Under federal rules, a beagle could legally spend its life in a dishwasher-sized cage. Nor are there enough inspectors: 105 are charged with overseeing about 10,000 facilities, including kennels, zoos and research labs. High-volume operations that sell directly to the public don't need a federal license, and most state laws and enforcement are weak.
Everything boiled down to the desire of wives to hear their husbands say "three magic phrases" more often: "Thank you," "Sorry," and "I love you".
Perched on a beer case serving as a makeshift podium in central Tokyo, a group of middle-aged Japanese men are standing up to save their marriages -- and, they hope, marriage in Japan generally. "I'm sorry I always forget to put the toilet seat down," said one man in a suit and tie confessed as he balanced on the beer box at Shimbashi, Tokyo's hub of "salaryman" corporate workers.
"I hereby declare that I will stop going to the hostess bar, I'm sorry," said another man as his wife looked on amid a crowd of curious bystanders.
Said another man: "I love you, even though I don't really say it."
In a country where reticence about one's private life is the norm, these men are trying to prove their worth to their wives by making their vows as public as possible.
The 20 men taking part in the unlikely rally chant their slogan together: "Say 'thank you' without hesitating. Say 'sorry' without being scared. Say 'I love you' without being shy."
BOSTON - The winner of a $1 million lottery scratch ticket may not be so lucky after all: He's a convicted bank robber who isn't supposed to gamble. Timothy Elliott faces a Dec. 7 court hearing over whether he violated his probation when he bought the $10 ticket for the $800 Million Spectacular game at a supermarket in Hyannis.
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Elliott was placed on five years' probation after pleading guilty in October 2006 to unarmed robbery for a January 2006 heist at a bank on Cape Cod. Under terms of his probation, he "may not gamble, purchase lottery tickets or visit an establishment where gaming is conducted, including restaurants where Keno may be played."
Sales soared by 300 percent over Halloween. Now costumiers have lined up a festive big seller -- the one-size-fits-all Santa pet hat for the dog determined to have a great Christmas.
"Some cynics would say the British love their dogs more than they do other people," said Benjamin Webb, spokesman for Angels Fancy Dress who have been supplying costumes for humans since 1840 and are now on a canine winning streak.
Counting together American and the regional airline it owns, American Eagle, mishandled bags rise to 8.69 for every thousand passengers, or a total of 639,146 through Sept. 30.
American Eagle had the worst bag-handling record of 20 airlines tracked by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics during that period, the agency reported.
“We never hit 100 percent — 90 percent is acceptable,” she said. Airlines are fond of saying that they have a success rate of more than 99 percent in getting luggage to its destination along with its owner. And every big airline has stepped up efforts to improve its operations. But the baggage problem is getting worse. One in every 138 checked bags was lost during the first nine months of this year, compared with one in 155 bags a year earlier.
But Amazon must be taking a big hit up front on this. My Sprint EVDO data plan costs $60 a month. That is a consumer price. Obviously, Amazon was able to negotiate a much lower price. Even at $10 a month per Kindle, Amazon would need to sell a dozen books just to recoup its wireless network costs. Maybe it got a better deal than that, since the device is designed more for a download-and-read experience than an always-on experience. So the Kindles may not end up using a lot of bandwidth. It is not like most people are going to be downloading a new book everyday. If Amazon was able to negotiate the rate down closer to $1 a month, that would make more sense, because that would only require one or two book downloads per customer to pay for a year’s worth of wireless access. Amazon would not comment on how much it is paying for the wireless network. If it is paying Sprint on a per-device basis, it won’t really matter unless the Kindle takes off in sales.
/sbin/chkconfig --level 3 mysql on
CARTER LAKE, Iowa - Bryan Smith has pictures of his dog in his coat pocket, a reminder of the pet that sacrificed itself to save him from his burning house.
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It was Tuesday night when Storm jumped on the slumbering Smith and alerted him to the growing smoke and flames outside his bedroom.
Smith says he grabbed his curtains, wet them for a mask and grabbed his puppy Daisy while the older dog ran ahead.
While serendipity may be the art of finding pleasant things by chance, what health inspectors found at celebrated eatery Serendipity 3 was not very agreeable.
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Officials closed the restaurant Wednesday night after it failed its second inspection in a month. An inspector spotted a live mouse and mouse droppings, fruit flies, house flies and more than 100 live cockroaches.
User-generated content sites such as "ipop" have clubs where users can pay by the download or pony up monthly subscription fees of about 10,000 won to 20,000 won ($11 to $22) that will let them tap into a huge library of U.S., Japanese, Chinese, and Korean TV programming and movies.
One of the most popular peer-to-peer clubs, Mansal, has had nearly 50 million visitors. While many are repeats, the total is still almost equal to the country's population.
"I like to download stuff because I don't have to wait to watch something" Seong-sun said.
The clubs make money from subscription fees and advertising. Young professionals with little time to spare and students with an abundance of time to search for material are the main clients for these services--making cable TV and TV sets obsolete.
