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Mo‘ynaq – Graveyard of Ships in the Desert Many have visited an abandoned city and wondered what catastrophic event could have caused such an exodus from a metropolis once so evidently thriving. Yet these cities are usually hundreds if not thousands of years old, the everyday clamor and cry of civilization just an echo. Visit Mo'ynaq in Uzbekistan, however, and you can see apocalypse right here, right now. The Soviet era sign still welcomes people to the city. Yet there are few visitors who stay more than a few hours. They all leave after they have done looking at what...

After 50 years, fire still burns under Pa. town (A motorist in 2004 drives among the smoldering remains of land near Route 61 in Centralia, Pa. AP file photo) Fifty years ago Sunday, a fire at the town dump ignited an exposed coal seam, setting off a chain of events that eventually led to the demolition of nearly every building in Centralia — a whole community of 1,400 simply gone. All these decades later, the Centralia fire still burns. It also maintains its grip on the popular imagination, drawing visitors from around the world who come to gawk at twisted,...

Once upon a time, the largest U.S. cities were the envy of the entire world. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Sure, there are areas of New York City, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles that are still absolutely beautiful but for the most part our major cities are rapidly rotting and decaying. Cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oakland were all once places where middle class American workers thrived and raised their families. Today, all of those cities are rapidly being transformed into cesspools of filth, decay and wretchedness. Millions of good jobs...

......I've often thought that God has a particularly acerbic wit. After all, FriedrichNietzsche, who famously proclaimed God is Dead, badly wanted to be known as a famous writer. He was granted his wish -after he became too insane to enjoy his fame. Obama seems to have wanted to become an uber-celebritycumpolitician in the worst possible way. How fitting it would be if presides over the bankruptcy of both systems. ..fabulists rising to some of the most esteemed positions in our society have potential impact far beyond what people suspect. They lay bare a rottenness at the heart of academia, the...

Live Out Your Walking Dead Fantasies In This Abandoned Tennessee Prison - Modern Ruins We're going to have to wait until season three of The Walking Dead TV show to see the zombie-filled prison. But if you're near Nashville, you can visit the Tennessee State Prison, an abandoned penitentiary. It looks like the zombies got to it first. Even before it fell into decay, this prison suffered plenty of woes at the hands of its prisoners. In 1902, a group of prisoners blew out a wing of the facility, killing one prisoner and allowing others to escape (two were never...

7 Most Incredible Tank Graveyards on Earth In certain corners of the globe you'll find the strangest of military cemeteries – places filled not with the bodies of fallen troops but littered with the carcasses of abandoned tanks. These once-formidable weapons of war no longer strike fear into the hearts of opposing forces; their days of rolling inexorably onwards on the teeth of steel tracks are over. Now, the armor of these behemoths is rusting and corroded, their hatches all but sealed from lack of use, and their controls never again to be manned by commanders in battle. WWII tank...

Formerly Great Cities All Over America Are Turning Into Open, Festering SoresJanuary 1, 2012 Once upon a time, the people of the United States constructed beautiful, shiny cities from coast to coast that were the envy of the entire globe. We had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen and life was quite good in America. But now all of our prosperity is coming crashing down and many of our formerly great cities are turning into open, festering sores. Unfortunately, we are drowning in so much debt that we can barely even slow down...

Authorities arrested at least nine people after a "series of fights" at the nation's biggest shopping mall sent chairs flying and caused after-Christmas shoppers to flee, officials in Minnesota said Tuesday. Police and security officers at the Mall of America arrested a mix of young adults and juveniles after a food-court fight around 4 p.m. Monday broke up into brawls elsewhere in the shopping center, Bloomington Police Department Commander Mark Stehlik said. At one point, police received reports of up to 10 separate fights, he said. Video of one incident showed a man picking up a chair to throw as...

Has the unveiling of perverse homosexual behavior among male college coaches shed light on a deeper systemic problem with America? Are we seeing the tip of an immoral and sick iceberg; which, if it continues to drift, may tear a hole in our ship?

