Another day

Another dollar's worth of wtfs....

An Army of Giant Rats Unearth Landmines in Africa

People Locked in Tiny Cages, Crying in Pain: What I Saw and Heard When the LAPD Threw Me in Jail for Exercising My Right to Protest the Oligarchy Don't believe the PR. There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD's attack on Occupy LA -- or the way detainees were later treated.

Pelosi Puts The Kibosh On GOP Payroll Tax Cut Strategy

Killing the Euro

The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011

Aliens!! Rat bomb sniffers! Sugar beets! Evil cuteness!

It must be aliens or a super secret spy mission for Bond. James Bond:

LOS ANGELES — The U.S. military's secretive X-37B unmanned spaceplane slipped out of orbit and landed itself in early morning darkness Friday at a California airbase after a successful maiden flight that lasted more than seven months, the Air Force said.

And then there's the rodents...

Reporting from Bogota, Colombia — Rats may soon become heroic figures in this nation's struggle to detect and dispose of land mines.

Early next year, anti-narcotics police will begin deploying squads of rats to sniff out land mines in remote areas of Colombia where leftist rebels and drug traffickers have planted hundreds of thousands of the deadly devices. It's an unconventional initiative in a country that is second only to Afghanistan in the number of land mine victims.

Using a project in Tanzania as a model, Colombian scientists have taught rats to detect mines buried as deep as 3 feet. The rats are conditioned to search and burrow down for explosives in exchange for the reward of sugar.

Monsanto!

DES MOINES, Iowa – A federal judge in California has ordered the removal from the ground of plants grown to produce seeds for genetically modified sugar beets, citing the potential for environmental harm.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White has again raised questions about the use of genetically modified crops and what will happen if growers aren't allowed to plant GMO seeds.

About 95 percent of the sugar beet crop has been genetically modified to resist the weed killer Roundup. The crop provides roughly half of the nation's sugar supply.
In his decision, White cited, "a significant risk of environmental harm."

Dangerous cute animals like the platypus. Be afraid!

Where the neocons go to ground?

A giant rodent five times the size of a common rat has been discovered in the mountainous jungles of New Guinea.

The 1.4kg Mallomys giant rat is one of two species of mammal thought to be new to science documented on an expedition to an area described as a "lost world".

(Picture from article.)

More proof that squirrels are plotting terroristic terrorism stuff!!

Be afraid!

More animals in Germany go ... bonkers:

BERLIN, Germany (AP) -- An unusually aggressive squirrel attacked three people in a German town before its last victim finished it off with a crutch, police said Wednesday.

The rodent jumped through a living-room window in Passau, on the Austrian border, on Tuesday and bit its first victim. With the squirrel hanging on by its teeth, the woman ran out into the street, where she managed to shake the animal off.

The squirrel then bit a builder before fleeing into a nearby garden, where it bit a 72-year-old man who eventually killed it with his crutch, police said.

The dead animal was to be tested for rabies.

Germany is obviously the first strike area by super rats , raccoons, and now squirrels. Expect invasion by a small fur military any day now. They are expecting flowers and candy.



Update: obviously I was so concerned about the squirrels I didn't read the rest of the report:

Separately Wednesday, Berlin commuters found themselves sharing the road with escapees from a local zoo -- six horses, three camels, two goats and a llama.

The animals escaped from a small petting zoo in the east of the capital and appeared shortly before 7 a.m. (0500 GMT) at a busy roundabout a few hundred meters (yards) away, police said.

The animals' excursion, which led to minor disruption but no injuries, was ended swiftly. The horses were caught in a nearby park and the llama at a cemetery, police said. Their comrades also were apprehended.

It was not immediately clear how the animals escaped.

A jail break on top of all the rest! They need to Gitmo those animals NOW!! What do they know and .... how do they know it!!

Super rats: immune to poisons

Are appearing in Europe and in North America:

The first poison of this type was called warfarin, which became available in 1953. It has many advantages, but also one decisive disadvantage: Just a few years after its introduction, rats capable of surviving their warfarin snack showed up in Scotland. The population's DNA had mutated so that blood coagulation was not affected by the poison. Today, resistant brown rats exist in several parts of Europe as well as in North America. Many of these rats are immune to both warfarin and some of the more recently developed agents.

"We've discovered the mutants in some areas of Germany as well," says Hans-Joachim Pelz from Germany's Federal Biological Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry. The area where resistant rats are thought to live stretches from the northern edge of the Ruhr area to southern Emsland in the Lower Saxony region. Its western edge extends into the Netherlands. "That was the extent of our knowledge at the end of the 1990s, at least," says Pelz. The super-rats have continued to spread since then, and rats resistant to commonly used poisons have now also been found in Hanover and Hamburg.

It is all part of their ingeeeeeenious plan! Today the sewers, tomorrow the world! Muhahahaha!

Update May 3, 2009:

The British Pest Control Association (BPCA) is calling on the Government to allow the use of more powerful pesticides to contain Britain's growing rodent population.

It is estimated that their numbers have swelled by 13 per cent in the past year to more than 50 million, one for every person living in England.

Infestations in some towns and cities have reportedly doubled in the past 12 months. Exeter council has seen a 66 per cent rise in vermin call-outs in 2008, while there was a 40 per cent rise in Salford.

The BPCA says the situation has also escalated in two Berkshire towns, which it has not named, because the local rat population is now almost completely resistant to the standard poisons.

[snip]

Pest control experts want the law changed so that two powerful rodenticides, brodifacoum and flocoumafen, can be applied outdoors. Currently their use is only allowed inside properties.

Other EU countries allow the use of the powerful poisons outside, but there is concern this endangers birds and pets.

Rats and mice are capable of spreading more than 35 diseases, including a fever inducing nausea and muscle aches passed to humans either via a bite or the rodent's urine.