Eideard

Gas stations across the country are increasingly offering discounts for fuel purchases made with cash as high oil prices eat into their profits.

Gas stations like this one in San Francisco, California, are required to clearly show cash and credit prices.

The difference of 10 cents a gallon or more has some customers used to paying with a credit card irate, but station owners say they have to do something to turn a profit.

“If we pay 3 percent or even a little less than that at $4 a gallon in a credit card fee and I’m making 12 cents a gallon, that’s my entire profit,” said Paul Kelly, who owns a Sunoco station in New Jersey.

No surprise, the oil companies squeeze independent filling station owners by restricting their profit to 7-12 cents per gallon regardless of percentage cost increases.

Oil-based sleaze and crime never ends in American politics.

A Greek court has dismissed a request by residents of the Aegean island of Lesbos to ban the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women.

Three residents of Lesbos, the birthplace of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho whose love poems inspired the term lesbian, brought a case last month arguing the use of the term in reference to gay women insulted their identity.

The Athens court said the word did not define the identity of the residents of the island, and so it could be validly used by gay groups in Greece and abroad.

The ruling ordered the plaintiffs to pay court expenses of 230 euros ($366).

Not so incidentally, several residents testified during the trial that the use of the word lesbian had brought recognition to the island and boosted its tourist trade.

Some “moral” nutball just had to have their day in court.

Bosnian Muslim woman praying today at the Potocari Memorial Center near Srebrenica

Radovan Karadzic, a former Bosnian Serb president, is blamed for these and other deaths during a genocidal war that claimed about 100,000 lives. He was captured yesterday in Belgrade, where the so-called “Butcher of Bosnia” had been living under an assumed name and practicing alternative medicine…

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia welcomed his arrest. “This arrest may be considered another milestone in the development of international law and further fulfillment of the Tribunal’s mandate to bring to justice the most senior persons alleged to be most responsible for war crimes in the Yugoslav conflicts,” the court says in a statement.

Right on!

A New Jersey man trying to exterminate insects in his apartment blew it up instead.

Isias Vidal Maceda was unhurt in the incident, but 80 percent of his apartment was destroyed, Eatontown, New Jersey police told the NY Daily News.

The accident occurred as Maceda was spraying for pests in his kitchen. Somehow the bug spray ignited a blast that blew out the apartment’s front windows and triggered a fire that quickly spread, the newspaper said.

He survived; so, he doesn’t qualify for a Darwin Award submission. Just an idiot!

Congress should explicitly declare a state of armed conflict with al Qaeda to make clear the United States can detain suspected members as long as the war on terrorism lasts, says U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Mukasey urged Congress to make the declaration in a package of legislative proposals to establish a legal process for terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo, in response to a Supreme Court ruling last month that detainees had a constitutional right to challenge their detention…

“Congress should reaffirm that for the duration of the conflict the United States may detain as enemy combatants those who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully supported al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated organizations,” he said.

Which includes any organizations so designated by the executive branch of government.
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Tim Miller

The children return from school confused, scared and sometimes with bruises on their wrists, arms or face. Many won’t talk about what happened, or simply can’t, because they are unable to communicate easily, if at all.

“What Tim eventually said,” said Dr. John Miller, a podiatrist in Allegany, New York, about his son, then 12, “was that he didn’t want to go to school because he thought the school was trying to kill him.”

Miller learned that Tim, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was being unusually confrontational in class, and that more than once teachers had held him down on the floor to “calm him down,” according to logs teachers kept to track his behavior; on at least one occasion, adults held Tim prone for 20 minutes until he stopped struggling.

The Millers are suing the district, in part for costs of therapy for their son as a result of the restraints. The district did not dispute the logs but denied that teachers behaved improperly.
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The one thing we all like to do at our desks is eat. But what should we eat? It’s a question to ponder, because the food you consume, rather like the clothes you wear, says a lot about you. And just as you wouldn’t wear day-glo leg-warmers to minute a meeting of the board of directors, so you’d be ill-advised to spend each lunchtime with a polystyrene box of doner meat and chips, criss-crossed artistically with ketchup, and expect that big promotion to be in the bag. Some foods ooze professional kudos. Other foods just, well, ooze.

So what are the good, the bad and the ugly of desk-top delicacies? Top of the list of pariahs comes smelly food – burgers, kebabs, hot dogs, saveloys and the like. In fact, any food which is normally consumed after four or five stiff drinks is best avoided at your desk.

Next there is kiddy food. Most of us have a hankering for the tastes of our childhood from time to time but indulge in infantile treats on a daily basis and people will start to question whether you’re really mature enough to have responsibility for … well, anything. If you need to kick-start the day with an outsize bowl of Coco Pops, do it in the privacy of your own home. And if you have a mother who is still willing to make you sandwiches with the crusts cut off on a daily basis, that might not be something to shout about.

And then there’s the problem of noisy food. A perfectly ripe peach is a lovely thing – but is almost impossible to eat without making disgusting slurping noises and getting juice all over your face and/or clothes.

But that’s the problem with eating – it tends to be a messy business, especially when your mind is on other things, even if you’ve packed the most carefully chosen non-smelly, non-kiddy, non-noisy items.

All my years on the road required developing survival skills – like how to eat a chile dog without turning my shirt and slacks into an advert for organic spot remover. While not running off the freeway at 80 mph.

Telegraph.co.uk. A young grey squirrel – using all the flexibility and ingenuity of his species – demonstrates how to get round a supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder.

Having lived ‘mongst these critters almost like family, I’m not at all surprised.

Call it the smoking jalapeno. After nearly two months of mystery, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has identified a jalepeno pepper that is contaminated with the same strain of Salmonella saintpaul that has sickened more than 1,237 people in 43 states.

It’s the first time during this outbreak that a test has found the salmonella strain in a piece of produce.

The discovery, which is being announced by FDA, was made at a packing plant in McAllen, Texas, according to a source familiar with the issue. The pepper was grown in Mexico, the source said, but was sent to the U.S. for sale. Authorities are not sure where it was contaminated with salmonella…

Because people continued to get sick after the tomato warning, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shifted their investigation to jalapeno and Serrano peppers, which sick people had reported eating.

Do you think fewer people would have fallen ill if the clowns at the FDA hadn’t waited for weeks before admitting that most of the people who became sick had eaten at Mexican restaurants?

The idiots in government were more concerned over upsetting ethnic voters than preserving the health of our citizens.