Leader of Lebanon's most powerful Druze clan Walid Jumblatt says Lebanon can turn to Iran to acquire the weapons it needs for protection against its enemies.

Speaking to Press TV in Beirut on Saturday, Jumblatt warned about a possible Israeli aggression against Lebanon, saying: "They (Israelis) are not hiding that, they are saying we will attack or we will one day come to Lebanon again."

He added that Washington refuses to provide Lebanon with its essential armament, fearing that the weapons could be used against its ally, Israel.

"Until now all the weapons delivered to the Lebanese army were American weapons or weapons from the Arab world," Jumblatt said.

An inscription praising Joseph Stalin at a refurbished metro station in Moscow has sparked a new controversy over the Soviet political and architectural heritage.

Passengers at the Kurskaya metro station, unveiled after the repairs, have been surprised recently to see it decorated with a powerful symbol of the past. A restored inscription contains a line from an old version of the Soviet national anthem.

The line reads: "Stalin brought us up to be loyal to people, inspired us to labor and feats." Unveiling the decoration coincided with the death of Sergey Mikhalkov, the author of the Soviet Union's and Russia's national anthems. In 1977, Mikhalkov had to renew the anthem, removing the name of Stalin from it.

The Nevada cop who rescued a woman raped by sicko Phillip Garrido 33 years ago lambasted authorities on Saturday for allowing the sex fiend to go free.

Long before Garrido abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard, Reno Police Officer Clifford Conrad caught the psycho raping a 25-year-old casino worker he also had kidnapped.

"Someone dropped the ball," the retired Conrad, 66, told the Daily News.

"I thought he got sentenced to 50 years to life, so how he got out after 10 years, I'll never know. I guess a lot of people dropped the ball his whole life."

"I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice." -- Deng Xiaoping, who opened China to foreign investment after 1978

China is being called a "miracle economy." It seems to have decoupled from the rest of the world, preserving an 8% growth rate while the rest of the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s. How is that phenomenal growth rate possible, when other countries relying heavily on exports have suffered major downturns and remain in the doldrums? Economist Richard Wolff skeptically observes:

We now have a situation in the world where we have a global capitalist crisis. Everywhere, consumption is down. Everywhere, people are buying fewer goods, including goods from China. How is it possible that in that society, so dependent on the world economy, they could now have an explosive growth? Their stock market is now 100 percent higher than at its low -- nothing remotely like that hardly anywhere in the world, certainly not in the United States or Europe. How is that possible? In order to believe what the Chinese are saying, you would have to agree that in a matter of months, at most a year, no more, they have been able to transform their economy from an export-based powerhouse to a domestically focused industrial engine. Nowhere in the world has that ever taken less than decades.

Philadelphia - A seldom-employed psychopath was sentenced to 120 years in prison Wednesday for making a huge cache of child pornography that shows him sexually assaulting a dozen children, including infants at a girlfriend's in-home day care.

The FBI found John Jackey Worman with more than 1 million images of child pornography when they arrested him in suburban Philadelphia in 2007.

Beijing - Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.

Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China's surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.

"I've seen a surge of young people coming to work in China over the last few years," said Jack Perkowski, founder of Asimco Technologies, one of the largest automotive parts companies in China.

When it happened in 1994, researchers were quick to reassure us what a once-in-a-millenia event it was. One paper "estimated that the time interval between impacts of 0.3 km diameter comets on Jupiter is approximately 500 years, whereas the interval between the impact of 1.6 km comets is about 6000 years." How appropriate then that the Universe should mock us wonderfully by arranging for the return of a similar-sized impact event exactly 15 years later!

But why should anyone be surprised? Just how long has NASA known about the high risk of impacts? While the 40 anniversary of the moon landing was being celebrated this month we turned to Victor Clube for long forgotten information about the moon landings:

"The Apollo astronauts planted seismometers on the Moon, primarily to measure Moonquakes. But they got diverted from their business by the discovery that objects, which they didn't expect at least, were hitting the Moon. These seismometers regularly recorded large bodies hitting the Moon like the meteoroids which I've just been describing. And this diagram is an illustration of the record of the incidence of these meteoroids, integrated over a period of about seven years until NASA switched the machine off- in exasperation, apparently, because they didn't think it was telling us anything very interesting.

© Unknown
Schumacher-Levy approaching Jupiter 15 years ago

Nevertheless, for seven or eight years they accumulated this data, and what you see here is the integral result of the observations, per day, through the years, throughout the whole of this seven or eight year period. And, of course, it looks a little like the skyline of Oxford, where I come from, but never mind, the prominent thing is that you see one remarkable peak in the middle which is, in fact, centered on about the 30th June. And all that peak, in fact, coincides with the products of one year's observing. So in that one year, 1975, in fact, we had a flood of objects hitting the Moon, which actually were also hitting the Earth, and they all were present, apparently, in the same stream, as was responsible for the Tunguska object in 1908 which, as you recall, also arrived the end of June. In fact, this end of June is an interesting time. It's the time when we pass through the Taurid stream, going in one direction. And the other direction is, in fact, the beginning of November, and you can see some signs of that in this same diagram."

Animals are being killed and maimed by a "demented psychopath'' on the New South Wales central coast, sparking fears the crimes will escalate.

In the past two weeks three mutilated kangaroos, two beheaded parrots, several savaged rabbits and what is thought to be a decapitated dog or sheep have been found, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

The animals were dumped in water or at the water's edge at separate sites at Point Clare and Avoca Lagoon.

Concerned local police have assigned an officer to collate the incidents and investigate links.

One of the men who robbed and murdered Shirley van Rensburg and then dismembered her body before burying it in a warthog burrow was declared a dangerous psychopath 17 years ago.

Correctional Services authorities were warned against his release on parole after a Grahamstown High Court judge ruled that Wayne Nass, 34, needed therapy while in custody. The judge made the comments as he sent Nass to jail for 20 years for murder and robbery on February 14 1992.

He was released on parole in December 2004.

On Friday, the Johannesburg High Court found Nass and his co-accused Boyce Matya, 48, guilty of the murder of Van Rensburg eight months after Nass had been paroled - on August 20 2005.

California has over $17 billion on deposit in banks that have refused to honor its IOUs, forcing legislators to accept crippling budget cuts. These austerity measures are unnecessary. If the state were to deposit its money in its own state-owned bank, it could have enough credit to solve its budget crisis with funds to spare.

"We make money the old-fashioned way," said Art Rolnick, chief economist of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. "We print it." That works for the federal government's central bank, but states are forbidden by the Constitution to issue "bills of credit," a term that has been interpreted to mean the state's own paper money. "Sacramento is not Washington," said California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in May. "We cannot print our own money." When legislators could not agree on how to solve the state's $26.3 billion budget deficit, the Governor therefore did the next best thing: he began paying the bills with IOUs ("I Owe You's," or promises to pay bearing interest).