Hoax Craigslist ads cost Ore. man huge property loss

KING5NEWS

10:34 PM PDT on Monday, March 24, 2008

Associated Press

JACKSONVILLE, Ore. - A pair of hoax ads on Craigslist cost an Oregon man much of what he owned.

The ads popped up Saturday afternoon, saying the owner of a Jacksonville home was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff's Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan.

But Robert Salisbury had no plans to leave. The independent contractor was at Emigrant Lake when he got a call from a woman who had stopped by his house to claim his horse.

On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater.

"I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back," Salisbury said. "They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did."

The driver sped away after rebuking Salisbury. On his way home he spotted other cars filled with his belongings.

Once home he was greeted by close to 30 people rummaging through his barn and front porch.

The trespassers, armed with printouts of the ad, tried to brush him off. "They honestly thought that because it appeared on the Internet it was true," Salisbury said. "It boggles the mind."

Read the rest here...

Missing: The £5bn aid needed to rebuild lives

25 March 2008

The Scotsman

Scotland

Related Topics: Afghanistan

By JEROME STARKEY AND ROSS LYDALL

BILLIONS of pounds earmarked for rebuilding Afghanistan have been wasted on overpaid consultants and corporate profits, a damning report claims.

Total foreign aid to Afghanistan amounts to £3.5 million a day – a fraction of the £50 million the United States government spends each day maintaining its military presence.

It says £5 billion of promised funds has never materialised – while £3 billion of the £7.5 billion actually spent has found its way back to wealthy donor countries rather than helping the Afghan economy.
This has happened through a mix of "high levels of corruption", bumper company profits of up to 50 per cent and the vast earnings potential of foreign consultants, who can take home up to £250,000 a year as a result of hardship payments and "danger money".
Some £5 billion of promised aid is still with foreign governments, apparently because of delays in reconstruction on the ground, corruption and the inability of the Afghan government to keep tabs on the vast sums of cash.
Five American companies are named as having scooped the lion's share of their country's cash – with huge sums eaten up by an opaque web of sub-contractors.
The consultants' six-figure salaries are in shocking contrast to the millions of Afghans who live in extreme poverty. About half of the 27 million population are thought to live on 50p a day, and one in five children dies before his or her fifth birthday.
Last night, opposition politicians in Britain said the discrepancy between the aid pledged and delivered was "staggering", and there was a "real danger" of failing Afghanistan's desperately poor population.
Total foreign aid to Afghanistan amounts to £3.5 million a day – a fraction of the £50 million the United States government spends each day maintaining its military presence.
Meanwhile, the security situation continues to deteriorate, as Afghans grow increasingly disillusioned with the international presence. There are about 57,000 troops in the war-torn country, including 7,800 from the UK.

Read the rest of the article: Here.

Mysteries: Fact or Fiction?

We present seven examinations of mysteries both genuine and artificial to show how pseudoscience deals with ancient mysteries.

by Jason Colavito

I: FOUR MYSTERIES STILL UNEXPLAINED

The genuine mysteries of the world seem to pale in comparison to the exaggerated and faked mysteries alternative authors put forward. These four quick looks at genuine ancient mysteries are, like all true mysteries, a little vague and short on details. For these puzzles from the past, more research is clearly needed to show where fact and fiction merge. . .


UNDERWATER RUINS
Legends of lost continents like Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu aside, tantalizing remains of underwater architecture still remain unexplained. Among the most prominent submarine ruins is the (in)famous Bimini Road, discovered in 1968. This miles-long complex of stonework that resembles a road or the walls of buildings is officially classified as a natural formation, but many people believe that the arrow-straight lines and right-angle turns imply an artificial source. Divers also report that patterns formed by the stones resemble the ground plans of Mayan temples. . .

On the other side of the world, Nan Madol, pictured above, is one of the great stone structures on earth. Its basalt megaliths form temples, palaces and other buildings with upturned corners so that they resemble boats. The native people remember legends that beneath the original Nan Madol, down in the ocean, is the primeval Nan Madol built during the glorious reign of the gods. Great stone pillars of this ancient city can still be seen off the island of Ponape. . .
Off the southernmost island of Japan, the Yonaguni Monument has created a heated controversy because of its resemblence to megalithic temples in South America and the Pacific islands. Japanese researchers have declared the structure man-made and 9,000 years old while American geologists like Robert Schoch, the man who claims the Sphinx dates from 7000 B.C., say Yonaguni is a natural formation. The underwater mysteries remain unexplained.

CROSS CULTURAL EXCHANGE
Still on the roster of unsolved mysteries is the question of just how much contact ancient cultures had with one another. Recently the story of the Egyptian cocaine mummies has reopened questions long thought answered. Analysis of Egyptian mummies has turned up traces of cocaine in hair follicles, implying that the Ancient Egyptians chewed coca leaves, a plant found only on the continent of South America.

