Chicken Soup 4 The Damned

Helms Likens Abortion To Holocaust

[Raleigh, NC] Jesse Helms, writing with the same passion that made him the archconservative of the U.S. Senate for 30 years, renews his criticism of abortion in a memoir published this week, comparing it to the Holocaust and the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"...let us not forget that every passing day in our country, more than three thousand innocent Americans are killed" through abortion, he wrote.

Utah Flails Against Rape Crisis / No State Money For Prevention, And Taboos Bury The Topic

"I've heard more stories of possible date-rape drugging," [A Salt Lake City nurse practitioner] said. "One of the things we hear all the time is 'I was in the bar and my friends disappeared and someone offered me a ride home.'"

Hunt Perv Caught In A Flash

[New York City] "I saw him massaging himself and then he unzipped and pulled it out. I thought, 'I can't believe he's doing this in the middle of the day!'" The subway car was mostly empty and Nguyen felt nervous, so she pulled out her Samsung P777 cell phone, equipped with a 1.3 megapixel digital phone.

"I turned on the camera," she said. "He was still masturbating. I aimed it and quickly took the shot. As soon as I took it, he zipped up and got off the train."

Family Terrorized After Fox News Wrongly IDs Them As Terrorists

[La Habra, CA] After the report ran on Fox News on Aug. 7, people have shouted profanities at Randy and Ronnell Vorick and spray-painted "terrorist" (spelling it "terrist") on their property....

John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor who appears on the Fox News segment "Inside Scoop with John Loftus," gave out the house address during the broadcast. He said the home belonged to Iyad Hilal, whose group, Loftus said, has ties to those responsible for the July 7 bombings in London. But Hilal moved out of the house about three years ago.

Man Arrested In Car Theft Case Involving Naked Woman

[Honolulu] The victim, who was naked at the time, said she was walking back to her tent when she saw Adric running.... Police said when she saw him trying to drive away in her rental car, she ran for the car and jumped on the hood....

When he was unable to shake her off the hood, he stopped, got out of the car, picked her up off the hood, put her down and got back in and started to drive away again, court documents said. She then grabbed onto the driver's-side door, but Adric allegedly continued to drive, dragging her. She eventually let go...

An officer noticed a car near the scene of the theft. They tracked down the owner of the car, who told police that he had lent the car to a friend, Adric. The victim picked Adric out of a photo lineup.

Businessman Gets 18 Months In Schools Bribery

Gilbert Sapperstein apologized yesterday for his role in a scheme to steal more than $3.3 million from the city school system -- but the grandfather and businessman received little sympathy as he was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

"I made a mistake, and I embarrassed my family," said Sapperstein, who pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy, bribery and theft. In a plea deal with the state prosecutor's office, Sapperstein, 72, a Green Spring Valley resident and owner of All State Boiler Service Inc., also agreed to pay back the stolen money.

Baltimore Circuit Judge John M. Glynn snapped back at Sapperstein: "It's not sufficient to say it was a mistake. It's a crime... and that's why you are going to jail."

Sapperstein admitted to paying bribes to a city schools employee in exchange for fraudulent work orders that netted the business owner millions of dollars in extra revenue.

President Touts Strategy As Keeping Battles Off U.S. Soil

[Salt Lake City] "As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down," he said. "And when Iraqi forces can defend their freedom... our troops will come home with the honor they have earned...."

[Senator] Hatch also told the audience that Bush was responsible for the absence of any terrorist strikes on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, though the president acknowledged attacks have occurred since then "in Bali, in Riyadh, in Istanbul, and Madrid, and Baghdad, and London, and Sharm el-Sheikh and elsewhere."

...Bush said the task of "spreading freedom is the work of generations."

"Gay Batman" Artist Gets "Cease & Desist"

D.C. Comics has hit a Chelsea art dealer with a "cease & desist" letter for exhibiting Mark Chamberlain's watercolors on a "gay Batman" theme.

The works, which were exhibited at Kathleen Cullen Fine Art this spring (where they found ready buyers at prices starting at $200), include images of Batman and Robin exchanging a kiss, a watercolor titled Robin's Baby Pictures depicting the Boy Wonder's cute rear end, and a rendering of the Caped Crusader, sans shirt but otherwise in costume, striking a languorous pose.

Waco Man Arrested After Desecrating Memorial

[Crawford, TX] Larry Northern has been charged with a felony criminal mischief count after allegedly driving his pickup truck over wooden crosses erected near the roadside campsite of Cindy Sheehan... A row of the memorial crosses, which carry the names of U.S. soldiers killed during the Iraq war, were destroyed when Northern... is said to have driven his truck (dragging a pipe and chains) over them....

Sheehan, 48, traveled to the 'Western White House' one week ago after Bush said that fallen U.S. troops had died for a 'noble cause' and that the mission must be completed....

"I want to ask the president, 'Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?" Sheehan told reporters. "[Last week], you said my son died for a noble cause' and I want to ask him what that noble cause is?"

Pee-Powered Battery Smaller Than A Credit Card

The urine-powered battery was able to generate a voltage of about 1.5 volts -- with a corresponding power of 1.5 micro-watts -- using just 0.2 millilitres of urine, says Lee. And if a second droplet of urine was added 15 hours after the battery was first activated, the replenished urine could generate still more electricity....

The battery is made of a layer of filter paper steeped in copper chloride, sandwiched between strips of magnesium and copper. This "sandwich" is then laminated in plastic to hold the whole package together. The resulting battery is just 1 millimetre thick and 60 by 30 mm across -- slightly smaller than a credit card.

To activate the battery, a drop of urine is added and soaks through the sandwiched filter paper. The chemicals dissolve and react to produce electricity. The magnesium layer acts as the anode, losing its electrons. And the copper chloride acts as the cathode, mopping up the electrons.

