O/T stories 08/06
PUSSSYKATT
Bill Hoffmann, NY POST Wire Services
--A New Jersey parole officer is making a fortune on the side by selling mullet
wigs. Frank Koller of Camden has already sold 1,500 mullets at $19.99 a pop
through his Web site, mulletwigs.com, and he can't keep them in stock. "Think
Andre Agassi, pre-Steffi. Joey Buttafuoco. The '93 Phillies. It's stupid. It's
crazy. People are buying them," Koller told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
--A Michigan family has just finished a 48,000-mile road trip, driving through
all 50 states in just over a year. Singer Gall says she and her husband, Ed,
took their kids - Samuel, 13, James, 11, and Benjamin, 6 - on the journey,
because "our friends from another country had seen more of the country than we
had. There was something wrong with that picture." During the trip, they
home-schooled the kids with lessons on American history.
--A U.S. immigration judge is in hot water for allegedly making jokes about
Tarzan to a woman raped and tortured in her native Uganda. The woman went
before Boston Judge Thomas Ragno seeking political asylum in the United States
because her husband was killed and she was beaten, raped and tortured in her
homeland. "Jane, come here. Me Tarzan!" Ragno said, according to the woman's
doctors. He has been suspended.
--Low-calorie watermelon has arrived. Israeli scientists say they have
developed a watermelon that has all the sweetness but significantly less sugar.
The average watermelon contains 54 calories per 4 ounces, while the new variety
has 20 to 40 percent fewer calories, said Shmuel Wolf, chief researcher at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
--You may think it's just a movie snack, but popcorn has just gained a whole
lot of respect. It's been named the "official state snackfood" of Illinois,
thanks to legislation signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Lawmakers who backed
popcorn for the honor turned their backs on Beer Nuts, Lemonhead candy and
other goodies produced in Illinois.
* * *
Dad Accused Of Making 8-Year-Old Son Drink Vomit
http://www.local6.com/news/2383769/detail.html
EAST HARTFORD, Conn. -- A 30-year-old man is under arrest, accused of making
his 8-year-old son drink vomit.
Chad McCalop was arrested over the weekend. He punished his oldest son by
forcing the boy to exercise for hours, rammed a sock into his mouth and forced
the boy to drink his own vomit, police said.
McCalop was charged with third-degree assault and four counts of risking injury
to a minor.
The boy told police he'd been made to do push-ups, squats and sit-ups for
several hours. When he cried, he said his father put a sock in his mouth.
The sock eventually made him choke. When the boy threw up, his father made him
drink the vomit, police said.
The state Department of Children and Families removed the boy and the man's
three other children from the home.
* * *
Beijing fashion shops use 'magic mirrors' to fool fat women
Hong Kong (dpa) - Fashion shops in Beijing are using ``magic mirrors'' to fool
fat women customers into thinking they look slimmer in their clothes, a news
report said Wednesday.
The shops are buying specially-made mirrors with a curved surface to make
people look more slender when they try on items in the fitting rooms, according
to the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily.
The ruse was discovered by one woman customer who bought a dress after it
seemed to make her look thinner only to find back at home the garment actually
accentuated her ample proportions, according to the newspaper.
An industry insider told the newspaper sales of the ``magic mirrors'' had
increased dramatically in recent months amid booming demand from clothes shops.
* * *
Pet snake’s bite kills firefighter
By Lou Grieco and Brandelyn Hall/Dayton Daily News
A Dayton firefighter died Monday at the University of Cincinnati Hospital after
being attacked by a poisonous pet snake Sunday night, a hospital spokeswoman
said.
Michael Peterman, 48, of 2645 Collins Ave. was pronounced dead at 3:17 p.m.,
the Hamilton County Coroner's office said. An autopsy is planned for today.
An anti-venom flown in from Miami-Dade County in Florida arrived at the
Cincinnati airport at 3 p.m., but Peterman died before the anti-venom was
delivered to the hospital, said Robert Dees, hospital spokesman.
Peterman was known to Dayton firefighters as a collector of snakes and lizards
who was occasionally called out to deal with reptiles.
The snake that bit Peterman was identified as an African rhino viper by exotic
animal rescuer Tim Harrison. Harrison, who is also an Oakwood police officer,
said the reptile is very aggressive and capable of striking quickly when
threatened or hungry.
Harrison, who founded the group Outreach for Animals to rescue exotic animals
and to educate the public about them, said he was called by the hospital to
identify and take care of the snake after the bite.
He said he believes the attack happened after Peterman accidentally hit the
snake while trying to feed it.
The African rhino viper is considered to be one of the most dangerous snakes in
Africa. Native to the tropical forests of central and west Africa, the snake
can grow up to 4 feet in length. The rhino viper's venom attacks the
circulatory system, destroying tissue and blood vessels. Its name comes from
the two or three distinctive "horns" it has above each nostril.
