It's happened in places like Louisiana, Arkansas and Kentucky. Hundreds of birds mysteriously found dead.

Folks in Yankton, South Dakota, thought they were being added to the list after hundreds of dead birds were found there on Monday. Turns out the unpleasant feathered discovery has a solid explanation. They were poisoned.


Some had thought 200 starlings found dead in Yankton's Riverside park had frozen to death. But they were actually poisoned on purpose, by the US Department of Agriculture.

Many of the European Starlings discovered by a passerby, were laying on the ground or frozen in trees. Officials first thought the birds were late to migrate and froze to death during the recent cold spell.

But that theory changed after Yankton police received a phone call from a USDA official who said the birds had been poisoned.

"They say that they had poisoned the birds about ten miles south of Yankton and they were surprised they came to Yankton like they did and died in our park," says Yankton Animal Control Officer Lisa Brasel.

The USDA confirms the story, saying the deaths were part of a large killing at a private feed lot in Nebraska.

Ontario's top court says the case of a woman who married her son, conceived several children with him and tried to pass him off as an African prince "gives new meaning to the word 'bizarre.'"

The Court of Appeal for Ontario upheld an incest conviction, as well as convictions on 46 counts of forgery and uttering forged documents, for a woman named B.D. in a decision released Thursday.

B.D. had appealed, saying the judge should have struck down DNA warrants, erred in his charge to the jury and in admitting some documents.

B.D., 47, maintains she is married to a man named Prince Wafi R. Dz., a real prince and a descendent of Nigerian or Ethiopian royalty. But, as found at her trial, her husband is really her 21-year-old son, Wafi. She also maintains that Wafi died in a volcano in the Congo, the court said.

The Appeal Court decision did not use real names, to protect the identities of the people involved, instead using fictitious names to help the decision be understood.

Psychiatric reports filed for the B.D.'s sentencing said she suffers from some delusional psychosis and is "intellectually deficient" with an IQ of 60.

The woman has seven children, including Wafi, three children fathered by Wafi and a girl named Wafu who died of natural causes at the age of two, but with characteristic traits of inbreeding, the court said.

It's a heartbreaking tale that could close the books on an 11-year cold case.

It involves a missing girl and a cancer-stricken convict who, on his deathbed, allegedly confessed to murdering her many years ago.

A health-care worker emerged this week to say that a convicted sex-offender, the prime suspect in the Julie Surprenant kidnapping case, revealed before dying that he dumped the girl's body in a river.

The medical worker apparently waited almost five years before going public with her story. She finally told a television celebrity, a well-known Quebec crime reporter, this week.

It's a story that Surprenant's father struggles to accept.

"It was a shock when I heard the news (this week) because I wasn't expecting it and because there's a level of credibility to it," Michel Surprenant said Thursday.

"For the time being, I'm holding back a little."

The father said he doesn't understand why it would take so long to go public with the supposed confession of the long-time suspect, Richard Bouillon.

Julie Surprenant, one of Quebec's best-known abduction cases, became famous as the smiling, curly-haired girl in the high-school graduation photo splashed on missing person's posters around the province.

The parents of a slain college student said Thursday that former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "messed with the wrong family" by reducing the prison sentence of the son of a political ally.

Fred and Kathy Santos spoke after filing a lawsuit in Sacramento County Superior Court asking a judge to restore a 16-year sentence for Esteban Nunez, the son of former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez.

"Arnold Schwarzenegger underestimated us," Kathy Santos said outside the courthouse. "I think he believed he could get away with this despicable commutation. He messed with the wrong family."

The younger Nunez, 21, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon for his involvement in the 2008 stabbing death of Luis Santos on the San Diego State University campus.

Prosecutors said Nunez and his friends were irate after being turned away from a fraternity party and were looking for revenge. After drinking alcohol, prosecutors alleged, they headed out on the street and came upon an unarmed group that included Santos, 22.

Schwarzenegger reduced Nunez's sentence to seven years the night before he left office and did not contact the family or the San Diego County district attorney's office before making the move.

Clovis, California - The Clovis Unified school board voted unanimously Wednesday night to expel a Buchanan High student, concluding that a wrestling move he used on a teammate during practice constituted sexual battery and bullying.

Preston Hill, 17, and his parents left before the decision was announced.

"They thought it would be a waste of time to stick around," said attorney Charles Magill, who made a last-ditch effort to get Hill reinstated at Buchanan.

The board deliberated privately for fewer than 30 minutes before announcing the decision at a public hearing at Clovis Unified School District headquarters.

Hill, who was suspended before the school year started, now can't finish his senior year at Buchanan or set foot on Clovis Unified property. His options include enrolling in another school district or attending a charter or private school.

Switzerland is the destination of choice for people from abroad who want to die. The office of the country's top legal official is pushing to change that.

While assisted suicide is permitted in the Netherlands, Belgium and the U.S. states of Oregon, Washington and Montana, only Switzerland allows doctors to help foreigners end their lives. More than 25 percent of the 380 assisted suicides in Switzerland during 2009 involved foreigners, most of whom died after drinking water laced with a lethal dose of barbiturates.

