Chinese Caught Selling Rat Meat as Lamb

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Photo Credit: jo-hEven for China’s scandal-numbed diners, inured to endless outrages about food hazards, news that the lamb simmering in the pot may actually be rat tested new depths of disgust.

In an announcement intended to show that the government is serious about improving food safety, the Ministry of Public Security said on Thursday that the police had caught a gang of traders in eastern China who bought rat, fox and mink flesh and sold it as mutton. But that and other cases of meat smuggling, faking and adulteration featured in Chinese newspapers and Web sites on Friday were unlikely to instill confidence in consumers already queasy over many reports about meat, fruit and vegetables laden with disease, toxins, banned dyes and preservatives.

Sixty-three people were arrested and accused of “buying fox, mink and rat and other meat products that had not undergone inspection,” which they doused in gelatin, red pigment and nitrates, and sold as mutton in Shanghai and adjacent Jiangsu Province for about $1.6 million, according to the ministry’s statement. The report, posted on the Internet, did not explain how exactly the traders acquired the rats and other creatures.

“How many rats does it take to put together a sheep?” said one typically baffled and angry user of Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblog service that often acts as a forum for public venting. “Is it cheaper to raise rats than sheep?”

Residents of Shanghai recently endured the sight of thousands of dead hogs floating down a nearby river, apparently the dumped victims of disease in piggeries upstream.

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How Porn Links and Ben Bernanke Snuck Into Bitcoin’s Code

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Photo Credit: CNN MoneyHere’s a little-known quirk of cyber currency Bitcoin: There are coded messages hidden in the ledger that track bitcoin transactions. Most are innocuous, but this week, the discovery of a malicious transmission filled with porn links set the Bitcoin community abuzz.

Bitcoin, a four-year-old digital currency developed by a hacker who still remains anonymous, is a favorite plaything of libertarians and cryptography geeks. It burst into the mainstream this year when investors took note of its wild price swings. One bitcoin is now worth around $112, down from a record high of $266 last month, but up from $5 a year ago.

At the core of the bitcoin network is a database recording every single transaction.

Bitcoin enthusiasts have long known about a technical loophole that allows people to inject coded messages into the database. The trick is typically used for pranks or harmless notes, but Bitcoin discussion boards lit up on Monday with the news that someone took advantage of it for a nastier purpose: adding encoded links that claim to lead to porn sites, some featuring children.

A technical analysis posted on BitcoinTalk.org delves into the details. There doesn’t seem to be much danger for the casual bitcoin user. The porn links are concealed in hexadecimal code, and a decoder is needed to translate them into English. In other words, you’d really have to be looking for it.

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Mayor Bloomberg Launches Vegetarian-Only Public School

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Photo Credit: APBlocked by the courts from banning big sodas in the Big Apple, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has zeroed in on another target in a quest for healthier lifestyles: Meat.

Public School 244 in the Flushing section of New York’s Queens borough has gone vegan — the first public school in the nation to serve only vegetarian meals for breakfast and lunch.

Cafeteria workers at Active Learning Elementary School have switched out poultry for black beans, tofu and falafel. And the New York Daily News reported the elementary eaters actually like it.

“This is so good,” said 9-year-old Marian Satti of a black bean and cheddar cheese quesadilla served at Tuesday’s lunch, the Daily News said. “I’m enjoying that it didn’t have a lot of salt in it.”

School heads — led by Chancellor Dennis Walcott, a self-claimed fitness guru — tout the healthier eating as pro-kid. Healthy kids make happy students, administrators said in the Daily News report.

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Man Grabs Shotgun From Armed Robber in New Orleans (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeWhen a robber armed with a shotgun pointed his weapon in the face of a man in New Orleans at 5am on Saturday morning, he probably was not expecting to be disarmed in a matter of seconds.

CCTV footage released by the local authorities shows the man walking down a street near the French Quarter at about 5am on Saturday morning. He is followed by an armed robber who cocks his weapon as he approaches.

Watch video here:

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Discovery News: Six Inch ‘Space Alien’ Remains Turn Out to be Human

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Photo Credit: SIRIUS, YOUTUBE SCREEN CAPTUREA teensy skeleton with a squashed alien-like head may have earthly origins, but the remains, found in the Atacama Desert a decade ago, do make for quite a medical mystery.

Apparently when the mummified specimen was discovered, some had suggested the possibility it was an alien that had somehow landed on Earth, though the researchers involved never suggested this otherworldly origin.

Now, DNA and other tests suggest the individual was a human and was 6 to 8 years of age when he or she died. Even so, the remains were just 6 inches (15 centimeters) long.

