Thursday, August 16, 2007

Short News for 8-16-07


Sinkhole nearly swallows minister's car
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070816/ap_on_fe_st/odd_preacher_sinkhole;_ylt=AtvFZgR8Cau_209ifGt8nIwZ.3QA Wed Aug 15, 8:24 PM ET
Holy sinkhole! A minister says he prayed "Lord don't take me yet" when his car nosed into a sinkhole on Wednesday. The Reverend Ralph Massey, pulled into a parking lot to turn around when the ground gave way, with no warning.
The car came to rest with most of its front section in the hole, and the back end and both rear wheels elevated.
Massey, who wasn't injured, was able to scramble out of the hole, which ended up being about 12 feet wide and six feet deep.
Authorities are trying to determine what caused the sinkhole.

Three nabbed for adding maggots to supermarket meat
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070816/od_nm/dutch_maggots_dc;_ylt=An_DtjyCvBVpfGPmDg_NH96ek3QF Thu Aug 16, 9:20 AM ET
Three young men in the northern Dutch town of Damwoude were charged with damaging property after adding maggots to supermarket meat that was later sold to a customer, police said Thursday.
The shopkeeper found 40 maggots after the customer complained, and identified the men, aged between 18 and 21, on a surveillance tape as they put the insect larvae into packaged meat.
Only one package of the maggot-infested meat was sold, a police spokeswoman said.
The suspects told the police that they had played a prank with bait left over from fishing. The rest of the meat in the store was destroyed.

Chinese couple tried to name baby "@"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070816/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_china_language;_ylt=ArI_hlYXvEqsDkOZKzYaUmkuQE4F Thu Aug 16, 3:04 AM ET
A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@", claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.
The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.
"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.
While the "@" simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word "at" to sound it out -- which with a drawn out "T" sounds something like "ai ta", or "love him", to Mandarin speakers.

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