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Tourists photograph King penguin Nils Olav as he walks past soldiers from the Norwegian King's Guard after he received a Knighthood at Edinburgh Zoo August 15, 2008.

LONDON - Nils Olav already has medals for good conduct and long service. He made honorary colonel-in-chief of the elite Norwegian King's Guard in 2005. And on Friday he was knighted. Not bad for a 3-foot tall penguin — actually, three of them. A resident of Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, the original Nils Olav was made an honorary member of the King's Guard in 1972 after being picked out as the guard's mascot by lieutenant Nils Egelien. The guards adopted him because they often toured the zoo during their visits to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an annual military music festival,...

An Antarctic fur seal has been observed trying to have sex with a king penguin. The South African-based scientists who witnessed the incident say it is the most unusual case of mammal mating behaviour yet known....

Kelly Hodge carries a penguin that survived an accident on a Texas highway Tuesday. About two dozen penguins, tropical fish and an octopus spilled out when the truck carrying them overturned. "We had a penguin wreck," Department of Public Safety Trooper Richard Buchanan said. He said Hodge, 34, the truck driver, swerved, overcorrected and then rolled the vehicle into a ditch.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI&search=gore%20and%20penguinWatch this spoof of an "inconvenient truth".If you loved "March of the Penguins"You'll cry! You'll laugh out loud as Al explains it all.

‘Pakistani terror suspect had bomb plans’ SYDNEY: A Pakistani-born man accused of planning terrorist attacks had maps of Australia’s power grid, aerial photographs of defence installations and bomb-making instructions in his possession when he was arrested, a court was told here on Tuesday. Architect Faheem Khalid Lodhi, 34, was also alleged in October 2001 to have acted “in an apparent official capacity” at a training camp in Lahore, operated by the banned terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba. “The camp specialised in urban warfare,” prosecutor Richard Maidment told Sydney’s Central Local Court at the opening of a committal hearing to decide if there...

Children on a fossil hunt have discovered the remains of what may have been the biggest penguin to waddle the planet. The remains were found last month near Kawhia and are thought to be 40 million years old. Experts think it may be the finest example of the long-extinct bird found. They say the Kawhia giant dwarfed the huge emperor penguin, and had it lived today would have looked many men in the eye. The 22-strong expedition from the Hamilton Junior Naturalists Club were out to find fossils for a natural history museum at Te Kauri Lodge, near Kawhia, when...

Zoo staff are "anxious" about a baby Jackass penguin which was stolen by burglars at a zoo. Toga, who is brown and white - having not yet reached his adult colouring - was snatched from Amazon World in Sandown on the Isle of Wight. Born in September, Toga lives on a special diet and needs to be kept cool, with access to plenty of fresh water. Keepers say he needs to be with his mother and will not take food from humans. He can survive for five days. Katherine Bright, manager at Amazon World, said: "Toga was last seen at...

It is an odyssey to rival Scott's in the Antarctic, albeit with a happier ending. Fierce snowstorms rage, icy blasts flick across the screen. March of the Penguins, an epic nature documentary with a cast of thousands, was the surprise usurper of summer blockbusters at the American box office and is tipped to be the hit family film in Britain this Christmas. To many, it will be no more nor less than a life-affirming portrayal of Mother Nature, reminiscent of Sunday-evening television with Sir David Attenborough whispering from the undergrowth. To some, however, the mesmerising images of birds waddling, mating...

New York City's most famous gay penguin couple has split up. Even worse, one of them has taken up with a female penguin new to the Central Park Zoo, the New York Post reports. Silo and Roy, two male chinstrap penguins native to the South Atlantic, made local headlines six years ago when they came out with their same-sex relationship. Since then, the pair have successfully hatched and raised an adopted chick — after trying to incubate a rock — and become role models for six other same-sex couples among penguins at the zoo. That all ended when Scrappy, a...

While investigating the sexual politics of penguins and the hit movie "March of the Penguins," I discovered a startling penguin-related psychosexual development. Even though the mainstream media have ignored this news, I am compelled to report it here, to you, today: Roy and Silo, the two famous gay penguins at New York's Central Park Zoo, are no longer a pair. Silo has gone straight. They broke up after six years together. Once, they were provided a donated egg. They sat on it and hatched it and this was celebrated as some kind of penguin lifestyle choice in the New York...

Founder of the animal sex tour quits after clash over birds' care. Jane Tollini, the world's most famous penguin keeper and creator of the popular Valentine's Day animal sex tour, has left the San Francisco Zoo. In a decision that no one seems happy about, Tollini decided to quit because she couldn't stand seeing her flock suffer during a recent deadly outbreak of chlamydia and didn't agree with a veterinarian's course of treatment. "I'm going through withdrawal and separation anxiety," Tollini said. "I'm practically lactating." Over two decades, she turned a wayward bunch of Magellanic penguins into the most...

