From Australia…

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HOUSEHOLDERS would be charged for each flush under a radical new toilet tax designed to help beat the drought.

The scheme would replace the current system, which sees sewage charges based on a home’s value – not its waste water output.

CSIRO Policy and Economic Research Unit member Jim McColl and Adelaide University Water Management Professor Mike Young plan to promote the move to state and federal politicians and experts across the country.

“It would encourage people to reduce their sewage output by taking shorter showers,recycling washing machine water or connecting rainwater tanks to internal plumbingto reduce their charges,”Professor Young said.

“Some people may go as far as not flushing their toilet as often because the less sewage you produce, the less sewage rate you pay.”

Professor Young said sewer pricing needed to be addressed as part of the response to the water crisis.

“People have been frightened to talk about sewage because it is yucky stuff, but it is critically important to address it, as part of the whole water cycle,” he said.

“We are looking at reforming the way sewage is priced and this plan will drive interest in the different ways water is used throughout Australia.”

The reform would see the abolition of the property-based charge with one based on a pay-as-you-go rate and a small fixed annual fee to cover the cost of meter readings and pipeline maintenance, Professor Young said.

The pay-as-you-go rate would provide financial savings for those who reduce their waste water output.

Professor Young and Mr McColl will promote the plan nationally through their Droplet, a newsletter whose 6000 subscribers include state and federal politicians, water policy specialists and economists around the country.

Professor Young said a sewage pricing plan, like the one proposed, was already used in the US.

“In places like the City of Bellaire, Texas (a virtual suburb of Houston), they do it and the system seems to work,” he said.

“As nearly all of (the homes in) mainland Australia’s cities and towns already have water meters, introduction of a volumetric charge, such as that used in the City of Bellaire, would not be difficult to implement.”

Mr McColl said the plan had to be viewed in the context of “the crucial issues surrounding water resources” in Australia.

“We should be prepared for the (drought) situation we are going through now to occur again, as well as the potential impact of climate change, so we have to act now for the future,” he said.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,24659589-5005369,00.html

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. – A Long Island surgeon embroiled in a nearly four-year divorce proceeding wants his estranged wife to return the kidney he donated to her, although he says he’ll settle for $1.5 million in compensation.Dr. Richard Batista, a surgeon at Nassau University Medical Center, told reporters at his lawyer’s Long Island office Wednesday that he decided to go public with his demand for kidney compensation because he has grown frustrated with the negotiations with his estranged wife.

He claimed he has been prevented from seeing their children, ages, 8, 11 and 14, for months at a time.

“This is my last resort; I did not want to do this publicly,” Batista said.

He said he gave his kidney to Dawnell Batista, now 44, in June 2001. She filed for divorce in July 2005, although he claims she began having an extramarital affair 18 months to two years after receiving the kidney transplant, his attorney, Dominick Barbara said.

Douglas Rothkopf, the attorney representing Dawnell Batista, did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Matrimonial attorneys were quick to shoot down any possibility Batista would succeed.

“I’ve been in this business over 40 years and I’ve never heard of that,” said Seymour J. Reisman, a Long Island divorce lawyer. “It’s not marital property, not a marital asset you can put a price tag on.”

Manhattan attorney Susan Moss said, “The good doctor is out of luck and out a kidney. This is similar to cases where a husband wants to be repaid for the cost of breast implants and the such. Our judges are not willing to value such assets, so to speak.”

Batista, 49, said he has no regrets about donating the kidney, only about the failed marriage. The couple was married in 1990 and lived in a million-dollar home in Massapequa. They met while he was working at a hospital and she was training to be a nurse.

He still recalls the day after the surgery took place.

“There is no greater feeling on this planet. As God is my witness, I felt as if I could put my arm around Jesus Christ. It was an unbelievable; I was walking on a cloud.

To this day I would still do it again.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090108/ap_on_fe_st/odd_kidney_dispute

When Baby Jesus disappeared last year from a Nativity scene on the lawn of the Wellington, Fla., community center, village officials didn’t follow a star to locate him.

A GPS device mounted inside the life-size ceramic figurine led sheriff’s deputies to a nearby apartment, where it was found face down on the carpet. An 18-year-old woman was arrested in the theft.

Giving up on old-fashioned padlocks and trust, a number of churches, synagogues, governments and ordinary citizens are turning to technology to protect holiday displays from pranks or prejudice.

About 70 churches and synagogues eager to avoid the December police blotter jumped at a security company’s offer of free use of GPS systems and hidden cameras this month to guard their mangers and menorahs.

Others, like the Herrera family of Richland Hills, Texas, took matters into their own hands. Upset after their teeter-totter was stolen, the family trained surveillance cameras on their yard and was surprised when footage showed a teenage girl stealing a baby Jesus worth almost $500. Police have obtained the tape.

“They took the family Jesus,” said Gloria Herrera, 48, a Catholic. “How can anybody do that?”

For two consecutive years, thieves made off with the baby Jesus figurine in Wellington, a well-off village of 60,000 in Palm Beach County, Fla. The ceramic original, donated by a local merchant, was made in Italy and worth about $1,800, said John Bonde, Wellington’s director of operations.

