meehawl

Petaluma animal control workers expected to find a horde of cats when they knocked on the door of a 67-year-old man whose neighbor complained of stench … About 1,000 pet rats — ranging from 3-year-old adults to little, pink newborns — shared the one-room house … Dier kept nearly all of his small furry friends in about 20 huge cages that he lined up around the room. About 20 of his rats were running around loose … Dier also purchased about 250 pounds of rat food every week.

Earlier Petaluma woman Marilyn Barletta living with ~200 cats.

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In his online blog, Townshend described how a boy and girl, both aged 16, engage in a sex act. One not-so-graphic part read: “She had splendid breasts for such an elfin girl: loose, low and lush; she was a luxurious creature.” But the rocker has been slammed for publishing such a story because he is on the Sex Offenders’ Register in the UK. In 2003, Townshend was placed on the register after admitting to accessing a child pornography website.

Townshend’s blog.
Google cache.

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After a comprehensive review of climate change data, the [US]‘s preeminent scientific body found that average temperatures on Earth had risen by about 1 degree over the last century, a development that “is unprecedented for the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”

Full report.

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An off-target Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip killed a pregnant woman and her brother Wednesday and wounded at least 15 other civilians, including three children … A 1-year-old child was also critically injured in the blast … The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released an assessment Wednesday evening stating that 32 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since June 9. Ten children were among the dead … At least six of the dead were members of armed Palestinian groups.

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Toxoplasma gondii looks as if it ought to be the most famous parasite on earth. This single-celled pathogen infects over half the world’s population, including an estimated 50 million Americans. Each of Toxoplasma’s victims carries thousands of the parasites, many residing in the brain … Cats play a major role in the parasite’s success. They can carry it in their intestines, where they can produce egglike cysts called oocysts. A single infected cat can shed 100 million oocysts in its droppings. The oocysts can survive in the soil for over a year and can contaminate drinking water.

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A week ago, when Mexico and Iran were still playing the first half of their World Cup soccer match, gunmen allied with the Islamic courts burst into a tiny theater in the Hiliwaa neighborhood of north Mogadishu, condemned the place as ungodly and angrily switched off the television set.

Abdifatah Nur, 26, said he was watching a World Cup soccer match at a movie house when Islamic militiamen crashed through the doors and ordered the television turned off. They beat the children with lashes and took the young men to a jail. Before the militiamen let their prisoners free three days later … they whipped him and cut off his long, curly hair … a few days later, in a different movie house, he watched as Islamic militiamen beat the owner to death, apparently for ignoring earlier orders to not show soccer matches.

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So while we were in Barcelona I noticed lots of posters about a nationhood referendum for Catalunya. Apparently it passed, with Catalonia declaring itself a full nation and not just an “autonomous region” of Spain. This should mean that there will be a separate Catalunya team in the next World Cup – it’s always seemed unfair to me that a political entity like the UK gets to field *four* possible teams (Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England) while the Spanish are limited to a single contending Spanish team.

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No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century that this website was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

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In proportion to population, King Philips War was one of the deadliest wars in American history. More than half of all English settlements in New England were either destroyed or abandoned. Hundreds of colonists were killed. Thousands of Indians died; those who survived, including Philips nine-year-old son, Massasoits grandson, were loaded on ships and sold into slavery. Because the conflict was, for both sides, a holy war, it was waged with staggering brutality. New Englands Indians fought to take their land back from the Christians, mocking their praying victims: Where is Your O God? One, having killed a colonist, stuffed a Bible into his victims gutted belly.

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