Authorities are investigating reports from around San Diego County of a strong odor similar to jet fuel. 10News has received dozens of calls from residents who say they smelled what they believe is jet fuel since around 2 p.m. Callers from Encinitas, Solana Beach, Pacific Beach, Mira Mesa and La Jolla have all reported the odor. Residents living in inland areas such as North Park, Hillcrest and Rancho Bernardo have said they can smell the odor in their area. The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department has confirmed they have received numerous calls regarding the smell. A public affairs spokesman at MCAS...

Tonight's season finale of Inspector America on the history channel at 10 pm.

(AP) MILWAUKEE (AP) - A 100-year-old greeter at a Milwaukee Walmart was shoved by a customer after the centenarian tried to stop the woman to determine if she'd paid for items that were in the lower part of her shopping cart, police said Monday. Greeter Lois Speelman fell down and went to a hospital after she was shoved on Sunday. "I'm bruised a little, but I'm able to go back to work Thursday," Speelman told The Associated Press from her home on Monday.

To some extent, Ed Miliband has spent much of the first 40 years of his life in the shadow of his older, better-known brother David, the former foreign secretary. During the leadership contest, both Miliband brothers made much of the fact they went to an ordinary North London comprehensive school. And while this is true, their childhood will probably have been a little more colourful, and certainly more intellectually stimulating, than that of the average North London schoolboy. Their father, Ralph, a Polish Jew who fled the Nazi invasion of Belgium in 1940, was one of the leading Marxist theorists...

While British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne frets over spending £148 on a fish and chips lunch with the Governor of the Bank of England, Barack Obama has no qualms about requesting an expensive revamp of the Oval Office when the US federal deficit is approaching a staggering $1.3 trillion and unemployment hovers at just under ten percent. The Wall Street Journal has outlined some of the chic decorative changes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Handmade striped wallpaper manufactured in Amagansett, N.Y., with trim painted in American-made Benjamin Moore. Obama’s decorating team reupholstered in caramel-colored leather the two mahogany arm-chairs...

When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit. But what if a well-known -- and apparently constant -- characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously? This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates -- these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The former head of the United Nations' internal oversight office has accused U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of poor leadership, saying that the world body was "falling apart" and becoming irrelevant. The latest criticism of Ban's performance at the helm of the United Nations, first reported by the Washington Post on Tuesday, comes as his aides weigh the former South Korean foreign minister's prospects for a possible second term. The former head of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), Inga-Britt Ahlenius of Sweden, said that under Ban's watch "there is no transparency, there is (a)...

News Share Print Email Font Resize Musicians assaulted in downtown St. Paul park, one robbed When assailants asked for their guitars, one man made a run for it By Mara H. Gottfried mgottfried@pioneerpress.com Updated: 07/15/2010 12:05:49 AM CDT Two longtime friends were playing guitars in a downtown St. Paul park late Tuesday when a group of men confronted them, assaulted both and robbed one... Zasada described the two robbers who weren't arrested: A black man, 25 to 31 years old, 6 feet 3 inches tall, 215 to 230 pounds, with short hair and no facial hair; wearing khaki pants, tennis...

Well-known gay marriage advocate Kathy Griffin has joked about Sarah Palin performing oral sex on John McCain. In a lowlife stab at comedy on her Life on the D-List show, Kathy Griffin took her comically challenged act on the road to Anchorage, Alaska, last Friday, performing for a lowbrow crowd which can only be described as getting off on profane, sexual innuendo-humor directed at Sarah Palin. As if this piece of distastefulness wasn't enough, perhaps equally surprising was the person who escorted Griffin on stage for her profane, anti-Palin performance: none other than Levi Johnston! That's right, the Levi Johnston,...

The text of the film “The fall of an empire—the Lesson of Byzantium” Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov) Russian winter landscape. A church. A snowstorm. Narrator. Hello. In 1453, the Byzantine Empire fell. Let us now take a look at how this happened. Islamic chant weaves into the gusts of freezing wind. Instanbul. The muezzin continues his prayer, amplified by a loudspeaker. The noise of a market place in a Middle Eastern city. Turkish conversation. Narrator. This city was once called Constantinople; six centuries ago it was the capital city of what was without exaggeration one of the greatest civilizations in world...

