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As newly minted princess Kate Middleton greeted Michelle Obama in the ornate surroundings of Buckingham Palace Tuesday, it was hard to believe she was wearing a $340 dress from British retailer Reiss — a frock any commoner could buy. (snip) While Michelle Obama has also been applauded for wearing clothes from affordable stores such as J.Crew and H&M, she also favors big-name designers such as Jason Wu and Isabel Toledo. The floral Barbara Tfank dress she wore to meet Middleton this week cost at least $2,000.

Mystery of the 'glowing' pork BLUE pork, now that sounds tasty. A Shanghai resident found the pork she bought was giving off a "blue fluorescence" at night. Food safety experts said the blue light may have been caused by a photobacterium that contaminated the pork. They added that the pork would not harm people's health if it was well cooked. The resident surnamed Chen, who lives in Gaohang Town in the Pudong New Area, bought a kilogram of pork from a market on Yanggao Road N. on Tuesday. She used some of the pork to make dumplings that night and...

One thing is for sure. The president of the U.S. will not perform his job, he will not gather the proper experts together to formulate a best guess on the radiation heading our way. And he will not hold a press conference. Instead, he's heading down to South America, well out of the way of the radiation plume heading our way. If his wife and kids go with him, then you know it's going to be far worse than they are letting on.

A mutant tree all aglow BY DAVE BARRY This classic Dave Barry column was originally published Dec. 14, 1997. Tis that special time of year, The Holiday Retail Purchasing Season, a time when we traditionally print heartwarming human-interest stories designed to make you feel better about running up a level of debt normally associated with Mexico. I have such a heartwarming story, which was published by The London Times and sent in by alert reader John Nicholls. The story, which I am not making up, concerns a man named Neil from Devon, England, who discovered an owl nesting in his...

Legislators appear ready to pass a bill encouraging the construction of more nuclear plants in Florida, even though safety concerns have stymied them in the U.S. since the 1970s. Your opinion? I'm in favor of it. Nuclear power is safer with today's technology and helps reduce global warming from fossil fuels. I'm against it. Nuclear power plants are dangerous, create radioactive waste and are targets for terrorists. I'm not sure.

SYDNEY, Australia -- An Australian food agency is trying to quell fears about glow-in-the-dark meats. In a statement released Wednesday, the New South Wales state Food Authority said the glowing phenomenon is caused by a harmless light-emitting bacteria that is naturally present in most meats and fish. "While most of us would understandably be shocked to see our food glowing, it is important to remember that the microorganism responsible for the glow is not known to cause food poisoning," the authority's director general, George Davey, said in the statement. The Food Authority receives around two phone calls each month from...

WASHINGTON: A Republican congressman said in a radio interview aired by a Florida station that if a multiple-city attack happened in the United States in the next 90 days, as predicted by an Israeli expert, and was found to be the work of extremist Muslims, then “we should take out their holy sites.” Congressman Thomas G Tancredo, Republican from Colorado, was being interviewed by AM 540 WFLA radio host Pat Campbell, who asked him what the response of the United States should be were terrorist attacks on US cities to take place and were attributable to extremist Muslims. The Congressman...

1. CHORNOBYL: A DISASTER THAT HAS BECOME A MORAL CATEGORY "The nuclear lighting of Chornobyl has struck...." For Whom The Bell Tolls ESSAY: By Myroslava Barchuk Welcome to Ukraine magazine Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number One, 2004 In 1986 the Ukrainian poet Ivan Drach came up with a stunning metaphor — “the nuclear lightning of Chornobyl has struck right into the genotype of the Ukrainian nation.” Back in 1986, we in Ukraine, could not grasp the full extent of the disastrous consequences of the Chornobyl "nuclear lightning." The Chornobyl disaster was to become a moral category. Like a chain reaction, it...

LOS ANGELES — The Planned Parenthood Association says it's not too early to be thinking of that perfect Christmas gift idea. They will be offering the little beauties (pictured left) at their Los Angeles offices starting next month. It's all part of a new nationwide campaign to make condoms more fun. "They could even be used as finger puppets, as you can see," said a spokesman for Planned Parenthood. "We're trying to get people away from thinking of the condom as strictly a 'backdoor' business." The spokesman said that Jewish versions are still in the testing phase. "Both the Star...