Recent Posts
Five men have been jailed in Burundi for murdering African albinos and selling their body parts to witch doctors. . . .
Police believe parts of the bodies of 11 murdered and mutiliated albino men, women and children were smuggled across the border into Tanzania and sold to witch doctors, who claim albinos' flesh brings luck in love, life and business.
link: Al Jazeera English - Africa - Killers of Burundi albinos jailed
1864. "Nashville, Tennessee. Rail yard and depot with locomotives." Wet-plate glass negative by George N. Barnard.
link: Nashville: 1864 | Shorpy Photo Archive
Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.
Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state plowed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the plows.
"They (villagers) believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains," Upendra Kumar, a village council official, said from Bihar's remote Banke Bazaar town.
"This is the most trusted social custom in the area and the villagers have vowed to continue this practice until it rains very heavily."
India this year suffered its worst start to the vital monsoon rains in eight decades, causing drought in some states.
link: Naked girls plow fields for rain | Oddly Enough | Reuters
LIMA (Reuters) - A pre-Incan mummy and eight other skeletons have been dug up from under what used to be a shanty town in the middle of Peru's capital, archeologists said on Wednesday.
Urban squatters had lived on the Huaca Huantille ruins for years, unaware they contained an ancient burial site.
Archeologist Roberto Quispe working on the excavation said the bones were from the Ychsma civilization dating from between 1000 and 1400 AD.
The burial site was found after city officials and Peru's national institute of culture kicked out 50 homeless families that had built a shantytown on the ruins, and later started excavations.
link: Pre-Incan mummy dug up in center of Lima | Science | Reuters
Honeybees sterilise their hives with antimicrobial resin, scientists have discovered.
In doing so, they give the whole colony a form of "social immunity", which lessens the need for each individual bee to have a strong immune system.
Although honeybee resin is known to kill a range of pathogens, this is the first time that bees themselves have been shown to utilise its properties.
The team published details of their discovery in the journal Evolution.
link: BBC - Earth News - Honeybees sterilise their hives
One of Osama bin Laden's sons may have been killed by a US missile strike in Pakistan earlier this year, National Public Radio reported.
Saad bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader's third-oldest son, is "believed" to have been killed by Hellfire missiles fired from a US Predator drone "sometime this year," the US broadcaster said on its website.
The United States has put Pakistan at the heart of the fight against Al-Qaeda. The US military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are the only forces that deploy drones to the region.
US spy agencies are "80 to 85 percent" sure that Saad bin Laden is dead, a senior counterterrorism official told NPR, while acknowledging that it was difficult to be completely sure without a body on which DNA tests could be conducted.
Officials at the CIA and the US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, told AFP they could not immediately confirm the report.
link: The Raw Story | US strike may have killed bin Laden's son: report
Christopher Hayes writes:
Just got back from an hour-long interview Speaker Pelosi gave to a few journalists on healthcare. I've interviewed the speaker a number of times, and it always strikes me how vast the gap must be between Pelosi's public persona as a kind of gentle earnest liberal grandmother, and her behind-the-scenes role as an incredibly effective vote wrangler. At one point she said that she's always called Washington DC "the city of the perishable. When you got the vote, you take the vote." And at this she pounded her fist into her hand with relish and a smile that made me think about just how much she seems to like her job.
She seemed confident about the House being able to pass a healthcare bill with a "strong" public option, the importance of which she repeatedly stressed. "That's gonna happen," she said flatly. She also said that for all the stories about Democrats rebelling over the Ways and Means proposed surtax on the rich, she's gotten very little push back from members of her caucus.
link: Pelosi on the Public Option: "That's Gonna Happen."
