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about individuals, she added.

'There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law.

'I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first.'

The document issued by the notary public declares Ms Duran to be the 'owner of the Sun, a star of spectral type G2, located in the centre of the solar system, located at an average distance from Earth of about 149,600,000 kilometers'.

>Ms Duran, who lives in the town of Salvaterra do Mino, said she now wants to slap a fee on everyone who uses the sun and give half of the proceeds to the Spanish government - and 20 per cent to the nation's pension fund.

She would dedicate another 10 per cent to research, another 10 per cent to ending world hunger - and would keep the remaining 10 per cent herself.

She said: 'It is time to start doing things the right way, if there is an idea for how to generate income and improve the economy and people's wellbeing, why not do it?'

For those who might be a little too broke to venture out in the sunlight - and risk a large bill at the end of the day - Ms Dueran has not yet figured out a way of enforcing her sun charge.

Police beat unconscious a man after he crashes his car

Not even close to what it appears to be!

It may appear cute and harmless, but he's actually screwing with Angela Merkel.

Pregnant woman survives after being stabbed 24 times, shot in the leg, and dumped in a ravine by two police officers facing robbery and extortion charges And the baby Survived too

Manila - A pregnant woman in the Philippines has survived being stabbed 24 times in an attack allegedly led by two police officers facing robbery and extortion charges, police said on Friday.

Grace Capistrano, 22, was a witness in the case against the two police officers, the regional police chief said.

Chief Superintendent Samuel Pagdilao said the two suspects have been taken into custody, while manhunt operations were launched against two accomplices.

Capistrano told investigators that four suspects abducted her from her house in Angono town in Rizal province, 30 kilometres east of Manila, on Tuesday.

They then taped her hands and mouth and stabbed her in different parts of her body, shot her once in the leg and then dumped her in a ravine, apparently thinking she was already dead.

But Capistrano was able to crawl her way up to the road where a driver of a passing cargo truck spotted her and brought her to a police station.

The police then took her to a hospital for treatment. Her baby also survived the ordeal, police said.

Man shot dead by police during pub robbery People make facebook page in memory of this good boy then Raided by the rest of the internet

A patient at Liverpool Hospital after the shooting. Photo: Channel Ten

POLICE shot two men, one fatally, after what is believed to be a failed armed robbery of a pub in Bankstown last night.

Two men with machetes entered the High Flyer Hotel in Marion Street near Bankstown Airport last night and threatened the bar staff.

When police arrived about 8.40pm they shot both the men – one was killed instantly, the other was injured and was taken to Liverpool Hospital, where he was in a stable condition.

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Police are searching for a third man who they said left the scene in a vehicle.

A witness said the police were in plain clothes.

"All of a sudden there was yelling and screaming going on, and all the women that were sitting at the table ... [were] all upset and said, 'The place is being robbed, the place is being robbed'.

"The next minute the doors burst open and I saw the policeman come in with his gun drawn and he was calling out 'Everybody down', screaming out ... [we heard] three or four gunshots and everything just went quiet. It was all over."

A second witness, who was visibly shaken, said there were "quite a few people" in the pub and they "scattered" when the men came into the hotel.

He said the men's faces were covered with balaclavas and they had machetes.

Police established a crime scene and were speaking with a number of witnesses. After the shooting many of the pub's patrons milled around the car park.

idiots everywhere i sware

Twice a century, India is attacked by huge rat armies that devour crops in massive destructive waves and leave people without any food. Scientists long dismissed it as an urban myth...until they discovered that it really happens, and why.

cut copy paste from website but fuck this rat plague would suck anywhere

The local farmers call it a flood; an inundation that happens every 50 years.

Others believe it to be an act of God, an inevitability.

It isn't water flooding the precious farmland in north-eastern India, but rats.

A once in a generation, gigantic plague of rats, that ruins crops and leaves people starving.

A rat army so big, so mythical, that until now some scientists did not believe it was real.

This explosion in the rodent population, leading to swarms of hungry pests, is caused by a glut in the food supply, namely bamboo seeds, researchers have confirmed.

And it is a perfect example of how the simple relationship between two apparently innocuous species, a tall grass and a tiny rodent, can turn the ecology of a whole region upside down: wiping out wildlife, destroying agriculture and leaving people destitute.

Worse, scientists suspect that climate change may create even bigger rat armies in the future.

Bamboo carpet

Bamboo forest covers more than 26,000 square kilometres throughout the north-eastern state of Mizoram, extending into the Chin Hills of Burma and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.

