treveskyn: odd news, strange news with attitude

BERLIN, Germany (AP) — An early-morning German bank customer had a bit of a shock when he found a horse in line at the automatic teller machine in front of him.

It seems the horse’s owner, identified only as Wolfgang H., had a bit too much to drink the night before and decided to sleep it off inside the bank’s heated foyer, police said Tuesday.

The 40-year-old machinist told Bild newspaper he had had “a few beers” with a friend in Wiesenburg, southwest of Berlin, and decided to hit the hay in the bank on his way home.

“It was late, it was already dark and cold,” he was quoted as saying.

Confronted with the lack of a hitching-post, he brought the 6-year-old horse, named Sammy, in along with him.

When a customer came across the horse and sleeping rider in the bank at 4:15 a.m. Monday, he called police, who then came and woke the owner up and sent him on his way.

No charges were filed, but there might be some cleanup needed: Apparently Sammy made his own after-hours deposit on the carpet.

MERIDIAN, Idaho (AP) — Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious — students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers to each other.

Now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device. Devices including iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.

“It doesn’t take long to get out of the loop with teenagers,” said Mountain View High School Principal Aaron Maybon. “They come up with new and creative ways to cheat pretty fast.”

Mountain View recently enacted a ban on digital media players after school officials realized some students were downloading formulas and other material onto the players.

“A teacher overheard a couple of kids talking about it,” Maybon said.

Shana Kemp, spokeswoman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said she does not have hard statistics on the phenomenon but said it is not unusual for schools to ban digital media players.

“I think it is becoming a national trend,” she said. “We hope that each district will have a policy in place for technology — it keeps a lot of the problems down.”

Using the devices to cheat is hardly a new phenomenon, Kemp said. However, sometimes it takes awhile for teachers and administrators, who come from an older generation, to catch on to the various ways the technology can be used.

Some students use iPod-compatible voice recorders to record test answers in advance and them play them back, 16-year-old Mountain View junior Damir Bazdar said.

Others download crib notes onto the music players and hide them in the “lyrics” text files. Even an audio clip of the old “Schoolhouse Rock” take on how a bill makes it through Congress can come in handy during some American government exams.

Kelsey Nelson, a 17-year-old senior at the school, said she used to listen to music after completing her tests — something she can no longer do since the ban. Still, she said, the ban has not stopped some students from using the devices.

“You can just thread the earbud up your sleeve and then hold it to your ear like you’re resting your head on your hand,” Nelson said. “I think you should still be able to use iPods. People who are going to cheat are still going to cheat, with or without them.”

Still, schools around the world are hoping bans will at least stave off some cheaters.

Henry Jones, a teacher at San Gabriel High School in San Gabriel, California, confiscated a student’s iPod during a class and found the answers to a test, crib notes and a definition list hidden among the teen’s music selections. Schools in Seattle, Washington, have also banned the devices.

The practice is not limited to the United States: St. Mary’s College, a high school in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, banned cell phones and digital medial players this year, while the University of Tasmania prohibits iPods, electronic dictionaries, CD players and spell-checking devices.

Conversely, Duke University in North Carolina began providing iPods to its students three years ago as part of an experiment to see how the devices could be used to enhance learning.

The music players proved to be invaluable for some courses, including music, engineering and sociology classes, said Tim Dodd, executive director of The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke. At Duke, incidents of cheating have declined over the past 10 years, largely because the community expects its students to have academic integrity, he said.

“Trying to fight the technology without a dialogue on values and expectations is a losing battle,” Dodd said. “I think there’s kind of a backdoor benefit here. As teachers are thinking about how technology has corrupted, they’re also thinking about ways it can be used productively.”

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Wreckage from a World War II torpedo boat was tossed up from the sea in the Solomon Islands after a powerful 8.1 earthquake hit the area in early April, an official said Friday.

Jay Waura of the National Disaster Management Office said the explosive-laden boat was exposed when reefs were pushed up three meters (10 feet) above sea level by the April 2 quake, which caused a devastating tsunami in the western Solomon Islands that killed 52 people.

