Newspage go!

Before we kick off, something serious.  I have a friend whose daughter has a friend in diabetic coma.  Add please to your prayer lists, my friends.

And now....


Headline #1:  Paging Captain Obvious...

Report: Biology kit for children includes dead frog soaking in formaldehyde

Well, duh.  Apparently the problem starts with "formaldehyde is a known carcinogen".  What isn't anymore.  I guarantee you, I will by the time I get cancer have consumed, handled, or respirated 70% of the world's known carcinogens, and it will be something stupid like "prolonged exposure to the paint used for the letters on your keyboard" that will get me.  Additionally, the education challenged found the booklet that went with it was "insensitive" (for graphically explaining what to do with the frog), and a YouTube video showed kids abandoning the booklet all together and just ripping it apart by hand, one child saying afterward, "Today we learned something interesting: How to kill something.”  Two words:  ADULT SUPERVISION- which means more than just posting a video you took when you should have been providing guidance.  Next case!


Headline #2:  And it probably hurts their little cow ears, too...


Vegan denied Swiss passport over 'annoying' campaign against cowbells

Yes, a Dutch vegan, Nancy Holten, whose children are Swiss somehow tried for a visa but was turned down.  It seems she made too many enemies in her campaign to get Swiss dairy farms to stop putting cowbells on their cows.  “The bells, which the cows have to wear when they walk to and from the pasture, are especially heavy.  The animals carry around five kilograms around their neck. It causes friction and burns to their skin.”  (11 pounds to you and me in America).


Under Switzerland’s system of extremely local democracy, a meeting of local residents was asked to vote on her application to become a naturalized citizen.

They rejected it by 200 votes to 60, the Swiss newspaper 24Heures reported.

A local government spokesman said the application was rejected because Holten keeping “rebelling against traditional things”, making people wonder why she even wants to be Swiss.


Headline # 3:  Yep, had to be the food...

Nude woman steals police car, claims she was poisoned 

So the situation here:  an admitted user of both spice and meth strips in the middle of the street, steals a cop car and goes for a 70-mile joyride, and when apprehended, tells the police:

"I've never gone a trip like that," Lisa Luna said in a jailhouse interview with KPHO.

The 31-year-old from Mesa told reporters she's used spice and methamphetamine in the past, but "never felt like that before."

Luna said she believes a relative may have been adulterating her food before a Maricopa County Sheriff's Deputy said he found her walking naked down a road last Thursday.

"She had been giving me stuff that had been making me feel really weird," Luna said. "I don't know what it was."

You know, though, I think I'll stick with the Dutch/Swiss vegan...

Headline #4:  Why you should always keep your info up-to-date

Supposedly, according to a link from a friend's law office, it was the bank's fault a couple got a divorce- or was it?  Paraphrasing from the story on The Indiana Lawyer:

Meet our married couple- she's an attorney, he's a retired IRS investigator.  They switch house insurance policies without informing the bank.  The bank pays the old company from the escrow, then finds out that the policy got switched.  They then pay the new policy from the escrow, informing the couple to take the refund check that's coming their way and deposit it in the escrow.  They decided to spend it, and so their payment goes up.  Funny how that works, right?


So they refuse to pay the higher payment, and demand the bank refund the escrow.  Good luck with that.  The mortgage goes into default, and the couple sues the bank for $300,000 because the whole ordeal led them to a divorce.  So what does the district court say?  This from the article, because I can't put it any funnier:

“RESPA requires servicers to correct account errors and give requested information to borrowers. Perron and Jackson were not harmed by an uncorrected account error because there wasn’t an error in the first place,” Sykes wrote. “Nor were they harmed by an information blackout. They knew Chase had paid the $1,422 from the escrow account to Allstate and why. They also knew why the December 2010 payment was held in suspense. … Simply put, Perron and Jackson weren’t harmed by being in the dark because the lights were on the whole time.”


Headline #5:  Depends.  Did you ask them?


From the BBC:

Did Trump answer our questions?


This headline made you think, is the BBC getting the CNN treatment?  Most of the free world knows by now Trump told a CNN reporter he was on the naughty list, and I'm sure the ideologically-similar political editor at BBC News thought this was a clever way of playing on that.  But when you READ the article, here's what you get:  the BBC had ten questions for Trump, but for whatever reason had nobody at the presser to ASK them.  I assume that has to do with the fact that they are going to give the company line no matter what Trump would have answered.    So they then parsed the presser to see a) if anybody actually DID ask the questions, and b) what he answered if they did.  I am beyond SMH at the incredibly piss-poor journalistic integrity it takes to come up with something like this.  I can't wait to see if CNN adopts the Fantasy-Presser approach to getting their answers after Trump told them to go fish.


Headline #6:  And if you want a little more BBC hypocrisy...

Fury over India flag doormats on Amazon

Yes, Amazon Canada is selling doormats with India's flag on them, and the Foreign Minister is threatening visas of Amazon employees, etc.  And I can kinda see his point; I'd be pissed too if they tried to sell our flag like that.  HowEVER, we are talking about the same nation that painted pictures of the gods on the sides of buildings to stop people from urinating on said walls- and failed.  Somehow I can't believe the majority of the population is terribly insulted.


Headline the last:  I didn't think Bloomington let out until May...

I'll let this headline speak for itself:  From Xinhua...

Liu Yunshan attends Party School graduation ceremony