The apparent suicide of a woman found hanging from a tree went unreported for hours because passers-by thought the body was a Halloween decoration.

Fake flu shots were given out last week at an Exxon Mobil Corp. health fair and an investigation was under way. Exxon Mobil spokeswoman Treacy A. Roberts said Thursday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation told the company that the shots administered were "definitely not the flu vaccine."

A woman wore nothing but a red G-string when she attacked and killed her boyfriend's estranged wife who had just found them in bed together, a court was told yesterday.

A would-be carjacker got quite a jolt when he picked the wrong car to try to steal, Jasper County deputies say. The suspect tapped the window of the car Wednesday morning with a gun and motioned the driver to get out. The driver of the car had just bought a cup of hot coffee. So he slammed his door into the carjacker's legs, threw the coffee on him possibly burning the suspect's neck and face, and wrestled him to the ground.

A Detroit man woke after being declared dead at about noon on Wednesday.

What's an Induced Coma?

A Salt Lake County man died Saturday in a tragic fall while hiking with friends and their dogs in American Fork Canyon. The accident happened in the Dry Creek area near Alpine when a 21-year-old man fell 100 feet to his death in an attempt to rescue a puppy, according to authorities.

Music may one day be very close to a woman's chest, with BT futurology which manufactures computer chips that store music, creating a MP3 player that can be implanted into a woman's breasts.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department aims without exception to expel all those who enter the United States illegally. "Our goal at DHS (Homeland Security) is to completely eliminate the 'catch and release' enforcement problem, and return every single illegal entrant, no exceptions.

New York is the last remaining U.S. jurisdiction to require fault (or living apart pursuant to a legal agreement) as a predicate for divorce but being denied sex only once does not constitute grounds for divorce, no matter how bad the marriage, a Queens judge has ruled.

Four Fox network programs, led by the comedies "The War at Home," "The Family Guy" and "American Dad," topped a parents group's annual listing of the worst prime-time shows for family viewing.

Dunkin' Donuts employees were thanking their good luck Tuesday after a woman who was accidentally given a bag with $771 in cash instead of the bagel with cream cheese she had ordered turned in the money.

Calling a 205-pound baby a "bundle" of joy sounds like an understatement. But that's how Lowry Park Zoo officials announced the birth this week of a baby male elephant - the first African elephant to be born in the Tampa Bay area. "We like to pat ourselves on the back, but it's really a feather in the cap for the whole bay area," zoo veterinarian David Murphy said Tuesday.

Engineers here are testing a new kind of transparent armor -- stronger and lighter than traditional materials -- that could stop armor-piercing weapons from penetrating vehicle windows.

David Copperfield says he plans to impregnate a girl on stage - without even touching her.

A 10ft (3m) snake thought to have been living in sewage pipes in a block of flats for three months has been caught on a bathroom floor.

A mysterious object found in a Davenport home turned out not to be a bomb, but a device that was supposed to scare off aliens believed to be living under the ground.

Sparked by today's Washington Post story that suggests Vice President Cheney's office is involved in the Plame-CIA spy link investigation, government officials and advisers passed around rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

A handwritten score of one of Ludwig van Beethoven's most revolutionary works has been discovered by a librarian cleaning out a cabinet in a seminary in Pennsylvania after being missing for more than a century. The 80-page manuscript for a piano version of Grosse Fuge, thought to have been written by Beethoven himself, dates from the final months of his life when he was completely deaf. The work was described by scholars of the German composer yesterday as an "amazing find" and "extremely important".

Rain fell for an eighth straight day around the waterlogged Northeast on Friday, pushing hundreds of people from their homes, closing roadways and leaving train tracks littered with fallen trees. And it's a good thing reporters had canoes to deal with the rain fall. (Video)

More than half-a-century ago, Machal Lalung was thought to be insane and sent to a mental asylum in India's remote northeast. A few months ago, he was set free after the National Human Rights Commission found that healthcare authorities had made a mistake and Lalung suffered only from epilepsy.

Pantos of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs are being censored - to outlaw the word "dwarf". A shocked village drama group sent off for a script and found Dopey and his pals - played by kids - had to be called "gnomes" instead. Ray Lionet, 73, of the Coxheath Players in Kent, said the ban was to avoid offending short people. He said: "It's madness."

A Maine scientist is preparing to release details of a $1 million reward for a photograph that leads to the live capture of Bigfoot, the abominable snowman or the Loch Ness Monster.

