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Comedian George Carlin dies at 71

LOS ANGELES - Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital Sunday, a spokesman said. He was was 71.

Carlin, who had a history of heart problems, died at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PT after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.

Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine about seven dirty words you could not say on television. A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of his “Filthy Words” routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Soldiers told the time is right to topple junta

BURMA is awash with rumours of a national uprising on August 8.

The day represents 8808 and is a significant number in a country driven by numerology and astrology.

Flyers being distributed inside Burma appeal to the foot soldiers of the military junta to turn on their overseers.

The date is strategic because the Olympic Games opens in Beijing on that day.

This links with efforts by American activists to make the Olympics a focal point of protests against oppression in Burma.

The US Campaign For Burma wants to rally one million citizens around the world to boycott television broadcasts of the Olympics unless China ends its support for Burma’s military regime.

The 8808 appeal is a powerful message for dispossessed and poorly paid Burmese soldiers working in hostile environments.

Entry into the Burmese armed forces previously consolidated a family’s future, ensured education, healthcare and a decent living in a very poor country. Now it does not.

The Democratic Alliance of Burma general-secretary Kyaw Nyunt said August 8 was an opportunity for the people of Burma to seek the justice they had been denied for decades.

Boy 'caged, eaten by family'

A MEMBER of a cult is accused of partially skinning her caged son and feeding his flesh to their relatives.

Kalra Mauerova, 31, of Brno in the Czech Republic, wept in court as she admitted torturing her son Ondrej, and his 10-year-old brother, Jakub, London’s The Sun newspaper reported.

Ms Mauerova, a member of the Grail Movement cult, caged Ondrej for months while relatives, also members of the cult, ate his raw flesh, a judge heard yesterday.

The court in Brno heard the family sexually abused the boys and made them cut themselves with knives.

The boys said they were kept in cages or handcuffed to tables and made to stand for days in their own urine.

The abuse was discovered when a man living nearby installed a TV monitor to keep watch on his newborn baby.

Instead of pictures of his newborn he was confronted by live images of Ondrej naked in the cellar — beaten and chained, The Sun reporrted.

Ms Mauerova is understood to have installed the monitor so she could watch her victims suffering from her kitchen.

Clone cell cancer 'cure' hailed

Scientists claim they have cured advanced skin cancer for the first time using the patient’s own cells cloned outside the body.

The 52-year-old man involved was free of melanoma two years after treatment.

US researchers, reports the New England Journal of Medicine, took cancer-fighting immune cells, made five billion copies, then put them all back.

Scientists in the UK warned that further trials would need to be done to prove how well the treatment worked.

Sixth Human Foot Found in Canada

Another human foot encased in a running shoe has been found on the shores of British Columbia in Canada, the second this week and the sixth within a year.

Like four of the others it was a right foot, a police official said.

The foot was found near Campbell River on Vancouver Island and appeared to have been severed, a witness said.

Police, who are not speculating on this, are trying to determine the origins of the feet and whether they are any links between the discoveries.

Update: It was a hoax.

Wiggling bird genitals give the ladies good vibrations

SOME male birds possess a wiggling tongue-like knob on their genitals, probably to titillate their mates.

In typical bird copulation, males and females momentarily press together their cloacas - genital openings - in what biologists call a cloacal kiss. A muscled tongue-like projection called a cloacal tip, spotted for the first time in males of several species of Australian wrens, means this might be more like a French kiss.

Glitch Leads to Lost Mars Photos

The Phoenix lander stopped digging soil near Mars’ north pole Wednesday as engineers on Earth worked to fix a glitch that caused the loss of a day’s worth of photos.

The problem was discovered late Tuesday after the spacecraft dug a trench inside a polygon-shaped surface feature that was likely caused by seasonal expansion and shrinking of ice.

The lander beamed back pictures of the trench, but an overload of data prevented it from saving images of the landscape and atmosphere in its flash memory.

Obama Forgoes Public Money in 1st for Major Candidate

With his decision, Mr. Obama became the first candidate of a major party to decline public financing — and the spending limits that go with it — since the system was created in 1976, after the Watergate scandals.

Mr. Obama made his announcement in a video message sent to supporters and posted on the Internet. While it was not a surprise — his aides have been hinting that he would take this step for two months — it represented a turnabout from his strong earlier suggestion that he would join the system. Mr. McCain has been a champion of public financing of campaign throughout his career.

“The public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who’ve become masters at gaming this broken system,” he said. “John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we’ve already seen that he’s not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations.”

The Proposed New Law is a Nightmare for Artists

US Congress is currently debating legislation which will remove the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located. Libraries and archives are among the groups lobbying for the change to allow copying of so-called “orphan works”. The legislation would allow a rights holder who subsequently emerges to be paid the normal fee, but removes the currently costly statutory damages which rights’ holders can charge.

The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work. This is because—unlike books, songs and films—works of visual art lack universally accepted titles that permit searching by name. And, the number of works by most artists typically exceeds the output of novelists, composers or script writers. Furthermore, it is easy for an illustration, drawing or image of a painting to become separated from any publication in which it has been reproduced and which may have identified the artist, especially in the internet age.

Bush Calls for End to Ban on Offshore Oil Drilling

WASHINGTON — President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to end a federal ban on offshore oil drilling and open a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration, asserting that those steps and others would lower gasoline prices and “strengthen our national security.”

President Bush also urged Congress to approve the extraction of oil from shale on federal lands, something he said can be done far more economically now than a few years ago, and to speed the approval process for building new refineries.

Mr. Bush sought to take full political advantage of soaring fuel prices by portraying Republican lawmakers as imaginative and forward-looking and the Democratic majority in Congress as obstructionists on energy policy.