Former Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, who was replaced by Simonetta Sommaruga in November, has proposed making the practice more difficult by demanding oversight by doctors who aren't connected with one of the country's four right-to-die organizations. Assisted suicide has been legal in Switzerland since 1942.

At least 22 confirmed last year in and around Fort Hood, doubling the post's total from 2009.

Killeen, Texas - Sgt. 1st Class Gregory Eugene Giger was a "tall quiet Texan" even after his wife filed for divorce while he was in Iraq, his mom says.

Still, he was devastated.

"The only thing that I know is when she sued for divorce, she charged him with $2,000-a-month child support and insisted that he pay half of the house," said Helen Giger, 71, of Chandler, east of Dallas. "And by the time she got through charging him with various things, he had very little money left over, not even hardly enough to pay for his rent."

Authorities found Giger, 42, of Houston dead in his apartment near Fort Hood, hanging by necktie. He was one of at least 22 GIs from the post to commit suicide in 2010.

Chief constable says relationships with targets in environmental movement 'grossly unprofessional'
A police spy married an activist he met while undercover in the environmental protest movement and then went on to have children with her, the Guardian can reveal.

He is the fourth spy now to have been identified as an undercover police officer engaged in the covert surveillance of eco-activists. Three of those spies are accused of having had sexual relationships with the people they were targeting.

The details of the activities of the fourth spy, who is still a serving Metropolitan police officer, emerged as the senior police officer managing the crisis in undercover operations insisted that officers were strictly banned from having sexual relationships with their targets.

Jon Murphy, the chief constable of Merseyside, told the Guardian it was "never acceptable" for undercover officers to sleep with people they were targeting.

"Something has gone badly wrong here. We would not be where we are if it had not," he said, referring to three inquiries into undercover policing that have been launched in response to the Guardian's investigation into the first spy, Mark Kennedy, an undercover officer who had several sexual relationships during his seven-year deployment.

Recently, the formerly highly respected web essayist, John Kaminski, wrote a new piece entitled "Parasite alert: Outing those who pretend to be friends of the truth" in which he took a strange jab at yours truly as follows:

[...] It's also interesting that Daryl writes about Zionists but agrees with French law that one may not speak about the Holocaust, a colossal act of cowardice that should send people running from his site and should de-legitimize anything he says in the minds of anybody who can think. [...] Another person who falls into this category is channeler Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who has inveigled many with her prescient psychological pronouncements that it is a percentage of psychopaths that hold the world in thrall through savagery. K-J's encyclopedic and endlessly perfect papers about aspects of human behavior scare the shit out of me, because her new science of ponerology could serve perfectly as a new template for totalitarianism, to be imposed by the very people who get to fund spooky think tanks like these. Thankfully, she has not caught on in any of the groups I observe working on the world's problems. [See our Forum Thread for the entire essay]

John is right: understanding what is really going on here on the BBM has not caught on in any of the groups he observes "working on the world's problems." We can also note that none of these groups seem to be making any progress because the very science that could help them to understand the first level of what they need to solve before anything can ever get done "scares the shite" out of them. Now, why would that be?

It's an interesting question, and I want to share a story about someone else who was working on solving the world's problems at another time and place in history, similar to our present day, in order to make a particular point. I want to talk about Frtiz Gerlich's Bloody Spectacles. Now, before I get to Fritz, let me first say a few words about David Irving. In my previous blogpost, I discussed the truly scary idea that is taking hold in many anti-Zionist circles that, because the Zionists seem to be at the root of the world's problems today, that Hitler must have been a good guy because he saw the Jews as being at the root of all the world's ills then. David Irving seems to be one of the ringleaders of this idea. I recently read an interview with Irving where he says that the "defining moment" for him was when he had penetrated the "inner circle" of the people who had been close to Hitler and he realized that they were all "well-educated, nice and decent". So, of course, if all these well-educated, nice people with deep thoughts and insights thought Hitler was a good guy, then of course, he must be! Irving was caught in the psychopath's trap just like all the people in Hitler's inner circle were caught... . He's not the first, either. Nor will he be the last. In fact, it's almost epidemic nowadays. I won't belabor the point; those of you familiar with the problem know exactly what I'm talking about. What is problematical is what this "conviction" has driven Irving to do: cherry pick and spin data. More than that, it has driven him to emulate his hero in certain respects. About the people who support him, Irving has been recorded to say:

"I find it odious to be in the same company as these people. There is no question that there are certain organizations that propagate these theories which are cracked anti-Semites."

In the space of one year, Fox News has lost its perch as the most trusted TV news network in the US and is now average at best, a new survey has found.

A poll gauging public trust in TV news has found that PBS is the most trusted name in news, while trust in Fox News has dropped significantly.

According to a survey from Public Policy Polling, "a year ago a plurality of Americans said they trusted Fox News. Now a plurality of them don't."

In a survey taken a year ago, PPP found that Fox was the most trusted news network, with 49 percent saying they trusted the network, and 37 percent saying they did not. In the new poll, 42 percent said they trusted the network while 46 percent disagreed.