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http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2007-11-09-mr-toilet_N.htm

‘Mr. Toilet’ nears completion of commode-shaped house

SUWON, South Korea — Sim Jae-duck has made his political career as South Korea’s Mr. Toilet by beautifying public restrooms. Now he’s got a home befitting his title: a toilet-shaped domicile complete with the latest in lavatory luxury.
Sim is building the two-story house set to be finished Sunday to commemorate the inaugural meeting later this month of the World Toilet Association. The group, supported by the South Korean government, aims no less than to launch a “toilet revolution,” by getting people to open their bathroom doors for the sake of improving worldwide hygiene.

Representatives from 60 countries will gather in Seoul to spur the creation of national toilet associations of their own and spread the word about hygiene. Organizers argue the issue deserves greater attention and cite U.N. figures that some 2.5 billion people live without proper sanitation or water supplies.

“The toilet revolution should start with talking about toilet issues freely,” said Song Young-kwon, head of the organizing committee for the five-day conference that opens Nov. 21.

The Seoul conference will be accompanied by a toilet expo featuring exhibits to excite the public about the cause: including a “Hansel and Gretel” bathroom made from cookies and candy that gives presents to children when they flush, and a “toilet gallery cafe” where people can sit on colorful commodes while drinking tea.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: South Korea | Seoul | Sim | Suwon
Sim, a lawmaker in the National Assembly, hopes his house in his hometown Suwon, some 30 miles south of Seoul, will help bring attention to the cause and is seeking a guest to pay $50,000 to stay one night with the proceeds to benefit the association that hopes to work with developing nations to build more and better toilets.

Several candidates have already expressed interest, but Sim said he would choose someone who can appropriately represent his cause — with the proceeds set to fund his foundation’s work. Visitors just wanting a glimpse inside the bowl will be charged a $1 donation.

“Toilets stand central to people’s lives,” Sim said as workers scurried to put the finishing touches on the home — including installing the final toilet inside.

The toilet theme is central to the house named Haewoojae, or a “place to solve one’s worries,” shaped like a 24½-foot-tall toilet bowl. Thinking of how to push forward his cause of having better hygiene and sanitation, Sim tore down his former home to build the $1.1 million building.

In case they had any doubt about who would choose to live here, a plaque inscribed “Mr. Toilet’s House” greets visitors. As a former mayor of Suwon, Sim spearheaded a campaign to beautify the city’s restrooms — part of a national push to spruce up the country’s facilities for hosting events such as the 1988 Summer Olympics and 2002 World Cup.

A showpiece bathroom at the center of the 4,520-square-foot house is on display through a floor-to-ceiling window made of glass that turns opaque at the touch of a button. When guests enter to do their business, a motion sensor activates classical music.

The bathroom emerges into a spacious living room featuring a grand staircase and lined by windows curving around the rounded facade of the building.

The home has four bathrooms that include a whirlpool bathtub, urinals and large glass showers.

Occupants gain access to the roof balcony around the rim of the “bowl” by climbing up stairs through what would be a toilet drain — which is equipped to collect rain for some functions to conserve drinking water. The home is encased in smooth, white-painted steel that appears similar to the ceramics used to make toilets.

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 Fiona MacRae from the www.dailymail.co.uk on Aug. 6th reports now that research is indicating that diabetic cats in the U.K. are approaching the half million mark. 

Fat cat!

 Mice can relax. Even nesting birds can sing a little more cheerily.

Their number one enemy, it seems, is getting so fat he can barely be bothered to get off the sofa for a night’s hunting.

Vets have found that cats are imitating their owners’ couch potato lifestyle.

As a result of eating more and exercising less, more than a third of cats are overweight and the number of cases of feline diabetes has risen five-fold in 30 years.

Edinburgh University (U.K.) researchers estimate that one in 230 – or up to 400,000 pet cats – is diabetic.

“The lifestyle of cats is changing. They are tending to eat too much, gain weight and take less exercise . . . Unfortunately, just like people, cats will over-eat if they are offered too much tasty food, particularly if they are bored and have little else to do . . . so they have little to do all day but eat, sleep and gain weight.”

-Danielle Gunn-Moore, a professor of feline medicine

Take “Goliath” for example:

In addition, stressed-out Britons are increasingly relying on cats for companionship.

