Headless goats and chickens found on U.S. beach

Two headless goats, three decapitated chickens, a beheaded rooster and a dove or possibly pigeon have been found on a scenic Southern California beach in the past week, puzzled police said on Thursday, Police in Laguna Beach said they were unsure whether the seven animals had washed up on shore or been placed there. They are trying to figure out who was behind the decapitations, and why. The headless goats were found inside a purple burlap sack on the sand a week ago. The other beheaded animals turned up in recent days. "We are looking at all kinds of things -- Halloween prank stuff, kids or cold, ritualistic-type activities," Laguna Beach police Sgt. Jason Kravetz told the Los Angeles Times. "They are wet. That means they are close to the surf line or they are washing up," he said. "It's something I haven't seen in my 18 years on the job." Laguna Beach, which lies about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, is an affluent seaside community which also provided the setting for the 2004 MTV teen reality show "Laguna Beach."

Publisher challenges genitals picture ban

A publisher has taken to Japan's top court his eight-year fight over the banning of imported images of male genitals in a book of pictures by the late American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Publisher Takashi Asai told Reuters he expected to win his case because the court had taken the step of agreeing to hear his appeal of a lower court ruling that the book, which includes sado-masochistic homosexual images, was obscene. Asai, who heads a film distribution company, translated and published a collection of Mapplethorpe's works in Japan in 1994, based on imported negatives that customs did not check. But when Asai carried a copy of his book back from the United States in 1999, it was seized by customs officials and he has battled with courts since to reverse the move. Japan's domestic obscenity laws were relaxed in the 1990s to allow pictures of pubic hair, but imported publications are handled by customs and it still bans images of genitals.

Sect holes up in cave to await end of world

At least 30 members of a Russian doomsday cult have barricaded themselves in a remote cave to await the end of the world and are threatening to commit suicide if police intervene, officials and media said Thursday. "They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out and are threatening to blow themselves up," an official in the local prosecutor's office told Reuters by telephone. "They threaten to detonate a gas tank and blow themselves up." The cult members, who include 29 adults and four children, are hidden inside a snow-covered hillside in the Penza region of central Russia. A Penza police spokeswoman said they had moved into the dug-out on November 7. "No one wants to take on the responsibility of provoking them ... because our information is that there are children among them," said the official. They are thought to have taken food and fuel supplies in with them and Russian television pictures from the scene showed smoke or steam coming out of a hole in the snow-covered ravine where it was built. A police patrol was guarding the area to prevent anyone provoking them. "They are simple Christians," a local priest, Father Georgy, told NTV television station. "They say: 'The church is doing a bad job, the end of the world is coming soon and we are all saving ourselves'."

Chocolate began as beer-like brew 3,100 years ago?

The chocolate enjoyed around the world today had its origins at least 3,100 years ago in Central America not as the sweet treat people now crave but as a celebratory beer-like beverage and status symbol, scientists said on Monday.

Researchers identified residue of a chemical compound that comes exclusively from the cacao plant -- the source of chocolate -- in pottery vessels dating from about 1100 BC in Puerto Escondido, Honduras.

This pushed back by at least 500 years the earliest documented use of cacao, an important luxury commodity in Mesoamerica before European invaders arrived and now the basis of the modern chocolate industry.

Cacao (pronounced cah-COW) seeds were used to make ceremonial beverages consumed by elites of the Aztecs and other civilizations, while also being used as a form of currency.

The Spanish conquistadors who shattered the Aztec empire in the 16th century were smitten with a chocolate beverage made from cacao seeds served in the palace of the emperor. However, this was not the form in which cacao had its beginnings.

"The earliest cacao beverages consumed at Puerto Escondido were likely produced by fermenting the sweet pulp surrounding the seeds," the scientists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of the researchers, anthropologist John Henderson of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said cacao beverages were being concocted far earlier than previously believed -- and it was a beer-like drink that started the chocolate craze.

 

In land of the Monkey God, a primate menaces

First it was the death of Delhi's deputy mayor, who fell after a fight with monkeys on the balcony of his home last month. Then, 25 residents were bitten, scratched and mauled by a lone monkey which went on the rampage in the capital last weekend.
The monkey reportedly tried to snatch several infants before being beaten back by residents armed with sticks and metal bars.

