Tourist pushed off cliff by monkey

A holidaymaker is suing her travel agents after she was pushed off a cliff by a monkey in China.

Zhou Juchang, 60, plunged 20 ft when she was mugged by a monkey for bags of food her tour guide recommended she should buy to feed them.

Zhou broke three ribs and fractured her hip in the fall in Chengdu.

A spokesman for Chengdu Wildlife Park said: “Her mistake was to show fear. If you show fear a monkey will bully you.”

World's new tallest man wants a wife

The world has a new tallest man - and the 8ft 1in title holder is hoping that his new-found fame will help him find a wife.Sultan Kosen, a 27-year-old Turkish man who also revels in the largest hands (27.5cm) and feet (36.5cm) in the world - was unveiled at a Guinness World Records event in London.

The lovelorn giant said: 'The first thing I want to do is have a car that I can fit in, but more than that I want to get married.

'Up until now it's been really difficult to find a girlfriend. I've never had one, they were usually scared of me. I'm hoping now I will find one.'

Kosen's official recognition as the world's tallest means that the previous title holder, our hero Bao Xishun, has been dethroned - Kosen is over 10cm taller than him.

But Bao might be able to offer Kosen some useful tips on the dating front - when he wasn't saving dolphins or meeting other record holders, much of his four-year reign was spent seeking a wife. He eventually found love with a woman from his home village, got married, and had a child.

Kosen, who works occasionally as a farmer after medical difficulties ruled out a career in basketball, knows all about the difficulties of being tall - the specially-made suit he wore to meet journalists was one of the first outfits he has owned that is the right size.

He said: 'The most difficult things are, for example, that I can't fit into a normal car. When I get into a car, it's a really tight fit. I can't go shopping like normal people, I have to have things made specially and sometimes they aren't always as fashionable.'

On the plus side, however, he noted: 'The good thing about being so tall is that I can see people from a long distance. The other thing is at home they use my height to change the light bulbs and hang the curtains, things like that.'

'Gollum-like' monster emerges from lake

A slimy, glob-like creature dubbed Gollum has terrified children after it slithered out of a lake and clambered over the rocks towards them.

The young teenagers were playing by the waterfront in a Panama lake near Cerro Azul when the bald beast emerged from a cave behind a waterfall. They started screaming as it shuffled out "as if to attack them".

Locals told Panama news the monster was like "Gollum from Lord of the Rings".

One said: "I have only seen that creature once before - and it was in the Tolkien film.

"But in a "desperate bid to defend themselves" four children grabbed rocks from the beach and hurled them at the beast.

Having killed it they picked up the body and tossed it back into the lake, before fleeing.

Disbelieving parents went to investigate and were amazed to see the body had washed up on the shore. It has since been picked apart by buzzards.

Melquiades Ramos, an expert at the National Environmental Authority said, he will investigate the animal.

Zoologist Jacobo Arauz said it was likely the creature was likely to be a mutation and suggested it could be a form of sloth.

Nadal kissing bandit could get jail time

The New Yorker who ran onto the court and kissed Rafael Nadal after his fourth-round victory at the US Open faces jail time on tresspassing charges, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Noam U. Aorta dashed onto the court past security guards just after six-time Grand Slam champion Nadal, trying to complete a career Slam on the Flushing Meadows hardcourts, defeated French 13th seed Gael Monfils early Wednesday.

The intruder raced up to Nadal as he was changing his shirt and kissed the Spanish tennis star before guards apprehended him and took him away.

"For me, it wasn't a problem. The guy was really nice," Nadal said. "He said, 'I love you,' and he kissed me.

"Aorta, 23, who lives near Arthur Ashe Stadium, faces charges of interference with a sports event and criminal trespass, which could bring a combined maximum of one year in jail and fines of 5,000 dollars.

Chinese woman spends $600,000 on dog

A millionaire in northern China paid four million yuan (600,000 dollars) for a dog and ordered 30 luxury cars to come to the airport to greet her and the animal, local media reported.

The woman and her new pet -- a black Tibetan Mastiff -- flew into Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province, a report on popular news portal sohu.com said.

A convoy of 30 black Mercedes-Benz cars, led by two sports utility vehicles, drove to the airport Wednesday to pick up the pair, who had arrived from the Tibetan-populated province of Qinghai in China's northwest.

Photos of the event posted with the report showed a committee of dog-lovers holding up a long red banner welcoming the mastiff to Xi'an.

The millionaire, who only gave her surname as Wang, said she and a friend had spent a long time searching for an original Tibetan mastiff.