So last year, officials took a GPS unit normally used to track the application of mosquito spray and implanted it in the latest replacement figurine. After that one disappeared, sheriff’s deputies quickly tracked it down.

Sensing opportunity in that kind of success story, New York-based BrickHouse Security is offering up to 200 nonprofit religious institutions a free month’s use of security cameras and LightningGPS products it distributes.

Chief executive officer Todd Morris said the idea was born after a few churches asked about one-month rentals instead of longer contracts that are the norm. The first 20 or so applications came from synagogues, he said.

Rabbi Yochonon Goldman of Lubavitch of Center City, a Philadelphia-area branch of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, signed up even though his previous biggest scare involved the wind knocking down a menorah.

“People are very security conscious, and this is simply a precaution,” said Goldman, who will put a GPS on one menorah and a camera on another. “It’s sad … but it’s the reality we’re faced with.”

As members of a minority religion, Jews are probably hit harder when their religious symbols are vandalized, said Deborah Lauter, national civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League.

“If Baby Jesus is removed, it tends to be seen as a prank,” Lauter said. “Vandalism or theft of a menorah is just more sensitive. You feel like you’re really being targeted for your religion.”

The ADL identified 699 incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism in 2007, consistent with recent years.

So far in 2008, Baby Jesus has appeared in several police reports. At First United Methodist Church in Kittanning, Pa., a baby Jesus was stolen and replaced with a pumpkin. In Eureka Springs, Ark., someone who absconded with a plastic baby Jesus from a public display last week also took the concrete block and chain that was supposed to act as a deterrent.

Previously, stolen Jesus figurines have also been defaced with profanity or Satanic symbols.

The incidents raise a question: Is stealing Baby Jesus harmless juvenile fun, or anti-Christian?

“I suspect most of it is childish pranks,” said attorney Mike Johnson of the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian legal group. “Clearly, there are adults with an agenda to remove Christ from Christmas. But they tend to occupy themselves with the courts and courtroom of public opinion.”

Stephen Nissenbaum, a retired history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of “The Battle for Christmas,” views the thefts as neither innocent vandalism nor religious hate crimes.

“What it means is that it’s OK to go around violating even pretty important norms, as long as real human harm isn’t being done,” he said. “It’s not exactly devaluing Christianity, but it is sort of a ritualized challenge to it. It could be Christian kids doing it – and on Jan. 2 they become good Christians again.”

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081210/D94VRG980.html

SANTA FE, N.M. – A 21-year-old man was accused of driving drunk and leading police on a chase that finally ended with him running over himself. The man was treated for minor injuries at a Santa Fe hospital and booked in to the Sandoval County detention center on charges of aggravated driving while intoxicated, fleeing a police officer, careless driving and two other outstanding traffic warrants.

A tip to the state’s DrunkBuster hot line Sunday afternoon alerted authorities to a possibly drunken driver.

State Police Officer Grace Romero spotted the man’s pickup truck swerving across both lanes of a highway, driving slowly and then fast. He refused to stop.

After narrowly missing other vehicles, police said the suspect drove through a ditch and a barbed-wire fence before stopping. He tried to put the truck into park, but it ended up in reverse.

Police said the man fell from his open door and both of his legs were run over by the front driver’s side tire.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081126/ap_on_fe_st/odd_drunken_driver

DENVER – A daredevil hopes to propel himself across a southern Colorado canyon using a jet pack powered by hydrogen peroxide.

Eric Scott tells the Rocky Mountain News he’s never travelled as far as he wants to Monday – 457 metres.

The Royal Gorge is more than 335 metres deep.

A bridge spanning it was the site of a deadly stunt in 2003 when a parachute jumper miscalculated and fell.

Scott works for Denver-based Jet P.I. The company developed a jet pack for stunts and promotions that is based on one developed in the 1960s for the military.

The original one could fly for only about 20 seconds.

The new one can go for more than 30 seconds at faster than 113 kilometres an hour.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=cp_gg9vrefld2

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canadian prison authorities were forced to release a 450-pound (205 kg) drug gang member this week because he was too large for his cell, the Journal de Montreal newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Michel Lapointe — known as Big Mike — was arrested in September 2006 and received a five-year sentence in May this year. The paper said he could not fit on the chair in his Montreal prison cell and when he went to bed, his body protruded six inches on either side.

A letter from the authorities to Lapointe said: “You have been detained for more than 25 months and your prison conditions are difficult because of your health”.

The authorities also cited the refusal of two other facilities to accept the 37-year-old. He was freed late on Tuesday.

“I’m going to have a proper bed and finally have a chair I can sit in,” he told the paper outside the prison.

“I want a normal life. I’ve done some stupid things and I’ve paid for them,” he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081112/od_nm/us_fat;

No matter where you stand on the American election, this is just sad. – Greg

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GROSSE POINTE FARMS, Mich. – A suburban Detroit woman has decided to scare up the vote among neighborhood children by just offering treats to John McCain supporters.

Shirley Nagel of Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., handed out candy Friday only to those who shared her support for the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate Sarah Palin. Others were turned away empty-handed.

