Police: MMA fighter found naked in Calif. Church

(Although it’s good to see nudity gaining popularity among the misbehaving and having a guy named “mayhem” being up to shenanigans should come as no surprise. None the less I’d like to hear his side of this,I’m sure it’ll all make perfect sense. )

MISSION VIEJO, Calif. — Mixed martial arts fighter and reality show host Jason "Mayhem" Miller was in jail on suspicion of burglary Monday night after deputies responding to reports of a break-in said they found him naked inside a Southern California church.

Miller was being held on $20,000 bail and was scheduled to appear in court Wednesday, Orange County jail records showed.

The pastor at Mission Hills Church in Mission Viejo called authorities when he found evidence of a break-in Monday morning, including books and CDs that were strewn about, white powder on the floors and missing boards from a previously broken window, sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said.

Deputies arrived and said they found Miller naked on a couch.

"When they asked him his name he responded, `Mayhem,' " Amormino told the Orange County Register.

They also found evidence that Miller had set off fire extinguishers inside the church, Amormino said. Miller was coherent and cooperated with authorities as he was arrested.

Deputies did not know if Miller had hired an attorney, and phone listings for Miller or a representative could not be found. A message left on his official Facebook page was not immediately returned.

Miller, a popular professional middleweight in the mixed martial arts world, has fought for several organizations including UFC, but has lost three of eight fights.

He also hosted the MTV show "Bully Beatdown," a reality show where bullies are challenged to take on professional MMA fighters for a chance to win money.

Before his last fight on May 27, Miller said he would retire if he was defeated, and went on to lose a lackluster decision to C.B. Dollaway

Camp aims to lift clown frowns during slow economy

(clowns, rarely a laughing matter. ‘cause apparently Clownin like pimpin ain’t easy. Weather as fangy horrors in Killer Klowns or being one the weirder roles Tim Curry ever played, the Clown like the Ninja, the Cowboy and the Pirate limps forward into the 21^stcentury eerie pale head held high ready to entertain and/or traumatize for generations to come.)

By GILLIAN FLACCUS, APONTARIO, Calif. — Even when she's not in character, Julie Varholdt acts like a buffoon.

On a recent day, the veteran clown named "Lovely Buttons" gave her age as 1 billion, 527 million and 437,512 seconds; did a few pull-ups on a luggage cart, and then stretched out on a hotel front desk to the giggles of the receptionist.

Bring up professional clowning, however, and the mother of three decked out in cartoon-sized purple buttons, a red straw hat and oversized shoes grows serious — and even sheds a few real tears.

"Clowning is an art, it is an ancient art," said Varholdt, whose grandfather was a clown. "You can't just pull on a wig and slap a watermelon smile on and — `Poof!' — you're a clown. Unfortunately, we see it a lot."

These days, that half-rate competition is cutting into clowning when the recession has already hit some in the business like a pie in the face. A weeklong conference to help clowns punch up their punch lines and learn new tricks also became a forum for how to make it in a niche industry that is contracting in decidedly unfunny ways.

For many at the conference about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, the number of paid gigs have dropped while demand for pro bono performances at charities, hospitals and schools has soared. Parents no longer are content with someone just joking around: They want a skilled face painter, a magician, a stand-up comic and a wizard with a menagerie of ever-more-complex balloon animals.

"I can't tell you how many times that phone will ring and they'll say, `Well, they do painting AND balloons for that price,'" said Donna Hofstee, who taught about 15 attendees the finer arts of face-painting, including how to dab on a tear drop and cover tiny faces with tiger spots, cheetah spots and zebra stripes.

California Clown Campin' started three years ago after a long-running camp in Wisconsin went kaput. Instructors from the U.S. and Canada led sessions on marketing and character development sprinkled among staples of slapstick and sleight of hand.

The most successful clowns will have a Mother Goose-type character for schools, a seasonal persona for the holidays and even a special shtick for parades, said Laura Sicklesteel, the event's co-director who focuses on church events as "Molly the Clown."

"Everybody's cutting the extras and unfortunately we are an extra," said Sicklesteel, who has seen a 15 to 20 percent drop in paid gigs. "The growth potential of expanding your character — or maybe even creating a new character — that helps you to market yourself better."

Morgan Thacker got a scholarship to the conference from Bristol, Tenn., with the hope of building her clown character.

She learned to twist balloons into ladybugs and dogs, apply her own whiteface makeup, yank a tablecloth without disturbing the place settings and practiced delivering and receiving a pie in the face.

"A person opens up so much more whenever you make them laugh, or make them smile or show them that you're a little bit different," Thacker said. "I think that will help me in all areas of my life."

