Falling ice pelts Iowa neighborhood

Large chunks of ice, one of them reportedly about 50 pounds, fell from the sky in this northeast Iowa city, smashing through a woman's roof and tearing through nearby trees. Authorities were unsure of the ice's origin but have theorized the chunks either fell from an airplane or naturally accumulated high in the atmosphere — both rare occurrences. "It sounded like a bomb!" 78-year-old Jan Kenkel said. She said she was standing in her kitchen when an ice chunk crashed through her roof at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday. "I jumped about a foot!" She traced the damage to her television room, where she found a messy pile of insulation, bits of ceiling, splintered wood and about 50 pounds of solid ice. Karle and Mary Beth Wigginton, who live a block away, heard a loud "whoosh" coming through the trees. They discovered several large chunks of ice in front of their home and some smaller ones in the yard and in the street. FIND MORE

record ketchup packet...huh?

Now citizens of this southern Illinois community are after the record for the world's largest ketchup packet. Collinsville has partnered with the H.J. Heinz Co. to fill an 8-foot tall, 4-foot wide plastic pouch with 1,500 pounds of the tomato goop for a school fundraiser. "That's a lot of ketchup," said Tracey Parsons, a Heinz spokeswoman.

88-year-old finally gets Eagle Scout rank

More than a half-century after he finished the requirements to earn the rank, an 88-year-old man was honored as an Eagle Scout, making him possibly the oldest person to ever collect the Boy Scout honor. Walter Hart could not become an Eagle Scout at the time he earned the rank because his service in World War II got in the way. "I've been looking forward to this for a long time," Hart, who lives in a retirement center in nearby Lehigh Acres, said Saturday. Scout officials say he may be the oldest person to ever earn the honor.

Hollywood pigeons to be put on the pill

Hollywood residents believe they've found a humane way to reduce their pigeon population and the messes the birds make: the pill. Over the next few months a birth control product called OvoControl P, which interferes with egg development, will be placed in bird food in new rooftop feeders.

"We think we've got a good solution to a bad situation," said Laura Dodson, president of the Argyle Civic Association, the group leading the effort to try the new contraceptive. "The poop problem has become unmanageable and this could be the answer."

Community leaders planned to announce the OvoControl P pilot program, which Dodson believes is the first of its kind in the nation, at a news conference Monday.

Dodson said representatives from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contacted her group with the idea to use OvoControl P. Other animal rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, support the contraceptive over electric shock gates, spiked rooftops, poisons or other methods.

It's estimated about 5,000 pigeons call the area home. Their population boom is blamed in part on people feeding the birds, including a woman known as the Bird Lady, who was responsible for dumping 25-pound bags of seed in 29 spots around Hollywood.

OvoControl P has been registered with the state Department of Pesticide Regulation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Developed by Rancho Santa Fe-based Innolytics, the substance contains nicarbazin, which interferes with an egg's ability to develop or hatch, said Erick Wolf, Innolytics chief executive.

The pilot program was expected to show results within a year, and the Hollywood area's pigeon population is expected to shrink by at least half by 2012, Dodson said.

Australian school makes sunglasses compulsory for pupils

There was a time when wearing sunglasses would have been seen as too cool for school, but for pupils at a pioneering primary in Australia they are now a compulsory part of the uniform.

The move is aimed at protecting young eyes from the sun's dangerous ultraviolet rays, and education authorities say they are considering adopting the plan at all state schools.

 

The headmaster of Sydney's Arncliffe Public School, where sunglasses are now compulsory for children from kindergarten through Year 6, said they had no problems wearing the glasses in the playground.

 

The "sunnies" as they are called in Australia, would soon become "routine" for the pupils, Stephan Vrachas told commercial radio.

 

The education minister of New South Wales state, of which Sydney is the capital, said the government would consider making sunglasses compulsory in all public school playgrounds.

 

"It is conceivable that in certain environments it might be appropriate to wear sunglasses when they are playing in the sun," John Della Bosca told reporters.