With all the opuses (opii?) around here lately, maybe it's best to just see who is still here.

A German zoo has abandoned a plan to break up homosexual penguin couples after protests from gay rights groups. The Bremerhaven Zoo in northern Germany had earlier flown in four female Humboldt penguins in an attempt to encourage three all-male couples to reproduce. The zoo originally defended the experiment on the grounds that the birds were an endangered species. But after protests from gay rights groups, director Heike Kueck said the zoo was abandoning the plan. "Everyone can live here as they please," Ms Kueck said. She said it was not her intention, nor was it possible, to separate the...

A German zoo's plan to introduce females into a group of what they think are homosexual male penguins has angered gay rights groups — who complain that the zoo's actions are trying to turn the penguins straight. The Bremerhaven Zoo concluded the penguins might be gay after the males tried to mate with one another. Zookeepers say they just want to see whether the birds were acting that way because of a lack of females. A spokesman added, "Nobody is trying to break up same sex pairs by force."

A German zoo has imported four female penguins from Sweden in an effort to tempt its gay penguins to go straight.The four Swedish females were dispatched to the Bremerhaven Zoo in Bremen after it was found that three of the zoo's five penguin pairs were homosexual. Keepers at the zoo ordered DNA tests to be carried out on the penguins after they had been mating for years without producing any chicks. It was only then they realised that six of the birds were living in homosexual partnerships. Director Heike Kueck said that the zoo hoped to see some baby penguins...

SCO seals deal for legal expense cap Published: November 5, 2004, 10:30 AM PST By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com The SCO Group has signed a previously announced agreement with two law firms that will cap legal expenses for its Linux and Unix litigation at $31 million, the company said in a legal filing Thursday. The expense cap agreement--announced Aug. 31 but signed Oct. 31--puts to rest some uncertainty about the company's abilities to pay the hefty legal fees incurred through its legal attacks against IBM, Novell, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler and its legal defense against Red Hat. SCO's stock...

There he goes again. President George W. Bush, having run out of attack slogans, has gone back to the old Republican standby of accusing his opponent, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., of being a liberal. What's wrong with that? It's ironic that the Bush 43 is accusing Kerry of being a "tax-and-spend liberal." This is the same president whose legacy will include a huge budget deficit that will be with us long after he has left office. The attempted demonization of the word "liberal" began with Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980 and was picked up by George H.W. Bush in...

Penguin and the great katie.com hijackBy Kieren McCarthyPublished Wednesday 4th August 2004 10:20 GMT It was a book that taps into many people's fears over Internet technology - how children may be at risk from adults manipulating the anonymous online exchange. There have been numerous TV programmes, articles and even laws created that cover and hope to battle the perceived menace of Internet chatrooms. However, Katie.com is unique in that its author - US teenager Katherine Tarbox - was actually a victim of an online predator. She was 13, so was Mark. Except Mark was really a 40-year-old called Frank, and...

FEBRUARY 16, 2004 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - Today's the day. On Nov. 18, 2003, The SCO Group announced that it would sue some corporate Linux user within 90 days. That put the deadline at Monday, Feb. 16. Has SCO sued? I don't know -- I'm writing this a few days before that deadline, and my time machine is in the shop, so you'll have to go to Computerworld.com for the latest news. But regardless of whether SCO has already sued a user or is just running a little behind schedule, winning any Linux lawsuits may have just gotten a lot...

A little penguin related fun.

The jury is in. After years of experimentation with Linux in the enterprise, customers, analysts, and vendors are starting to sing a consistent tune about where Linux makes financial sense and where it doesn’t. Although Linux is often thought of as a free alternative to established OSes such as Windows and proprietary Unix is it really cheaper when you add the costs of acquisition, migration, operation, and support? In other words, is the TCO (total cost of ownership) of Linux really lower than that of Unix or Windows? The simple answer is this: The more fully an enterprise adopts Linux...

<p>A few penguins swimming leisurely every now and then at the San Francisco Zoo is nothing new. But dozens of them doing laps in unison all day to the point of exhaustion has zookeepers perplexed.</p> <p>"We've lost complete control," said Jane Tollini, the zoos penguin keeper. "It's a free-for-all in here. After 18 years of doing this job, these birds are making mincemeat of me."</p>

HotheadsAprile Pazzo was about to call it a day when she noticed that the penguins she was observing seemed strangely agitated. Pazzo, a wildlife biologist, was in Antarctica studying penguins at a remote, poorly explored area along the coast of the Ross Sea. "I was getting ready to release a penguin I had tagged when I heard a lot of squawking," says Pazzo. "When I looked up, the whole flock had sort of stampeded. They were waddling away faster than I'd ever seen them move." Pazzo waded through the panicked birds to find out what was wrong. She found one...