DAY DREAMER

Mysterious dreams lead to creation of highly sought after loudspeakers

"Things were pretty dire and then one night I had this dream," Garth Murray explained. "And in the dream I saw myself making a loud speaker - something I'd never done before."
He woke up, drew up the plans and spent six months making it. Meanwhile the visions continued.
"I actually had a further dream where I saw one of our larger speakers and I saw the name of the company," Mr Murray said.
As it turns out, the name of his company Theophany means divine manifestation.

INFLAMMATORY ISSUE

Volunteers guard the sacred flame

Chinese Olympic torch escorts who put their lives on the line to protect the sacred flame should be commended, the Foreign Ministry said Thursday."They protect the world's holy fire with their bodies to prevent disruption and sabotage by Tibetan independence forces. Such spirit should be praised and understood," Jiang Yu said in a regular press briefing.

OFF TARGET

Russian space craft lands off-target

A Russian Soyuz space capsule has landed in Kazakhstan some 400 kilometres off-target.Russian officials say emergency helicopters are on the way to the site but the crew are safe and well.
The capsule was returning from an 11-day mission to the International Space Station.On board are South Korea's first ever astronaut, 29 -year-old Yi So-Yeon and two colleagues.

TORTURE RULES

Mugabe supporters set up torture camps: rights group

As Zimbabwe awaits for results of the election recount, a leading rights group has claimed supporters of President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party have set up a network of torture camps where they have been assaulting opposition activists.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said that suspected supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were being rounded up and then beaten for several hours at a time with wooden sticks and batons in the wake of last month's disputed elections.

MIND OVER MATTER

Man hypnotises himself before op

Alex Lenkei, 61, from Worthing, chose to sedate himself by hypnosis before undergoing the 83-minute operation.
He said he was fully aware of everything going on around him during the procedure but was free from pain.
The operation at Worthing Hospital involved removing some bone in the base of the thumb and fusing some joints in an attempt to improve his arthritis.

BIG BROTHER

Google Street View Draws Concerns In Australia

Anthony Klan at The Australian writes:

Google Australia is expected within months to launch an application that will publish highly detailed, street-level photos of much of Australia, in a move that has drawn strong criticism from privacy advocates.

Google's picture-snapping cars have been cruising Australia's suburbs since late last year, with pictures of thousands of homes expected to be uploaded to the internet with Street View's launch.

While Google has defended the project, the internet company baulked when The Weekend Australian requested the personal details and addresses of the group's key figures to allow the paper's photographers to take pictures of their homes. "Providing those details would be completely inappropriate," said Google spokesman Rob Shilkin.

EARTH CHANGES

US climate change plan 'disastrous and Neanderthal'

US President George W Bush's plan to cap greenhouse gases by 2025 has been dismissed as "disastrous" and "Neanderthal" by some ministers at a climate change meeting in Paris.

In a statement entitled "Bush's Neanderthal speech," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said: "His speech showed not leadership but losership. We are glad that there are also other voices in the United States."

South Africa blasted Mr Bush's proposal as a disastrous retreat by the planet's number-one polluter and a slap to poor countries.

George W

Beneath the photo from the Reagan Diaries is an actual quote that Reagan wrote about George "W" in his diaries, recently edited by author Doug Brinkley and published by Harper Collins:

Reagan Diaries - George W

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his n'er-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida; the one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

NO COINCIDENCE

Suicide Links Heart Donor, Recipient

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. (April 6) - A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor's widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

No foul play was suspected in 69-year-old Sonny Graham's death at his Vidalia, Ga., home, investigators said.

PEOPLE NEWS

World's smallest girl proud of her tiny size

At just 58.4cm (1ft 11in) tall, Jyoti Amge, 15, is dwarfed by her neighbour's baby.
"I'm just the same as other people. I eat like you, dream like you. I don't feel any different."

MALL GHOST

Ghost caught on camera

FRANCIS, the Adelaide Arcade ghost, has been caught on the centre's security cameras for the first time, so it appears.

Adelaide Arcade promotions manager Sharon Leaney provided the City Messenger with the eerie surveillance footage which shows a burst of light, man-like, fading in and out, near the Grenfell St end of the arcade.

"It's been on the surveillance cameras for quite a few days," Ms Leaney said.

"We have had lots of reports of people hearing footsteps, going cold, but this (film) is the first time I've ever seen anything."

The Adelaide Arcade ghost is said to be its former caretaker Francis Cluney.

He was investigating a flickering light one night in June, 1887, when he fell into the generator and died. Adelaide Arcade, built in 1885, was the first mall in Australia to boast electric lights.

Click HERE to see Francis.

GOOD GANESHA

The god with two faces

A baby girl in northern India has been born with two faces and is being worshipped as a reincarnated god.

After the un-named girl was born in a Delhi hospital with two faces, two mouths and four eyes, people in her rural village have been singing and dancing, offering money and asking for her blessings. Locals believe the four-day-old girl is the reincarnation of the Indian God Ganesha.

The 24-year-old father Vinod Kumar says she's eating and breathing normally — feeding through one mouth and sucking her thumb with the other, as reported by AFP.