Rather than joining the circus, though, she'll start her freshman year this week at Utah State University — with some new tricks up her sleeve. Her clowning aspirations will soon be tested off-campus.

She has her first gig at a family restaurant this fall.

Conn. homeowner billed 25 years for streetlights

( way to go office of consumer council, better late than never. It may be cynical of me but it seems you find more articles like this in an election year, now I’m saying politicians are look for photo ops, good press and easy fixes to boost their popularity..no wait, I’m saying exactly that. Every year the oligarchy looking to keep the angry mobs at bay and keep their sweet jobs intact flood the news with stuff like this. Like they’re saying “see! See! We are helping you and not taking your money for no reason!” now don’t get me wrong I’m not tea party, no government, liaise faire type, for the most part, I think government does it’s intended job. I also think it’s overrun with opportunistic self serving s.o.b.s that would sell you out for a plug nickel if they thought they could get away with it. so this fine lady being reimbursed after years of being ripped off right under her very nose sounds like a mixed blessing to me)

CHESHIRE, Conn. — Connecticut Light & Power has reimbursed a woman almost $10,500 after acknowledging it billed her for 25 years for the electricity used to power streetlights near her home.

Grace Edwards tells the Hartford Courant she discovered the billing error after a prospective buyer for the house in Cheshire asked for a history of utility charges.

The bills included line items for "9500 Lumen HP Sodium" and "6300 Lumen HP Sodium" — two sodium vapor streetlights.

When she inquired about those charges, Connecticut Light & Power said a developer who previously owned the home had agreed to pay for the streetlights.

The company removed the charges from her bill but initially refused to reimburse Edwards for past charges. She said they relented when the state's Office of Consumer Counsel got involved.

"I called CL&P, wrote letters, did it all, but they were unresponsive to any kind of reimbursement," she told the New Haven Register. "I really thought I was going to have to sue CL&P."

CL&P spokesman Mitch Gross said the company has acknowledged that the service was below the company's standard and has apologized to her for the error and the inconvenience.

"We have reimbursed her in the amount that she was incorrectly billed plus interest and will be using this case as a learning experience to identify process and customer service improvements to be sure this doesn't happen again in the future," Gross said.

The company cut Edwards a check for $10,491.21, which is about $35 for each month she was overbilled. The company said the actual overcharges were about $5,800, which is about $19 a month

Woman denies NJ man locked her in room for years

(this just raises so many questions, why were police searching his home? If someone wants to be locked up for their own “safety’ is it ok? Was this woman a werewolf? Did this neighborhood suffer from Panty stealing Goblins? Why do they always list the cash value of found drugs? Who determines these numbers? Is it an average or based on local fair market value? Are we really sure this woman wasn’t a werewolf? Soo many questions.)

By DAVID PORTER, AP
1 hour ago

PATERSON, N.J. — A woman found behind a padlocked door inside a New Jersey apartment said the boyfriend accused of keeping her there for years is "a good man" who has never abused her.

Nancy Rodriguez Duran said the kidnapping case against 42-year-old Michael Mendez is a lie and that she asked him to padlock the bedroom door with her inside.

Speaking to reporters before Mendez appeared in court Tuesday, Duran said her boyfriend was going out last Thursday and she was worried about maintenance workers coming into their Paterson, N.J., apartment and seeing her in a nightgown.

A state police street gang unit searched the apartment for drugs that day and found the 44-year-old woman in the locked bedroom. Based on interviews and evidence, investigators believe she was kept in the room for extended periods of time for the last two years and possibly up to 10 years, state police spokesman acting Sgt. 1st Class Brian Polite said.

Mendez, who police say is a member of the Latin Kings street gang, was charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment and other counts, including some related to the drugs officials said they were looking for in the first place.

He pleaded not guilty Tuesday and remains held on $1 million bail.

Investigators said the woman was sometimes let out of the room when Mendez was home.

A neighbor said Mendez was a familiar face around the three-story brick apartment complex. He said he often could be seen outside, polishing a car and listening to music.

The neighbor said he saw the woman a few times in recent years, though it was rare. The man, who refused to give his name because of worries over safety, said he remembered seeing the woman get into a car sometime in the last few years.

Neighbors on either side of Mendez's top-floor apartment said they weren't aware that another person lived in the apartment.

"I didn't see any woman," said a man who identified himself only as Buddy and opened his door only a few inches as he spoke. "This is the first I'm hearing of it."

A maintenance worker, who also declined to give his name because of concerns over his safety, remembered the woman "cussing me out one time when I was doing my work."

