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Police say the boy modified the camera using instructions from the Internet. He brought the device to school but a teacher intervened before he could use it.
School Resource Officer Kyle Strunjo says the makeshift device is potentially capable of giving someone a 600-volt shock.
The boy has been charged with possession of a dangerous weapon on school grounds, attempted assault and breach of peace.
The latest scare is more dire than most. An article from the UK warns that the use of mobile phones can be more dangerous than smoking.
Even though we usually know what’s in our refrigerators (after all, we bought the stuff didn’t we?) we always seem to open the door and stare inside for long minutes searching for something good to eat.
At our house we make more efficient use of leftovers since we started using glass containers even though we still occasionally find something that looks like a high school science project gone bad.
With diesel at almost four dollars a gallon, it costs the average owner-operator $1,200 to fill up every one thousand miles.Chris Pearson, a state legislator in Vermont, had a sense that the people were with him when he proposed a bill last November to allow residents to block junk mail.
He got media attention, radio interview requests and e-mails from constituents eager to stop the credit card offers, furniture catalogues and store fliers that increasingly clog their mailboxes.
Then came the pushback from the postmasters, who told Pearson and other lawmakers that "standard" mail, the post office's name for junk mail, has become the lifeblood of the U.S. Postal Service and that jobs depend on it.
Sure junk mail is a nuisance but if banned, many people would be out of work including a lot of postal service workers.
If the postal service didn’t have the revenue generated by junk mail, our first class postage rates would go through the roof.
Banning junk mail would end many advertising agency jobs. It would also put many printers out of work.
The next time we are tempted to grumble about the junk mail in our mail boxes, we should think of all the jobs that would be lost by banning junk mail as the nearsighted Vermont congressman proposed.
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As it gears up to host the 2008 Olympic Games Beijing has been awarded an unwelcome new accolade: the air pollution capital of the world.


Satellite data has revealed that the city is one of the worst environmental victims of China's spectacular economic growth, which has brought with it air pollution levels that are blamed for more than 400,000 premature deaths a year.
According to the European Space Agency, Beijing and its neighboring northeast Chinese provinces have the planet's worst levels of nitrogen dioxide, which can cause fatal damage to the lungs.
China is the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, and the World Bank has warned it is home to 16 of the planet's 20 most air-polluted cities.
Investigators say the original incident happened in the hallway of St. Andrews Middle School between two female eighth-grade teachers on Thursday, March 14.
Sheriff Leon Lott said 30-year-old Tawana Horton of Columbia and 28-year-old Cambrella Pickney of Columbia got into a physical altercation in the hallway, after the teachers "bumped into each other."
The resource officer says "an ongoing personal dispute" can be blamed for the reason the teachers were fighting, but he didn't elaborate on what the dispute regarded.
Ernie Haase sang tenor for the Cathedrals from 1990 until the group retired in 1999. Ernie then formed his Signature Sound Quartet.

Glen Payne (on left) was lead singer for the Cathedrals from 1963 to 1999. George Younce (on right) was the Cathedrals bass singer from 1963 to 1999.
Liver cancer claimed the life of Glen Payne in October, 1999.
George Younce suffered from heart trouble as well as kidney failure, and was on dialysis during the last years of his life. He passed away in April 2005.
George Younce was Ernie Haase’s father-in-law.

This high-tech Murphy bed et all is offered by FlyingBeds of Denver, Colorado. They also offer a TwirlyBed.
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How about these stereo headphones that transmit sound vibrations through users skull bones rather than their eardrums?


The Royal Caribbean Cruise ship Explorer of the Seas steamed upriver on its way to State Pier in New London this morning.
Since the cruise ship Explorer of the Seas is powered by gas turbine engines, why did they say she steamed upriver?
It must be that we just can’t be logical and nautical at the same time.