The snake that attacked Peterman is at Heaven's Corner Zoo for Endangered
Animals in West Alexandria.
Officials with the Fire Department and Dayton Firefighters Local 136 declined
to comment Monday.
Peterman was off duty July 31, 1998, when someone found a python under a truck
parked at Benham's Caterers and Restaurant at 209 Warren Street, just down the
street from Company 11. Firefighters from the station picked up the snake,
placed it in a 55-gallon trash can, then called Peterman.
Peterman told the firefighters it appeared healthy and well fed and probably
had been someone's pet. He declined an offer to adopt the python because he had
no cage large enough.
* * *
Thieves Hit Pay Dirt Stealing Other's Plants
FOX NEWS/By Amy C. Sims
Crooks are seeing a different kind of green in gardens and on farms, making big
money stealing and reselling coveted produce, decorative plants and trees.
These agriculture thieves rob residential yards and hardworking farmer's fields
of their bounty. And they aren't just picking a couple of peaches off a
neighbor's tree: Crop robbers are can be armed and dangerous.
Just last month, workers at an avocado grove were shot at by thieves who were
discovered pillaging the trees in Bonall, Calif., in broad daylight. No one was
hurt except the grove owner’s wallet, but the flagrant crime called attention
to the growing problem of crop theft.
“The nickname for avocado is green gold,” said Elisabeth Silva, deputy
district attorney of San Diego, adding that avocados are particularly
vulnerable to thieves.
Jerome Stehly, owner of the Stehly Ranch, which has 1,500 acres of avocado
trees in Valley Center, Calif., said crop theft has become a consistent
problem.
“We usually get hit in some of the groves every year,” he said. “We try
to divert them or keep them out by picking the lower fruit on the trees or
putting up fences. This year they cut right through the fences though.”
Stehly said one 40-acre plot of his land was robbed of $20,000 to $30,000
dollars worth of avocados this year. "That would pay two months of water
bills," he said. "It’s very frustrating. It’s hard to catch them so it’s
a constant battle."
The problem is harder to solve than some crimes because it's almost impossible
to trace produce back to a particular farm, said Silva, who specializes in
prosecuting agricultural crime. And packinghouses or roadside stands often
neglect to follow paperwork guidelines devised to track the origins of produce.
“As long as you know where to go, you can turn those avocados to cash pretty
easily,” Silva said.
Crooks are typically either members of picking crews or drug dealers looking
for quick cash who rob fields or crates awaiting pickup, according to Silva.
“One lady had a bin by the side of the road. She got a strange feeling and
went out there and sure enough there was a heroin addict unloading her avocados
into his Buick,” she said.
But farmland isn’t the only earth being robbed. Suburbia also gets hit up for
green.
In Detroit, Japanese maples are being dug up and stolen right out of people’s
yards.
Deborah Totzkay of Pleasant Ridge, Mich., placed a sign in her garden that
read, “NEIGHBORS BEWARE. On June 17th, my Japanese maple was stolen. Protect
yours!” the Chicago Tribune reported. Her $150 tree was stolen from her yard
while she was at work.
In Midtown, Tenn., Scott Williams was shocked one morning when he looked out
his window and saw holes in his lawn instead of dogwood trees, The Commercial
Appeal reported. He too posted a sign: “Missing: three dogwood trees. White
flowers, green leaves."
And Silva said San Diego’s flower and nursery products are major targets too.
“A lot of landscaping plants and palm trees are stolen,” she said.
“People don’t know what hit them, then they look up and down the street and
see the same thing has happened to their neighbors."
Sago Palms, which grow to be about 5 feet tall, are particularly popular with
thieves, netting $100 per inch in trunk length, Silva said.
But farmers aren’t giving up the fruits of their labor without a fight. Some
have hired private security firms to patrol their land.
The police are waking up and smelling the guacamole too. Many large groves are
being given Global Positioning System coordinates to make it easier for local
law enforcement to track them. And police helicopters equipped with night
vision and heat-seeking technology fly over fields to search for produce perps.
Silva said while agricultural crime may not seem dire to the average person,
she hopes people will appreciate its impact.
“I think a lot of people do look at it as kind of funny, like ‘Why are we
making a big deal out of avocados?’" she said. "But then you look at the
scale of the theft. You are hitting [farmers] directly in the pocketbook and
these are the people that are feeding the country.”
* * *
Vegas rated nation's 'meanest city' for homeless
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LAS VEGAS (AP) - It's been called sinful and decadent. Now the city of Las
Vegas has been dubbed the meanest in America for homeless people.
