Metal Prices Go Up, Powerline Wires Go Down

science news, sky news, health news, sports news, tech news, msn news

According to the police spokesman London police issued a warning after two men were seen trying to cut live wires carrying 13,000 volts, reports The Sun.

“This could have easily killed or seriously injured anyone that touched the exposed wire,” said Constable Amy Phillipo.

Base metal prices have jumped in last couple of years. The new prices gave the thieves the motiv to strip live wires for copper. Some of them were caught stealing statues and tombstone fixtures.

“Copper and aluminum prices are now at all time highs,” said Wayne Kummer, co-owner of London Salvage on Egerton Street.

Business news reports say that copper is about $4 a pound, but you can get as much as $3.60 at scrap yards. Also aluminum is going for $1.40 a pound. Dealers will pay about $1 a pound.

Kummer’s company has policies to discourage or catch thieves trying to sell stolen metals or steal from his yard.

“We can usually tell if someone’s stolen it and our people are told to watch for anything new. We don’t let anyone in our yard unless they have a vehicle and we record the licence plate and make of vehicle.” said Kummer to The Sun.

“Stealing copper from an energized electric grid is extremely dangerous, putting the lives of the public, employees and the suspects themselves at serious risk of injury or death from electrocution,” said Constable Amy Phillipo in her interview for the local news.
Read more

Teen charged with his twin death

science news, sky news, health news, sports news, tech news, msn news

The death of Dennis Lewis was shocking enough: The National Honor Society student and marching band member was shot in his bedroom while masked robbers held a gun on his mother in another room.

Then police arrested his identical twin, an advanced placement student also active in their high school band. Authorities are accusing Derris Lewis of taking part in the attack and being an accomplice in his brother’s death, saying his bloody palm print was found in the bedroom where Dennis was killed.

The family, crushed by the death of one twin, is adamant the other is innocent.

“There’s no way, shape or form that my brother was even in that house,” said the boys’ older sister, Diane Lewis, who lives two doors from where the shooting happened. “He would never put my mom in harm’s way whatsoever - she didn’t raise killers or criminals.”

Derris is charged in juvenile court with being an accomplice to aggravated murder, aggravated robbery and kidnapping. Because he turned 18 two weeks after the shooting, prosecutors are seeking to have him charged as an adult.

Authorities won’t say what Derris Lewis is accused of doing. They say the motive that night was robbery but won’t elaborate.

“There were multiple people that entered and anyone who entered the premise is an accomplice,” said Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien.

Derris Lewis’ public defender, Libby Hall, declined to comment.

The attack happened just after midnight on Jan. 18 in a tough neighborhood of small homes on the city’s north side.

The twins’ mother, April Agee, was asleep on a couch in the front room of her house, the only place she could lie comfortably because of her multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy.

Dennis was asleep in the next room with the door shut. Derris had moved out a few weeks earlier and was staying with his girlfriend elsewhere in the city.

Agee says several men wearing black masks, white shirts and white sneakers entered the house, put a gun to her head, demanded money and asked who else was in the house.

“They kept saying ‘Where’s the money, where’s the money,’ with a .45 up to my head,” Agee recalled at her daughter’s home. She doesn’t know who the men were.

“I couldn’t do nothing but be still. God say ‘Be still,’ and I was, but my son started fighting them,” she said.

Agee, 47, said one of the men kicked Dennis’ bedroom door in and struggled with him. She heard someone yell “He’s too strong,” then the sound of a gun shot.

The family says there was no forced entry. They don’t know if the front door was locked before Dennis and his mother went to bed that night.

The robbers did not take $235 in cash in an envelope in Dennis’ room, money he was saving to visit Florida State University, which he planned to attend.

The family believes police made a mistake with the palm print.

Derris’ prints were in the room because he had lived there until recently, Diane Lewis said.
Read more

3-year-old threw out family savings

A Chinese couple are distraught after their three year old daughter threw their life savings out of the window of their 17th floor flat.

The little girl threw the equivalent of £700 out of the window of their rented apartment in Shenzen while her parents were asleep.

“When I woke up, she wasn’t beside me, and my purse was on the bed, open, and with a thick wad of money missing,” said the mother, Mrs. Huang.

Mrs Huang says she immediately asked her daughter what had happened, but the girl said she didn’t know.

“I looked everywhere, then I noticed there were two notes on the windowsill, and another two on the window sill one floor down,” she added.

