Free Republic

Cruelty to animals? A waste of time and money? A project to get rid of some pesky birds beneath bridges is being met with serious questions. The motivating factor behind the project is avian excrement - otherwise known as poop. Tucked beneath 14 North Texas tollway bridges, you'll find cages baited with corn, waiting for pigeons to step inside. The tollway says trapping them is necessary to cut down on bird droppings hazardous to the highway and people's health. But Teri Latsko and Nicole Matocha say the threat is to the birds. And they have the pictures to prove it....

Good grief. The bizarre antisemitic propaganda being fed to the Iranian people would be funny in a dark way if it didn’t provoke such a sense of foreboding, of history repeating. (Courtesy of MEMRI TV.) (Video at link) Following are excerpts from an episode of an Iranian documentary series on Hollywood cinema, featuring “Saving Private Ryan,” which aired on IRINN – the Iranian News Channel on May 27, 2008: Narrator: The concentrated efforts of the Zionist lobbies in America have led the U.S. government to be the greatest supporter of the regime occupying Jerusalem. In recent years, following the exposure...

Pounded and strained by heavy traffic and weakened by missing bolts and cracking steel, the failed interstate bridge over the Mississippi River also faced a less obvious enemy: pigeons. Inspectors began documenting the buildup of pigeon dung on the span near downtown Minneapolis two decades ago. Experts say the corrosive guano deposited all over the Interstate 35W span's framework helped the steel beams rust faster...

BALLSTON SPA, N.Y. - An upstate New York couple didn't think a few bats in the attic were much of a problem when they were buying a house last summer. Months later, they found out how wrong they were when they discovered more than a ton and a half of bat droppings up there. Nick LaBoda and Jenna Caputo say a home inspector informed them about the bats. They called an exterminator, who told them to wait a while before removing the bats because the babies were too young to fly. Then they forgot about the bats until they smelled...

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- After two years of study in an isolated northeast Oklahoma cave, Jim Stout has discovered that a rare species of grotto salamander has a diet much different from what was expected. Stout, the supervisor of the Herpetarium at the Oklahoma City Zoo, has helped write a report published by a leading scholarly journal that documents how a blind cave-dwelling salamander eats bat droppings. The salamander was thought to subsist on bugs and shrimp and this is the first report of a salamander, or any amphibian, living on bat guano.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Detainees at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have clashed at least 16 times, including one man who claims he has been beaten by fellow prisoners because he practices a different form of Islam than the majority at the camp. None of the incidents resulted in life-threatening injuries to the detainees at the center for U.S. terror suspects, according to the documents, which were obtained by The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. In one incident, two detainees fought after one accused the other of lying to military interrogators...

Lackawanna County Courthouse jokesters have had a lot of rich material to work with lately: At least 1,000 pounds worth, in fact. That's the low estimate of how much pigeon dung has been excavated from above a bathroom at the courthouse in the last week. The deposit may weigh a ton, said president of the company cleaning the feces out. The deposit -- two feet deep -- was in the turret on the northwest corner of the courthouse, above the private bathroom off Judge Vito P. Geroulo's chambers. Bob Conway, president of Alicon Environmental of Clarks Summit, estimated the dung,...