A palatial pleasure yacht with swimming pools, opulent salons and, should the winds of war blow, a rocket launcher and mini-submarine.
The sale of the 269-foot Ocean Breeze [pictured], built for Saddam Hussein and docked on the French Riviera, could be thwarted, however, if Iraq can prove it belongs to someone in the late dictator's entourage — and now, therefore, to the government in Baghdad.
The yacht was built in 1981 and was originally named Qadisiyah Saddam. It was stored in Saudi Arabia's Red Sea port of Jiddah in 1986. The Yacht has been renamed Ocean Breeze and is now in the harbor at Nice, on the French Riviera.
The yacht has an asking price of Euro 23.5 million (US $34 million).
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Some of the comments from the site are:
The UFOs are just too big to be water towers (and there’s no shadow).
Definitely they’re NOT marks for picture stitching. In most stitching software (like for making panoramas) the algorithm comes down to finding sharp and contrasting details and aligning those spots with each other
Condensation inside some sort of housing would be my guess. If the drop were directly on the lens it would be effectively invisible. Put it a few inches/feet away and have the camera shooting with a very deep depth of field (as you would with a small aperture) and it would look just like that anomaly.
I’m sure the photos do not show alien spacecraft. They are not out of this world but they are interesting to look at. Anomalies perhaps, but not flying saucers.
Talk of a Clinton blueprint reminds Lucianne of an old cartoon showing two prisoners chained hand and foot to a cement wall. One says to the other, "I have a plan." 
Here is something for that ‘hard to buy for’ person on your Christmas shopping list.
International Falls, Minnesota now has the dubious distinction of owning the "Icebox of the Nation" title.The city on the Canadian border had been fighting the ski town of Fraser, Colorado for the legal right to the trademark.
International Falls claimed victory this week when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sent the city attorney a certificate granting the community Reg. No. 3,375,139.
International Falls, Minnesota took the “Icebox” title but no one can take the scenic beauty away from Fraser, Colorado (lower photo).
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The FPS (frames per second) of the camera were exactly synchronized with the rotation of the helicopter blades making the blades appear to be motionless.
The iPhone was designed to be used only on Apple's exclusive partner AT&T.One million iPhones, or 27% of those sold last year, have been adapted to work on other networks.
Apple recently admitted that the number of unlocked iPhones was "significant".
The iPhone, which was launched last summer, is tied to a single phone network in each country it is on sale.
While AT&T is Apple's chosen partner in the US, in the UK the iPhone is only officially available through O2, while in Germany it is tied to T-Mobile.
The first iPhone ‘unlock’ in the U.S. was soon after the phone was first released last summer.
A college student hacked his iPhone and put it on a T-Mobile network
At that time Apple announced that iPhones would stop working if tempered with. Apparently the Apple iPhone lock is not very secure.
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1. Your cell phone is extremely unlikely to blow up your gas tank. [this may have had some validity in the early years of cell phones but static sparks from sliding out of your car seat at a gas station was always a much greater risk].
2. Starbucks (or Target, or insert name of retailer here) does not hate veterans.
3. A dying 7-year-old girl did not write a moving poem that will raise money for cancer.
4. The United States is not merging with Canada and Mexico in 2010.
5. There is no "Life is Beautiful" computer virus.
The writer goes on to explain how e-mail claims can be checked:
Type the words "Internet hoax" into an Internet search.
You'll find several sites that specialize in tracking down the truth or falsity of rumors. His favorite is snopes.com.
In turn, those sites usually have their own search function. (Don't be fooled, by the way, by e-mails that claim to have been "checked out." Do it yourself anyway.)