This species of bamboo (Melcocanna baccifera) is invaluable for farmers whose entire livelihood is based on what they can grow.

It provides a building material, clothing and even food - in the form of bamboo shoots.

Ecologically though, it is an aggressive plant that has annihilated its competition, and carpeted the area.

Approximately every 50 years, though, that carpet of forest dies off.

Whatever the environmental conditions, an internal clock signals to each plant that it is time to flower, set seed and die.

Bamboo forests cover 26,000 square kilometres of the region

"It's a way for the bamboo to ensure that the seeds survive," explains Steve Belmain, an ecologist from Greenwich University in London.

"But when the bamboo seed falls - you end up with 80 tonnes of seed per hectare on the ground.

"That's 80 tonnes of food just lying there waiting to be eaten."

For Dr Belmain and his colleagues, the most recent bamboo flowering, which began in 2004 and will continue to 2011, provided a unique opportunity to study an event that only occurs every half century.

"Before this, all we had was anecdotes from 50 years ago," he told BBC News.

"It had become a legend - many people who live in the area now weren't alive during the last outbreak."

'Rat armies'

It is only now that scientists have accepted that the "bamboo masting" is the trigger for the outbreaks.

The infrequency and scale of the event rendered it somewhat mythical.

"The many fantastic stories make it much harder for scientists to take it seriously and separate fact from fiction," says Dr Belmain.

When his colleagues interviewed the communities in the Hill Tracts, some people talked about "rat armies" that appear to work together.

And many believed the rat plagues to be an act of God.

Man saves driver of sinking car

"Hi. I'm on my way home now, but I might be a bit late because the road has turned into some sort of transparent liquid."

This was her second time being arrested for drunk driving in 3 years. how does she still have a licence?

OCEAN CITY, Md. -- Police said a 23-year-old Delaware woman who was allegedly driving drunk careened into a bayside canal, sinking her car, and would have drowned if a bystander hadn't rescued her.

"She said, 'Dude, I'm gonna kill you -- you broke my car.' I said, 'Darling, you gotta get out, or you're going to die,' " Sullivan said.

According to charging documents, Ocean City Police Pfc. Pat Flynn was taking her back to the police station when she told him, "If you drop me off here, I'll give you $20 ... I'll pay you anything, just let me go."

She offered increasing amounts up to $200 in exchange for her release, police said. Police also charged Vanderhook with attempting to bribe a public official.

Vanderhook is scheduled to face her charges Dec. 16 in Ocean City District Court. Court records show Vanderhook was also charged in 2007 with drunken driving in Ocean Pines. She pleaded guilty to a charge of driving while impaired, paying $458 in court costs and fines.

Taylor Cole Vanderhook

I for one welcome our concrete generating microbes

"Researchers at the U.K's University of Newcastle have created a new type of bacteria that generates glue to hold together cracks in concrete structures - that means everything from concrete sidewalks to buildings that have been damaged by earthquakes. When the cells have been germinated, they burrow deep into the concrete until they reach the bottom. At this point, the concrete repair process is activated, and the cells split into three types that produce calcium carbonate crystals, act as reinforcing fibers, and produce glue which acts as a binding agent to fill concrete gaps."

Simplest phone

If you can only call, talk and hang up, it doesn't appear very useful to me. Listening would be a nice addition, and receiving calls as well.

“It does not provide any hi-tech features. No apps. No Internet. No camera. No text messaging. All you have to do – in fact, all you can do – is call, talk and hang up.”

Man makes boat that looks like its sinking sea troll in action

Artist Julien Berthier created a boat, named Love Love, that looks like it’s sinking, but actually has a motor that allows it to be driven around, fully afloat. Check past the jump for a picture of the boat out of the water.

This picture of the boat in port was too hilarious not to include:

"A fool and his money are soon parted" -- Thomas Tusser.

"A US court has heard that a couple conned at least $6 million from the great-grandson of an oil industry tycoon after he brought his virus-infected computer in for repair. The couple are said to have tricked the composer into believing that, while investigating the virus, they had found evidence that his life was in danger – concocting a story that the virus had been tracked to a hard drive in Honduras, and that evidence had been found that the composer's life was in danger.

" The victim here, Roger Davidson, may have lost as much as $20 million, after being convinced that he was in danger from a grand conspiracy. Vickram Bedi and girlfriend Helga Invarsdottir convinced Davidson to pay $160,000 monthly, and possibly much more, for their help.

