NEILLSVILLE- A 34 year old Marshfield man is Prohibited from getting an ATM card after he pleaded no contest Monday to urinating on an ATM. James Turley was convivted in Clark County Court of criminal damage, disordley contact and indecent exposure. Turley Uriniated on an Automated teller machine in april in the lobby of M&I Bank in Neillsville after the machine said he account was empty. He caused $8,500 in damages. He received 20 days in jail and three years' probation and was ordered to pay $8,500 restitution and a $150 fine plus costs, Clark County District Attorney Darwin Zwieg said. The judge also ordered that Turley not to be issued an ATM card.
In Columbus, Ohio, on July 12, Lester DeBoard, 36, was sentenced to five years in prison for luring an 11-year-old girl to a far corner of a public library, where he had fondled her feet. (He faces a similar charge in a library fondling in nearby Worthing- ton, Ohio.) Four days later, police arrested Dwight D. Pannell, 40, for the assault of a 33 year-old female student (a stranger to him) in the main library at Ohio State; with a motive he is keeping to himself, he allegedly pricked her foot with a syringe containing an unknown substance.
In May, the Food and Drug Administration approved the pre- scription product Eros Clitoral Therapy Device, a suction pump instrument that increases blood flow for the purpose of improving sexual responsiveness in women. (Rudimentary blood-flow suction-pump devices for men, not approved by FDA, have long been on the market and sell for far less than Eros' $359 price tag, and in fact are illegal to possess in Alabama, Texas and Georgia, which ban devices sold for the purpose of stimulating sex organs.)
In July, engineer Roman Kunikov gave a public demonstration in Ufa, Russia, of his gasoline-powered boots that he said would enable the wearer to jump around at about 12 feet per stride and run at a pace of about 25 mph. The boots, not yet on the market, weigh about 2 pounds each, including fuel.
(story aired friday 13th OCT 2000)
Altoona has their biggest game of the season coming up this weekend the
homecoming game. As we all know this also means that the homecoming dance will
also be this weekend, And the prom king and queen were picked by the Altoona
student body. As tradition follows a parade supersedes the game. two days before
the parade the king queen and some of the student body meet at the school to
build the float that would be in the parade. the home coming king, who's name
I will not mention, decided that it would be amusing to drop his pants and moon
his friends. Which he did. The school board caught wind of this happening and
he was not allowed to play in the homecoming game. Nor was he allowed to be in
the parade or go to the dance, longer than was required by his "crowned duties"
Parents and teachers spoke with the district hoping to get some exception made.
The District refused to budge on the issue. The student continued to say that it
was a joke and it shouldn't of left the premises.
(Story aired wednesday Oct 11th 2000)
Monday morning, the Teacher staff in Chippewa Falls Wisconsin of Chippewa Falls
High school. found a nice large cake in the teachers lounge. With the message,
'to the best teachers in the whole state' written on it. no one saw who brought
the cake in, the administrative staff knew nothing of it. and assumed that it
was from one of the parents or from the PTA comitte. Tuesday morning, it was
discovered that the cake was given to the teachers by one of the students. When
the student in his freshman year was questioned on his actions, the student
simply replied that "he wanted to give a nice surprise for everyone involved."
Later one it came to the attention of the faculty that this student had baked a
little surprise into the cake. He had shaved his lower.. body hair (pubic hair)
and had baked the hair into the cake. The student was charged with two counts
of Disorderly conduct, and will not likely be returning to school this year.
