POSTED // May 28,2012 - New coins issued by Britain’s Royal Mint contain metal that could prove harmful, according to dermatologists. The five-pence and 10-pence coins contain nickel,

POSTED // May 21,2012 - Wind farms could be contributing to climate change and affecting crops, according to new research based on satellite data of surface temperatures from Texas.

POSTED // May 14,2012 - Following revelations that the federal General Services Administration spent $823,000 of taxpayer money on a lavish Las Vegas conference that included $3,200 for a motivational mind reader,

POSTED // May 7,2012 - Police charged Gregory Derrell Lea, 42, with assaulting a 27-year-old woman in Charles County, Md. They said he “threw a couch on top of her.” (The Washington Post)

POSTED // Apr 30,2012 - When the men couldn't produce a bill of sale for the animal, they were arrested on suspicion of rustling

POSTED // Apr 23,2012 - The gift shop at the Gettysburg National Military Park visitors’ center stopped selling bobblehead dolls of John Wilkes Booth holding a handgun after a reporter asked about them.

POSTED // Apr 16,2012 - Holding a gun makes you think others are, too, according to research by University of Notre Dame psychologist James Brockmole and Purdue University perception expert Jessica K. Witt.

POSTED // Apr 9,2012 - Missouri lawmakers voted to add gun owners to the list of groups protected against workplace discrimination. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Wanda Brown, said the measure was inspired by a constituent who runs a meat-packing plant in a bad neighborhood and “was told that if he didn’t quit carrying his gun, the USDA would not come and inspect his product,” meaning he couldn’t sell it. After the measure passed, 115 to 36, openly gay Rep. Mike Colona declared, “What this body has done is put protecting gun ownership above discriminating against somebody because of their sexual orientation.” (St. Louis’s KWMU-FM)

POSTED // Apr 2,2012 - A Brazilian school system is spending $670,000 to provide students with computer chips, to be embedded in school uniforms, that send a text message to the cell phones of parents when their children enter the school or alert them if the children fail to arrive within 20 minutes after classes begin. Coriolano Moraes, education secretary of Vitoria da Conquista’s 213 public schools, said nearly half of the city’s 43,000 public-school students have started using the chips and that all of them will be using them by next year. (Associated Press)

POSTED // Mar 26,2012 - English fire fighters summoned to rescue Simon Burgess, 41, found the victim floating face down in a 3-foot-deep model boating lake in Gosport, Hampshire. They refused to enter the water because it was above their ankles. “The officers were trained to go into ankle-deep water, which is level one, so we waited for level-two officers, who can go into chest high,” Tony Nicholls, a watch manager at Gosport fire station said. “One of the police officers told me he would like to go in the water, and I advised him in the strongest terms not to.” Nicholls added that because the body had already been in the water for five or 10 minutes when he arrived, “I made an assessment it was a body retrieval and not a rescue.” (Britain’s The Telegraph)