Vet Elaine Pendlebury said much of the problem was because of owners giving their cats calorie-laden treats.

She said: “People are feeding them things like sausages from their own table. Sausages are quite high in salt and quite fatty.

“If you want to give your cat a treat, give it a small bit of boiled chicken or, even better, play a game with your cat.”

The diabetes study, published in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, looked at the veterinary records of 14,000 cats, coupled with questionnaires filled in by owners.

Cats are not the only pets to be losing the battle of the bulge. A quarter of dogs are clinically obese and overweight rabbits and even hamsters are also a common sight in vets’ surgeries.

Garfield ain’t nothing to this!

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Public Enemy #1?

“The poop problem has become

unmanageable and this could be the answer.”

-Laura Dodson, president of the Argyle Civic Association.

Sorry everybody I just couldn’t help quoting a “president” as starting off with something she refers to as a “poop problem” more on this later . . .

According to the AP those in Hollywood land are going to spike your feed, that is if your a pigeon.  OvoControl P will be used to hinder egg development in SoCal fowl, this after the group “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” suggested the idea to concerned citizens. 

 ”Community leaders planned to announce the OvoControl P pilot program, which Dodson believes is the first of its kind in the nation . . . it was preferred over electric shock gates, spiked rooftops, poisons or other methods.”

First of its kind in the nation, how much exactly is this costing local govt?  Leave it to hollywood to try to find a happy ending to these “problem” birds, even if it costs the local joe and jane a steep tax bill.  More on that when somebody out there returns my call .  What struck me as even more odd about this story is that electric gates, spiked areas etc. are not all that uncommon to “control” humans, yet in SoCal these methods are too extreme for pigeons, point being that it is very interesting that some love animals more then they might their fellow man?  Point to ponder.

“Their population boom is blamed in part on people feeding the birds, including a woman known as the Bird Lady, who was responsible for dumping 25-pound bags of seed in 29 spots around Hollywood.” 

Ok maybe this is just me but how many laws has this woman broken?  The press won’t name her?  I’d be much more interested on the backstory of her for weird news and oddball stuff.  You have to think she has violated littering laws, public nuisance, heck even a few traffic laws if these pigeons are that dense that SoCal is getting scientific on them.  Will try my best to find out if officals have cited her on any of these.

“The pilot program was expected to show results within a year, and the Hollywood area’s pigeon population is expected to shrink by at least half by 2012″

I had to actually read this sentence over again, 50% reduction after 5 years . . . so really in the next few years there will be no noticable difference in the “poop problem” as the prez calls it. 

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http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSSYD1415720070801

Catholic dean on leave after YouTube outburst
Wed Aug 1, 2007 9:27AM EDT
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Free $50,000 Practice Account.CANBERRA (Reuters) – A Roman Catholic priest who unleashed a torrent of expletives and racist abuse against skateboarders outside his Australian cathedral, only to have the outburst filmed and placed on YouTube, has been put on leave.

The Reverend Monsignor Geoff Baron, the dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Australia’s second biggest city, Melbourne, was videotaped swearing at and abusing a group of teenagers using the cathedral grounds as a skate park.

“Move, you f****** fool,” Baron tells one skater in the video, slapping one of the group across the head and prompting a torrent of abuse in reply.

Pointing to a skater lying on the ground, Baron is heard telling the youth “Little foreigner there, look at the sleepy eyes, black hair.”

“At least he’s got hair. You f****** bald p****,” one youth replies. Others spat on and shoved the furious priest.

The embarrassed Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, placed Baron on indefinite leave after the outburst appeared on YouTube, while security guards began patrolling the cathedral grounds Wednesday amid threats of reprisal attacks.

“I want to relieve the dean of the pressures and responsibilities he carries as dean of the cathedral,” Hart said, promising further action.

Baron apologized for the outburst Tuesday, but on radio described the skaters as “jackals and hyenas” who had provoked him with allegations he was a pedophile.

“It was outrageous behavior. I let myself down terribly badly, quite clearly, and I’ve also brought scandal and shock to other people,” he told local radio.

The video clip of the outburst, which was filmed a year ago but only recently posted on YouTube, was viewed tens of thousands of times but is now listed as “removed by the user.”

