Cue Austin Powers....

One of Zimbabwe's leading junior athletes, who has won several gold medals in women's events, is really a man, police say.

Samukeliso Sithole, 17, has been charged with impersonation.

At her court appearance, she insisted that she was a woman, despite a doctor's report to the contrary.

Ms Sithole said she was born with both male and female sexual organs and a traditional healer had made the penis disappear but it had since egrown.

She told the court that the penis had returned because the healer had not been fully paid for his services.

She said that she had already arranged to pay the healer on 3 March, the day her trial is set to start, and so she expected her penis to disappear once more, according to the state-run Herald newspaper.

Rat the waiter is wrong.

They have also seen Ong Bak.

A man was stabbed and five other people were taken to hospital after thousands of customers caused a stampede at the midnight opening of a new IKEA furniture store in north London.

The stabbing victim, a man in his 20s, was attacked at around 1:30 a.m. near the IKEA store, a spokeswoman for London's Metropolitan Police said, adding that his condition did not appear life-threatening.

The new IKEA warehouse in the Edmonton district had been due to operate 24 hours to mark the opening, but shut until further notice after some 40 minutes because of the unexpectedly large crowds.

Some 6,000 people flocked to the Swedish furniture store, which had been offering special bargains including leather sofas for $84.

Many customers abandoned their vehicles in the middle of a major road near the shop and walked to the store, causing severe traffic jams, police said. In addition to the stabbing victim, one patient was taken to hospital with chest pains and four others were treated for minor injuries, a London Ambulance Service spokesman said.

IKEA said it had opened 12 other stores in Britain before and was stunned by the Edmonton stampede.

Curse you, Lara Croft

Chinese archaeologists unearthed a rare 2000-year-old tomb only to find nothing left in the main chamber but a modern pair of gloves

Not sure how I can blame Lara Croft for this one, but I'll find a way.

Road builders demolished a large section of China's World Heritage-listed Great Wall last month in an indication of the perilous state of one of the world's best known landmarks, state media said today.

Almost 100m of the wall in northern Ningxia autonomous region was levelled in two overnight raids by construction workers who used the material to pave a road, the Ningxia Daily said.

The destroyed area near Zhongwei city was constructed during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in an region known as "the Great Wall Museum" because of the profusion of rammed earth sections of the wall.

Less than 2500km remain of the 6300km long wall that was first built in the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC).

It was rebuilt in the Ming Dynasty to keep out northern tribes threatening the Chinese heartland.

Amazonian ants learn to fly.

Tiny ants living in the Amazonian treetops have a remarkable survival strategy - when blown off a branch, they can glide back to the safety of their tree, a new study reveals.

Cephalotes atratus ants live in communities tens of metres above the ground where gusts of wind constantly threaten to send them spiralling to the forest floor. That would spell certain death, says Robert Dudley at the University of California at Berkeley, US, and one of the study team.

"For these social insects, if you can't find your tree again in the Amazon, you're never going to find your home which means you'll die," he says.

So the team, led by Stephen Yanoviak at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, US, has worked out how the ants avoid this fate.

The researchers found that falling ants pivot to fall hind-feet-first in midair and swerve in a J-shaped swoop to land on the bark of their home tree trunk (View a Real Media video file).

Of 120 worker ants dropped from branches 27 metres high, 85% landed safely back on the tree. Even after a brief stumble on impact, most ants marched back to their original location within 10 minutes.

If the ants were not actively controlling their descent, the authors estimate that a mere 8% of dropped individuals would land on their tree. And while the team's experiments with blinded ants show that visual cues are important for hitting the tree target, exactly how the insects steer their speedy glide is a mystery, says Dudley.

Saturn, like Ong Bak, is also smurfy.

Saturn's moon Mimas in orbit over the planet's northern hemisphere.

Fun from Ohio!

Woman sues seven-year-old-boy because she hit his bike while rollerblading and broke her leg.

Also, man blames viagra and a "wardrobe malfunction" for his indecent exposure.

And more!

Everyone saw THIS one coming.

North Korea admits to having nukes, claims they are not going to disarm as long as they feel the USA will invade them if they do.