Them Nigerians are laughing their heads off at you now

Stanford's simple-to-disassemble Bloom laptop concept is designed for easy recycling

"It's a given that we will one day be discarding our present laptop computers. It's also a given that e-waste is currently a huge problem, that looks like it's only going to get worse. While most of the materials in a laptop can be recycled, all of those pieces of glass, metal, plastic and circuitry are stuck together pretty tight, and require a lot of time and effort to separate. What is needed are laptops that are designed to be taken apart, for easy recycling – that's why a group of graduate students from Stanford University made one."

As part of Stanford’s ME310 industrial design course, design software maker Autodesk asked the students to create an easily-recyclable consumer electronics product, using the company's software. What they came up with was the Bloom laptop, which can be completely disassembled by hand, in under 30 seconds, and in ten steps. By contrast, a traditional laptop requires three tools, up to 120 steps, and takes about 45 minutes.

Needless to say, this limits the number of computers that can be taken apart in one day, making the recycling of them less financially-viable. It also leaves the disassembly process in the hands of trained workers, whereas the Bloom can be taken apart by its owner.

A by-product of making the computer modular was the development of a detachable wireless keyboard and trackpad – a feature that allows users to type from wherever they wish, without having the screen right there in their face. Upgrading is also much easier, as users can just pop out the obsolete piece, buy a new one, then pop it in.

The ME310 students won Autodesk’s Inventor of the Month award for this October. They were assisted in the Bloom project by students from Aalto University in Finland.

Man in disguise boards international flight

"A young male of Asian appearance was caught in disguise during a flight from Hong Kong to Canada. The disguise consisted of a molded silicone face and neck mask, hat, glasses and cardigan. An intelligence alert (PDF) from Canada Border Services Agency contains photos of the man with and without the disguise as well as further details of the incident. Suspicions were raised at the start of the flight when the subject was noted as having an elderly appearance that didn't match his hands of youthful appearance. Later in the flight the subject entered an aircraft washroom to remove the disguise and was caught emerging as an early 20's Asian male. This disguise is more elaborate than those used by the suspected perpetrators of the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai, January 2010. Will the continued introduction of biometric passport security deprecate the use of disguises or will disguises simply become more sophisticated?"

Australian mother a little too loose on parenting egged on son to do shots of 44% liqure

This is so disturbing! An Australian mother got her 5-year-old son drunk! Luckily, his dad called the ambulance in time and now the mom has been jailed for eight months. Is that enough of a punishment?

Some people just shouldn’t be parents. Kylie Eastwood is one of those people. The 36-year-old from Moe, east of Melbourne, Australia, is heading to jail after she allowed her 5-year-old son to consume numerous shots of homemade grappa in 2008. “He likes his alcohol,” the mother-of-six said.

According to the boy’s father, Kylie returned home from a visit to a friend’s house where she received a bottle of the home-brewed grape brandy. A few minutes later he caught his little boy drinking it. “I walked into the kitchen and saw my son with a shot glass to his lips,” he said in court.

The dad quickly took the bottle off the tot. But before long he heard Kylie “woo-hooing” in the kitchen. When he went to investigate, he discovered the kid drinking more shots as his mother cheered him on. “He likes his alcohol and asked me for a drink, and I told him, ‘Well OK, just one,’” says Kylie (who has six children to four different fathers).

HollyMoms, tests on the grappa showed that it contained 44 percent alcohol! Luckily for the little boy, his dad acted fast and called the police and the paramedics. At the hospital the boy underwent tests that showed he had a blood alcohol level of 0.09, and police believe he consumed between four to six shots of the potent booze. In American 0.08 will get you arrested for driving under the influence.

Officer Sonia Cummings, who arrived on the scene, says that the little guy was so drunk he was “making grunting noises” and walking into walls. How horrible! Kylie Eastman should be ashamed of herself. “At the time I didn’t see the severity of it but I tell you what, the next morning I did,” she says. Too little too late. That’s the kind of logic that college kids use after a night of partying on Fraternity row, but it’s wholly upsetting to hear it coming from a mother who should definitely know better than to give her little boy shots. I have a feeling this tyke won’t touch booze until he’s legal, after this experience.

Kylie originally plead guilty to reckless conduct endangering serious injury and failing to protect a child from harm and was sentenced to five months in jail. But she changed her plea to not guilty after prosecutors appealed her sentence on the grounds that it was inadequate.