An estimated 200 or more Livingston County students could face criminal charges for possessing a cell phone picture of a naked Pinckney High School student — a photo the girl took herself and shared with friends who forwarded it to others, police say. The Livingston County Sheriff's Department has confiscated a dozen phones containing the photograph and is asking any students who have the photo to turn in their cellular phones at the school or Sheriff's Department. Sheriff Bob Bezotte said the 14-year-old girl indicated that she "was clowning around" when she took the picture of herself during the summer...

Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s. Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analysed the raw data...

Where's it worst? Ohio, according to our analysis, which racked up four of the 10 cities on our list: Youngstown, Canton, Dayton and Cleveland. The runner-up is Michigan, with two cities--Detroit and Flint--making the ranking.

European, Asian and Canadian companies are taking advantage of the weaker dollar to buy their U.S. counterparts at a record pace, increasing investment in the United States but also raising fears about a potential loss of jobs and autonomy. "We could be looking at the world's largest tag sale if we continue to see declines in the dollar," said Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist at DataCore Partners. In the latest large deal aided by a weak dollar, Commerce Bancorp, which is based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, agreed Tuesday to be acquired by Toronto-Dominion Bank of Canada in a cash-and-shares deal...

Most anybody in the mortgage business will tell you that August was a month that will live in infamy: The market was in turmoil, as doubts about the stability of subprime loans spread to other sectors of the mortgage world. How bad was it? A survey of mortgage brokers suggests that one in three consumers who recently signed purchase contracts canceled in August -- up from just 4 percent three years ago, according to the research firm that conducted the survey for Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade journal. The cancellation rate undoubtedly was fed by two scenarios playing out: Many...

Sir Winston Churchill once said, "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." Although he did indeed write, as well as make, much history, it will be of no avail to him personally now that he has been dropped from the official list of persons required for study by English school students from the ages of 11 to 14. In an effort to improve the minds of their youth, in lieu of studying the man who was dubbed "The Greatest Briton of Them All" in a 2002 BBC poll, they will instead concentrate on "debt management,...

Source: New York University Date: March 16, 2007 Tooth Decay Analysis Supports 'Out Of Africa' Theory Of Human Evolution Science Daily — A New York University College of Dentistry (NYUCD) research team has found the first oral bacterial evidence supporting the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa to Asia. The team, led by Page Caufield, a professor of cariology and comprehensive care at NYUCD, discovered that Streptoccocus mutans, a bacterium associated with dental caries, has evolved along with its human hosts in a clear line that can be traced back to a single common ancestor who lived in...

Three seniors from Huntingtown High School were charged as adults with armed robbery and first-degree assault last week after holding up another Calvert County teenager in his home, law enforcement and school officials said. Robert Dredger, 17, and John Obal, 18, both from Chesapeake Beach, along with Ali Moasser, 17, from Huntingtown, are accused of carrying out a robbery with a 20-gauge shotgun on Wednesday to take a laptop computer, a cellphone and a wooden box from the Huntingtown home of 18-year-old Ryan Dailey, according to the Calvert Investigative Team. ~~~snip~~~ The robbery in Huntingtown occurred about 3 p.m. as...

The Swedish Media MassageAFA Center for Law & Policy Friday, February 17, 2006 The disturbing truth about Sweden?s moral decay should serve to sober us from our own complacent drunken stupor.I recently had occasion to discuss religion and politics (dangerous ground, I know) with a Swedish mother of two visiting America. Sonya (not her real name) is a manager at a large investment house in Sweden. Her politics may be described as fiscally conservative and socially liberal. In a word, fashionable. We chatted about the Swedish economy, city life versus country life, and agreed that high taxes were hard on...

The front door and main steps to the Supreme Court will remain closed until an assessment of the damage is completed. Built in 1935, the Supreme Court building is one of the newer facilities on Capitol Hill, compared with the more than 200-year-old U.S. Capitol and other historical buildings. Maintenance on those buildings is done every one-to-three years, said Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the Architect of the Capitol Office, which oversees and maintains the U.S. Capitol complex. In 2003, inspectors checked the building's east pediment during a routine maintenance check, Miss Malecki said. "There were no indications at that...