They are probably fairly easy to make and can be made to look really cool.
Draw on them with a pen as on the right or carve them as shown on the left.
A great rainy-day project for kids.
The Idiot's Cube is the perfect gag gift and you can get one of your very own for thirteen bucks.It's the deal of a lifetime. Bob and Ricki Husick of Pittsburgh are offering anyone who buys their home a full refund when they die.
The Husicks have been trying to sell their suburban home for almost a year, but have failed to do so in the current shaky market.
Some area homeowners have lowered prices, offered free trips and tried a variety of other gimmicks, but the Husicks came up with their own unique incentive.
The couple have no heirs and built the house in 1993. They want $399,900 for the four-bedroom, 3 1/2-bath home, which is located about 20 miles north of Pittsburgh.
Under the Husicks' offer, the buyer would get the sale price back when they die.
Dairy farmers are five times less likely than the general populace to develop the disease, New Scientist magazine reports.
The study found farmers typically breathed in dust that consisted largely of dried manure, and all the bacteria that grew in it.
New Scientist said adults who had a greater exposure to germs than usual might build up a better resistance to bugs, including cancer.
What about politicians? They should never need to worry about lung cancer.
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By entering the acronym ICE (In Case of Emergency) – into your cell phone book, users can list the name and number of someone who should be contacted in an emergency.Turned into a "paint" which can distinguish even a small number of cancerous cells from healthy tissue, the venom would vastly improve surgeons' accuracy when removing tumors.
Democrats in 22 states across America go to the polls next Tuesday to pick between two presidential prospects: Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
We urge them to choose Obama - an untried candidate, to be sure, but preferable to the junior senator from New York.
Obama represents a fresh start.
His opponent, and her husband, stand for déjà vu all over again - a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency.
Does America really want to go through all that once again?
It will - if Sen. Clinton becomes president.
Bill Clinton's thuggishly self-centered campaign antics conjure so many bad, sad memories that it's hard to know where to begin.
Suffice it to say that his Peck's-Bad-Boy smirk - the Clinton trademark - wore thin a very long time ago.
Far more to the point, Sen. Clinton could have reined him in at any time. But she chose not to - which tells the nation all it needs to know about what a Clinton II presidency would be like.
Tell us what you really think Mr. Murdock. Don’t hold back.
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America's Dairyland wants you to know it's not just full of cheeseheads.
Problem is, it is hard to alter a stereotype that has been around for so long.
To start with, it will be an uphill battle just to clear the cheesehead hats from Lambeau Field during Packers home games. Packer fans wearing their cheeseheads are seen on TV by millions of fans every year.
It will be a slow process to remove the stereotype whatever method they use.
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At age 90, Sen. Robert Byrd (pictured) of West Virginia has been in the Senate longer than anybody else.
And he's spent much of that time as head of the most powerful spending committee, with extraordinary control over earmarks - grants of your tax dollars without the normal public review.
Byrd was the first senator to rack up a total of $1 billion in earmarks for his home state.
That was in 1999. Today he's past the $3 billion mark.
And though tradition frowns on sitting members of Congress funding projects in their own name, they don't seem to have a problem with it in Byrd Country. West Virginia is full of ventures paid for with your tax dollars but named after him.
You can take the Robert C. Byrd Highway to the Robert C. Byrd Locks and Dam, explore space through the Robert C. Byrd Telescope, and work at the Robert C. Byrd Hilltop Office Complex.
In all, we found more than 40 projects bearing the Byrd name. Many of them sound perfectly reasonable, but the problem is other needy communities never get a crack at the money.
The worst part is the money was not his to spend.
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A stylish new house sits on South Tampa's Vasconia Street, for sale or rent.
But yellow crime-scene tape rings the front yard. A chunk of the stairway apparently has been cut away. Pieces of the slab are stacked in the garage. The foyer has a foxhole.
And a murder victim may be buried under it all.
For now, the 3,200-square foot home at 3908 W Vasconia isn't exactly open for showing.
Judge James Muirhead reached for Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs and Ham" for inspiration after getting the egg from inmate Charles Jay Wolff.
The judge wrote:
I do not like eggs in the file
I do not like them in any style.
I will not take them fried or boiled.
I will not take them poached or broiled.
I will not take them soft or scrambled
Despite an argument well-rambled.
The judge then ordered the egg destroyed saying:
No fan I am
Of the egg at hand.
Destroy that egg!
Today! Today! Today I say!
Without delay!"
Dr. Seuss would have been proud.
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Does this mean the piggy bank is making a comeback? The ship is currently known as the St. Marys Challenger and holds the honors of being the oldest lake boat still trading on the Great Lakes.Challenger was christened as the William P. Snyder when originally launched in Detroit. Over the years, the ship also was known as the Alex D. Chisholm, Medusa Challenger and Southdown Challenger.

Powered by a steam engine, the Challenger was launched in 1906 - six years before the RMS Titanic set sail on its doomed maiden voyage.
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Bill Clinton is accustomed to being treated kindly by the media. Especially “Clinton friendly” media such as CNN, the network that has patronized him for the last 15 years.
Link here to a Field & Stream magazine article that shows how to pack a survival kit into an Altoids tin. 
I never dreamed an Altoids mint tin could have such an interesting and useful second life.


Awesome picture of lightning strikes and a rainbow. Photo taken near Fort Smith, Arkansas.
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A picture of my cave
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