Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry threatened legal action on Monday against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport.

Baron Cohen, who portrays a spoof Kazakh television presenter Borat in his "Da Ali G Show", has won fame ridiculing Kazakhstan, the world's ninth largest country yet still little known to many in the West.

Baron Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

TOKYO - Police on Tuesday questioned three siblings after it was discovered they had been living with the decomposed corpse of their father for nearly a decade, an official said.

Police found the body of Kyujiro Kanaoka lying on a futon bed at the family's home in Itami city in Hyogo prefecture in western Japan, said a prefectural police spokesman, who declined to be identified.

Kanaoka's three elderly children, all in their 70s or older, told police they thought their father was still alive but that one of them recently had consulted a relative about the possibility that he might be dead, the spokesman said.

Long considered the choice of losers and slackers, quitting can be one of the most empowering and active decisions that a person can make, says Evan Harris, author of The Art of Quitting . All things must come to an end, and by choosing when to quit a job, a relationship, a philosophy, or a bad habit, quitters direct their own destinies.

...

In some ways, now is a better time than ever to quit. "If you've been at one company for too long, corporate America figures that you are a dud," says Barbara Sher, author of I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was. "Companies are not loyal to employees anymore. Nobody blames you anymore and asks why you didn't stick with things."

The midlife crisis and the approach to retirement have long been socially accepted times to reassess. But it's increasingly acceptable to search for purpose and satisfaction wherever you are in life.

He chose the city's most famous skyscraper as the place to end his life. But three weeks after a man leaped off the observation deck of the Empire State Building, his absence has gone unnoticed by the world at large and he is still known to police simply as No. 6071.

His identity and the personal demons that drove him to suicide are still a mystery.

"There have been no missing persons reports, no tips, no phone calls," a detective from the NYPD's missing persons squad told the Daily News. "We're just hoping someone out there knows who he is."

Girls can kiss Bob. Boys can't kiss Bob. Everybody can hug Bob, but the No. 1 rule is don't hurt Bob."

A elderly Romanian man mistook his penis for a chicken's neck, cut it off and his dog rushed up and ate it, the state Rompres news agency said Monday.

It said 67 year-old Constantin Mocanu, from a village near the southeastern town of Galati, rushed out into his yard in his underwear to kill a noisy chicken keeping him awake at night.

"I confused it with the chicken's neck," Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. "I cut it ... and the dog rushed and ate it."

Doctors said the man, who was brought in by an ambulance bleeding heavily, was now out of danger.

Hundreds of airline passengers suffered disruption to their travel plans when a major regional airport was shut down for an hour after a humming and vibrating adult sex toy was mistaken for a bomb.

The vibrator was discovered at 9:15 am (2315 GMT Sunday) by a security officer who checked out a suspicious package inside a rubbish bin at the terminal cafeteria of Mackay Airport in the northeastern state of Queensland, a police spokeswoman said.

The terminal was evacuated immediately while passengers who had just arrived from a flight, check-in staff, cafeteria employees and hire car personnel were all forced to leave.

Cafeteria manager Lynne Bryant said her staff had been cleaning tables when they noticed a strange humming noise coming from the rubbish bin.

"It was rather disconcerting when the rubbish bin started humming furiously," she said.

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement.

Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries.

"We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said.

"There were two swastikas painted on the ceiling, but also celtic crosses and several stars of David, so we don't think it's extremists. Some sect or secret society, maybe. There are any number of possibilities."

[...]

A tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

"Jesse Huffman insists he didn't do it on purpose, but the toilet he left plugged after "nature called" at this border crossing in north-central Montana has him facing criminal charges.

Toole County authorities charged the 19-year-old college student from Great Falls with criminal mischief after a border agent accused him of intentionally clogging the toilet.

Huffman said the clogged piping was completely unintentional, the result of an urgent, but natural bodily function.

"I've never been arrested before or anything like that, and I get arrested for taking a dump," said Huffman, a student at Montana State University in Bozeman.

[...]

Cory Grayson, one of Huffman's friends, said he couldn't believe it when border agents first threatened charges.

"I didn't think they were serious at first, I was just laughing so hard," he said. "

There's an unknown object hovering in the sky over the Twin Cities, and it doesn't appear to be a bird or a plane.

Meteorologist Tony Zaleski of the National Weather Service in Chanhassen says the white object appears to be higher than the white, whispy cirrus clouds, which means it's probably higher than 30,000 feet.

Although the object looked like it might be rotating, it doesn't appear to be going anywhere. Zaleski says that probably would rule out a satellite.

Patrick Hogan at the Metropolitan Airports Commission says folks in the tower at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport thought it might be a weather balloon. But Zaleski says if that's true, the Weather Service didn't release it.

The Federal Aviation Administration hasn't returned calls about the mysterious object.

"A British man who accidentally shot himself in the testicles after drinking 15 pints of beer was jailed for five years on Tuesday for possessing an illegal firearm, a court spokesman said.

David Walker, 28, was arguing with a friend at a pub in South Yorkshire, northern England, when he went home to get his sawed-off shotgun, which he jammed into his trousers.