"Gold has a price, but this Tibetan mastiff doesn't," the young woman said, according to the report.

China's economy has developed at a fast pace, creating with it an increasing number of millionaires.

Research by the Hurun Report, a magazine that tracks China's wealthiest, revealed in April that 825,000 people had personal wealth of over 10 million yuan (1.5 million dollars), or 0.06 percent of the population.

The vast majority of these millionaires have said the global financial crisis has not had any impact on their lifestyle, the research said.

Giant parrot attacks policeman

A giant pet parrot attacked a policeman after its owner was pulled over for driving with the bird on her shoulder.

The driver was arrested after the officer discovered she was banned from driving - but then had to drive her car to the pound with the pet parrot flying loose inside the car.

The macaw, which was furious at being parted from its owner, launched wave after wave of attack on the officer - leaving him with bite and scratch marks to his hands and arms as he tried to drive the car to the pound.

Chief officer Steve Masters said he drafted in a raw recruit to take care of the macaw, saying that the 'bad' jobs fell to new people in the job.

The RSPCA in Dover now has the bird.

Cat survives 26 days in fire debris

A woman's pet cat has been found alive, after being buried for 26 days beneath debris from a fire.


Sandy LaPierre says she assumed 1-year-old Smoka had died from the August 10 fire in Franklin, Ohio. The blaze broke out in a building housing a flower shop and LaPierre's second-floor apartment.


A demolition company moved in to tear down what was left of the building the day after the fire. A crew from Stark Wrecking Co. came back on September 4 to clear away the rubble - and found Smoka's head sticking out from under 16 feet of debris.


LaPierre says her female cat lost a lot of weight and has been gobbling down food to make up for it. Smoka has some difficulty walking, she added, but otherwise seems OK.

Jellyfish tosser arrested

A man has been arrested in Florida accused of throwing jellyfish at teenagers.

Witnesses said that 41-year-old Keith Edward Marriott was being 'loud and disruptive' on Madeira Beach, and that he repeatedly pretended to drown, submerging himself in the water before floating back to the surface.

It was after the fake drowning that he began tossing the jellyfish at the teenagers.

Marriott now faces charges of disorderly intoxication and of carrying a concealed weapon, as he was found to have a pocketknife in his shorts.

According to witnesses, Marriott had been drinking since 9 a.m., the St. Petersburg Times reports.

100 Greatest Science Discoveries of All Time ~ #3: Human Anatomy

What Is It? The first scientific, accurate guide to human anatomy.

Who Discovered It? Andreas Vesalius

Year of Discover? 1543

Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?

The human anatomy references used by doctors through the year A.D. 1500 were actually based mostly on animal studies, more myth and error than truth. Andreas Vesalius was the first to insist on dissections, on exact physiological experiment and direct observation—scientific methods—to create his anatomy guides. His were the first reliable, accurate books on the structure and workings of the human body.

Versalius’s work demolished the long-held reliance on the 1,500-year-old anatomical work by the early Greek, Galen, and marked a permanent turning point for medicine. For the first time, actual anatomical fact replaced conjecture as the basis for medical profession.

How Was It Discovered?

Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1515. His father, a doctor in the royal court, had collected an exceptional medical library. Young Vesalius poured over each volume and showed immense curiosity about the functioning of living things. He often caught and dissected small animals and insects.

At age 18 Vesalius traveled to Paris to study medicine. Physical dissection of animal or human bodies was not a common part of accepted medical study. If a dissection had to be performed, professors lectured while a barber did the actual cutting. Anatomy was taught from the drawings and translated texts of Galen, a Greek doctor whose texts were written in 50 B.C.

Vesalius was quickly recognized as brilliant but arrogant and argumentative. During the second dissec tion he attended, Vesalius snatched the knife from the barber and demonstrated both his skill at dissection and his knowledge of anatomy, to the amazement of all in attendance.

As a medical student, Vesalius became a ringleader, luring his fellow students to raid the boneyards of Paris for skeletons to study and graveyards for bodies to dissect. Vesalius regularly braved vicious guard dogs and the gruesome stench of Paris’s mound of Monfaucon (where the bodies of executed criminals were dumped) just to get his hands on freshly killed bodies to study.

In 1537 Vesalius graduated and moved to the University of Padua (Italy), where he began a long series of lectures—each centered on actual dissections and tissue experiments. Students and other professors flocked to his classes, fascinated by his skill and by the new reality he uncovered—muscles, arteries, nerves, veins, and even thin structures of the human brain.