On the 60th anniversary of the North Korean Communist Party, Kim Jong Il wallows in a cult of personality. But not everybody is celebrating -- food is bring rationed again and not even a colorful show can remove the spotlight from the country's growing problems. Workers and students celebrate both Kim Jong Il and his late father in the Arirang Festival at Pyongyang's May Day Stadium. Zoom AP Workers and students celebrate both Kim Jong Il and his late father in the Arirang Festival at Pyongyang's May Day Stadium. In an auditorium on the Taedong River in Pyongyang, two special...

A new way to stop digital decay Sep 15th 2005 From The Economist print edition Computing: Could a “virtual computer”, built from software, help to save today's digital documents for historians of the future? WHEN future historians turn their attention to the early 21st century, electronic documents will be vital to their understanding of our times. Old web pages may not turn yellow and brittle like paper, but the digital documents of today's culture face a more serious threat: the disappearance of computers able to read them. Even a relatively simple electronic item, such as a picture, requires software...

EARTH'S natural radioactivity has been measured for the first time. The measurement will help geologists find out to what extent nuclear decay is responsible for the immense quantity of heat generated by Earth. Our planet's heat output drives the convection currents that churn liquid iron in the outer core, giving rise to Earth's magnetic field. Just where this heat comes from is a big question. Measurements of the temperature gradients across rocks in mines and boreholes have led geologists to estimate that the planet is internally generating between 30 and 44 terawatts of heat. Some of this heat comes from...

It is virtually impossible to have a debate about the American healthcare system without someone mentioning the Canadian alternative (socialized medicine, with the government acting as a single payer and no private alternative system available). Exalted by the likes of idealistic liberals, the Canadian system often gets touted as a more humane alternative to the American scenario since it offers that glorious-sounding fantasy of “universal coverage.” The only trouble, of course, is that Canadians face intolerable waiting times that compromise their health and quality of life (and sometimes their very lives themselves). The situation has gotten so severe that now...

Parents Television Council considers asking FCC to declare spot indecent. LOS ANGELES - A Carl's Jr. commercial starring a scantily clad Paris Hilton frolicking with a water hose is too hot for a media watchdog group. "This commercial is basically soft-core porn," said Melissa Caldwell, research director for the Los Angeles-based Parents Television Council. "It's inappropriate for television." The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that the group plans to mobilize its more than 1 million members to protest and is considering asking the Federal Communications Commission to declare the ad indecent.

PARIS -- Minutes after cruising down the Champs-Elysées to close out his record-breaking sixth straight championship of the world's premier cycling race -- the Tour de France -- Lance Armstrong took a congratulatory overseas phone call from fellow Texan George W. Bush. "You're awesome," the president of the United States told the triumphant American athlete. If a similar gracious gesture was forthcoming from the president of France, however, I have yet to hear about it. And somehow I don't think I ever will. Armstrong's repeated success in this most-French of all international athletic competitions is not something the host nation's...

Crumbling edifice of the UN By Susannah Price BBC United Nations correspondent The landmark United Nations headquarters in New York was state of the art when it was built more than 50 years ago. Impressive from the outside... Its gleaming marble and glass tower, a familiar sight overlooking the East River, is a popular tourist destination where visitors gaze at the impressive General Assembly and Security Council chambers. Behind the scenes, it is a different story. The plumbing, electrical, heating and cooling systems also date back half a century and have gone well beyond their useful life. The UN is...

She kissed Madonna on stage and drunkenly married a childhood friend for 55 hours, but Britney Spears's new live show is her most shocking performance yet. The 22-year-old, wearing pink underwear with stockings and suspenders, cavorts with a male dancer and writhes suggestively on a bed as she tries to win over an older audience. It remains to be seen whether fans have tired of her attempts to shock with revealing outfits and erotic dance routines. The world tour is not a complete sell-out and tickets are still on sale for her rare UK dates. Spears, who performed at Miami's...

Site last updatedNovember 3, 2003 Morality Continues to Decay November 3, 2003 Of the ten moral behaviors evaluated, a majority of Americans believed that each of three activities were “morally acceptable.” Those included gambling (61%), co-habitation (60%), and sexual fantasies (59%). Nearly half of the adult population felt that two other behaviors were morally acceptable: having an abortion (45%) and having a sexual relationship with someone of the opposite sex other than their spouse (42%). About one-third of the population gave the stamp of approval to pornography (38%), profanity (36%), drunkenness (35%) and homosexual sex (30%). The activity that garnered...

