Catholic Church Sets Up Exorcist Hotline in Response to Skyrocketing Possessions

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The Catholic Church has established an exorcist hotline in Milan, its biggest diocese, to cope with demand. Monsignor Angelo Mascheroni, the diocese’s chief exorcist since 1995, said the curia had also appointed twice as many exorcists to cope with a doubling in the number of requests for help over 15 years.

“We get many requests for names, addresses and phone numbers; that’s why we’ve set up a switchboard in the curia from Monday to Friday from 2:30 pm to 5 pm,” he told the chiesadimilano website.

“People in need can call and will be able to find a priest in the same area who doesn’t have to travel too far.” And to that end, the number of demon-busting priests on call has increased from six to 12.

The Monsignor said he knew of one exorcist who had been seeing up to 120 people a day. “But with so little time per client he was only able to offer a quick blessing. That’s not enough,” he said. ”There should be two to four appointments a day, no more, otherwise it’s too much.”

It’s not clear why the number of suspected possessions has risen so sharply. But Monsignor Mascheroni said that part of the increase might be explained by the rising numbers of parents having difficulty controlling disobedient teenagers.

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Dog Day Afternoon! The Great Dane Caught on Camera Doing Cannonballs in Owner’s Pool

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What do dogs get up to when their owners are at work?

They have a pool party of course. Well, this particular pet does anyway.

An amusing video has captured a Great Dane having a great time tumbling down a waterslide into its owner’s swimming pool, supposedly while they’re out for the day.

The footage, uploaded on Pawnation.com this week, is doing the rounds online, with dog lovers fawning over the pooch’s impressive party trick.

The huge black animal is seen on the tape bounding down the slippery slide, which is carved out of what look to be rocks on the side of the pool.

The canine then lands with a gigantic splash in the middle of the water.

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Verdict: Loving Husband Turned Into Homosexual Addict by Parkinson’s Drug

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A Parkinson’s sufferer has won a six figure pay-out against a drug giant after his medication turned him into a ‘gay sex and gambling addict’.

Didier Jambart had been a well respected man, an upstanding member of the community in Nantes, western France, and a loving father and husband. But within two years of taking the drug Requip he was so addicted to both his vices he sold his children’s toys to raise money and advertised himself on the internet for sex. He has now been given £160,000 in damages after a court in Rennes, France, upheld his claims.

The ground-breaking ruling was made yesterday by the appeal court, which awarded the damages to Mr Jambart from GlaxoSmithKline, the British pharmaceuticals giant.

With his wife Christine beside him, Mr Jambart, 52, broke down in tears as judges upheld his claim that his life had become ‘hell’ after he started taking Requip, a drug made by GSK. He told reporters ‘this is a great day’ after the court threw out the firm’s appeal against an earlier ruling to award him 117,000 euros. The court increased the level of damages to 197,468.83 euros after finding that there was ‘serious, precise and corroborated’ evidence to blame his transformation on Requip.

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Belgian Discovers His Wife Used To Be a Man After 19 Years

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photo credit: huntingtontheatreco

The man, only named as Jan, married Monica, his family’s former au pair in a previous marriage, in 1993 despite legal difficulties raised by the Belgian immigration authorities.

But it was only in recent weeks that he discovered that his wife had originally been a man and had undergone a sex change.

“I feel I’ve been assaulted,” he told the Het Nieuwsblad newspaper.

“I brought her to Belgium. That was not easy. The Belgian courts had serious doubts about the authenticity of her birth and her identity papers, but eventually they accepted it anyway. I thought she was an attractive woman, all woman. She had no male traits.”

Jan, 64, said that he and his wife had decided not to have children because he had two by his previous marriage and she fooled him by pretending to menstruate, using sanitary towels, “to conceal the truth”.

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Canadian Man Arrested After Telling Children ‘Santa Doesn’t Exist’

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In Kingston, it’s not the Grinch but a 24-year-old man who police say stole Christmas.

As Christmas-themed floats slowly rolled down Princess St. during Kingston’s annual Santa Claus parade, an intoxicated man shouted blasphemous lies to shocked children: Santa doesn’t exist.

The man, whose gelled hair “looked like a set of devil horns protruding from his head,” was reported to Kingston police, Const. Steve Koopman said.

Police arrested a 24-year-old man around 6 p.m.

“It was pretty despicable that someone, during this time of the year, would tell kids Santa isn’t real — which of course we would argue,” Koopman said.

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$54,000 See-Through Public Restrooms Installed in Texas

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America’s first ever public restrooms made entirely from glass have been unveiled in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The two glass restrooms cost $54,000 to design and resemble a large mirrored box. They take pride of place in the revamped public square in downtown Sulphur Springs.