But as he walked back to the pub, the gun went off, blasting pellets into his testicles. Doctors later removed what remained of his testicles during emergency surgery."

The boy has muscles twice the size of other children his age and half their body fat.

He was born to a muscular mother, a former sprinter. Her brother and three other relatives were also very strong — one a construction worker with a talent for hefting curbstones.

The LAPD's figures show a 5% year-on-year rise in homicides from Jan to April 2004. And while the number of homicides fell in some neighbourhoods last year, it only ever continued to rise in the hardcore gang areas.

In civil-rights lawyer Connie Rice's words, the officers are simply "shovelling quicksand" - and without more equipment, back-up, effective witness protection, training and, crucially, more officers, they are fighting a losing battle. And she should know. Having worked with the community and the LAPD on various initiatives and reform programmes ever since the 1992 Rodney King case sparked riots, she is now about to begin investigating the newly re-opened Rampart police corruption scandal inquiry.

Aside from a rising homicide rate, Ms Rice warns that the gangs are crossing a line that has not been crossed before: They are now targeting police officers themselves. She says: "It's one thing for gangsters to exchange fire with the police in situations, but we are now starting to see sniping. We are now seeing the ambushing of cops by gangsters and we should be panicking. "We are on the way to a point of no return and we will end up in a Falluja situation. It is already a Falluja situation in some areas. LA
is on the road to Falluja."

Bush Administration Freed Terror Suspect
Nabil al-Marabh, once imprisoned as the No. 27 man on the FBI's list of must-capture terror suspects, is free again.

He's free despite telling a Jordanian informant he planned to die a martyr by driving a gasoline truck into a New York City tunnel, turning it sideways, opening its fuel valves and having an al-Qaida operative shoot a flare to ignite a massive explosion.

Free despite telling the FBI he had trained on rifles and rocket propelled grenades at militant camps in Afghanistan and after admitting he sent money to a former roommate convicted of trying to blow up a hotel in Jordan.

Free despite efforts by prosecutors in Detroit and Chicago to indict him on charges that could have kept him in prison for years.

Those indictments were rejected by the Justice Department in the name of protecting intelligence. Even two judges openly questioned al-Marabh's terror ties. The Bush administration in January deported al-Marabh to Syria - his home and a country the U.S. government long has regarded as a sponsor of terrorism.

Polish archaeologists have unearthed 13 lecture halls believed to be the first traces ever found of ancient Egypt's University of Alexandria, the head of the project said Wednesday. "This is the oldest university ever found in the world," Grzegory Majderek, head of the Polish mission, told The Associated Press.

The lecture halls, with a capacity of 5,000 students, are part of the 5th century university, which functioned until the 7th century, according to a statement from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. "This is the first material evidence of the existence of academic life in Alexandria," Majderek said. Knowledge of earlier intellectual pursuits in the Mediterranean coastal city came through historical and literary documents and materials.

Ancient Alexandria was home to a library, which was founded about 295 B.C. and burned to the ground in the 4th century. Ruins were never found, but Alexandria was an intellectual center where scholars are thought to have produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and edited Homer's works. The auditoriums were found near the portico of the Roman Theater in the eastern part of the ancient city. All the lecture halls are of identical dimensions. Each contains rows of stepped benches in a form of semicircle and an elevated seat apparently for the lecturer, the Antiquities Department statement said.

When photographer Clifford Ross first saw Colorado's Mt. Sopris, he was so taken with the beauty of the mammoth formation that he jumped on the roof of his brother-in-law's car - denting it - to photograph the landscape.

But Ross found that his 35mm photos didn't get anyone else excited. They simply didn't capture enough detail to convey the majesty of the white-capped mountain surrounded by grassy fields.

So he decided to make a camera that could create an image as awe-inspiring as the vista before him. The result was R1, a 110-pound, 6-foot film camera that produces what experts say are some of the highest-resolution landscape photographs ever made.

"Mountain I," a 5-foot-by-10-foot color photograph captured by that camera, is on display at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York through July 30.

Ross, 51, wanted to share a near-replica of reality, without any of the blurring visible in most large prints. "You can choose to go up to the picture and experience it intimately with a sense of unbroken reality," he says.

Details of the mountain's snowcapped peak - 7 miles from the camera - are in sharp focus, as are individual blades of grass only 30 meters away. When sections of the image are magnified nearly four times, other details are clearly visible: the shingles on a barn 1,200 meters from the camera, a red bird in the grass 45 meters away.

A lower-resolution image captured on everyday 35mm film would break down when displayed at the size of "Mountain I." Viewers would see a fuzzy, fractured image - and Ross' miniature red bird would likely not be visible at all.

"You have to ask the question, `What's the point of painting a scene like this when you can reproduce it with no loss of resolution?'" says Conor Foy, a 36-year-old painter. "The resolution of this seems to be more than anything I've seen before."

Ross acknowledges that he has very little technical background. "I'm not a research scientist and I'm not a designer of photographic mechanisms," the first-time inventor says. "I'm doing this because I want to make a piece of art."