News for 07/03/07

Hey hey everybody! It’s the day before Independence Day… so let’s do THE NEWS!

(In)famous Russian music site Allofmp3.com has finally shut down… don’t cry too much though, because they’ve already launched a replacement site: MP3Sparks.com. In fact, were it not for the new site’s radically different color scheme, you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference between the two sites. Why shut down one site, only to open an exact duplicate on the same day? Your guess is as good as mine. At least they didn’t sell out completely – unlike, say Fergie. The erstwhile member of the Black Eyed Peas has completely sold out to Candie’s (the shoe\clothing company). Sources say that the company will pay Fergie $4 million to “to promote their clothing line in her songs”. I guess something like this was inevitable – hell, Fergie’s already promoted Dolce & Gabbana and Fendi for free, so why not get some coin for dropping Candie’s name in her music? Still, I can’t help but find the whole thing distasteful. Actual product placements in music? What’s the world coming to?

No good, if you ask me. It seems that Wal Mart secretly took out life insurance policies on their own employees and cashed them in when those employees died. According to a lawsuit files in US District Court in Tampa, Wal Mart took out “the policies… for $50,000 – $80,0000… out on any employee from 18-70 who participated in Wal Mart’s health plan”. Although Wal Mart ceased taking out new policies in 1995, they continued to collect the death benefits from existing employees until 2000, when the retail giant stopped the practice altogether. Creepy is a pretty good word for this, but I think something stronger needs to be invented, like “super-duper-extra-creepy”!

Here are a couple of quick stories that just might restore your faith in humanity, though. It seems that a woman in Arizona found $20,000 in a bank’s drive-up depository, then calmly went inside and returned the money. And a Continental Airlines pilot bought pizza for an entire plane full of people (out of his own pocket, mind you) after a series of delays on what should have been a 47-minute flight from Massachusetts to New Jersey. It seems that the weather was too bad to land in New Jersey, so the plane circled southern Connecticut for an hour – long enough to use up too much fuel to return to Massachusetts. So the plane had to land at a remote airstrip somewhere to refuel… but then the same storm that kept them from landing in New Jersey swept over the airfield, and the flight was grounded for two hours! By this point, the passengers had been on the plane for four hours. The pilot, knowing his passengers were probably getting cranky, somehow had 10 pizzas delivered to the plane. Sadly, the crew had to beg the passengers not to tell anyone, as they’d “get in trouble” with Continental if the home office found out about it.

Think Americans are stupid? It seems that 60% of Canadians would fail their own citizenship test.

And lastly for today… read all about the mystery of the dead camel found next to a Swedish highway. It sounds like a bad joke, but it’s not: apparently a dead camel was found next to the E22 highway near Karlskrona, in southeastern Sweden. Police initially thought calls about the camel were pranks, but an officer sent to the scene indeed found a dead camel. Police guess that the camel was being transported in a trailer and somehow fell out en route.

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