 

Excessive exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays, already blamed for skin cancers, can also lead to cataracts, experts say.

 

A specialist at Sydney Eye Hospital told the national AAP news agency that wraparound glasses were the best for eye protection and children should be encouraged to wear them from the age of three or four.

 

Sunglasses were particularly important in summer, when ultraviolet exposure was up to five times higher than in winter, said Con Petsoglou.

 

Male belly-dance back in vogue in Turkey

At Istanbul's Club Fox on the Sea of Marmara coast the belly dancer's hips gyrate and tassels swirl to the music but the stomach is a little hairier than usual -- it's a man's.

Male belly dancers are thrilling audiences in Turkey and other European capitals, drawing on a tradition dating back to Ottoman times when men in the Sultan's palaces were entertained by young male dancers as the women lived separately in harems. As 36-year-old dancer "Alex" takes to the stage and the repetitive beats are replaced by Arabesque music, the young Turkish crowd goes wild, flinging their arms in the air and jostling for a view of his belly.

"All kinds of people watch me. I dance on stage in clubs, bars and even rock concerts," said Alex, who goes by his stage name.

His costume and dance style are distinct from that of a female dancer. He wears loose black trousers, a chain-mail headdress, a richly-tasselled belt and stole, and a cloak made of sheer fabric, which he extends with his arms like wings. "I am really against people thinking oriental dance is a female dance. In doing this they are trying to give it an identity...but all dances can have male and female characters."

Ballet also has male and female dancers, he points out. Alex began dancing aged 16, drawn to belly dance as he thought it was the most expressive dance for his body shape whilst also being highly in demand.

"He dances often two or three nights a week. It is popular with visitors," said club manager Metin Kemer.

Alex said he learned the history of male belly dance from Ottoman palace archives and then modernized the tradition.

The multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, governed from Istanbul, spanned three continents in its heyday around 400 years ago. As the empire's reach declined and society modernized women became more in view and the number of female belly dancers rose, but Alex sees the dance as most erotic on a male body. Although the stomach moves are reminiscent of those of a female belly dancer he makes stronger lines with his arms.

The dancer says he has no concerns about intolerance towards his profession in predominantly Muslim Turkey, nor about the re-election of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party, which has Islamist roots.

"I did not face any problems. There are more marginal jobs than mine in Turkey... I was marginal 10 years ago in Turkey. Now you can watch striptease or a topless DJ."

He says he has become so well known that there are even impersonators operating in the country.

"I am being imitated which means I must be going in the right direction. I registered with a patent institute."

But male belly-dancers still face a battle for wider recognition of their craft, they say.

London-based Turkish Cypriot dancer Ozgen Ozgec said: "I think there are just a few Turkish male belly dancers in the world, including me, doing an international stage job and trying to get it recognized as art and not just a bar job."

85-year-old Hermon man learns he needn't lease his phone

Lloyd Overlock never had much reason to think about his telephone. The 85-year-old Hermon resident just paid his bills and knew the service was there if he needed it.

 

But Overlock, who for five decades has been paying a monthly fee to lease his phone, found out recently that the arrangement is a pricey, outmoded throwback to the days of telephone industry monopoly.

 

"I don’t use it much; I just sit here and wait for it to ring," he said Friday during a visit at the cozy home he built himself and moved into back in 1952. That’s the same year he got his telephone, a heavy, dark-gold contraption the size of a child’s shoebox, with a solid-feeling finger dial. It hung on his kitchen wall all those years — until last week, when his niece Roberta York was making one of her frequent visits from her home in Millinocket.

 

York said she peeked at a bill from AT&T lying on the kitchen table. As is the case with most area residents, she said, her uncle’s phone service is provided by Verizon, so she was curious.

 

"I said, ‘Uncle, what’s this?’ And he said, ‘That’s for my telephone.’ That’s when I realized he was still leasing his phone from AT&T," she said. "He got that phone in 1952, and he’s paying $4.42 a month for it, every month."