The owner of a restaurant on the first floor of the building told her that money had been raining down on to the street, and that passers-by had gone crazy trying to catch it.

Mrs Huang said she spent the whole day in tears as £400 of the money had belonged to other people.

“We’re now hoping for magic, and that the people with our money will bring it back,” she said.

The parents have now installed wire mesh on all of their windows, reports Southern Metropolis News.

Cops On Steroids

According to Associated Press New York Police Department will soon begin random testing of its officers for steroid abuse. Allegations about criminal ring supplying the drug to police officers is what started the investigation within the department.

The New York Post reported that the decision to test for anabolic steroids doesn’t reflect a concern about widespread abuse at the nation’s largest police department. They are only trying to point out that using steroids without a prescription is illegal. Last week, the NYPD issued a lengthy memo reminding officers that anabolic steroids are a controlled substance that can cause “aggressive, anti-social or inappropriate behavior,” and that bodybuilding “is not a legitimate medical use.”

“Since the NYPD already tests for narcotics, it “only makes sense to include steroids,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in his statement for one of the local News agencies.

The urine testing should start in July and according to news reports it’s expected to cost about $1 million a year. At the moment officers are being tested randomly for heroin, cocaine, marijuana and other illegal drugs using hair samples.

Departments drug testing policy has been re-examined last year after several police officers were linked to the investigation of a Brooklyn pharmacy suspected of peddling millions of dollars of steroids and human growth hormone.

In their seized records police found that their clientele included 27 NYPD officers who worked out at the same gym.
Read more

11-year-old Boy Steered A Bus to Safety

The 11-year-old boy who steered a runaway school bus to safety said Wednesday he did it because he saw a truck coming at them and because his brother also was on the bus.

David Murphy said he worried afterward that he might get in trouble for jumping into the driver’s seat, but he said police and fire officials reassured him that he did the right thing, and so did his classmates.

“Some of them said I saved their life,” David said in a phone interview.

David was among 27 students headed to a charter school on Monday when the driver stopped at a service station, pumped about $40 of fuel and went into the rest room while the bus engine idled. In his absence, the bus began rolling down a side street that swoops through an industrial area and was on a collision course with an oncoming tractor-trailer rig.

David said he looked up and saw the truck approaching.

“I hurried up and turned the wheel so I could get out of the truck’s way,” David said.

After dodging the truck he aimed the bus for the last pillar on a bridge to avoid going farther down the steep hill. “There was nothing good down there,” he said.

David said one of the reasons he jumped into the driver’s seat was because his 12-year-old brother Patrick was on board.

Patrick said he was about to jump off the bus but stayed because he saw his brother steering.

“Yeah, he’s a hero,” Patrick said.
Read more

$8 million Facelift

Its paint may be chipping off, but the famous London Tower Bridge is not falling down - it’s merely getting an $8 million facelift. The British landmark, made famous by the nursery rhyme, “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” will be stripped of its old paint and repainted in its traditional blue and white.

The facelift will take over four years, according to the plan. Work on the landmark bridge will begin in June and will be completed in the winter of 2010. However, the bridge will remain open to traffic during the renovation.

The City Bridge Trust charity will fund the work on the landmark that was opened in 1894 by future King Edward VII and has become one of England’s most recognizable sites.

Just married and off to jail

A man who had just received a 10-year prison term exchanged marriage vows with a woman in the courthouse before being led away in shackles.

Forrest Lynn Foreman, 49, was sentenced to 10 years jail on Friday after pleading no contest to making methamphetamine, but he wanted to marry 30-year-old Amie Gayleene Lang before beginning his sentence.

In a third-floor courtroom of the Bryan County courthouse, Calera Police Chief Don Hyde Jr, who is an ordained minister, performed the marriage ceremony after being asked to do so by a court clerk deputy.

“It was an emotional moment because the two had professed to love each other and do what was right and unite as a family,” Hyde said.

“It was a situation, that from talking to the two of them, he was going away a long time and they wanted to become legal as a couple.”
Read more

7-Foot Python Hitches Ride in Manila

Commuters in the Philippine capital got a shock when they found an unwelcome passenger on their minibus: a 7-foot-long python.

The discovery Thursday sent passengers running and snarled traffic in the Manila suburb of Quezon City, police said Friday.

The python had wrapped itself around steel suspension bars under a “jeepney,” a kind of minibus unique to the Philippines, that had traveled into the capital from a nearby province, traffic police Inspector Erlito Renegin said.