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A Scheme to Profit From Panda Poop
By AUDRA ANG,AP
Posted: 2007-07-30 13:18:58
Filed Under: Weird News
BEIJING (July 30) — Nothing says “I love you” like a photo frame made from panda poop.

The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base has come up with a dung-for-profit scheme that turns droppings from the endangered species into odor-free souvenirs ranging from bookmarks to Olympic-themed statues of the animals, state media and base officials said Monday.

AP

The facility in the southwestern province of Sichuan houses about 40 bamboo-fed pandas who produce less than a ton of excrement a day.

“We used to spend at least 6,000 yuan ($770) a month to get rid of the droppings but now they can be lucrative,” Jing Shimin, assistant to the base director, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The products will be made at a local handicraft company mostly from undigested bamboo culled from the panda waste through a special process, Xinhua said.

An official who answered the phone at the Chengdu facility said the dung is “carefully selected, smashed, dried and sterilized at 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit).” He refused to give his name but said the products will be of all colors because they will be dyed.

“They don’t smell too bad because 70 percent of the dung is just remains of the bamboo that the pandas are unable to digest,” Jing said.

While no price has been set, he said the most expensive souvenirs will contain a panda hair – collected from the wild – in each package.

The 2008 Olympic statues will feature “athletic pandas performing various Olympic sports,” Xinhua said.

In March, base officials said they were looking into making high-quality paper from the fiber-rich panda excrement, inspired by a trip to Thailand, where they found paper made from elephant dung.

The Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand already sells multicolored paper made from waste produced by its two resident pandas. Making paper there involves a daylong process of cleaning the feces, boiling it in a soda solution, bleaching it with chlorine and drying it under the sun.

The panda is one of the world’s rarest and most beloved animals, with about 1,590 living in the wild in China, mostly in Sichuan and the western province of Shaanxi. Another 180 have been bred in captivity.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2007-07-30 12:11:55

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/a-scheme-to-profit-from-panda-poop/20070730121109990001

Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp’s mass wedding. “They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia”.Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.

With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.

But this organisation – known as “Nashi”, meaning “Ours” – is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=471324&in_page_id=1770

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End of story? Not exactly. There’s also a less-noticed cause for the neglect. Washington’s vaunted think tanks—citadels for public intellectuals both liberal and conservative—have tiptoed around the problem. Ideally, think tanks expand the public conversation by saying things too controversial for politicians to say on their own. Here, they’ve abdicated that role.

The aging of America is not just a population change or, as a budget problem, an accounting exercise. It involves a profound transformation of the nature of government: commitments to the older population are slowly overwhelming other public goals; the national government is becoming mainly an income-transfer mechanism from younger workers to older retirees.

Consider the outlook. From 2005 to 2030, the 65-and-over population will nearly double to 71 million; its share of the population will rise to 20 percent from 12 percent. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—programs that serve older people—already exceed 40 percent of the $2.7 trillion federal budget. By 2030, their share could hit 75 percent of the present budget, projects the Congressional Budget Office. The result: a political impasse.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20010728/site/newsweek/?from=rss

SCIENTISTS have created the world’s first schizophrenic mice in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the illness.

It is believed to be the first time an animal has been genetically engineered to have a mental illness. Until now they have been bred only for research into physical conditions such as heart disease. It will allow researchers to study the disease and develop treatments using a limitless supply of laboratory animals.

Animal rights campaigners have condemned the research, saying that it is morally repugnant to create an animal doomed to mental suffering.

The mice were created by modifying their DNA to mimic a mutant gene first found in a Scottish family with a high incidence of schizophrenia, which affects about one in every 100 people. The mice’s brains were found to have features similar to those of humans with schizophrenia, such as depression and hyperactivity.

“These mutant mice may provide an important new tool for further study of the combinations of factors that underlie mental illnesses like schizophrenia and mood disorders,” said Takatoshi Hikida, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a leading researcher.

The egg cells of mice were genetically modified by inserting a gene associated with schizophrenia into their DNA. The eggs were fertilised and grown into viable baby mice using surrogate mothers.

Animal Aid, a campaign group, said rodents were not a reliable way of modelling human disease.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2159295.ece

By ANGELA K. BROWN, Associated Press Writer 

FORT WORTH, Texas – Fed up with deadly drive-by shootings, incessant drug dealing and graffiti, cities nationwide are trying a different tactic to combat gangs: They’re suing them.