TV station WJBK says a sign outside Nagel’s house warned: “No handouts for Obama supporters, liars, tricksters or kids of supporters.”

Nagel calls Democrat Barack Obama “scary.” When asked about children who were turned away empty-handed and crying, she said: “Oh well. Everybody has a choice.”

Fax and phone messages left at numbers for Nagel were not returned.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081101/ap_on_fe_st/odd_halloween_politics

FORT PIERCE, Fla. – St. Lucie County officials are investigating whether a firefighter took a man’s severed foot from the scene of a traffic accident. On Sept. 19, a crash on I-95 caused a man’s foot to be sheared off; the man survived and is undergoing treatment at a local hospital.

It’s the Fire District’s policy to take a severed body part with the patient to the hospital if there is any chance of reattachment, or the body part goes to the medical examiner’s office. But authorities said the foot was taken to the hospital days later, on Sept. 24.

Officials would not release the name of the firefighter under investigation, but said the firefighter trains cadaver dogs, which are used to locate and follow the scent of decomposing human flesh.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080926/ap_on_fe_st/odd_stolen_foot

An Indian man who was knocked unconscious during a stampede of thousands of religious pilgrims on a steep Himalayan mountain path woke up as doctors were preparing to perform his autopsy, the Times of India reported.

Mange Ram, 19, lost consciousness in the stampede that killed 150 people and was triggered by rumors of a landslide leading to a Hindu temple devoted to the goddess Naina Devi.

Ram awoke in the hospital morgue Sunday in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.

“When I woke up, I was in the middle of a row of bodies waiting for post mortem,” he told the Times. “My throat was parched and I asked for water. Towering over me the doctors and nursing staff at Anandpur Sahib Civil Hospital looked dazed. They must have been surprised to see a dead man come alive like that.”

Sat Pal Aggarwal, a doctor on the pilgrimage, said little was done to see if victims of the stampede were still alive.

“People were dumped quite haphazardly into trucks without following any procedure or checking if they were alive,” he told the Times.

Despite the huge loss of life, the pilgrimage continued only hours after the corpses had been cleared, according to the newspaper.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,398661,00.html

Jesus Christ’s epic Sermon on the Mount, with its calls for peacemaking, helping the poor and working for justice, could well be compared to a modern political campaign speech in front of the multitudes in a modern stadium.Now a Gilbert church is launching a Jesus for President campaign and will conduct a two-month effort starting in August – parallel to the U.S. presidential campaign – that emphasizes a familiar issue in the 2008 campaign: change.

“Advocating for Change Since 33 A.D.” is the secondary theme of the campaign that Pastor Mark Connelly is launching this weekend at Superstition Springs Community Church at 4450 E. Elliot Road.

Members will be asked to put “Jesus for President” signs in their yards and wear buttons with the same appeal. And like all candidates, it will be promoted by a Web site, www.anewplatform.com.

“In the midst of political chaos and social inequality, Jesus ran a platform where people did not just lobby for change; they became change,” say the organizers of the campaign, which will be launched Aug. 9 and conclude Oct. 5.

Connelly isn’t saying who might have filled Jesus’ Cabinet almost 2,000 years ago – perhaps Peter as vice president, Paul as secretary of state and Judas Iscariot as the treasury secretary.

Connelly says he is capitalizing on the buzz of this year’s national presidential campaign by driving home the message that people should not look to politicians to remedy problems and “produce change for us.”

“Things don’t seem to be changing all that much depending on who is in office,” Connelly said. “What if Jesus were running for president? What would be the platform that he would be running on?”

The pastor said Christ’s platform can be best summed up in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 5 and 6.

They are the heavily quoted biblical passages of the talk Jesus gave on a mountainside, beginning with the eight “beatitudes” – “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven …”

The Sermon on the Mount has been called the “Charter of Christianity.”

While planning a late summer sermon series, the church’s staff looked to a book, “Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals” by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, which targets Christian skeptics and calls for them to immerse themselves in the world’s struggles to transform the planet as well as themselves.

“While we are not necessarily following what the book is about, we were inspired to take that direction,” said Brian Kaufman, the church’s communications director.

Sermons for four weekend services spread across nine weeks discuss new kinds of “issues, peacemaking, purity and righteousness.”

Superstition Springs Community Church, founded in 1995, puts a heavy emphasis on social justice issues, Kaufman said.

One target is sex trafficking in Arizona, Fiji and Africa.

“Ending human trafficking is one of our biggest ministries,” Connelly said.

They work to rescue teens, especially girls, from sex trades, then settle them in safe environments, he said.

One project includes developing a 43-acre village for girls in Fiji. Another center in either India or Jamaica is being explored.

Moreover, the church, which draws about 2,000 worshipers each weekend, has adopted an African village with 900 children who are AIDS orphans.

“We provide food, water, schools, community centers and shelters for these kids – and give them a second chance,” Connelly said. Ministries also include supporting transitional housing for the Valley’s homeless women and children.

The Jesus for President campaign, Connelly said, will stress that “we have to politically embody those changes and become the changes that we desire to see in our communities and our nation.”

Lasting change, he said, “emerges from the hearts of the people who have been transformed, rather than just seeking people to legislate for us.”

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/121150