State police said they found 4,200 prescription pills valued at $100,000, 190 grams of marijuana valued at nearly $2,000 and nearly $23,000 in cash inside the apartment.

 Billboard with dummy on noose shocks Vegas drivers

( hangman’s just not the game it used to be.)

LAS VEGAS — Police say a mannequin dangling from a hangman's noose on a Las Vegas billboard with the words "Dying for Work" was a publicity stunt.

Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Jeremie Elliott says 911 calls started coming in early Wednesday from drivers worried the dummy along Interstate 15 near Bonanza Road was a real person.

The black billboard featured the words "Dying for Work" in white lettering, with a hanging, dark-suited mannequin.

A woman who answered the phone at Lamar Advertising Co. says the sign was not authorized and was being removed. She did not provide her name.

Elliott says it's not clear who's responsible.

At least one similar billboard was reported in Las Vegas. That sign read "Hope You're Happy Wall St." and featured another dummy

Fossils hint at distant cousins to our ancestors

(monkey, monkey ,monkey, ain’t science grand? I do enjoy when science finds things like this, when the neat and tidy packages come unraveled to reveal some new tangle lurking just below the surface. I’ve long believed that humanity grew from many sources and it’s good to see some evidence backing that up.)

WASHINGTON — Our family tree may have sprouted some long-lost branches going back nearly 2 million years. A famous paleontology family has found fossils that they think confirm their theory that there are two additional pre-human species besides the one that eventually led to modern humans.

A team led by Meave Leakey, daughter-in-law of famed scientist Louis Leakey, found facial bones from one creature and jawbones from two others in Kenya. That led the researchers to conclude that man's early ancestor had plenty of human-like company from other species.

These wouldn't be Homo erectus, believed to be our direct ancestor. They would be more like very distant cousins, who when you go back even longer in time, shared an ancient common ancestor, one scientist said.

But other experts in human evolution aren't convinced by what they say is a leap to large conclusions based on limited evidence. It's the continuation of a long-running squabble in anthropology about the earliest members of our own genus, or class, called Homo _an increasingly messy family history. And much of it stems from a controversial discovery that the Leakeys made 40 years ago.

In their new findings, the Leakey team says that none of their newest fossil discoveries match erectus, so they had to be from another flat-faced relatively large species with big teeth.

The new specimens have "a really distinct profile" and thus they are "something very different," said Meave Leakey, describing the study published online Wednesday in Nature.

What these new bones did match was an old fossil that Meave and her husband Richard helped find in 1972 that was baffling. That skull, called 1470, just didn't fit with Homo erectus, the Leakeys contended. They said it was too flat-faced with a non-jutting jaw. They initially said it was well more than 2.5 million years old in a dating mistake that was later seized upon by creationists as evidence against evolution because it indicated how scientists can make dating mistakes. It turned out to be 2 million years old.

For the past 40 years, the scientific question has been whether 1470 was a freak mutation of erectus or something new. For many years, the Leakeys have maintained that the male skull known as 1470 showed that there were more than one species of ancient hominids, but other scientists said it wasn't enough proof.

The Leakeys' new discoveries are more evidence that this earlier "enigmatic face" was a separate species, said study co-author Fred Spoor of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The new bones were found between 2007 and 2009 about six miles away from the old site near the fossil-rich Lake Turkana region, Leakey said.

So that would make two species — erectus and the one represented by 1470.

But it's not that simple. The Leakey scientific team contends that other fossils of old hominids — not those cited in their new study — don't seem to match either erectus or 1470. They argue that the other fossils seem to have smaller heads and not just because they are female. For that reason, the Leakeys believe there were three living Homo species between 1.8 million and 2 million years ago. They would be Homo erectus, the 1470 species, and a third branch.

"Anyway you cut it there are three species," study co-author Susan Anton, an anthropologist at New York University. "One of them is named erectus and that ultimately in our opinion is going to lead to us."

Both of the species that Meave Leakey said existed back then went extinct more than a million years ago in evolutionary dead-ends.

"Human evolution is clearly not the straight line that it once was," Spoor said.

The three different species could have been living at the same time at the same place, but probably didn't interact much, he said. Still, he said, East Africa nearly 2 million years ago "was quite a crowded place."

And making matters somewhat more confusing, the Leakeys and Spoor refused to give names to the two non-erectus species or attach them to some of the other Homo species names that are in scientific literature but still disputed. That's because of confusion about what species belongs where, Anton said.