That attack shredded his back, literally peeling the skin back, he said, “like a banana peel.” But because Endris’ stomach was pressed to the surfboard, his intestines and internal organs were protected.
The third time, the shark tried to swallow Endris’ right leg, and he said that was actually a good thing, because the shark’s grip anchored him while he kicked the beast in the head and snout with his left leg until it let go.
The dolphins, which had been cavorting in the surf all along, showed up then. They circled him, keeping the shark at bay, and enabled Endris to get back on his board and catch a wave to the shore.
Our finned friends
No one knows why dolphins protect humans, but stories of the marine mammals rescuing humans go back to ancient Greece, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
A year ago in New Zealand, the group reports, four lifeguards were saved from sharks in the same way Endris was — by dolphins forming a protective ring.
His fiancee Susan Gabrielson — who has "only one carat on her finger" — her daughter Sayde and Susan's sister Sarah accompanied Blake to the park this week. Susan found a 1.47-carat stone and some smaller gems Monday.
"We're going back out today. We'll take a lunch and then go back into the field," Blake said.
More than 700 diamonds have been found at the park this year.
The Crater of Diamonds park is the world's only diamond-producing site open to the public and visitors can keep the stones they dig up. The largest diamond ever found in the United States, the 40-carat white diamond named Uncle Sam, was unearthed in 1924 at the Murfreesboro park.
'Chore Wars,' where 'World of Warcraft' meets toilet cleaner
Posted by Michael Kanellos
SAN FRANCISCO--Housework is a lot more fun with a battle axe and a couple of dwarves.
Chore Wars, a game shown off by noted game developer Jane McGonigal at the Web 2.0 Summit recently, gives users "experience" points for various household chores. Collecting those points then lets you advance your profile in the online game.
Jane McGonigal
Jane McGonigal speaks at the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco this past May.
(Credit: James Martin, CNET News.com)
Swiffer the floor twice a week and get 20 points for charm, that sort of thing. You can also play for virtual gold doubloons. These can be exchanged for rewards, inside your own circle of friends. Earn 200 doubloons and you can receive a get-out of-cleaning-the garage card. Or if you are the low scorer for a month, you can be dubbed a scapegoat and put up for adoption.
Naturally, most players concentrate on people you know. Who cares if some guy in Texas slew 200 yards of PVC pipe in putting together his new sprinkler system and got 1,000 doubloons. The bean bags in your guest room still need to be stacked. Still, you can get a sense of the value that other people put on certain tasks to get a sense of the value of your own.
There are different roles you can play--apprentice, dungeon master (DMs have full administrative power and get to wield the unstoppable cleansing power of Comet) and adventurer.
Every once in a while his two worlds - programming and blogging - collide. Time was, Killelea was best known as the author of "Web Performance Tuning," a geeky manual that helped him get jobs. Now his fame as a bubble blogger has spread - not always to his advantage. "Once a guy called me in for a job interview just to berate me," he said. "I don't do this language called Ruby that he wanted, so I said, 'Why did you bring me here?' He said, 'I want to talk to you about your Web site.' He complained about how he had overpaid for a house in Palo Alto and couldn't get out of it. It was not a civil conversation."
A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said on Monday as China seeks to wean Internet addicts offline.
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The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.
How it works
Women often lose their reproductive capacity around age 50, but if men can still reproduce into their 70s, Darwin would say it's advantageous for males to live longer lives providing they can hook up with a woman capable of reproducing. Natural selection should favor longevity-boosting genes, which would get passed down from fathers to both sons and daughters. So women would benefit as well in future generations, the scientists say.
Result: Over time, the older-guy-with-younger-gal lifestyle would lift the lifespan ceiling for both men and women in the next generations and so on.
"By increasing the survival of men you have a spillover effect on women because men pass their genes to children of both sexes," said study team member Cedric Puleston, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University.
Tumble your way to tasty meat
Posted by Jennifer Guevin
Now even procrastinators can serve up tender, tasty meat as if they hadn't forgotten to start marinating until 10 minutes before their guests arrived.
Meat in barrel
The Reveo requires a surprisingly small amount of marinade. Mmmm...meat juice...
(Credit: Jennifer Guevin/CNET Networks)
I recently got to test out the Reveo MariVac from Eastman Outdoors, a funky kitchen appliance that looks suspiciously like a rock tumbler and that the company claims can cut down the time it takes to marinate meat to a fraction of the norm.
To use it, you just put raw meat and marinade into a compartment that tumbles it all together for up to 20 minutes. The idea behind the machine is that it vacuums out the air in the main barrel, stretching the fibers of the meat to allow the marinade to soak deeper into the meat in a shorter amount of time. All the while, the barrel turns, tumbling the meat and the marinade together in a messy bucket of flavor and goodness.
A soup with dog meat called boshintang is popular in Korea, especially on the three hot "dog days" of summer on the lunar calendar. The traditional belief is that dog meat helps boost stamina and virility, but activists regularly criticize the practice and call for bans on eating dog meat.