A report issued Tuesday by the Washington-based National Coalition for the
Homeless ranked the city at the top of its list of "Meanest Cities" based
largely on "dozens of downtown `sweeps' in which jaywalking, pedestrian
obstruction, and other quality-of-life ordinances were used as an excuse to
stop people and 'clean up' the area."
But city officials discounted the report, saying it includes factual errors and
relies too heavily on media reports instead of law enforcement statistics.
Titled "Illegal to Be Homeless: The Criminalization of Homelessness in the
United States," the report looked at "anti-homeless laws" in 147 cities,
enforcement and penalties and whether the political climate was hostile to the
homeless.
The rankings also took into account whether local activists or organizations
supported the "mean" designation and whether additional legislation to
criminalize the homeless was pending in each city, the report said.
"(Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman) has been cited on a number of occasions as
mean-spirited and the source of the mischaracterization of homeless people that
leads to the sweeps," said Donald Whitehead, the coalition's executive
director.
The report points to Goodman's remarks in his 2002 State of the City address,
when he said the homeless were "robbing people, raping people and killing their
own."
The coalition has cited the remark before, and the mayor has said his remarks
weren't directed at all homeless people.
Goodman said the report failed to mention the city's programs to help the
homeless, which have cost more than $7 million in the five years he has been in
office.
"The report has factual errors and misrepresents the support the city has
provided to homeless persons," Goodman said in a statement. "The city of Las
Vegas is the only place in the valley where a homeless person can find shelter.
We are committed to improving the lives of every resident."
Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, said the city's top
ranking was not a surprise.
"Anybody who has been paying attention to what has been going on with regard to
civil liberties in the last couple of years can understand why we haven't come
out favorably in this report," Peck said. "The city has a pattern of
aggressively enforcing quality of life ordinances in a discriminatory way."
But Linda Lera-Randle El, director of the nonprofit Straight from the Streets,
said she is unsure Las Vegas is the meanest city.
"It falls in line with all the cities all over the country that are frustrated
with the issue," she said.
* * *
If Warhol were alive at 75, he'd likely be on the Internet
By JUDY LIN
The Associated Press
PITTSBURGH (AP) — If Andy Warhol were alive to celebrate his 75th birthday,
his fans say he would have embraced the Internet, cell phones and even reality
TV.
While no one will ever know what he would have done with 21st century
technology, they're sure that the Pop Art pioneer wouldn't have stopped
experimenting with new mediums.
"He would have loved the Internet for the democratization of art," said Thomas
Sokolowski, director of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. "I know he would
have gone into every new technology."
To mark Warhol's birthday — as much as his artistic contributions —
Sokolowski's museum is offering free cake and 75 cent admission Wednesday.
Visitors will be able to view six special exhibitions as part of the "Summer of
Andy" event at one of the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the
world.
On Saturday and Sunday, visitors will receive $1 off the regular $8 adult
admission if they bring a canned good for a food drive. People are also invited
to share memories of the time Warhol spent in Pittsburgh.
Born in 1928, Warhol grew up and developed his early artistic skills in
Pittsburgh. At the center of the Pop Art movement in the 1960s, Warhol turned
the Campbell's soup can and silkscreen portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn
Monroe and Mao Zedong into works of art.
He experimented with the camera, using innovative ways to capture the
appearance and mood of people such as actor Dennis Hopper and artist Salvador
Dali, who sat in for screen tests at his New York studio.
Currently, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is showing some of those
black-and-white film portraits and the small exhibit continues to attract
crowds, said Gary Garrels, curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA.
Warhol's work remains fresh and relevant decades later because the artist was
able to put his finger on the pulse of popular culture, Garrels said. Warhol
knew people were fascinated with ordinary people — the same reason reality
shows are so popular, Garrels said.
"Warhol was in love with contemporary life, fascinated by the way the world
moves forward and obviously obsessed about how we present images of ourselves,"
Garrels said. "Whether that's in photography or movies or videos and any kind
of media. And he was interested in the ways different media affected our
perception of those things."
Warhol understood the art of spinning stories and how Americans were developing
an appetite for sound bites and packaging, strategies since perfected by
broadcasters from MTV to NBC, Sokolowski said.
While Warhol didn't come up with the Q&A format, he showed off his innovation
by having celebrities interview celebrities to help sell his Interview
magazine, Sokolowski said.
"He understood if you got a well-known person to interview another hip person,
people will love it," Sokolowski said.
Sokolowski won't hazard a guess about what Warhol would be doing today, just
that Warhol would be trying new things.
Even though the artist was best known for his figurative work, Warhol also
dived into abstract art late in his life, Sokolowski said. Warhol died in 1987
at the age of 58 following complications from gall bladder surgery.
Today, Warhol continues to transcend hipness and youth, though he always felt
like an ugly duckling.