Their Toyota Indy 400 ended in a crash Sunday, but the action between Danica Patrick and Jaques Lazier didn't end on the track. "So you're telling me that Jaques is saying he got beat up by a girl?" Patrick told the Star through a Rahal Letterman Racing spokesperson. Dr. Kevin Scheid was driving the rescue vehicle and told the two drivers to settle down. But he would not settle the punch/poke debate.

Blockbuster declined an opportunity to buy NetFlix for $50 million. Netflix is now worth $1.4 billion and Blockbuster is worth about $850 million.

University of Delaware researchers are opening a new front in the war on cancer, bringing to bear new nanotechnologies for cancer detection and treatment and introducing a unique nanobomb that can literally blow up breast cancer tumors.

This guy brought down MySpace by writing a little Javascript worm that added himself as everybody's friend.

A Japanese Internet whiz is tipped to become the world's fourth space tourist -- and he wants to orbit the earth dressed as an ace pilot from the hit Japanese animation series Gundam.

ABC News is drawing fire for using college interns in an investigative report that alleges lax security at nuclear reactors on 25 U.S. college campuses.

The creator of a meat-scented dog condom had high hopes for his invention, until the pooch product was recalled. Phillip Laxis, product developer for dogcondoms.com, admits, "I'm not going to lie to you. It's a disappointment," but says the extensive test market studies that resulted in 102 unwanted pooch pregnancies and 15 near- choking incidents justified the recall.

Tucked deep inside a massive bill designed to track sex offenders and prevent children from being victimized by sex crimes is language that could put many Hollywood movies in the same category as hard-core, X-rated films.

If Manhattan cops find someone on the street with the right look, they will pay him or her $10 to participate in a lineup.

A 31-year-old Bridgeport man is facing burglary charges after being caught inside the Bridge Academy charter school in his underwear downloading pornography on an office computer.

A red-faced sheriff has apologized to city police, who joined deputies in a phony car chase that a sheriff's spokesman called "horseplay that has gone seriously awry." The Oct. 3 chase ended when police used a spike strip to disable the fleeing car and drew their weapons on the driver, who turned out to be an undercover deputy being chased by another deputy on the way to the Public Safety Building to end their shifts.

A Chinese man who raised bears to tap them for their bile, prized as a traditional medicine in Asia, has been killed and eaten by his animals.

China's Li Liyin set a weightlifting world record Wednesday in the 152-pound snatch division with a lift of 275.5 pounds. She is the third female weightlifter to break a record this week at her country's national games.

A Dutch burglar phoned police after fleeing in panic when he found the corpse of an 89-year-old woman in a house he broke into.

A compilation clip put together by Media Matters featuring a couple rants on Canada. Both clips are old, but you can never get enough Canada bashing. Especially when it's done on "respected" national news networks. Plus there's really no better quote than "They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent." That's about as good as it gets, folks.

The Queensland state government has said it would investigate allegations that a forensic laboratory worker stole parts from human brains so they could be injected into racehorses to make them run faster.

Authorities have arrested a Lakeland, Fla., man on obscenity charges after investigating his adult Web site, which has gained international attention for allegedly allowing U.S. soldiers to post pictures of war dead on the Internet.

Six drinks that changed history.

A retired Washington firefighter won the annual Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off on Monday, presenting a gigantic pumpkin that weighed 1,229 pounds. In Rhode Island, a welder won a similar contest with an entry weighing 1,443 pounds. Joel Holland said the pumpkin could make roughly 600 pumpkin pies but instead will be displayed in a parade in Half Moon Bay this coming weekend, then carved into a jack-o'-lantern for Halloween.

A 9-year-old boy swam the precarious waters between Alcatraz island and the San Francisco shoreline Monday, raising $30,000 in donations for Hurricane Katrina victims. Johnny Wilson, a fourth grader from Hillsborough, called the swim in the 53-degree San Francisco Bay "tiring" but said he kept telling himself, "I'm almost there, I'm almost there."

The smartest state in the union for the second consecutive year is Massachusetts. The dumbest, for the third year in a row, is New Mexico.

Almost 90 years after Einstein postulated his general theory of relativity scientists have finally finished collecting the data that will put this theory to an experimental test. For the past 17 months, NASA's Gravity Probe-B (GP-B) satellite has been orbiting the Earth using four ultra-precise gyroscopes, about a million times better than the finest navigational gyroscopes, to generate the data required for this unprecedented test.

The age of faster-than-sound commercial travel took a step back from the grave yesterday when Japan used a rocket to test fly a scale model of a proposed supersonic jetliner from the Woomera rocket range, in South Australia's outback.