The Solomons’ coastline is still littered with decaying military wrecks from World War II, including the torpedo patrol boat commanded by U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

“My team members believe that this boat could have been one of those U.S. torpedo boats such as the famous PT-109, which the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy had served aboard during the war,” Waura said.

Kennedy’s boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer in the Blackett Strait in August 1943 off Gizo, the main town of western Solomon Islands. The Solomons’ main island, Guadalcanal, was the scene of fierce World War II fighting.

Waura said people on Rannonga island showed his team the wreckage sitting on dry ground.

“We were amazed by this finding, as previously this wreckage had long been sitting under the sea and rusting in peace without anyone knowing about it,” New Zealand Press Association quoted Waura as saying.

Only the boat’s hull with its deadly cargo of explosives remained intact, he said.

Waura said a Solomon Islands Police Force bomb disposal unit would be sent to the island to safely detonate the explosives.

Kennedy was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy serving in the Pacific when his PT-109 was cut in two by the Japanese destroyer. Two crew were killed, but Kennedy and the vessel’s other survivors clung to the wreckage before swimming to a nearby island. The experience earned Kennedy the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.

Wreckage from PT-109 was found in 2002 by shipwreck hunter Robert Ballard, who also found the Titanic as well as other notable sunken ships.

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) — A government study in India has shown elephants prefer food crops to forest fodder and often travel hundreds of miles to the same farmland every year, even remembering specific months of harvesting.

Elephants were adapting to new foods as their traditional habitat was shrinking because of villagers encroaching in forests, experts said after a four-year study on Asian elephants in West Bengal state.

“They find food crops more palatable and come back to farmlands to satisfy their taste buds,” Ujjal Bhattacharjee, chief conservator of forests in West Bengal, said Thursday.

During the federal government study, which was finished last month, hundreds of wildlife experts and volunteers trapped dozens of elephants and installed radio and satellite collars on them.

Elephants are migratory animals and move from one forest to another through corridors which are now fragmented because of villages and farmlands, conservationists say, making the animals change their habits.

“Villagers were cultivating crops right on their path and were responsible for the changing food habits of elephants,” said Shakti Ranjan Banerjee of the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

Home to 50,000 wild Asian elephants a century ago, just 21,300 elephants are roaming India’s national parks and forests.

Elephants are also shot by hunters for precious ivory and sometimes killed by villagers to protect their fields.

Wildlife officials were hopeful the study could help mitigate the conflict and strengthen the elephant corridor.

“Relocating villages with people’s support and securing the corridor is definitely an option,” Bhattacharjee said.

Thirteen-year-old Morgan Pozgar, of Claysburg, Pennsylvania, was crowned LG National Texting champion on Saturday after she typed “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from “Mary Poppins” in 15 seconds.

“I’m going to go shopping and buy lots of clothes,” the teen said after winning her $25,000 prize from the electronics company LG.

Morgan defeated nearly 200 other competitors at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan to become East Coast champion and then beat West Coast champion Eli Tirosh, 21, of Los Angeles, California.

She estimated that she sends more than 8,000 text messages a month to her friends and family.

Thirteen-year-old Morgan Pozgar, of Claysburg, Pennsylvania, was crowned LG National Texting champion on Saturday after she typed “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from “Mary Poppins” in 15 seconds.

“I’m going to go shopping and buy lots of clothes,” the teen said after winning her $25,000 prize from the electronics company LG.

Morgan defeated nearly 200 other competitors at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan to become East Coast champion and then beat West Coast champion Eli Tirosh, 21, of Los Angeles, California.

She estimated that she sends more than 8,000 text messages a month to her friends and family.

LONDON, England (Reuters) — British Airways has airbrushed a scene of arch-rival Sir Richard Branson out of its in-flight James Bond movie “Casino Royale”, sources close to the company said on Monday.

The Virgin Atlantic chief is briefly featured in the original 007 film at an airport security scanner, but can only be seen from the back in the edited version.

Shots of the tail fin of a Virgin plane have also been obscured.

