Testing Grounds The latest industry being outsourced to India is clinical drug trials. And any number of tragic things can happen on the way to your medicine cabinet.
Friday Night Rewind It doesn't matter which team you cheer for. We've got video previews of every high school football program in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando County.
An Australian politician is proposing a designated day for residents to hunt and kill poisonous cane toads. "The toad is probably the most disgusting creature known to man," said lawmaker Shane Knuth. Wow. The toads are such a problem, and even the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is behind the Toad Day Out. "Obviously we're not idiots," said society spokesman Michael Beatty. (Whenever someone starts a sentence declaring that they're not an idiot, the next part of the quote is always awesome.) "We understand a lot people will be highly reluctant to fill their freezers with dying cane toads, but at the moment that is the only humane way that we can recommend." So, yes, kill them ... by freezing them. Knuth sees the toad cull event as sort of a family fun day, "a special day that Queenslanders, especially children, could all play their part."
Whoops
Robbery goes awry, robber plays dead
Police in Burjassot, Spain, caught a man trying to rob a funeral home. No one really knows what he was hoping to steal, but the interesting part is how he tried to get away with it. Police arrived while he was inside, so he tried to blend in ... by playing dead in a glassed-in viewing chamber. There were a couple of problems with his plan, though. First, most of the corpses put out for viewing are well-dressed. "This guy was in everyday clothes that were wrinkled and dirty," a police officer said. So that raised some eyebrows. The other thing that made police think that maybe he wasn't so dead was that he was breathing. None of the corpses put out for viewing are ever breathing. They arrested the man, 23, and said his record included robbery.
Regular programs interrupted for porn
A technician at a French Polynesian television station was suspended for a week without pay after he was watching some unapproved programming (porn) in the booth and, of course, hit the wrong button, giving everyone with a set of rabbit ears a show. Haupert Ives, the station's director, told the Tahiti Nui network that the program went out for about three minutes, and that it was explicit for about 52 seconds. "It is funny, yes, but not really to us," Ives said.
Parental supervision
The Gooch can hit bars, with his mum
A judge in Lancashire, England, has decided that Lee Gooch, 36, is no longer allowed to go to bars anywhere in the country after he beat up a fellow patron in an unprovoked attack. Well, he's not allowed to go to a bar unsupervised. He can go as long as one of parents is with him, reports the Lancashire Evening Post. Gooch, who coincidentally has the same name and is just about the right age to have been the never-seen bully who tormented Arnold Jackson on Diff'rent Strokes, told the court that for some years he had suffered from psychiatric problems and had "bizarre illusions" about people. The judge said he was lenient in sentencing because the victim was sympathetic to the Gooch's condition. But the judge said if he steps into a bar without mom or dad, he will enforce a 51-week prison term.
Compiled from Times wire services and other sources by staff writer Jim Webster, who can be reached at jwebster@sptimes.com.
[Last modified: Apr 02, 2008 09:14 PM]
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