WhiteBoard News for Thursday, September 11, 2003
London, England (Ananova):
A pregnant woman has earned $400 by selling her "bump" as an advertising billboard for the day.
Zoe Ellis, 28, received the money for walking around London with the advert for MicroBabies painted on her stomach.
Toy manufacturer Tomy rented her bump for the day to promote their latest product.
Zoe, who is eight months pregnant, said she was proud to host the advert.
"I think this is a really fun idea, and I'm happy to show off my new figure."
Tomy is now looking to recruit 100 expectant London mums to follow in Zoe's footsteps before expanding the idea nationwide if the campaign is successful.
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Charleston, South Carolina (Ananova):
A woman spent a night in a jail in South Carolina after her mobile phone rang in a courtroom.
Lashenda Floyd became the first person in Charleston history to be held overnight in a county jail for contempt of court involving a ringing phone.
It rang as Judge Markley Dennis was sentencing a man to life in prison for murder.
Once he'd dealt with Travis Lamont Graham, he ordered Floyd before the bench and found her in criminal contempt of court for failing to turn off the phone.
She told him she had seen the signs ordering phones to be switched off, but said she had forgotten to do so, says the Post and Courier.
In August 2000, the state's Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal banned pagers, mobile phones and other personal communications devices from the state's courtrooms, saying they had become distractions.
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Drumheller, Canada (CanWest News Service):
Mountains, beavers and the maple leaf: There may be another Canadian symbol added to that list.
A recent paleontological discovery may mean Canada will be known for another natural wonder -- tyrannosaurid turds.
A team of Canadian and American scientists recently identified an Alberta fossil as the world's largest dinosaur dropping, stealing the title from a headline-making T-rex turd found in Saskatchewan in 1995.
For scientists, however, while stool size is notable, what's really exciting about this latest find is what it contains: incredibly well-preserved dinosaur muscle tissue.
The 75-million-year-old fossilized feces, formally known as a coprolite, was discovered in the late 1990s near the town of Onefour in southeastern Alberta by Wendy Sloboda, a freelance paleontologist who is leading a paleo-tourism tour in the Gobi Desert.
Sloboda also has the distinction of co-discovering the T-rex coprolite.
"She's got a very good eye (for coprolites)," says Karen Chin, the world's foremost authority on dinosaur coprolites.
Measuring in at 64 centimetres in length and up to 17 centimetres wide, the six-litre bulk of the Albertan coprolite rules out small dinosaurs from contention as the probable pooper, says Chin, who led the analysis of the specimen. And, given the presence of bone fragments and the age of the fossil, Chin and colleagues think the dropper was probably one of T-rex's earlier relatives in the Tyrannosaurid family, including either Daspletosaurus or Gorgosaurus.
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Cairo, Egypt (Reuters):
An Egyptian lawyer said Wednesday he was planning to sue the world's Jews for "plundering" gold during the Exodus from Pharaonic Egypt thousands of years ago, based on information in the Bible.
Nabil Hilmi, dean of the law faculty at Egypt's al-Zaqaziq University, said the legal basis for the case was under study by a group of lawyers in Egypt and Europe.
"This is serious, and should not be misread as being political against any race. We are just investigating if a debt is owed," Hilmi told Reuters in a telephone interview.
The relevant passage from the Bible, Exodus 12 verses 35 to 36 reads: "The Israelites had done as Moses told them; they had asked the Egyptians for jewelry of silver and gold, and for clothing. ... And so they plundered the Egyptians." This translation is in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
Some Jewish commentators say that while the Biblical passage may be fact, the Hebrews were enslaved by the Egyptians and therefore had a right to claim compensation for wages.
"Hilmi's assertion that the Hebrew Bible is fact has given Israel and Jews the world over a reason to rejoice. He has opened the door for all Jews to sue Egypt for over 400 years of slavery," writer Beth Goodman told Reuters.
Tareq Zaghoul, a lawyer at the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights in Cairo, said it would be difficult to prove historical fact in the passage that would stand up in court.
"This needs historical documents and evidence to back it up. It is rather far-fetched," he said.
Hilmi said Egyptian and European historical and religious experts were trying to establish if the biblical passage could be taken as fact, and hence form the basis for a lawsuit.
He said the argument that Jews could sue Egypt for enslaving them was also being studied by experts.
Hilmi gave no details of which court he planned to file the case in or whether he thought such a case would be exempt from the sort of statute of limitations that in many countries rules out legal cases after a certain period of time.
He also declined to put a value on the goods "plundered."
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Mishawaka, Indiana (AP):
Two would-be robbers left an Indiana convenience store empty-handed after getting into an argument about the contents of a note they handed to the clerk.
The two men entered the 7-Eleven store in Mishawaka, just east of South Bend, early Tuesday morning.
They left the store and came back a few minutes later. One of them handed the clerk a note saying, in part, "put it in the bag."
When the clerk said she didn't understand what that meant, the man who handed her the note said he didn't know either because his buddy wrote it.
The two men began to argue and left the store. They are still at large.
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Seget, Croatia (Ananova):
A man who tried to set fire to his home to avoid having sex with his wife has been jailed for two years.
Svetin Gulisija, 26, from Seget in Croatia admitted starting a fire in woods just behind his house because he was too tired for sex with his wife.
The couple had to be evacuated as firefighters tried to bring the blaze under control.
The damage was later estimated to be around $23,900.
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Chow
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