Happy Birthday, Ryu!
Ryu from The Get Busy Committee is celebrating his birthday today! The guy is now thirty years old! ...
Dog Survives Being Buried Alive And 40 Pellet Gun Shots
The tiny island nation of Malta is rallying behind a stray dog that defied the odds and miraculously survived a horrible act of animal cruelty at the hands of an unknown assailant.
Officers investigating an unrelated case near the city of Birzebbuga last week heard faint whispers from under a plank with a tree stump on top of it. After removing the plank, they made the gruesome discovery: a dog buried alive in dirt up to its face, its snout and limbs tied up, and multiple bullet wounds in its head, The Times of Malta reported.
The dog, a female mixed-breed that rescuers named "Star," was dug out and taken for emergency surgery at the Ta' Qali hospital. Doctors were able to save her life, despite removing more than 40 gun pellets from her skull.
The case caused an uproar in Malta and led to calls for the country to revise its animal cruelty laws. Currently, anyone convicted of animal abuse faces a maximum one-year jail sentence....
Gender-Free Baby: Is it O.K. for Parents to Keep Their Child’s Sex a Secret?
If pregnancy were a musical composition, finding out whether you're having a boy or a girl would be the coda. Indeed, "Do you know what you're having?" is probably the question lobbed most frequently at pregnant women, right up there with, "When are you due?" So news that a Canadian couple is raising their third child "genderless" in what amounts to a grand social experiment has set parental tongues a-wagging.
Gender is so central to parents' concept of their unborn children that most moms- and dads-to-be can't even wait until delivery day to learn what they're having. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 66% of 18-to-34-year-olds said they would choose to learn their baby's sex before seeing their newborn's birthday suit for the first time.
Yet Kathy Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, have kept their baby Storm's gender a secret. The only people who know are one family friend and Storm's older brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2. (Not surprisingly, the two midwives who delivered Storm on New Year's Day are in the know as well.)
A lengthy feature last week in the Toronto Star profiled the family and their quest to raise their baby unfettered by the rules of pinks and blues. The couple began by sending out an email after Storm's birth: "We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...)."...
Black Couple Shocked After Having A White Baby
Black and white family: Francis and Arlette with Seth and Daniel
A black couple told yesterday of their shock and mystification when their son was born with white skin and blond hair.
Francis Tshibangu admitted: ‘My first thought was “Wow, is he really mine?”.’
He and his wife Arlette already have a two-year-old boy, Seth, whose features reflect his African parentage. But it is thought that baby Daniel, now 11 weeks old, has a slight genetic mutation. He is not an albino.
Congo-born Mr Tshibangu, 28, said his ‘jaw dropped open’ when Daniel arrived at Leicester Royal Infirmary.
‘I was too stunned to speak and I could see the doctors looking at each other, thinking the baby couldn’t be mine.
‘Then Arlette and I looked at each other and smiled and I knew he was. I have been with my wife for three years and there was never a question of infidelity, but seeing his white skin was a surprise to say the least.’
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