Passengers scampered to safety after the snake crawled out from under the jeepney onto the road during a stop, Renegin told The Associated Press. Other cars tried to avoid hitting it, he said.

Renegin said he worked with traffic officials and bystanders to wrestle the snake into a sack.

Dante Santiago, a snake handler from the government’s Wildlife Rescue Center who picked up the python from a police station, said the animal appeared tame. Despite being handled many times, it lunged at him only once, indicating it was familiar with people and could have been a pet that escaped, he said.

Wildlife officials said they would return the python if someone could prove ownership, but that they otherwise would keep it and perhaps release it into the wild.

Mouse Hunt

Remember that old movie? Well something like that really happened and I have to say it was probably funnier than the movie it self. Apparently a German man who is afraid of rodents saw a mouse running through his house and scared to death ran out in his underwear and slippers in the middle of the night.

According to local news agencies, he panicked when he saw a mouse and ran out into the snowy night wearing only boxer shorts and slippers. He then called a police from a nearby Pay-phone.

Surprisingly enough they came and actually tried to catch the little fellow.

“He alerted the police from a public call box,” police in the central city of Göttingen said in a statement released late on Tuesday. “The 23-year-old man told the amazed officers that there was a mouse in his flat and that there was nothing he was more afraid of than the little rodents.”

Armed with traffic cones police officers ran through his house trying to catch the sneaky creature, while the freaked owner waited outside, but they failed.

The owner of the apartment decided he couldn’t share his home with the mouse and went to a friend’s house. “How the mouse spent the rest of the night remains a mystery,” police said. “Maybe it came out of hiding and spent the night dancing on the table.”

Something tells me the police came only because they needed something to laugh at.

Guy Eats Pot To Escape Arrest

When Durant police officers arrived to the Shady Brook Apartments on North 7th Street answering a call about a loud party they were in for a big surprise.

According to local news officers said that Tony Pelayo ate two marijuana joints trying to hide it from them. He was of course arrested for destroying the evidence.

Apparently, at the arrival they found two marijuana joints on the table, but Pelayo quickly took them. Officers said they asked him to hand them over but Pelayo said he couldn’t because he ate the evidence. He then proceeded to show police a leafy smile.

According to specialist ingesting and smoking cannabis does not have the same effect. It takes about one or two hours for ingested marijuana to start working but unlike the short term effect of smoked marijuana the effect of eaten lasts up to 10 hours. Also it can be far more potent than smoking the same amount.

One of the the most important effect of cannabis is an intensification of the emotional situation you are in. I think Pelayo is in for a long depressing night in jail.

Drug Lord Wins Lottery

They say good things happen to good people, but apparently these days even the bad guys have luck. An alleged drug kingpin Khanh Nhat Bui won $1.35 million on lotto, just as the police investigation closed in on him for involvement in international heroin trafficking syndicate.

Police targeted Bui and his family for a long time. During the raids on the family properties in 2005, $350,000 was seized in cash. The investigation continued after that and finally in December last year Bui was charged for Heroin trafficking.

The investigators believe he brought blocks of heroin from Vietnam and distributed it to his dealer network.

His former associate revealed the win: “Everyone in the community knows that Ca (Bui’s nickname) won the Lotto. Ca told me that he won $1.35 million,” and legal sources confirmed that Bui won lotto prize in 2006 in the middle of police investigation.

I guess money really does stick to money.

If You Wanna read more funny, weird or breaking news go Here

Modern Hermits

A hermit (from the Greek erēmos, signifying “desert”, “uninhabited”, hence “desert-dweller”; adjective: “eremitic”) is a person who lives in seclusion and/or isolation from society. According to Sociologist Isacco Turina modern hermits no longer wear long beards and hide away in caves, they live in apartments and surf the Internet just like you or me.

“At the risk of sounding like a caricature, the average hermits are the sort of people who belong on the plains,” he said. “However,” he added, “many have found it is perfectly possible to be totally alone in the middle of a bustling city.”

While working on his new book ‘The New Hermits, The Flight from the World in Modern Italy’ Professor Turina tracked down 37 hermits. He said that most of them were “around 55 years old, and that they had decided to drop out of the rat race when they were between 35 and 50.”

“More people are opting to lead a hermit’s life and turn their backs from the modern world, “although there is no institutional guide on how to do it,” adding that “around 60% of hermits are female.”

As professor Turina said there are now as many as 1000 hermits in Italy, with several hundred more dotted across Europe and the US. According to him, their return started in 1983 when the Vatican offered “full recognition” to hermits who were willing to devote their lives to the solitary “praise of God”.