Kissinger Finds Parallels To Vietnam In Iraq

An architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam more than 30 years ago said Sunday that he has "a very uneasy feeling" that some of the same factors that damaged support for the conflict there are re-emerging in the 2-year-old war in Iraq.

"For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made," former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

Support for the war has dropped in recent polls, and criticism of President Bush's handling of the conflict has grown. The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, taken Aug. 5-7, found that 54 percent of those surveyed thought the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake.

Novak Sorry For Outburst

Novak's outburst happened 10 minutes before the end of the show in the midst of an exchange among Novak, Henry and liberal analyst James Carville....

"He's got to show the right-wingers that he's got backbone," Carville said. "Go ahead, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching. Show them you're tough."

Novak, shown on the screen sitting next to Carville, waved his right hand and replied: "I think that's bull----, and I hate that. Just let it go." While Henry addressed another question to Carville, Novak stood up, walked off the set behind Carville -- fully visible to viewers -- and apparently pulled off his microphone....

The veteran political commentator and newspaper columnist has been under fire in recent months for his role in the identification of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush critic Joseph Wilson.

Army Whistleblower Draws Fire

Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse is the Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting [PARC] in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.... she is responsible for awarding billions upon billions in taxpayers' money to private companies hired to resurrect war-torn Iraq and to feed, clothe, shelter and do the laundry of American troops stationed there....

Last October 6, she was summoned to the office of her boss. Major Gen. Robert Griffin, the Corps' deputy commander, was demoting her, he told her, taking away her Senior Executive Service status and sending her to midlevel management.

If she didn't want the new position, she could always retire with full benefits, the letter noted. [Instead she hired a lawyer.]

• Over her objections, [Halliburton subsidiary] KBR was awarded three multibillion-dollar war-related contracts... worth as much as $20 billion -- the entire cost of the Manhattan Project, adjusted to today's dollars.
• ...the Restore Iraqi Oil contract, estimated at $7 billion, originally planned to handle oil field fires that might be started by Saddam Hussein's troops. When that failed to happen, it morphed into an agreement to repair oil fields and import fuel for civilians and soldiers.... In Greenhouse's view, that process violated federal regulations...
• A month before KBR got the contract... she had demanded KBR officials be ejected from a Pentagon meeting attended by high-ranking officials from the Corps and the Defense Department. "They should not have been there," she said. "We were discussing the terms of the contract."
• ...she boldly wrote an objection to... the contract's length, five years. One year would have been more than fair, she said. After that, it should have been put out for bid...
• She was joined by a former Halliburton employee who said KBR fed spoiled food to American troops and charged the government for thousands of meals it never served.

'Da Vinci Code' Author Wins Copyright Case

[New York City] U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels said Dan Brown's book exploring codes hidden in Leonardo Da Vinci's artwork is not substantially similar to "Daughter of God," by Lewis Perdue.... He also ruled out any copyright violations of Perdue's 1983 novel "The Da Vinci Legacy...."

Brown and publisher Random House Inc. last year asked the court for a declaratory judgment that Brown's 2003 novel does not infringe on Perdue's work after Perdue threatened to sue. In a countersuit, Perdue asked the judge to rule there was infringement...

Perdue alleged that Brown copied the basic premise of "Daughter of God," including notions that history is controlled by victors, not losers, and the importance of the Roman Emperor Constantine in requiring a transition from a female- to a male-dominated religion.

Hiroshima Marks 60th Anniversary Of Atomic Bomb

Officials estimate that about 140,000 people were killed instantly or died within a few months after the Enola Gay dropped its deadly payload over the city, which then had a population of about 350,000.

• Nuking Japanese civilian targets: A+plus
• Old and busted FDR shaking Stalin's hand at Yalta: f-minus

Sidestepping Senate, Bush Sends Bolton To U.N. / Recess Appointment Ends Nomination Impasse

Bush said the job at the United Nations was "too important to leave vacant any longer, especially during a war and a vital debate about U.N. reform...."

Senate Democrats -- joined by a prominent Republican, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich -- blocked a final vote on Bolton amid concerns about his record, demands for the White House to release certain documents and questions about whether he had the temperament to serve in a critical job.

Scottish Cities Scuffle Over 'Birthplace' Of Star Trek Character

[London, England] ...a spat has broken out over boasting rights to fictional "Star Trek" engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott following the death last month of the actor who played him, James Doohan, The Times reported Tuesday.

• Local councillor Willie Dunn told the newspaper that Linlithgow had "information" Scotty was supposed to have been born in the city in 2222, and that a plaque honouring him would be put up to boost tourism.
• Aberdeen believes Scotty was born there in 2220, citing a fan website which lists an episode in which the USS Enterprise's engineer refers to himself as an "Aberdeen pub crawler..."
• ...Edinburgh has its own claim, based on another website which lists Scotty's birthplace as "Edinburgh, Earth..."
• ...while Elgin bases its boast on an interview with Doohan in which he supposedly names it as his character's home.

Murdoch Clashes With Children

The Wall Street Journal reports that [Rupert] Murdoch and his [4] adult children are clashing over this split of the Murdoch family trust, which owns a controlling 28.5 percent stake in the media conglomerate that Murdoch runs. That trust is now worth a reported $6.1 billion in both voting and non-voting stock, according to the report....

In 1999 Murdoch got married for a third time to Wendi Deng, a former News Corp. junior executive from China in her mid-30s. They have two young daughters, according to the paper. And the paper reports Murdoch has attempted to change the arrangement he agreed to in the second divorce to give some control of the stake to the two children.