This series culminated in January 1540, with a lecture he presented to a packed theater in Bologna, Italy. Like all other medical students, Versalius had been trained to believe in Galen’s work. However, Vesalius had long been troubled be cause so many of his dissections revealed actual structures that differed from Galen’s descriptions.

In this lecture, for the first time in public, Vesalius revealed his evidence to discredit Galen and to show that Galen’s descriptions of curved human thigh bones, heart chambers, segmented breast bones, etc., better matched the anatomy of apes than humans. In his lecture, Vesalius detailed more than 200 discrepancies between actual human anatomy and Galen’s descriptions. Time after time, Vesalius showed that what every doctor and surgeon in Europe relied on fit better with apes, dogs, and sheep than the human body. Galen, and every medical text based on his work, were wrong.

Vesalius stunned the local medical community with this lecture. Then he secluded himself for three years preparing his detailed anatomy book. He used master artists to draw what he dissected—blood vessels, nerves, bones, organs, muscles, tendons, and brain.

Vesalius completed and published his magnificent anatomy book in 1543. When medical professors (who had taught and believed in Galen their entire lives) received Vesalius’s book with skepticism and doubt, Vesalius flew into a rage and burned all of his notes and studies in a great bonfire, swearing that he would never again cut into human tissue.

Luckily for us, his published book survived and became the standard anatomy text for over 300 years.

Fun Facts:

The average human brain weighs three pounds and contains 100 billion brain cells that connect with each other through 500 trillion dendrites! No wonder it was hard for Vesalius to see individual neurons.

Medical mystery as boy cries tears of blood

A teenager in America has left doctors baffled with a mysterious medical condition that sees him regularly crying tears of blood.

15-year-old Calvino Inman says that the bleeding happens at least three times a day, with little warning. He told local news station WATE: 'Sometimes, I can feel it coming up, like a tear. I feel my eyes watering. Sometimes, it will burn as it comes out.'

The bleeding can last for just a few minutes, or sometimes up to an hour.

Despite several visits to specialist doctors, Calvino's illness still hasn't been diagnosed. However, since his story was first reported in America last week, one doctor who specialises in cases of bloody tears has come forward to offer his help in diagnosing the ailment.

'In the common medical practice it's a relatively rare symptom to have and so we see a number of people who have other exams and they're difficult to diagnose and so that's usually why they're sent to us,' said Dr. James Fleming, of the Hamilton Eye Institute in Memphis.

Inman's family, in Rockwood, Tennessee, are now sending his medical records to Fleming in the hope that his bleeding eyes might finally be cured.

Inman has endured taunts because of his condition. 'I've been called possessed by almost all of my friends,' he said. 'I guess I'm used to it now. At first, it kind of hurt my feelings.'

Dog eats cop car's tyres

Some dogs chase cars. One in a North Carolina town decided to try to eat one.

The Cumberland County Sheriff's Office says a pit bull managed to deflate all four tyres of a deputy's cruiser near Hope Mills on Sunday.

Police spokeswoman Debbie Tanna says the deputy parked his car in a woman's driveway while responding to her complaint about another dog.

When Deputy Lynn Lavallis went to speak with Gloria Bass, the dog started eating the tyres. By the time the deputy returned, all four had been wrecked.

Tanna says the dog's owner, Bass's next-door neighbor, will be billed $500 for a new set of wheels.

Judge tapes defendant's mouth shut

A judge unhappy with repeated interruptions from a robbery suspect took rather direct action to achieve silence in court - he ordered a deputy to put duct tape over the defendant's mouth.

Judge Stephen Belden, of Canton Municipal Court in Ohio, said that the taping last Thursday was the best way to restore order at a hearing for 51-year-old Harry

Brown of Canton, The Repository newspaper reported.Brown complained that his court-appointed attorney wasn't prepared and angered the judge with interruptions. After a warning, the judge told the bailiff to tape Brown's mouth shut.

When the tape was removed, Brown said that the judge wasn't being respectful. The judge ended the hearing and sent the case to a grand jury.

World's smallest dog dies from being too small

A contender for the smallest dog in the world title has tragically taken its last pant aged just six months old.

The Maltese pup, named Scooter, was so small he could even fit in the palm of your hand, but sadly it was just that which caused his untimely death.

The sprightly pooch jumped out of his minders hands and broke his leg after landing awkwardly on the floor.

The 8cm tall, 20cm long, dog received medication for the break, but sadly he developed stomach ulcers and died the following night.