A spokesman for BA said only that it “previews films before they are screened on our aircraft and regularly edits films” on the grounds of taste and suitability.

The latest 007 film, which shows how Bond acquires his license to kill with its “00″ prefix, broke worldwide box office records for a Bond movie, and earned Daniel Craig a Bafta nomination for best actor.

Virgin Atlantic said it had helped the film’s producers get a plane to Prague, Czech Republic, where some of the scenes were shot.

A Virgin Atlantic spokeswoman said the company does not have a policy of editing its in-flight films.

“We think that passengers should see all the film, and nothing but the whole film,” she added.

Branson has had cameo roles in other movies, including a Superman film, and in TV shows such as “Friends.”

Spats between the two carriers go back a long time. Last year, Virgin Atlantic was identified as having provided U.S. and British authorities with information that triggered an investigation of alleged airline price-fixing in passenger fares and fuel surcharges involving British Airways.

Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Clerk’s mistake turns into $200,000 lottery payoff

ANTWERP, Belgium (AP) — We all know not to feed the animals when visiting the zoo. Now the Antwerp Zoo has urged visitors to, please, stop staring at the chimpanzees.

New rules have been posted outside the chimp enclosure at the city zoo urging visitors not to form a bond with a particular male chimp named Cheetah. He was raised by humans but is now bonding with the seven other apes at the park, a zoo official said Wednesday.

“We ask, we inform our daily visitors and other visitors that one of the monkeys (sic) is particularly open for human contact,” zoo spokeswoman Ilse Segers told AP Television News. “He was raised by humans in a family and therefore we are trying to integrate him, to try to get more social integration with the group.”

She said Cheetah’s continued interaction with humans was “delaying the social integration of the animal in the group,” and isolating the ape from the others.

A sign posted on the glass enclosure asks onlookers not to stare at the apes. “Look away when an animal seeks to make contact with you, or take a step back,” it says. “Some individuals are more interested with visitors than their own kind.”

Segers said the zoo was not barring visitors from looking at the chimps altogether. “Of course eye contact is not forbidden. We have more than 1 million visitors a year and of course they are very welcome still to have a look at the animals.”

The 164-year-old Antwerp Zoo is one of Europe’s oldest animal parks, attracting around 1.3 million visitors a year.

PARIS, France (AP) — For sale: a 15,000-year-old Siberian mammoth skeleton.

On Monday, Christie’s auction house in Paris, which usually sells fine art and furniture, is hosting an unusual auction of paleontological curiosities, including several prehistoric mammals.

Skeletons of a 10,000-year-old, 13.5-foot-long rhinoceros and a 7.5-foot-high cave bear are also going under the hammer. The skeletons are owned by a private collector, but buyers may include museums or artists, said Christie’s spokeswoman Capucine Milliot.

The auction is not to all paleontologists’ liking. Pascal Tassy, professor at Paris’ Natural History Museum, has decried the selling off of specimens that could be useful to science.

“It is a pernicious consequence of the Jurassic Park effect,” he said. “In the past, private collectors donated to museums, it was a great time of patronage. Nowadays we make money off anything.”

Bidders interested in buying the star specimen — a Siberian mammoth dubbed “The President” — will need at least $199,000 and a lot of floor space. Tusks and all, it’s 12.5 feet high and 16 feet long.

A 330-pound meteorite containing semiprecious stones and showing rare traces of its entry into the atmosphere is valued at between $122,000 and $162,000. An unhatched dinosaur egg and a wide collection of fossils — some of them 400 million years old — will also be up for auction.

Among the curiosities is a bezoar, a sort of pearl formed in the stomach of some herbivores, made of a stone or hair covered by a layer of calcium phosphate. Bezoars that reach or exceed the size of an egg become tremendously valuable. This one is valued at $34,000.

The auction is also toasting modernity. For the first time at Christie’s in Paris, bidders will be able to remotely bid online. Christie’s Live, used for the first time in New York in July 2006, then in London and Amsterdam, allows users to “virtually” attend auctions.