(story aired Monday Oct 16th 2000)
20 years ago, a gas explosion all but destroyed a home. The only person known
to be in it was Chris Tucker. When the fire department arrived Chris had not
come out of the blazing home. Fire fighters went in and was unable to find the
man. After the blaze was dosed, Fire fighters and local authorities couldn't
find or identify what they thought was the body. an extensive investigation
was launched, but they found no traces of the body. 8 years later he was
pronounced dead. without a body. Police did investigate the wife, and found that
she was no one near the home. Reports indicate that it was Chris himself that
called in the fire. The widow re married about 5 years ago. as of Last month
Chris tucker was found barely alive. His currently in the hospital for a
gunshot wound to the chest. He is listed as in critical condition, and it is
unknown weather or not he will survive the wound. AS it turns out Chris had
been in hiding for the last 20 years. He came home one night the summer of 2000
walked up the stairs and climbed into bed with his wife. His wife not recognizing
the man who just got into bed with her. She pulled a gun and shot him at point blank
range. Then called the police. They came and took the strange man to the
hospital, where the widow Identified him as her long dead husband. The now
re married ex-wife had no charges pressed. Charges have been pressed against him
for faking his own death provided that he survives the gun shot wound.
Several years ago, (we are talking 1997 or later) A man walked into a Wells Fargo Bank, took out a deposit slip and wrote. "I have a gun, give me all of your money" The man then got in line to see a teller. The would be bank robber, worried that someone might have seen him write the note, got nervous and left. Where he preceded to Walk across the street to The Bank Of America. When he got the teller window, the nice young woman read the deposit slip then told him that in order for the slip to be redeemed, he had to go across the street to Wells Fargo. The Bank Robber Thanked the teller for being so nice, and walked BACK across the street. The teller called the police, and told them the story, The police arrested the man just as he got to the Teller window.
ST. LOUIS (Reuters) - A month after the U.S. Supreme Court said Missouri must allow the Ku Klux Klan to take part in an "Adopt-A-Highway" cleanup program, the state has kicked out the group, citing its failure to collect roadside litter.
"Groups are required to pick up litter four times a year in this program, and our records indicated that the Klan had not fulfilled their adoption agreement," said Missouri Department of Transportation spokeswoman Megan Casalone on Thursday. "They have never picked up anything off the highway."
Casalone said the Klan had until last Tuesday to respond to a March 20 letter informing the group they were not complying with the program rules. The KKK did not respond, she said.
Missouri's battle with the Ku Klux Klan began in 1994 when an official with the Missouri organization of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, filed an application asking that the group be included in the Adopt-A-Highway program, which calls for organizations to clean up roadsides in return for signage that publicly acknowledges the group's participation.
The white supremacist organization requested a half-mile (0.8 km) stretch of Interstate 55, one of the routes used to bus black students to county schools as part of court-ordered desegregation efforts in the St. Louis area.
Missouri denied the request, citing the group's racist beliefs, and alleging it violated state and federal anti-discrimination laws, and had a history of violence. The Klan's membership excludes anyone who is black, Jewish, Mexican or Asian.
But the Klan successfully challenged the state's denial in court, saying the state was violating the group's constitutional rights, and forcing Missouri to designate a mile-long stretch to the Klan in late 1999 as the state pursued appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Missouri's appeal on March 5.
MDOT spokesman Chris Sutton said the state could have kicked the Klan out of the program much earlier because of its lack of effort to clean up the side of the highway as required. But it waited until all court appeals were exhausted, he said.
KKK officials could not be reached for comment.
9:01 AM ET April 6, 2001
Excite News Network
American aerospace engineers love the idea of science fiction coming true. First there was Star Wars, the space-based mega-laser system of the Reagan years. Then there was the National Missile Defense concept; the anti-missile network that could potentially rewrite the old Cold War theory of mutually-assured destruction. Now it looks like researchers at Boeing are keen to see the X-wing fighter and the Colonial Viper make the jump from film to fact.
Boeing's prototyping organisation, Phantom Works, has started publicly tossing around the idea of plasma-based directed-energy weapons being mounted on the next generation of hypersonic aircraft platforms; the very vehicles currently favoured for fast-track R&D by the Bush administration.
George Muellner, vice president and general manager of the Phantom Works, told Jane's Defence Weekly that it should prove feasible to "skim off" some of the plasma that forms naturally around the nose of a hypersonic vehicle for use by an "onboard directed-energy weapon."