The tiny pup was waiting for his first birthday before vying for the Guinness Book of Records title, but it seems it wasn't meant to be for the cute creature.

All in all, it's a sad week for dog lovers after the New York-based Laborador, Chanel - who held the Guinness World Record for being the oldest dog - also died at the grand old age of 21.

These pears have gone baby-shaped

Things aren't going pear-shaped for the humble fruit - they are going baby-shaped.

Britain could soon see the arrival of pears from China which have been shaped to look like youngsters.

Farmer Gao Xianzhang spent six years perfecting his idea, which involves growing each fruit for a certain amount of time inside individual moulds.

Despite costing £5 each, people in his home village of Hexia, in northern China's Hebei province, have been snapping up the unusual fruit.

He said: 'People seem to think they are cute or lucky and will buy them as soon as they're off the tree.' He has cropped 10,000 of the pears this season and is planning to export them to Britain and the rest of Europe.

Luckily for Mr Gao, he should have no problem getting his irregular shaped fruit past EU officials.

In July, wonky shaped fruit and vegetables such as curvy cucumbers and knobbly carrots returned to supermarket shelves thanks to the abolition of EU rules on the size and shape of 36 types of fruit and veg.

For 20 years, EU-wide marketing standards encouraged only the finest-looking produce to reach shops.

Temporary tattoos to find lost children

A concerned mother has come up with a novel solution to re-unite lost children with parents - temporary tattoos.

Virginia Lu came up with the idea of 'tottoos', which can be tailor-made to include phone numbers or details of medical conditions, after finding a missing girl at a packed football stadium.

They can be stuck on children before families head to busy venues and wash off with soap and water.

'It's just enough information to contact the parent,' said Mrs Lu, of Washington DC.

Dutch police in marijuana destruction error

Dutch police who mowed down what they thought were illicit marijuana plants were red-faced Thursday when it emerged they'd actually ruined a research group's officially sanctioned field of hemp.

Police proudly announced Wednesday that they'd found more than 47,000 cannabis plants, with an estimated street value of nearly €4.5 million (£3.9 million) concealed in a corn field in the Flevoland province east of Amsterdam.

They mowed down half the plants only to be informed they were the property of Wageningen University and Research Center, a respected agricultural school.

The field contained a new strain of hemp that researchers hope can be a sustainable source of fiber, Simon Vink, a spokesman for the executive board of Wageningen University and Research Center, said Thursday.

Hemp plants are related to marijuana but have only trace elements of THC, the mind-altering chemical that cannabis contains.

'The street value from a drug point of view is less than zero,' Vink said.

History buff fires cannonball into neighbour's house

A Pennsylvania history buff who recreates firearms from old wars accidentally fired a two-pound cannonball through the wall of his neighbour's home.

Fifty-four-year-old William Maser fired a cannonball on Wednesday evening outside his Uniontown home - which then ricocheted and hit a house 400 yards away.

The cannonball, about two inches in diameter, smashed through a window and a wall before landing in a closet. Authorities say nobody was hurt.

State police charged Maser with reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct.

Maser told local news station WPXI-TV that recreating 19th century cannons is a longtime hobby of his. He added that he is sorry, and he will now stop shooting the cannons on his property.

Smelly people free to ride on Honolulu buses once more

A proposal to bar smelly people from travelling on buses in Honolulu has been turned down.

The Honolulu City Council had considered making it illegal to have 'odors that unreasonably disturb others or interfere with their use of the transit system.'

Anyone convicted of being too smelly could have been fined up to $500 and/or given a six-month jail term.

But officials and others wrinkled their noses at the plan during a hearing on Thursday.

Lawyers from the city and the American Civil Liberties Union said it was vague and could lead to unconstitutionally subjective judgments, while members of the public pointed out that bad odors could be produced by disease, or be carried from a person's workplace.

French 'Spiderman' climbs Petronas Towers in Malaysia

French "Spiderman" Alain Robert was arrested Tuesday after successfully scaling Malaysia's Petronas Towers, in his third attempt on the nation's tallest structure, police said.

The 46-year-old began climbing the 88-storey building before dawn and reached the top before being discovered by security officials, Kuala Lumpur police chief Muhammad Sabtu Osman told AFP.

"We have taken him back to the police station for questioning and checking his passport. He can be charged for criminal trespass," he told AFP.

Robert first tried to scale the building on March 20, 1997, and made a second unsuccessful attempt in 2007 after which he was freed without charge.