A company called Spiritour even offers “hermit holidays” in the dunes of Morocco, while Ictus Voyages have a similar retreat in the Sinai desert. Who knows, maybe we could use a break from our lives. I know I certainly would.

Blinding Fate

According to reports at least 48 people from India’s Kottayam district have lost their sight after staring at the sun hoping to see an image of the Virgin Mary that allegedly appeared above the house of a former hotel owner in Erumeli.

The house has been the subject of rumors for months. The hotel owner, who has since moved, reportedly claimed other miracles happenings in his home, like the statues of the Virgin Mary in his house crying with tears of honey, and bleeding oils and perfumes.

Despite the warnings from the city, the health authorities and church officials regarding the dangers of looking at the sky and exposing the eyes to the sun, 48 cases of sight-loss caused by photochemical burns on the retina have been recorded since Friday.

“All our patients have similar history and symptoms,” said Dr. Anamma James Isaac, an ophthalmologist at the St. Joseph’s ENT and Eye hospital. “they have developed photochemical, not thermal, burns after continuously gazing at the sin.”

According to Dr James Isaac the patients are mostly girls in 12-26 age group. The youngest patient is 12 and the oldest 60. “Most of them were looking at the sun between 2 and 4 pm, when UV1 and UV2 rays are harshest,”
“Most patients may hopefully improve their vision. But there may be long-term effects on the retina,” he added.

All churches in the area have disowned the miracle, but despite warnings, and the potentially harmful effects of the sun to their eyes, believers are still flocking in front of the house where the divine image is said to have appeared. Apparently there are quite a few people still seeking the miracle.

Can fate really be that blinding?

I will walk out of here on my own two feet

And he did. November 4th wasn’t a good day for documentary filmmaker John Andrews but yesterday certainly was. A little bit over 4 months after the accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down, Andrews walked out of Madonna Rehabilitation Center.

A bike crash bruised his spinal cord and he found out about his condition while in MRI chamber: “I started insisting that they unstrap me, and then the doctor explained to me I wasn’t strapped. That’s how I found out I was paralyzed,” Andrews said.

He was really worried about his family, and how he was going to care for his nine year old son, but he was determent to get back on his feet.

“I decided after a while, if my body didn’t work, I would have to use my mind,” he said.

Only two days later, the plastic surgeon who was working on Andrews’ face noticed his toes moving.

On January 3rd he took his first steps and made a promise that he’d walk out of the hospital. Remembering the first time he felt his weight supported on his feet Andrews said: “That was the day I began to have hope I would walk again.”

In a TV interview Andrews said that a work on a documentary about his wife’s battle with stage 3 breast cancer helped a lot, and “mentally prepared him to take on this challenge.”

“Even though the odds are against you beating something like that, you can face a challenge and be able to overcome it,” he said.

He made a promise, and he kept it. But as he said, his recovery wasn’t always easy: “There were times I felt frustrated, but I was able to just chip away little by little. Eventually, you see the big picture,” Andrews said. “I think what I lost physically, I was able to gain some things mentally.”

John’s case is the best proof that the power of mind is really an amazing thing. So before you quit to fast think is it really impossible? Maybe there really isn’t anything we can’t do once we set our minds to it.

Person of Interest in Missing S.C. Couple Case Found Dead

The man named as a person of interest in the disappearance of a Hilton Head Island couple appears to have committed suicide, authorities said Tuesday.

The body of Dennis Ray Gerwing was found by his lawyer around 4 p.m. in the bathroom of a resort condominium unit his company manages, according to a news release from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office.

Gerwing left behind two notes that are being examined by state agents, said deputies, who refused to release the contents of the notes.

An autopsy has been schedule for Wednesday. Authorities called the death an apparent suicide, but would not disclose any other details.

Gerwing, 54, was named a person of interest earlier Tuesday and was not cooperating with officers investigating the disappearance last week of John and Elizabeth Calvert, deputies said.

The couple remains missing.

Investigators searched Gerwing’s home, office and vehicles Saturday. Police would not say what, if anything, was found.

Gerwing was listed as chief financial officer of The Club Group, a realty group that manages property on Hilton Head Island. According to the group’s Web site, that includes boat slips for the Harbour Town marina leased and managed by the Calverts.

The phone at the office of Gerwing’s lawyer, Dan Saxton, was not being answered Tuesday night.
Read more

Next Page »