The United States has had many cases of mysterious stones and markers bearing writing variously attributed to Phonecians[sic], Egyptians, Vikings and Celts. While the vast majority of these are obviously racist hoaxes designed to bolster Euro-American claims to Native American lands, at least a handful of these artifacts have not been explained. In addition, late twentieth-century research confirmed that Vikings had colonized a portion of eastern Canada, the famous Vinland, during the eleventh century.

An archaeological team announced in 2001 that Roman coins had been discovered underneath the floor of an Aztec temple, proving that Roman goods had been present in the New World before Columbus. This dovetailed on reports of a Roman-style sculpture discovered in Mexico and Roman amphorae in Brazil. While some of these goods could have arrived through ships blown off course or by conquistadors bringing a bit of home with them, this mystery remains unexplained.

ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY
In 1901, an ancient clock-like mechanism surfaced off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. The original 1959 Scientific American article on the device called it "the most complex scientific object that has been preserved from antiquity." The Antikythera Computer, as it is now called, had apparently been used to calculate the position of the stars as an aid to navigation. This computer predates the supposed invention of clockwork gears by millennia and is still considered only a curiosity by mainstream science. However, it is unlikely that the only Greek computer ever built would have been preserved, so presumably there were others.

Many sources comment on the exquisite workmanship of ancient artifacts. There have been rumors of archaic vessles made out of platinum or aluminum, metals not used in the West until the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, most of these objects seem to exist only in the pages of alternative histories and are nearly always described as "missing" or "lost." Consequently, it is impossible to comment on the veracity of most claims of ancient metalurgy, but an analysis of the remains of metal clamps used to hold together the blocks of the ancient Andean city of Tihuanaco seems to imply that the alloy used needed a higher smelting temperature than most archaeologists believe Andean peoples could generate. These mysteries require more investigation before they can be safely tucked away. (see Dendera Lightbulb and Coso Artifact below)



THOSE MIGHTY MEGALITHS
Despite nearly a century of theorizing, no one has been able to certainly determine how ancient peoples moved the massive megaliths that make up ancient buildings. Such structures seem to defy attempts to explain them away. While many competent theories have been proposed (and many more incompetent ones), no one can claim to completely solve the mystery of the megaliths.

At Ollantaytambo, above, to take one example, a series of polygonal megaliths weighing upwards of 70 to 100 metric tons each are fitted together in an immense jigsaw puzzle of a wall over 260 feet tall. What makes this more amazing is that all of the immense stones had been transported 195 feet up the side of a mountain from a quarry located five miles away and almost 3,000 feet higher on the other end of the Vilcamayu river valley.



Other megalithic sites on the same order include Sacsayhuaman, right, Tihuanaco, the Great Pyramid, and scattered ruins on the beautiful Polynesian islands. Other megalithic sites of large scale and note include Easter Island, Stonehenge, Carnak and the inexplicable stone spheres of Costa Rica. These spheres are near-perfectly spherical and range in size from an inch to tens of feet in diameter. They are placed seemingly at random across the jungles of Central America and, though we know how they were made, their purpose has never been satisfactorily explained.

Read more here...

FBI: Who is this man?

KING 5 NEWS

10:50 PM PDT on Thursday, March 20, 2008
By CHRIS INGALLS / KING 5 News

SEATTLE – Who is he and what is he up to? Those are questions that federal agents in Seattle are asking after they arrested a man who has lived under assumed names for at least twenty years.

He's used names like Robert Lowe, William Gee and Dwayne Spill, but to FBI and Social Security agents, he is known only as John Doe.

"We determined he was using several identities and to this point we still don't know who he is," said Steven Dean, Assistant Agent-in-Charge, FBI.

Dean says it's rare that law enforcement's vast network of fingerprints and computer files fails to identify a suspect.

John Doe has lived under assumed names in a tiny, unkempt apartment on Lower Queen Anne for 5 years.

Agents arrested him a week ago at Postal Express Delivery, where he has worked as driver named Bob Lowe for several years.

But after months of investigation, agents still don't know who this man is.

Agents say John Doe aroused suspicions in Vancouver last year when he requested a copy of a birth certificate claiming to be someone who was actually deceased.

Agents traced his trail of aliases to Seattle where he is still wanted on a 1998 warrant, and they have also linked him to criminal convictions and rap sheets under assumed names in other states.

To make things even more bizarre, John Doe isn't your usual identity thief who's after money.

"A typical ID thief is using stolen identities to commit fraud, to take as much money as they can," said Dean.

But he doesn't do that. Read more here.

A Baby Kiwi Is Born

Hatching is hard work.

An exhausted baby kiwi, a highly endangered bird from New Zealand, is resting at the Smithsonian's National Zoo after being born early March 7.