He has been nicknamed "Spiderman" for his high-profile escapades, which have included climbing the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

The 452-metre (1,483-feet) Petronas Twin Towers, which were completed in 1998, were for several years the world's tallest buildings until being upstaged by Taipei 101 among others.

Police arrest monkey man

Australian police arrested a man dressed as a monkey, provoking the ire of a crowd of onlookers.

The man in the monkey suit, Brenton Green, was carted off to jail after spending Sunday afternoon dancing around Perth, hugging people and posing for photos. He spent that night in cutody.The incident began when police interrupted Green's show in front of a small crowd, and demanded his name.

At first, the monkey responded just by shaking his head and making odd sounds; when asked for his name again, he simply said 'Monkey'.

At that point, the officers pushed him against a shop window and handcuffed him, as onlookers laughed and booed. 'Why are they arresting this monkey?' cried one onlooker.

Police said Green had been spotted by officers bumping into people, and allegedly had knocked a hamburger out of a man's hands. They said that he then refused to give them his name, instead 'continually shaking his head and making squeaking noises'.

He was taken to jail, where is he was bailed on the condition that he not return to the city. But as he walked to the train station, the same officer then re-arrested him, on the grounds that he'd breached the bail conditions. He was then held overnight.

'I thought it was some sort of a joke. And then he put the cuffs on me and I just couldn't believe it,' Green told PerthNow.

He appeared in Perth Magistrates Court on Monday, charged with 'failing to comply with a request given'. He was given a three-month community release order and ordered to pay $60 in court costs.

Bank robber who only robbed on Thursdays jailed

A punctual New Jersey criminal who robbed banks every Thursday has been sentenced to nearly six years in prison.

Peter Bielecke pleaded guilty in June to one count of bank robbery, but also admitted five other holdups on consecutive Thursdays in January, February and March. He robbed banks in several cities including his hometown of Brick.

He didn't give a reason for choosing Thursdays - but authorities say the pattern made it a lot easier to track him.

The 40-year-old was arrested after a March 5 robbery in Old Bridge, New Jersey.

He'll serve five years and 10 months in prison, and also have to pay nearly $12,000 (around £7,400) in restitution under the sentence handed down on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Trenton.

Grenade-shaped cologne sparks emergency

A grenade-shaped bottle left under a busy bridge closed a major thoroughfare and brought police to investigate - only to discover that it contained French cologne.

The black bottle of Arsenal cologne by the design house of Gilles Cantuel looked realistic enough for police to halt rush-hour traffic Thursday morning.

The result was a three mile (5km) traffic jam in South America's biggest city - already known for its congested streets.

It wasn't clear if the bottle was left as a practical joke or for more sinister reasons, police investigator Renato Fernandes told the Globo news website.

Police have made no arrests in the case.

Police baffled as dozens of 'suicidal' cows throw themselves off cliff in the Alps

Dozens of alpine cows appear to be committing suicide by throwing themselves off a cliff near the small village in the Alps.

In the space of just three days, 28 cows and bulls have mysteriously died after they plunged hundreds of metres to rocks below where they were killed instantly.

In each case, local mountain rescue services using a helicopter had to be called in to remove the bodies because of the danger to the local groundwater of pollution.

A police spokesman said: 'There are no large carnivores living in the Alps anymore who would once have disposed of the bodies so they have to be moved.

We are investigating because cows growing up in the mountains normally can estimate dangers and do not plunge down cliffs.'

According to local reports, there had been violent thunderstorms in the area which may well have spooked the animals.

Cows wandering at high altitude are a common sight across much of the Alps, where farmers let them loose to graze on the green plateaus above the villages.

Often carrying large bells around their necks, most are dairy cows as the mix of vegetation and grasses at that high altitude are particularly good for milk and for making cheese.

Cows do occasionally fall to their deaths in these Alpine regions although it is rare for so many to fall in one particular place.

There has been speculation in the past that when this does happen it is because a tightly-grouped number have followed each other as they search for more grass.

Most scientists generally believe that animals are incapable of committing suicide.

Even lemmings, which by popular myth throw themselves off cliffs during mating season, do not take their own lives intentionally.

Instead, evolutionary pressures cause them to feel the urge to change habitat at which point they migrate in huge droves.

Sometimes, particularly in Scandinavia, they reach clifftops overlooking an ocean and, driven by the urge to cross a body of water, throw themselves off in order to swim to the other side.

They often die of exhaustion or drown as a result.

The myth came to the public's attention when a Disney wildlife film in the 1950s mocked up the lemming migration to make it look like the animals had committed suicide.