A restaurant in northeastern China that advertised illegal tiger meat dishes was instead found instead found to be selling donkey flesh — marinated in tiger urine. The Hufulou restaurant, located beside the Heidaohezi tiger reserve near the city of Hailin, had advertised stir-fried tiger meat with chilies for 800 yuan ($98), as well as liquor flavored with tiger bone for 600 yuan ($74) a bottle, the China Daily reported. Raw meat was priced at 7,000 yuan ($864) per kilogram. The sale of tiger parts is illegal in China and officers shut down the restaurant, only to be told by owner, Ma Shikun, that the meat was actually that of donkeys, flavored with tiger urine to give the dish a special
tang. The report didn’t say how the urine was obtained — via Warren Ellis
A flying reptile that lived 100 million years ago and had an 18m wingspan has entered the record books as the largest-known animal to have taken to the air. Scientists discovered the fossilised bones of the dinosaur-like creature at a site in Mexico and have calculated that its wingspan was nearly twice the length of a Spitfire’s
Activist’s Arrest Prompts Questions About Security Powers
Human rights lawyer Julian Burnside QC has questioned whether the Federal Government has abused its powers by planning to deport Scott Parkin, an American peace activist. Greens Senator Bob Brown has described Mr Parkin’s detention and probable deportation as an abuse of ASIO’s powers. To add insult to injury, John Howard‘s minions have charged Scott Parkin $11,000 for sending him back to the US
Two activists in Massachusetts are planning to create an online database of all the 65,825 people who signed a recent petition calling for a ballot question to ban gay marriages in the state. The activists say that the online list — which will include the names, street addresses, hometowns and ZIP codes of all the homophobes who signed — will help gay people to determine if their friends and neighbours are secretly bigots — via BoingBoing
Ghosts may be headed to court in Orlando to help settle a very human fight. The owners of Amura Japanese Restaurant say they don’t want to move into a renovated building at Church Street Station because it’s haunted, according to a lawsuit filed by the building’s landlord — via Neil Gaiman
A new architecture for a nanomemory chip could boost the capacity of flash memory cards to around 100GB. Engineers from Imperial College London, Durham University, and the University of Sheffield report on their prototype, called Magnetic Domain-Wall Logic — via BoingBoing
US authorities have backed off a proposed ban by the US military on journalists and photographers documenting the recovery of bodies in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. CNN filed a suit in the US District Court in Houston to halt government efforts to exclude the media, rejecting the official argument that the television images would not respect the privacy of the dead. A judge granted CNN a temporary restraining order, prompting the Government back off the zero access
policy
Australian researchers have patented a search method that they claim could revolutionise existing search engines, complementing searches conducted on services such as Google, Yahoo or MSN
The BBC has released the first TV clips from its archive onto the internet for people to rip, mix and share
. Almost 100 clips, from shows such as Walking With Beasts and Tomorrow’s World, are for the UK public to use for free in their own creative works. The BBC hopes to foster innovation by letting anyone re-use its material for personal and educational purposes under the Creative Archive Licence. BBC Radio 1 launched the scheme with a competition to produce a music video — via BoingBoing
Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, the world’s oldest unit dedicated to tackling political violence, is to disappear under a major reform of the way the Metropolitan Police deals with terrorism. The unit was established in 1883 to counter Irish Fenian
terrorism on mainland Britain and has remained an autonomous unit, with its own selection and promotion systems and a culture seen by some mainstream officers as high-brow and at times elitist
The beasties at my friends’ place in Inverell.
Miss Lily and Pepe giving the evil eye
The beasties at my friends’ place in Inverell.
Pepe is distracted by one of the other cats while preening
CNN obtained a temporary restraining order late Friday to prevent government agencies from restricting news coverage as victims are recovered in New Orleans and other areas hit by Hurricane Katrina. A hearing has been scheduled for today to determine if the order should be made permanent — via BoingBoing
In a move that could mark a big strategy shift for the online auction company, eBay is in talks to acquire Skype for between $2 billion and $3 billion
The comment spammers have a new trick.
I checked out trackback spam on The Pagan Prattle before killing it off and found a clean looking, well designed site that appeared to be about the cars it claimed to be in the ping. I didn’t get a chance to see if the links were real because the cursed thing launched a trojan at me. Fortunately, NOD32 caught it.
Beware bait sites bearing trojans
Federal Emergency Management Agency — whose three top jobs went to the retarded monkey boy‘s political cronies with no apparent experience coping with catastrophes — has been spending its time blocking relief efforts instead of helping the people of New Orleans
Infecting allergy sufferers with the humble hookworm could be used to treat asthma — providing more support for the idea too much hygiene is responsible for rising rates of the disease. The idea is the parasitic bugs that suck blood from people’s guts will prime their immune systems so they no longer react to grass pollen, cat dander and dust mites
RSS – Posts