Keepers had been incubating the North Island brown kiwi egg for five weeks, following a month long incubation by the chick’s father, carefully monitoring it for signs of pipping: the process in which the chick starts to break through the shell. The chick remained in an isolet for four days and is now in a specially designed brooding box.

Kiwis are one of the world's most endangered species. Only four zoos outside of New Zealand have successfully bred kiwis, and only three U.S. zoos, including the National Zoo, exhibit them.

The sex of the chick is still unknown and is difficult to determine by sight. For this reason, Bird House staff enlisted the help of National Zoo geneticists. Using DNA samples swabbed from the inside of the egg and from the bird’s beak, the geneticists hope to decipher its sex in the coming weeks.

There are five species of kiwi and all are unique to New Zealand. The North Island brown species of kiwi is the national bird of New Zealand. They are widely thought to be the most ancient bird and have existed in New Zealand for more than 30 million years. Kiwis typically mate for life, and both parents share the responsibility of caring for the egg. After kiwi chicks hatch, however, they receive no parental care. Unlike other bird species, kiwis hatch fully feathered and equipped with all of the necessary skills they need to survive.

The North Island brown kiwi species is classified as endangered by the International Union of Conservation of Nature. Read more here.

Police looking for dangerous criminal

SEATTLE KING 5 NEWS


10:42 PM PDT on Thursday, March 13, 2008
KING5.com

BELLINGHAM, Wash. – The Washington State Patrol, King County Regional Auto Theft Unit and Law Enforcement Agencies from across Washington and New Mexico are seeking help in locating Kurt Sohrbeck.

Auto theft detectives want to find 43-year-old Sohrbeck in connection to criminal activity that stretches across the State of Washington, and now includes the attempted murder of a police officer in New Mexico.

Sohrbeck was tracked to New Mexico and Thursday, a deputy stopped Sohrbeck just outside Carlsbad, NM.

During the traffic stop, the deputy was shot several times.

The deputy was airlifted to a hospital and is listed in critical condition.

Investigators found that Sohrbeck has extensive criminal history. A felony warrant from Whatcom County has been issued and there is also the new warrant for attempted murder of a police officer in New Mexico.

Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies are currently conducting an extensive manhunt for Sohrbeck. He is considered armed and extremely dangerous, and should not be contacted. Read the rest of the story...

Woman fired for her military service

KING 5 NEWS SEATTLE

10:34 PM PST on Thursday, March 6, 2008
By CHRIS INGALLS / KING 5 News


SEATTLE – Kelly Hansen of Kirkland has served for many years as a National Guard chaplain. But now she says it has cost her her job as a chaplain at Children's Hospital in Seattle.

She was required to drill for a weekend and take time off work.

"The first day she came back to work after her drill weekend she was called into her supervisor's office and terminated," said James Beck, her lawyer.

In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Seattle Federal Court, Hansen claims she was fired because Children's Hospital knew that her unit was on alert and she would be leaving for a 14-month deployment to Iraq.

State and federal law require businesses to hold jobs for employees serving the Guard and Reserves, and those that don’t can face stiff penalties.

Read the rest of the story here.

Seattle woman shatters world boomerang record

05:00 PM PST on Tuesday, March 4, 2008
KING5.com

SEATTLE - A Seattle attorney become the first woman to set a world boomerang record for time aloft.

The United States Boomerang Association says Betsylew Miale-Gix broke the world record for unlimited time aloft by throwing and catching a boomerang that stayed airborne for an incredible 3 minutes and 49 seconds.

USBA says Miale-Gix broke the record for "Maximum time Aloft" at a tournament in Tucson, Ariz. on Feb. 23.

"I knew it was a big throw but had no idea it had been up that long," said Miale-Gix.

USBA says Miale-Gix has been the "premier" female competitive boomerang thrower in the world for the last decade, and has been the only woman throwing for the United States on the last five United States Boomerang Teams in International World Cup competition.

Seattle will host the 2008 World Boomerang Championships, Aug. 17-28.

Read the rest of the story here.

Fred Meyer recalls bleach

02:03 PM PST on Sunday, March 2, 2008
KING5.com Staff

Fred Meyer is recalling bottles of bleach that were sold exclusively at Fred Meyer and QFC stores that could potentially burst out of the bottle when opened.

The Every Day Living Bleach involved in the recall was on the shelves beginning January 17. It includes 96-ounce bottles of its regular, citrus and mountain blend bleaches as well as 128-ounce bottles of the regular bleach.

Fred Meyer says customers who purchased the product should put the bleach in a garbage bag, and place it in a second bag if the container looks bulged.

"Please don't attempt to take this item back to a store," the company says in a notice on their Web site. They ask customers to move the item to an area where it "won't cause damage" and contact the manufacturer, KIK Custom Products at 800-479-6603 ext. 656.

The company says customers can make arrangements for the manufacturer to come to their house and pick up the bagged bleach.

For the rest of the article: King5 website.