Fort Worth and San Francisco are among the latest to file lawsuits against gang members, asking courts for injunctions barring them from hanging out together on street corners, in cars or anywhere else in certain areas.

The injunctions are aimed at disrupting gang activity before it can escalate. They also give police legal reasons to stop and question gang members, who often are found with drugs or weapons, authorities said. In some cases, they don’t allow gang members to even talk to people passing in cars or to carry spray paint.

“It is another tool,” said Kevin Rousseau, a Tarrant County assistant prosecutor in Fort Worth, which recently filed its first civil injunction against a gang. “This is more of a proactive approach.”

But critics say such lawsuits go too far, limiting otherwise lawful activities and unfairly targeting minority youth.

“If you’re barring people from talking in the streets, it’s difficult to tell if they’re gang members or if they’re people discussing issues,” said Peter Bibring, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “And it’s all the more troubling because it doesn’t seem to be effective.”

Civil injunctions were first filed against gang members in the 1980s in the Los Angeles area, a breeding ground for gangs including some of the country’s most notorious, such as the Crips and 18th Street.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s suit in 1987 against the Playboy Gangster Crips covered the entire city but was scaled back after a judge deemed it too broad.

Chicago tried to target gangs by enacting an anti-loitering ordinance in 1992 but the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in 1999, saying it gave police the authority to arrest without cause.

Since then, cities have used injunctions to target specific gangs or gang members, and so far that strategy has withstood court challenges.

Los Angeles now has 33 permanent injunctions involving 50 gangs, and studies have shown they do reduce crime, said Jonathan Diamond, a spokesman for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office.

The injunctions prohibit gang members from associating with each other, carrying weapons, possessing drugs, committing crimes and displaying gang symbols in a safety zone — neighborhoods where suspected gang members live and are most active. Some injunctions set curfews for members and ban them from possessing alcohol in public areas — even if they’re of legal drinking age.

Those who disobey the order face a misdemeanor charge and up to a year in jail. Prosecutors say the possibility of a jail stay — however short — is a strong deterrent, even for gang members who’ve already served hard time for other crimes.

“Seven months in jail is a big penalty for sitting on the front porch or riding in the car with your gang buddies,” said Kinley Hegglund, senior assistant city attorney for Wichita Falls.

Last summer, Wichita Falls sued 15 members of the Varrio Carnales gang after escalating violence with a rival gang, including about 50 drive-by shootings in less than a year in that North Texas city of 100,000.

Since then, crime has dropped about 13 percent in the safety zone and real estate values are climbing, Hegglund said.

Other cities hope for similar results.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued four gangs in June after an “explosion” in gang violence, seven months after filing the city’s first gang-related civil injunction.

Fort Worth sued 10 members of the Northcide Four Trey Gangsta Crips in May after two gang members were killed in escalating violence, said Assistant City Attorney Chris Mosley.

“Our hope is that these defendants will be scared into compliance just by having these injunctions against them,” Mosley said.

However, some former gang members say such legal maneuvers wouldn’t have stopped them.

Usamah Anderson, 30, of Fort Worth, said he began stealing cars and got involved with gangs as a homeless 11-year-old. He was arrested numerous times for theft and spent time in juvenile facilities.

Anderson says if a civil injunction had been in place then, he and his friends would have simply moved outside the safety zone.

“That’s the life you live, so you’re going to find a way to maneuver around it,” said Anderson, a truck driver who abandoned the gang life about seven years ago and has started a church to help young gang members.

The ACLU and other critics of gang injunctions favor community programs. The Rev. Jack Crane, pastor of Truevine Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Worth, is helping Anderson’s group provide gang members with counseling, shoes and other resources needed to help them escape that life.

“We don’t want to lose another generation,” Crane said.

Some residents in the Fort Worth safety zone say they feel better with the injunction in place.

Phoebe Picazo, who recently moved to the city to care for her elderly parents, said she hears gunfire almost every night.

“This has always been a quiet community with a lot of seniors, but now we’re having to keep our doors locked,” Picazo said. “With the injunction, I feel better for my folks.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070729/ap_on_re_us/gang_lawsuits_2