In other words, a plasma cannon.
Hot work
Plasmas are ionised gases. They generally occur either by passing an electric current through the gas, or by heating it to such an extremely high temperature that it enters a different state of behaviour. Plasmas occur naturally in phenomena like lightning discharges and are commonly used in neon light tubes. In the aerospace industry, they are most known for their build-up around the nose and leading edges of hypersonic vehicles or those re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. As the aircraft passes through the air, the gases in front are shocked to a high temperature and plasma state.
The thing about plasmas that most excites aeronautical engineers is their mainly unexplained talent of reducing drag. Laboratory experiments performed in Russia with objects passing through plasma chambers have shown that when enveloped in the ionised gases, up to 30 percent less drag is experienced. Since aircraft designers usually go to great lengths to eradicate a fraction of a percent of drag, that's quite a performance factor. The plasma environment also delays and reduces the sonic shockwave associated with faster-than-sound flight.
This has lead to much speculation about the possibility of mounting plasma-generating apparatus on the front of aircraft, reducing drag and allowing hypersonic travel at a fraction of the fuel cost.
Another effect of plasmas is their ability to absorb radio waves. A plane surrounded by a ball of plasma would be virtually undetectable to radar. That would mean stealthy aircraft without the need for cumbersome and drag-inducing panelling. There is evidence that Russia at one stage tried to develop a strap-on "plasma shield" for its military aircraft.
Beam me up
But all this theory has been around for years now. It's the apparent idea that Boeing is considering plasma beam weapons that has made many industry watchers sit up and take note. It seems that the boys and girls at Phantom Works originally had their interest piqued by the secret Russian experiments. With the collapse of funding in the old Soviet Union though, the Russian scientists have been looking overseas for development partners.
"We've been doing work with the Russians and we've been doing plasma work on our own and we have seen considerable improvements in drag and sonic boom attenuation," Muellner said.
He was more sceptical of the radar shielding benefits of plasma. "There's no way to effectively engineer it," he said, adding that the power and weight of the onboard plasma-generators would most likely negate the stealth benefits.
What the Boeing honcho did say though was that plasmas that form naturally around high-Mach aerospace vehicles could, in the long term, be diverted "as a huge energy resource" to a beam weapon for defensive purposes. Of course, anything used for defence can also be used offensively, so taking things to their natural conclusion, Muellner is talking about fighter aircraft packing plasma-based weapons.
There are two likely engineering approaches for converting the plasma envelope into something useable as a weapon. The first is to channel the plasma into a chamber and use its energy in combination with a gas like argon and some high-power optics to generate a potent laser beam. The other, more complicated possibility, is to bind and contain compact rings or 'toroids' of plasma energy in intense magnetic fields. These could then somehow be fired out as plasma bullets, demolishing air and ground targets with a burst of superheated gas.
Mystery star
Phantom Works hinting at the possibility of plasma weapons is not without precedent. In the early 1990s, the US Air Force began preparing tests intended to culminate in the development of a ground-based plasma-weapon for downing incoming warheads with multiple 'bullets'. The idea was to rely on a capacitor bank capable of storing a vast amount of energy very quickly and releasing it all simultaneously. Scientists involved expected that they might be able to throw out the plasma shells at up to 10,000km/sec (3% of the speed of light!) by the turn of the century.
However, towards the end of the 1990's, the program, known as Shiva Star, was officially dropped as being unworkable. Of course, the conspiracy theorists have maintained that Shiva's sudden disappearance just at the time the firing tests were scheduled reeks of the project being swallowed into a classified environment.
What is certain though is that vehicles capable of speeds so great that they produce their own supply of plasma are only just now becoming viable. With several RAM and SCRAM jet aircraft inching their way towards feasibility, both the platforms and sufficient plasma will soon be around to play with.
So look out for the latest in directed beam weaponry at an Area 51 near you soon.
Beyond 2000 news
Aired April 1st 2001 (this is not a practical joke)