"Primal Invasion" read the headline in the Hindustan Times.

Authorities are struggling to contain primates that are stubbornly resisting efforts to portray New Delhi as a modern, clean and globalize capital.
The city of 14 million people is growing quickly and experts say monkeys are increasingly being forced out of forests to lead urban lives, putting them on a collision course with humans.  It is a pattern seen across India as the economy booms. Elephants, leopards and tigers are also coming face to face with man as cities sprawl into their former habitats.


Monkeys are a regular sight in New Delhi. They can be seen in groups climbing outside government ministries. Troupes lounge on pavements, oblivious to the chaotic traffic around them. But culling monkeys has never been an option as many Hindus worship the monkey god Hanuman, seen as a symbol of strength, perseverance and devotion. And when Delhi tried to shift them out of the city, neighboring states complained.  

 

Faced with what many saw as a monkey plague on homes, offices and ministries, this year city authorities started to capture and send them to a sanctuary on Delhi's outskirts.
Delhi government officials say they have caught and relocated around 1,900 monkeys. While there is no census of monkey numbers, officials say thousands still live on the city's streets.  

But a spate of high-profile monkey attacks has made headlines and increased public pressure for the government to act quicker.

"The latest attack was unprecedented," said J.K. Dadoo, environment and forest secretary in the Delhi government. "Monkeys normally operate in groups."
Experts say there is a growing pattern of lone attacks that may highlight the random way authorities are trying to reduce the monkey population in the city.
"Incidents of lone monkey attacks were almost unknown until recently," said Sonya Ghose, founder of Citizens for the Welfare and Protection of Animals and a member of an enforcement panel overseeing the monkey relocation campaign.
"I fear that monkeys are being trapped in a haphazard manner. Monkey catchers are breaking up troupes of monkey families, leaving some monkeys alone without their families."



"Then they have nothing to lose and turn aggressive."

 

Spain's king tells Venezuela's Chavez to "shut up"

Spain's King Juan Carlos told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Saturday to "shut up" during closing speeches by leaders from the Latin world that brought the Ibero-American summit to an acrimonious end. "Why don't you shut up?" the king shouted at Chavez, pointing a finger at the president when he tried to interrupt a speech by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Zapatero was in the middle of a speech at the summit of mostly leftist leaders from Latin America, Portugal, Spain and Andorra, and was criticizing Chavez for calling former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar a fascist. Chavez, a leading leftist foe of Washington, also attacked Spanish businessman Gerardo Diaz Ferran earlier in the week after he questioned the safety of foreign investments in Venezuela. "I want to express to you President Hugo Chavez that in a forum where there are democratic governments ... one of the essential principles is respect," Zapatero told the leaders gathered in the Chilean capital, Santiago. "You can disagree radically, without being disrespectful," Zapatero, a socialist, said sternly, drawing applause from some of the other heads of state.

Temple built 4,000 years ago unearthed in Peru

4,000-year-old temple filled with murals has been unearthed on the northern coast of Peru, making it one of the oldest finds in the Americas, a leading archaeologist said on Saturday. The temple, inside a larger ruin, includes a staircase that leads up to an altar used for fire worship at a site scientists have called Ventarron, said Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who led the dig. It sits in the Lambayeque valley, near the ancient Sipan complex that Alva unearthed in the 1980s. Ventarron was built long before Sipan, about 2,000 years before Christ, he said. "It's a temple that is about 4,000 years old," Alva, director of the Museum Tumbas Reales (Royal Tombs) of Sipan, told Reuters by telephone after announcing the results of carbon dating at a ceremony north of Lima sponsored by Peru's government. "What's surprising are the construction methods, the architectural design and most of all the existence of murals that could be the oldest in the Americas," he said. Lambayeque is 472 miles from Lima, Peru's capital. Discoveries at Sipan, an administrative and religious center of the Moche culture, have included a gold-filled tomb built 1,700 years ago for a pre-Incan king.