Spitting Into the Wind

It never ceases to amaze me how people can be so cruel to animals. One news item last week reported than an Asian elephant had become addicted to heroin after being fed bananas spiked with the drug and underwent a detox program. He was among six elephants lured by animal smugglers along the Sino-Myanmar border in China.

Four-year-old male elephant Xiguang and his companions having their meals in a wild animal protection centre in China's southernmost Hainan Province.

Xiguang received methadone injections for a year at five times the human dosage. He was illegally captured by traders in 2005 in south-west China. When police arrested the traders and freed the elephant, it was found to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

The elephant's eyes kept streaming and he made continuous trumpeting noises, the Beijing News newspaper's website reported.

It is thought that the traders fed the elephant bananas laced with heroin to capture and control it. Xiguang was sent to a wild animal protection centre on Hainan island in south-west China for rehab.

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How bizarre, a child molester's ploy to try and make a jury feel sorry for him backfired when the court had trouble believing his story.

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Repeat offender ... 10-year-old cartwheeler Cali Buschgens
with her mum Kylie. Picture: Townsville Bulletin

Forget smoking or bullying - at Belgian Gardens State School, doing a cartwheel on the playground can get you suspended. The school has banned all forms of gymnastics during breaks, including handstands and somersaults - even the humble forward roll has been given the flick.

Mother Kylie Buschgens told The Townsville Bulletin she was dumbfounded when her daughter Cali, 10, was told she could no longer do cartwheels, even on the grass.

Later the same day, the Principal was asked to do a back-flip, and overturn the cartwheel ban.

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It's not uncommon to hear of dictatorial governments that have blocked internet sites, cutting access to sites that spread information that could be harmful to the dictators. China's internet policy has been mentioned quite a bit in the lead-up to the Olympics. In today's news it was revealed that an Italian judge has completely blocked a popular file-sharing site:

A judge in the northern town of Bergamo, Italy, has ordered Italian ISPs (Internet service providers) to block access to the Swedish file-sharing Web site The Pirate Bay in a crackdown on the illegal sharing of copyright material over the Internet.

This is a first for Italy, and it is impossible to connect to Pirate Bay from Italy. Pirate Bay responded by inviting Italian users to switch to OpenDNS to bypass their ISPs' filters or use the alternative URL http://labaia.org - "the bay" in Italian. But Italian authorities were quick to block access to that site, along with alternative Web addresses and even future addresses connected to Pirate Bay. The alternative site works for me, but possibly not for people inside Italy.

Italy's Prime Minister is out to put an end to copyright infringement and is strangling the free information with his media connection. He is the founder and majority owner of Fininvest, a media and finance conglomerate that controls much of the nation's television market within the Mediaset empire, as well as the film company Medusa. Last month the same judge ordered the closure of Italy's leading Bit Torrent Web site and prosecutions are being prepared against three of its administrators.

The Pirate Bay is facing a lawsuit at the moment from the MPAA, who is demanding $15.4 million from The Pirate Bay to cover claimed losses from torrents of "Harry Potter," "Syriana," "The Pink Panther," "Walk the Line" and 13 episodes of the television show "Prison Break." The MPAA recently won a $110 million judgement against TorrentSpy but the tracker receives more than 20 million visitors a month so it doesn't seem to have slowed business any.

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I was happy tonight to the point of shedding a tear or two when Terri won Big Brother Australia. I'm not normally a Big Brother fan, and felt like I was forced to watch it because the kids just loved the show. As the weeks went on I got into the show as much as the kids, and was interested in the evictions and the voting, and the general carry-on.

Terri deserved that money probably more so than anyone: the crap she put up with all those weeks. Good on you girl. $250,000 is nice compensation. It's a lot less than the original BB winners got though, I remember someone being a millionaire after winning Big Brother.

I won't go so far as to say I'm going to miss the show. And if it's the last season of BB I'm actually happy. I don't particularly like any of the reality shows (with the exception of Australia's Biggest Loser, I love to see the weight being shed), and I'll welcome something else to watch on TV.

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A British pensioner believes he has produced the world's largest family tree after tracing nearly 10,000 relatives.

Roy Blackmore, 76, has spent the past 28 years and £20,000 ($A41,000) scouring census registers, cemeteries and archives to find the names of 9390 family members. He has been able to trace his relatives back to the Cerdick family in AD500. Included among them are Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror as well as a Wild West cowboy, Civil War soldiers and a former French king.

Mr Blackmore's interest in exploring his heritage stemmed from being an orphan as a child.

I have a couple of Aunties who spend alot of their time tracing family members. I imagine it would be very interesting and genealogy is a fascinating topic, with lots of online resources.

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Recently I wrote about the plight of the Tasmanian Devil and it's listing as an endangered species. Scientists have recently observed that the Tasmanian Devil is maturing much more quickly than usual and devils as young as one are bearing young in an attempt to save themselves. It's incredible to think that a survival instinct has occurred so quickly to allow that to happen.

Adolescent pregnancies are now rife in the population as the marsupials fight back against the deadly facial tumour that threatens their survival.

Unfortunately, scientists don't think it's enough to help the endangered devils beat the catastrophic cancer. The grotesque facial tumours grow on the face and mouth, stopping the devils from eating and leaving them to starve to death. The cancer has more than halved the wild devil population since it emerged in 1996, with experts warning the species could be extinct by 2020.

News.com.au

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