"His family called him Andy, the red-nosed Warhola," Sokolowski said.
The Andy Warhol Museum, http://www.warhol.org/
Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org/
* * *
TOXIC WTC FALLOUT SLASHED INFANTS' BIRTH WEIGHT
NY POST/By WILLIAM NEUMAN
----------------------------------
Pregnant women who were exposed to the toxic plume from the World Trade Center
collapse were twice as likely to have much smaller babies than other new moms,
researchers said yesterday. A study of 182 women who were near the towers when
they came down showed that 15 of them gave birth to infants who registered in
the lowest 10 percent for birth weight, said Trudy Berkowitz, a professor at
Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Although they may have been just ounces lighter than similar babies born to
moms who weren't near the towers on 9/11, "their birth weight was smaller than
you would have expected, given the length of the pregnancy," Berkowitz said.
The study appears tomorrow in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The Mt. Sinai research found that 8.2 percent of the WTC babies had the smaller
than expected birth weight, compared to 3.8 percent for a control group of
infants born to women who were not exposed directly to the trade center dust,
ash and smoke.
"It was a doubling in the proportion and that was statistically significant,"
Berkowitz said.
"The babies look like they're pretty healthy and what were talking about are
fairly subtle effects so it's not like extremely small babies," Berkowitz said.
"We're going to monitor their growth and development. They come from homes with
good nurturing and very highly educated parents and we don't expect to see
neurological deficits."
The 15 infants that emerged as the focus of the study - ranging from 3.1 to 6.1
pounds - all registered within the lowest ten percent for birth weight for
babies of the same gestational age, even though that could be just ounces less
than similar newborns.
The lower birth weights could be due to a condition known as intrauterine
growth restriction, or IUGR, a slowed or stunted fetal growth which has been
linked in other studies with chronic exposure to air pollution, Berkowitz said.
IUGR may have repercussions later in life, with some studies suggesting a
higher risk of heart disease, hypertension and other health problems in
adulthood.
Berkowitz said stress did not appear to be a factor in causing the lower birth
weights.
The study found the WTC moms were not more likely to have premature births or
babies with abnormally low birth weights. Taking into account all babies born
to the WTC moms, the infants averaged just over 2 ounces less than those in the
control group.
Only two WTC babies were born with what is considered a "very low birth weight"
of less than 3.3 pounds, and just one of those was in the group of 15 - the
other, although low in weight, apparently came in above the bottom ten percent
for a baby born at the same point of development.
* * *
NY POST/By WILLIAM J. GORTA
------------------------------------
The West Virginia Powerball winner who promised to donate millions to churches
was ripped off for more than $500,000 while he hung out in a topless bar,
police said. But cops later recovered the booty, which was stolen from an SUV
belonging to Jack Whittaker, the cowboy-hat-wearing winner of a $314 million
jackpot last year. Whittaker was inside the Pink Pony strip club in Cross
Lanes, W.Va., around 2:30 a.m. yesterday when someone broke the passenger-side
window of his Lincoln Navigator and swiped a briefcase containing $245,000 in
cash and three blank cashier's checks valued at $100,000 each. The briefcase
was on the front seat of the SUV, which had been left running outside the front
door of the club. "Everybody in the bar knew that was his Navigator," Kanawha
County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Phil Morris told the Charleston Daily Mail. Cops
found the briefcase and its $545,000 contents stashed behind a trash bin. No
arrests have been made.
PHOTO: http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/2519.htm
* * *
TENNIS DAD SERVED FATAL DRINK: COPS
NY POST/By BILL HOFFMANN
---------------------------------
A tennis dad from hell - bent on turning his kids into court superstars -
diabolically doped their competitors with tranquilizers, causing one to die in
a fiery car crash, cops say. Christophe Fauviau, father of France's most
promising 13-year-old player, Valentine Fauviau, and an equally gifted son,
Maxime, 16, was charged with death by poisoning yesterday.
French authorities said Fauviau poured a strong antidepressant called Temesta
into the water bottle of promising player Alexandre Lagadere shortly before he
faced Maxime in a regional match last month.
The drugged-up Lagadere forfeited the game saying he was too tired to continue,
then fell asleep behind the wheel of his car as he drove home and crashed,
dying instantly.
A witness later told police he had seen Fauviau tampering with the victim's
water bottle.
Fauviau was arrested in Drax, southwestern France, when he returned from a
tournament in Egypt where Valentine had played.
Sources told the French newspaper Le Parisien that Fauviau admitted spiking the
water bottles of his kids' opponents. Two other players told detectives they
saw him tampering with water at matches in June.
Police plan to review every match Maxine and Valentine have played and tennis
officials said their victories could be scratched if any foul play is
discovered.
If convicted, Fauviau faces up to 20 years in jail.
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