For anyone concerned that people might be able to see you doing your business, fear not they have been constructed from special mirrored glass that enables people on the inside to look out but doesn’t enable nosey people to see in.

Locals are excited about being home to this unusual first and hope the mirrored bathrooms will become something of a tourist attraction. ‘Bathrooms are typically ugly no matter what you do, how can you make them disappear?’ city manager Marc Maxwell told ABC News. ‘You cover it with mirrors, that’s how, and why not make it a one-way mirror while you’re at it.’

After some initial uncertainty about how safe it is to use a glass bathroom, residents have quickly fallen in love with the quirky loos that enable you to see everything going on around you, even who is next in line. ‘I stood around the bathroom for a long time to make sure you couldn’t see inside and you couldn’t,’ said local resident Merrideth Caddell. ‘Once I went in, it felt strange that four men were looking into the bathroom, but they couldn’t see me.’

The structure works because the designers worked to devise the right combination of glass and lighting. For the illusion to work properly, the outside of the structure must be more lit than the inside, explained David Gideon of the Commercial Glass & Mirror Company. The bathrooms have no lights on the inside and in order to see at night, LED lights have been placed on the outside of the structure, so that the illusion remains intact.

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Videos: Turkey Attacks on the Rise; Residents Try to Defend Themselves

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By Bobby Sisk. Neighbors are on the offensive in Brookline after what some residents are describing as aggressive turkeys. “They were attacking the vehicle,” Karen Halvorson said outside her home in the Aspinwall Hill neighborhood.

After getting in her truck, a neighbor came and ran the birds off but it didn’t stop there. “Then, the turkeys came and started attacking my front door,” she said.

A second run-in came a few weeks ago as she walked nearby. “I looked back and three of them charged me,” she explained.

She moved to the center of the street to avoid the animals, but it wasn’t enough. “The turkey flew in my face and scratched my neck,” she said. Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s the video of the CBS affiliate news report:

And here’s a video of a reporter freaking out as she’s attacked by a turkey:

Six Million Dollar Man One Step Closer to Reality With Giant Leap in Mind Control of Computers

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The science fiction behind the Six Million Dollar Man took a step closer to science reality yesterday when researchers announced a breakthrough in thought control of computers.

Researchers from Stanford University in California have developed an algorithm that translates the neurological signals for movement with greater than ever speed and accuracy. The system, which relies on a silicon chip implanted in the brain, has been used to allow monkeys to control computer cursors – but could one day control prosthetic limbs.

‘These findings could lead to greatly improved prosthetic system performance and robustness in paralysed people,’ said Krishna Shenoy, who led the team that carried out the research.

When a paralysed person imagines moving a limb, cells in the part of the brain that controls movement still activate as if trying to make the immobile limb work again, the researchers explain. Even where a neurological injury or disease has severed the pathway between brain and muscle, the region where the signals originate often remains intact and functional…

Previous research into the field of neural prosthetics has begun to develop brain-implantable sensors able to measure signals from individual neurons, interpret them, and use them to control computer cursors using thoughts alone.But the new algorithm developed at Stanford, known as ReFIT, vastly improves the speed and accuracy of the control, the researchers reported on the November 18 issue of the Journal Nature Neuroscience.

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Self-Service Marijuana Machine Stock Soars 3000% After Washington, Colorado Legalization

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Medical marijuana company Medbox saw its stock soar an astonishing 3,000 per cent as investors seek to get in on the ground floor of what they think could be America’s next boom industry.

In the wake of this year’s elections in which both Colorado and Washington residents voted to legalize marijuana, investors began buying up MedBox shares as quickly as they could. On Monday, MedBox shares sold for $4. By Thursday they were at $215.

Medbox is an automated medication dispenser for medical marijuana accessible with fingerprint recognition or or a medical marijuana card. Using a touch screen, patients can select up to 50 different varieties of pre-weighed medical marijuana sealed in standard medication vials.

The machines do not use cash, but rather a pre-paid card that alerts the customer when the balance is low so that each purchase can be documented.The company operates 130 dispensers and is scheduled to install 40 more before 2013.

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Now that’s a mobile home! Inside the $500,000 ‘expedition vehicles’ with solar panels and 2,000-mile gas tank (shame it looks like a garbage truck)

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Most people probably wouldn’t want to live in a garbage truck, but then again most garbage trucks don’t have the amenities this one does.

Unicat Amerigo – which bills its models as the ‘ultimate family Expedition Vehicle’ – are so huge that despite being built as exploration vehicles they’re often mistaken for garbage trucks in photos.

The vehicles are so rugged they were chosen by Jalopnik as one of the best places you could ride out a zombie apocalypse.

Starting at more than $500,000 they may cost more than your average home but then again few homes can drive from coast to coast.

For that you get, depending on the model, a 2,000-mile range and enough supplies to keep people alive for months if need be.

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