News from life

An Illinois pastor used the Bible he was reading out of to shield himself from bullets being pumped at him from an unknown gunman who opened fire during Sunday services at the First Baptist Church in Maryville, Ill.

Senior Pastor Fred Winters was preaching during the 8 a.m. service when a man entered the church, walked down the aisle and started shooting, a parishioner told FOX News. Four others were also reportedly shot.

The .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol jammed and the suspect started stabbing himself with a knife, Ralph Timmins of the Illinois State Police told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. [...]

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Police in a Chinese city sent out six patrol cars after reports of a man with a hunting rifle - but it turned out to be a giant cigarette lighter.

The main police station in Nanjing received emergency calls saying a man wearing a hunting rifle on his back was stalking the streets.

“We sent out six patrol cars immediately, trying to stop the man before anything bad happened,” said a police spokesman. [...]

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More than 100 unmarried villagers in India’s Bihar state are working flat out to build a 6km (3.7-mile) road to help their efforts to get married.

The village of Barwaan Kala, in the west of Bihar, is located high in the Kaimur hills and is known locally as the “village of unmarried people”.

Some 121 villagers aged between 16 and 80 remain bachelors, they say, because of the remoteness of the village.

The last wedding in the village was reportedly 50 years ago.

“Even those who have managed to get married have done it surreptitiously by taking temporary shelter in the less remote villages of their relatives,” Ram Chand Kharwar, a 50-year-old bachelor, told the BBC.

Apart from the inaccessibility of Barwaan Kala, outsiders are also fearful of Maoist militants who operate in the area. [...]

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Lisa Dowd, Sky Correspondent
The recession is hitting pubs severly but one landlord thinks he has the answer - bring your own booze.

he Raven pub in Corby used to be packed with regulars at lunchtime.

Customers, however, concerned about spending during the recession, are staying at home and the pub is now on the brink of closure.

Just a handful of people are having a drink or a bite to eat when Sky News visited the pub. [...]

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TAIPEI (Reuters) - A 4-year-old boy has won the use of an uninhabited tropical island, with white sand beaches and clear turquoise waters, in a Taiwan lottery aimed at boosting spending during an economic downturn.

Officials said Yeh Chien-wei, who won the prize at Thursday’s draw, will get exclusive rights to the tiny plot in the Taiwan Strait from May through September.

Penghu County, an offshore archipelago, will provide food, drinks, water and electricity to the boy. He has been quoted in local media saying he wants to play in the sea. [...]

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An 11-year-old boy has pocketed £8,000 from the sale of his collection of McDonald’s memorabilia.

he 5,000 items included posters, Happy Meal boxes, toys, limited edition cups and shop-front displays, all made between 1990 and 1999.

The young seller, Luke Underwood, from South Clifton, Nottinghamshire had owned the collection for four years. [...]

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Madonna’s a Material Girl for real this time.

Following her cheap and cheerful clothing line for H&M, the star is now working on a ridiculously trendy fashion range.

She’s teamed up with designer-of-the-moment Ed Hardy - the Godfather of Tattoo.

Brand owner Christian Audigier, who is designing an outfit for Michael Jackson’s comeback tour, approached the singer after spotting her wearing Ed’s tattoo-print clothes. [...]

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EXACT replicas of a man’s thumb bones have been made for the first time using a 3D printer. The breakthrough paves the way for surgeons to replace damaged or diseased bones with identical copies built from the patients’ own cells.

“In theory, you could do any bone,” says Christian Weinand of the Insel Hospital in Berne, Switzerland, head of the team that copied his thumb bones. “Now I can put spares in my pocket if I want,” he says. [...]

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A SKELETON exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the “vampires” widely referred to in contemporary documents.

Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth (see right) while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice (see second image here).

At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by “vampires” which, rather than drinking people’s blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, Borrini says. [...]

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HARARE (Reuters) - The wife of Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who was killed in a car crash that also injured her husband, is expected to be buried on Wednesday, a senior MDC and government official said on Sunday.

Tsvangirai was flown to neighbouring Botswana on Saturday to recover from the accident and to undergo another medical check-up, but is expected to return to Harare late on Monday, the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. [...]

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