Kylie is required to serve at least five months before she is eligible for parole, but reports don’t reveal whether she is losing custody of her six children.

18 month old girl fell from 6th floor

The girl was left unattended by her parents when she somehow fell, then bounced off the awning of a cafe below.

She had a further stroke of luck when a passing doctor saw her fall and caught her before she hit the ground, witnesses were quoted as saying.

The doctor found no injuries but she was taken to hospital for a check-up.

The girl's dramatic fall and rescue took place on the corner of the Cours de Vincennes and the Rue des Pyrenees, in the 20th arrondissement, late on Monday afternoon.

A man living in a building opposite from the apartment told France Info he saw the girl playing by the window with another girl a few years older.

They were coming and going from the window, he said, and had a feeling something bad might happen.

The man who caught the girl was walking by with his wife and son when the boy spotted the girl falling.

Another witness told Le Figaro that the doctor positioned himself by the awning and caught the girl in his arms after she bounced off it.

The witness, Francois, said the girl cried a bit at first but quickly calmed down.

The doctor, identified as Philippe Benseniot by France Info, said it was pure badassery.

Many Parisians live in six- or seven-storey apartment blocks

First road car produced with a 3D printer

A prototype for an electric vehicle -- code named Urbee -- is the first to have its entire body built with a 3D printer.

Stratasys and Winnipeg engineering group Kor Ecologic have partnered to create the electric/liquid fuel hybrid, which can deliver more than 200 miles per gallon on the motorway and 100 miles per gallon in the city.

The two-passenger hybrid aims to be fuel efficient, easy to repair, safe to drive and inexpensive to own.

All exterior components -- including the glass panel prototypes -- were created using Dimension 3D Printers and Fortus 3D Production Systems at Stratasys’ digital manufacturing service -- RedEye on Demand.

“Other hybrids on the road today were developed by applying ‘green’ standards to traditional vehicle formats," says Jim Kor, president and chief technology officer, Kor Ecologic. “Urbee was designed with environmentally sustainable principles dictating every step of its design."

The 3D printing technology eliminates tooling, machining and handiwork, creating great efficiencies when a design change is needed. The same technology has been used in the UK by Gordon Murray Design to help create the avant-garde T.25 city “eco-car” which was unveiled in July.

A full-scale Urbee prototype will be displayed for the first time in the US at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas.

Australian man saves woman from an attacking Great White by grabbing its tail. As the girl started to sink to the bottom, he grabbed her and brought her to the surface and on board the boat

A swimmer saved a young woman who was attacked by a shark, off the coast of western Australia, by grabbing it by the tail, rescuers have said.

The shark, which had bitten 19-year-old Elyse Frankcom, let go of her, they added.

The anonymous swimmer then brought Ms Frankcom to the surface and got her on board a boat.

She is said to be in a stable condition after undergoing six hours of surgery in hospital.

One of the first rescuers on the scene, Fremantle Sea Rescue senior skipper Frank Pisani, said of the swimmer: "He certainly was instrumental in making this a good outcome."

The shark attacked on Saturday as Ms Frankcom led a group of tourists on a swim with dolphins from a boat sailing off Garden Island, about 50km (30 miles) from Perth.

The 3m-long shark, which has not been definitively identified but is believed to be a Great White, came up from the bottom of the water and bit her.

Mr Pisani said: "As the shark bit her, it brushed aside a fairly large male who grabbed hold of the tail of the shark, which then made it let go.

"The girl then started to sink to the bottom and he grabbed her and brought her to the surface and got her back on board the boat."

Elyse Franckom said she was doing what she loved

He said Ms Frankcom apparently had bites on both thighs. She was flown to hospital by helicopter.

Shark's tooth removed

The man, who was taking part in the swim, refused to speak to journalists when the tour boat returned to dock, other than to say: "No comment, thank you. It's cool. All I want is the girl to be OK."

More than 30 people, including several children, were on board the boat at the time of the attack.

Ms Frankcom was working for Rockingham Wild Encounters, which organises boat and swimming trips, from a town south of Perth.

Terry Houston, from the company, said: "They pulled a shark tooth out of her butt, so Elyse is pretty proud of that. She's got that as a bit of a memento."

She had recently posted a message on her Facebook page saying: "If I get attacked or die, at least I die happy and doing the thing I love."

Sharks are a common feature of Australian waters but, according to the Australian Shark Attack File, attacks are rare with only 53 fatalities in the last half-century.