"National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice." -Samuel Smiles I ask you, to which side has the scale tipped in these United States?

MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - U.S. Episcopalian leaders moved closer on Friday to approving the church's first openly gay bishop, a step that church conservatives warned could shatter unity among the world's 77 million Anglicans. After a fierce public debate, Episcopal leaders attending the church's triennial convention voted behind closed doors to recommend ratification of New Hampshire bishop-elect Eugene Robinson, a divorced father of two. The vote count was not made public, and the debate participants were urged not to cheer after the terse announcement was made. Robinson's expected elevation to his post by the full convention on Sunday will be followed...

MORALISTS WITHOUT MORALS I would fain flee to Sarmatia and the frozen Sea when people who ape the Curii[1] and live like Bacchanals dare talk about morals. In the first place, they are unlearned persons, though you may find their houses crammed with plaster casts of Chrysippus;[2] for their greatest hero is the man who has brought a likeness of Aristotle or Pittacus,[3] or bids his shelves preserve an original portrait of Cleanthes.[4] Men's faces are not to be trusted; does not every street abound in gloomy-visaged debauchees? And do you rebuke foul practices, when you are yourself the most...

MSN Home   |   My MSN   |   Hotmail   |   Search   |   Shopping   |   Money   |   People & Chat   Thomas and Sandra Nunez with their son, Andrew, and daughter, Ava, at home in Denton, Texas She Works, He Doesn’t The number of American families in which the sole wage earner is the woman is small, but many economists think it’s growing By Peg Tyre and Daniel McGinnNEWSWEEK     May 12 issue —  Since the beginning of time, anthropologists believe, women have been programmed to seek a mate who can provide for a family—whether that means dragging the mastodon back to the cave or making the payments on the Volvo. So when Laurie Earp walked down...

UNITED NATIONS -- Over the next few days, the United Nations will again be the epicentre of world diplomacy, as leaders parade through its marble hallways with an urgency not seen since the height of the Cold War. But as the planet looks to the UN to forge an international stand on Iraq and North Korea, the world body faces another crisis of embarrassing proportions: Its New York headquarters is falling apart. "I never thought it would be such a dump," said Gary Bindermann, a German who was taking a recent tour through the often dimly lit and musty corridors,...

"Purchase lands in America, where liberty will maintain her empire till a dissoluteness of morals, luxury, and venality shall have prepared the degenerate sons of some future age to prefer their own mean lucre, the bribes, and the smiles of corruption and arbitrary ministers to patriotism, to glory, and to the public weal. No doubt the same causes will produce the same effects, and a period is already set to the reign of American freedom; but that fatal time seems to be at a great distance. The present generation at least, and I hope many succeeding ones... will enjoy the...

"Adam Sandler invites you to share some holiday cheer in the new, no-holds-barred musical comedy Adam Sandler's 8 Crazy Nights.. MPAA Rating: G-13 for frequent crude and sexual humor, drinking and brief drug references "

WASHINGTON, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Pressing his case against an assault on Baghdad, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said on Wednesday the United States had no legitimate reason to attack Iraq and that it would be a grave mistake to do so. "The claim that Iraq is a threat is a complete fraud. I don't think they believe it for a minute," Clark said, referring to the Bush administration's stated grounds for seeking to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Clark, who served in the Johnson administration at the height of the Vietnam war, said it would be "the...

Unionized hotel workers voted 2,045 to 501 yesterday to authorize a strike against Hilton and Sheraton hotels in Waikiki, while hotels still struggle to bring in revenue in the aftermath of Sept. 11. "The members have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike," said Eric Gill, Local 5 financial secretary-treasurer. "I'm overjoyed with that." The vote, taken at the Hawai'i Convention Center, covers 4,000 workers at Hilton Hawaiian Village and Sheraton's four Waikiki hotels. A strike authorization vote does not mean there will be a strike. That's up to union officials to decide. Gill said the union will attempt to reach...