 

Right away, she said, she picked up the gold receiver and dialed the customer service number on the bill to cancel the service. The friendly operator on the other end attempted to dissuade her, offering her uncle a 20 percent discount off his monthly rental fee and reminding York of the benefits of leasing.

 

"She said that if something goes wrong with that phone, they’d have a new one here the next business day," she recalled. "I was thinking to myself, ‘If something goes wrong with that phone, I’ll go to Wal-Mart and get one the next day.’ But I didn’t say it." She just told the representative to cancel the lease, and then she drove to a local dollar-discount store and bought her Uncle Lloyd a new wall phone for $7. It plugged right in to the old connection and worked like a charm.

 

York said it troubles her that elderly people like her uncle get taken advantage of. The monthly lease doesn’t seem like a lot of money, she said, but it adds up.

 

"For some people, that four dollars could mean a gallon of milk or a prescription or something to eat," she said.

 

Wayne Jortner, an attorney with the Maine Public Advocate’s Office, said Friday that Overlock’s situation is not unique. Before 1984, when a federal court determined that AT&T’s lock on the nation’s telephone industry constituted an illegal monopoly, most consumers were required to lease their phones, he said. The forced restructuring of the industry included opening up the manufacturing of telephones, and people began purchasing their own instruments.

 

Now, leasing is rare. Most people who still lease are elderly, according to Jortner, and they keep making the monthly payments because they don’t realize they have an alternative or perceive that alternative as being too complicated.

 

They also may be paying much higher rates for phone service than they need to, as well as paying additional service charges and fees that could be eliminated by choosing a different service plan.

 

Jortner said a national settlement in 2003 against AT&T based on its leasing program awarded $80 per phone to thousands of consumers who had leased a telephone between 1984 and 1990.

 

The lease program is not illegal, he said, but consumer advocates faulted the company for some of its practices.

 

"The bottom line is, it’s totally ridiculous to lease a phone when you can buy a better one for much less money," Jortner said.

 

Attempts on Friday afternoon to reach AT&T’s corporate headquarters in San Antonio were unsuccessful. A call to the company’s leasing service headquarters in Florida resulted in several minutes of listening to a recorded on-hold message explaining the advantages of leasing a telephone. These included the next-day replacement service cited by York, as well as assurances that a leased phone will have "a real bell ringer" and be hearing aid-compatible. In addition, said the recording, "You can be assured that your lease supports jobs right here in the good old U.S. of A!" There is also a "lease rewards card" that offers discounts on prescriptions and hearing aids.

 

Faye, the customer service representative who eventually picked up, said "hundreds of thousands of people" prefer to lease a phone, although the actual number was not available. Charges vary depending on the telephone model and some other options, but the basic cost of a rotary-dial phone like Overlook’s gold-tone antique is $4.45 a month, she said. Customers are free to cancel their lease at any time, and instructions for doing so are printed on each month’s bill, she said.

 

On Friday, Overlock’s old telephone sat like a dull gold cinderblock on the coffee table, its heavy plastic casing battered and the receiver grimy from decades of use. York examined a prepaid white Mylar envelope that had arrived from AT&T a few days earlier with instructions to mail the phone to Fort Worth, Texas, in order to complete the cancellation of the lease.

 

"We have five weeks to send it back, or they’ll start billing him again with all the back charges," she said.

 

According to Jortner, the mail-back requirement is nothing but "a hurdle to customers trying to get the lease charge off their bills." The phone itself is essentially without value, he said, but many senior citizens will forget to put the package in the mail, or be unable to get to the post office, or not understand that the envelope is prepaid.

 

Not a chance, said York. "They’re pushing against the wrong person," she said.

 

Overlock, meanwhile, said he likes his new phone, a sleek, silver touch-tone model that fills only a fraction of the space left by its predecessor. He never has tried making a call using push-buttons instead of a rotary dial, but figures he can get used to it.

 

He brightened when a test call from a nearby cell phone filled his small home with the new phone’s shrill ring — the first time he had heard it.

 

"Now, that’s quite a phone," he said with a smile.