The case comes just months after Indian doctors performed a rare marathon surgery to remove the extra limbs of a girl born with four arms and legs. Now whoever said Indians were two faced?

FIRST DROPS

Homeowner says five meteorite strikes must be deliberate

A Bosnian man whose home has been hit an incredible five times by meteorites believes he is being targeted by aliens.
Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that all the rocks Radivoje Lajic has handed over were meteorites.

They are now investigating local magnetic fields to try and work out what makes the property so attractive to the heavenly bodies.
But Mr Lajic, who has had a steel girder reinforced roof put on the house he owns in the northern village of Gornja Lamovite, has an alternative explanation.

He said: "I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate."

The first meteorite fell on his house in November last year and since then a further four have smashed into his home.

Astronomy: Stardate (BBC)
Last year, I visited a home in Chicago where a 2.5 kilogram meteorite had fallen through the roof just days earlier. It crashed through the attic, destroying a thick wooden support joist along the way, then smashed through a bedroom ceiling, breaking the window and mirrored wardrobe doors as it bounced off walls around the room.

Stop Worrying (Time magazine)
What are the chances of being hit by a meteorite? In Popular Astronomy, Professor Lincoln LaPaz, head of the University of New Mexico's Institute of Meteoritics, estimates the odds: three chances out of ten that someone will be hit every 100 years. Since a little Japanese girl was nicked in 1927 by what was probably a meteorite, the danger for the rest of earth's inhabitants for the rest of the century is just about zero.

PLANE SIGHT

'Security threat' a misunderstanding: Qantas

Qantas has denied claims of a security threat on a flight from Adelaide to Melbourne on Friday night.
The plane was delayed on landing in Melbourne, after Australian Federal Police were notified of an incident onboard.
They gave the all clear around 8:00pm (AEST), saying they were satisfied there was no security threat.
A spokesman for Qantas says the incident was the result of a misunderstanding between the pilot and the control tower.

SPORTING LIFE

Chinese Olympic officials 'thugs': Seb Coe

Sebastian Coe, the London 2012 Olympics chief, has been overheard by a British broadcaster describing several Chinese officials guarding the Olympic flame as it passed through London as "thugs".

BOSON NOVA

'God particle' will be found soon: physicist

British physicist Peter Higgs says it should soon be possible to prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible - as he first argued 40 years ago.
Professor Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson", which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year.

The 78-year-old's original efforts in the early 1960s to explain why the force, dubbed the Higgs field, must exist were dismissed at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
Today, the existence of the invisible field is widely accepted by scientists, who believe it came into being milliseconds after the Big Bang created the universe some 15 billion years ago.

CERN's new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) aims to simulate conditions at the time of that primeval inferno by smashing particles together at near light-speed and so unlock many secrets of the universe.


A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
Collider's ATLAS detector.

Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?

Doomsday fears spark lawsuit

The builders of the collider are being sued in US federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

MIND HACK

This delusion is false

The psychiatrist and philosopher Bill Fulford describes a patient who was the living embodiment of the logical paradox "this statement is false" during a discussion on the difficulties in assuming delusions are false beliefs, as described in the standard definition:

a 43-year-old man, was brought into the Accident and Emergency Department following an overdose. He had tried to kill himself because he was afraid he was going to be "locked up". However, this fear was secondary to a paranoid system at the heart of which was the hypochondriacal delusion that he was "mentally ill".

He was seen by the duty psychiatrist and by the consultant psychiatrist on call, neither of whom were in any doubt that he was deluded. Indeed, both were ready on the strength of their diagnosis to admit him as an involuntary patient.

Yet had their diagnosis depended on the falsity of the patient's belief, as in the standard definition, they would have been presented with a paradox: if the patient's belief that he was mentally ill was false, then (by the standard definition) he could have been deluded, but this would have made his belief true after all.

Equally, if his belief was true, then he was not deluded (by the standard definition), but this would have made his belief false after all. By the standard definition of delusion, then, his belief, is false, was true and, if true, was false.

AUSSIE YOWIE

Photographs back yowie claims

YOWIE hunter Paul Compton has long believed a giant animal lives in the Glen Innes district - and he claims he finally has photos to prove it.
“I’ve got hair at home that’s been identified by Dr Henner Fahrenbach from Oregon Regional Primate Research Centre in America who believes it to be a high primate and identical to the type of hair belonging to the (American) Big Foot or Sasquatch.”

Blogged with the Flock Browser

THE DOPE

Cannabis 'should remain Class C'

The official body which advises the government on drugs policy has decided that cannabis should remain a Class C drug, the BBC understands.
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs' decision would appear to go against the view of Gordon Brown, who favors returning the drug to Class B.
The government asked the council to review cannabis's legal status, amid concerns over stronger forms of it.

DOG DAYS

Seoul aims to reclassify dog meat

"Dogs are consumed in their millions in this country every year. That's a fact. We have to take care of this situation," Lee Hae-Woo, head of the city government's department of food safety, said.
"We plan to recommend to the central government that dogs are classified as livestock.