The thing the USA should REALLY be worried about:

Loonies from Massachusetts!

Woman informed that her home will be forclosed upon for $30 in back taxes that she was never told about, from a town that she doesn't live in.

"Gong-show journalism"

The Washington Times: an openly white-supremacist newspaper, that runs racist ads and whose editor writes that

White men should "run, not walk" to wed "racially conscious" white women and avoid being out-bred by non-whites. Latinos are "rising to take this country away from those who made it," the "Euroamericans." Muslims are "human hyenas" who "smell blood" and are "closing in" on their "weakened prey," meaning "the white race." Blacks, Coombs sneers, are "saintly victims who can do no wrong." Black solidarity and non-white immigration are imposing "racial revolution and decomposition" in America.

Why does this matter? Well, check out these subscribers:

President Reagan once described it as his favorite paper. President Bush said it "in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C."

That influence may have reached a public peak this winter, when George W. Bush invited its top leaders to the White House for an exclusive, 40-minute interview. The resulting stories were spread across the front page of the Times' Jan. 12 edition.

Good news for cartoon fans.

With 2000 pre-orders, Rich Burlew is quitting his day job and doing Order Of The Stick full-time.

Sweeeeeeeeeet.

"Liberation Much Appreciated"

While it was posted by an Iraqi, he didn't take it. The boy is apparently Palestinian, and I don't recognise the uniform but I would guess Israeli.

Quote of the Day:

John Rogers on Americans exporting bigorty north:

I find it incredibly ironic that Stephen Harper is the leading opponent of gay rights, because if he takes this money he might as well be wearing chaps and a t-shirt that says "I'm an American Evangelical's BOTTOM BITCH."

Gotta love those family values!

Many, many links on Jeff Gannon, Bush's press-corps plant, and his history (apparently dating until *yesterday*) with gay prostitution under his various pseudonyms.

"His Christian faith has enabled him to receive forgiveness for the sins of the past." Hmm. If his 'past' is really past, why is his picture still posted looking for dates on his AOL profile?

Yet another British man with no testicles.

A British woman was sentenced to two and a half years in jail Thursday for ripping off her ex-lover's testicle with her bare hands during a drunken brawl after he refused her sex.

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage in May last year after Geoffrey Jones, 37, who had ended their long-term relationship, rejected her advances.

She grabbed him by the genitals, tearing off his left testicle, then hid it in her mouth before a friend of Jones handed it back to him saying "that's yours."
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Oddly enough, I've linked this one before. This is an update.

Open-source genetic retooling!

A paper appearing in this week's edition of Nature is antiseptically entitled: "Gene transfer to plants by diverse species of bacteria." But the information that lies within may herald a revolution in biology.

The paper describes two new technologies: TransBacter, a method for transferring genes to plants, and GUSPlus, a method of visualizing where the genes are and what they do. Behind the research, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, is a team of scientists who want to provide the technologies as a "kernel," modeled on the Linux movement, as the beginning of perhaps the first practical offering in open-source biology.

Researchers who want to develop technologies based on this kernel can use it as they wish if they agree to a flexible license issued by Biological Innovation for Open Society, or BIOS. The initiative is being spearheaded by Richard Jefferson, also founder of Cambia, an agricultural life science institute in Canberra, Australia.

(no subject)

The mystery of the Hope Diamond has been solved

Researchers using computer analysis have traced the origin of the famed Hope Diamond, concluding that it was cut from a larger stone that was once part of the crown jewels of France.

A French connection had been suspected for the Hope, but the new study shows just how it would have fit inside the larger French Blue Diamond and how that gem was cut, Smithsonian gem curator Jeffrey Post explained.

The deep blue Hope Diamond is the centerpiece of the gem collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, famed for its claimed history of bad luck for its owners. It's been good fortune for the museum, though, drawing millions of visitors.

Post said the new analysis of the diamond took a year, with researchers using sketches from pre-Revolutionary France, scientific studies of the French crown jewels and computer models.

(no subject)

Wife claims lethal sherry enema was self-inflicted.

For those of you who haven't hit your daily TMI limit yet,

"He did coffee enemas, he did Castile soap, Ivory soap," she said. "He
had enema recipes."