Two likely possibilities are Homo rudolfensis _which is where 1470 and its kin seem to belong — and Homo habilis, where the other non-erectus belong, Anton said. The team said the new fossils mean scientists can reclassify those categorized as non-erectus species and confirm the earlier but disputed Leakey claim.

But Tim White, a prominent evolutionary biologist at the University of California Berkeley, just isn't buying this new species idea, nor is Milford Wolpoff, a longtime professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. They said the Leakeys are making too big a jump from too little evidence.

White said it's similar to someone looking at the jaw of a female gymnast in the Olympics, the jaw of a male shot-putter, ignoring the faces in the crowd and deciding the shot-putter and gymnast have to be a different species.

Eric Delson, a paleoanthropology professor at Lehman College in New York, said he buys the Leakeys' study, but added: "There's no question that it's not definite." He said it won't convince doubters until fossils of both sexes of both non- erectus species are found.

"It's a messy time period," Delson said.

.

Russia: Underground sect charged with abuse

(on the one hand this is horrible and tragic on the other hand it’s good to see other countries also have crazy cults, after all why should American Christian crazies have all the fun? Y’know who you never hear about doing crazy stuff like this Sihks, I suppose the whole turban/beard thing is crazy enough for them. So here’s a plan, if you wanna be in a religion it should require some outlandish costume requirement, funny hat and hairstyle minimum, after all it works for so many, Yakamas and sidelocks, turbans and beards, berets and goatees,

MOSCOW — A self-proclaimed prophet had a vision from God: He would build an Islamic caliphate under the earth.

The digging began about a decade ago and 70 followers soon moved into an eight-level subterranean honeycomb of cramped cells with no light, heat or ventilation.

Children were born. They, too, lived in the cold underground cells for many years — until authorities raided the compound last week and freed the 27 sons and daughters of the sect.

Ages 1 to 17, the children rarely saw the light of day and had never left the property, attended school or been seen by a doctor, officials said Wednesday. Their parents — sect members who call themselves "muammin," from the Arabic for "believers" — were charged with child abuse.

The sect's 83-year-old founder, Faizrakhman Satarov, who declared himself a prophet in contradiction to the principles of Islam, was charged with negligence, said Irina Petrova, deputy prosecutor in the provincial capital of Kazan.

The children were discovered when police searched the sect grounds as part of an investigation into the recent killing of a top Tatarstan Muslim cleric, an attack local officials blame on radical Islamist groups that have mushroomed in the oil-rich, Volga River province of Tatarstan.

Satarov ordered his followers to live in cells they dug under a three-story brick house topped by a small minaret with a tin crescent moon. Only a few sect members were allowed to leave the premises to work as traders at a local market, Russian media reported.

The children were examined at hospitals and will temporarily live in an orphanage, pediatrician Tatyana Moroz said. "They looked nourished but dirty, so we had to wash them," she said in televised remarks.

Their parents expressed concern about the children's medical treatment.

Doctors "can do anything to them," Fana Sayanova, a woman wearing a long white dress with her face veiled, told local television.

The decrepit house on a 700-square-meter (7,530-square-foot) plot of land was built illegally and will be demolished, Tatarstan police said.

"They will come with bulldozers and guns, but they will have to demolish this house over our dead bodies!" sect member Gumer Ganiyev said on the Vesti television channel. The ailing Satarov appointed Ganiyev as his deputy prophet, according to local media.

Satarov had followers in several other cities in Tatarstan and other Volga River provinces, local media reported.

In a 2008 interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, Satarov said that he fell out with other clerics and authorities in the Communist era, when he said the KGB sent him to Muslim nations with stories about religious freedom in the officially atheist Soviet Union. Government-approved Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics routinely traveled abroad on Soviet publicity trips.

"That's how I became Satan's servant, a traitor," the white-bearded and turbaned man was quoted as saying. "When I understood that, I repented and started preaching."

Muslim leaders in Tatarstan said Satarov's views contradict Islamic doctrine.

"Islam postulates that there are no other prophets after Mohammad," Kazan-based theologian Rais Suleimanov told the Gazeta.ru online publication Tuesday.

Police raided Satarov's house last Friday as part of an investigation into the killing of Valiulla Yakupov, Tatarstan's deputy chief mufti, who was gunned down in mid-July as he left his house in Kazan. Minutes later, chief mufti Ildus Faizov was wounded in the legs when a bomb blast ripped through his car in Kazan.

Both clerics were known as critics of radical Islamist groups that advocate a strict and puritanical version of Islam known as Salafism.

Prosecutors have named two suspects in Yakupov's killing who remain at large and arrested five others in the case.