While the jury is out regarding the mutations that cause the deformity, and there is a real discrepancy in how we account for the apparent age of the bones … every nucleotide I’ve been able to look at is human,” researcher Garry Nolan, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, told LiveScience. “I’ve only scratched the surface in the analysis. But there is nothing that jumps out so far as to scream ‘nonhuman.'”

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Wow! Monster Hurricane on Saturn Spied by NASA Spacecraft

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Photo Credit: NASASpectacular new images from a NASA spacecraft orbiting Saturn have captured the most detailed views ever of an enormous hurricane churning around the ringed planet’s north pole.

The stunning new images and video of the Saturn hurricane, which were taken by NASA’s Cassini probe, show that the storm’s eye is 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide — about 20 times bigger than typical hurricane eyes on Earth. And the Saturn maelstrom is more powerful than its Earth counterparts, with winds at its outer edge whipping around at 330 mph (530 km/h).

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” Cassini imaging team member Andrew Ingersoll, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

Saturn’s hurricane swirls inside a mysterious, six-sided vortex. Unlike hurricanes on Earth, which tend to drift northward as our planet rotates, the Saturn storm and its hexagonal vortex have been camped out at the north pole for a while.

“The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that’s likely why it’s stuck at the pole,” Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., said in a statement.

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Lawsuit Exposes NYC Church's Two Billion Dollar Assets

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Photo Credit: Michael NagleThere has never been any doubt that Trinity Church is wealthy. But the extent of its wealth has long been a mystery; guessed at by many, known by few.

Now, however, after a lawsuit filed by a disenchanted parishioner, the church has offered an estimate of the value of its assets: more than $2 billion.

The Episcopal parish, known as Trinity Wall Street, traces its holdings to a gift of 215 acres of prime Manhattan farmland donated in 1705 by Queen Anne of England. Since then, the church has parlayed that gift into a rich portfolio of office buildings, stock investments and, soon, mixed-use residential development.

The parish’s good fortune has become an issue in the historic congregation, which has been racked by infighting in recent years over whether the church should be spending more money to help the poor and spread the faith, in New York and around the world. Differences over the parish’s mission and direction last year led nearly half the 22-member vestry — an august collection of corporate executives and philanthropists — to resign or be pushed out, after at least seven of them asked, unsuccessfully, that the rector himself step down.

Over the years, the church has sold or given away much of the original 215 acres from Queen Anne, but it has 14 acres, including 5.5 million square feet of commercial real estate.

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South Carolina Woman Accused of Using Ambulance as Taxi – at Least 100 Times

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Photo Credit: extranoiseA South Carolina woman was arrested after authorities discovered she called 911 at least 100 times in the past seven years to get rides into Charleston, the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office says.

Audrey Ferguson, 51, allegedly faked illnesses and would immediately sign out of area hospitals upon arrival, telling doctors she was fine, WCSC reports.

“She’ll have a vague medical complaint; for instance, abdominal pain,” Dorchester County EMS Director Doug Warren said. “She has medical complaints that are legitimate, and so until she’s been evaluated and determined not to be sick, we have to assume she is.”

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Family Makes Unexpected Find in Can of Green Beans (+video)

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Photo Credit: ABC When checking the St. Joseph County Health Department complaint reports, what turned up in some foods at local stores was surprising. The most disturbing case concerns a can of green beans – and what one family found inside will keep them from ever eating canned green beans again.

“We eat a lot of green beans, we do, we did. Nobody wants anymore now,” said Gloria Chubb of South Bend.

Chubb, a retired nurse’s aide, is disgusted by what she served up at the dinner table. “It was meatloaf, mashed potatoes, gravy and green beans,” said Chubb.

It was what was in the can of Meijer green beans that made them both lose their appetite.

“My son put some on his plate and said, ‘What is that?’ I thought maybe it was a piece of moldy bacon or something– because they have bacon in them sometimes,” said Chubb. “I and I took it out of there and it wasn’t moldy bacon, it was a toad with parts of his little legs all in the green beans. Other than that he was fully intact.”

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Last Words: Texas Con Calls Lethal Injection 'Awesome'

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Photo Credit: Sarah G…[Convicted murderer Richard] Cobb, 29, spent a decade on death row for the murder of Kenneth Vandever, a man whom he abducted and later killed in a convenience store robbery 11 years ago. Cobb abducted Vandever, then 37, and two other women whom he shot with a shotgun and left for dead. The women survived to call police, but Vandever died…

As the first injection entered his bloodstream, Cobb lifted his head from the gurney on which he was tied down, and craned his neck to stare at the warden who stood behind him.

“Wow!” Cobb shouted. “That is great. That is awesome! Thank you, warden! Thank you (expletive) warden!” he said.

Soon after the outburst, “his head fell back on the pillow, and his neck twisted at an odd angle, with his mouth and eyes open,” the AP reported.

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