Tips for applying to a job from Craigslist.

Two New Orleans police officers have been charged with battery after repeatedly punching a 64-year-old man accused of public intoxication outside a bar near Bourbon Street on Saturday night. A third officer has been charged with battery after assaulting an Associated Press Television News producer as a cameraman taped the confrontations. [with video]

Stanley and the Stanford Racing Team were awarded 2 million dollars for being the first team to complete the 132 mile DARPA Grand Challenge course. Stanley finished in just under 6 hours 54 minutes and averaged over 19 miles per hours on the course.

A European satellite designed to measure how fast the polar ice caps are melting crashed into the Arctic Ocean after its launch went wrong.

Yuma County sheriff's deputies will now be patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border in a surplus British military armored personnel carrier. The $18,000, nine-ton, six-wheeled vehicle is needed because of increased attacks against deputies and U.S. Border Patrol agents by drug and migrant smugglers, sheriff's and patrol officials said. The agencies frequently work together.

Thieves have stolen one of Britain's rarest trees from Kew's country garden in West Sussex. Botanists said that the southern beech tree, Nothofagus gunnii, which disappeared last week, would probably die because of the damage caused to the roots and lack of the care needed to make it grow.

Gold may extend its longest rally of the year, topping the highest prices since 1988, as investors stock up on bullion as a hedge against accelerating inflation.

A 25-year-old woman in Melbourne, Fla., was treated at a hospital Thursday after an alligator jumped out of the water and bit her hand as she tried to feed it by hand. Rivera told a FWC investigator that she was trying to feed an alligator when it bit her hand instead of the food. She said she did not realize it could propel itself out of the water. "This is a classic example of why it is against the law to feed alligators in Florida," said Joy Hill, public information coordinator for the FWC's Northeast Region.

A high school football player was killed and several people were injured by lightning after a game was stopped because of a thunderstorm. Another junior varsity player and a cheerleader who had been standing next to Noel were injured. They were hospitalized in serious but stable condition.

The inventor of artificial testicles for dogs, Nigerian Internet scammers and a team that calculated the pressures created when penguins poop won Ig Nobel prizes for 2005 on Thursday.

A great white shark named Nicole logged more than 12,000 miles swimming from Africa to Australia and back, the first proof of a link between the two continents' shark populations.

Fans of non-stop drinking may soon be able to cut down on time wasted ordering refills, thanks to a beer coaster that can tell when a glass is empty.

Owensboro, Kentucky is the birthplace of mankind's most advanced automated device. And believe it or not, this astonishing new technology was created specifically to play We Love Katamari.

A genetically-engineered vaccine against cervical cancer is on its way, marking another major step in the battle against the disease, the World Health Organisation has said. It would be the second vaccine against a major human cancer, following a hepatitis B vaccine that prevents primary liver cancer.

Drivers filling up at a Hallandale Beach gas station were in for quite a surprise Wednesday morning. They got premium grade gas for 33 cents a gallon.

Two major Internet backbone companies are feuding, potentially cutting off significant swaths of the Internet for some of each other's customers. On Wednesday, network company Level 3 Communications cut off its direct "peering" connections to another big network company called Cogent Communications. That technical action means that some customers on each company's network now will find it impossible, or slower, to get to Web sites on the other company's network.

Authorities were increasing mass transit security after word of a credible threat of a bombing on New York City's subway system, a congressman said in Washington. In New York, a law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity in advance of an official announcement, said the threat is "specific to place, time and method."

U.S. real estate and gambling kingpin Donald Trump is joining forces with top Emirates developer Nakheel LLC to build a tulip-shaped hotel on a man-made island shaped like a palm tree.

A cleric turned top-selling author of supernatural children's novels was thrown out of a school where he was delivering a talk after he told pupils that Harry Potter was "gay".

A lottery winner who squandered every cent of his $11.1 million hanged himself in his parents' garage this week.

A 13-foot Burmese python recently burst after it apparently tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole, authorities said. The incident has heightened biologists' fears that the nonnative snakes could threaten a host of other animal species in the Everglades. "It means nothing in the Everglades is safe from pythons, a top-down predator," said Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor.

One minute Jonathan Reed was hiking with his golden retriever in a forest in Seattle. The next, his pet was being torn apart by a "gray" -- an alien being with an elongated head, smelling of rotting fruit.

A Swedish hunter was knocked unconscious after his son shot a flying Canada goose which then fell onto his head.

Those who call for a Pizza from the Papa Johns at 2601 E. Euclid Ave., will deliver not only get their pizza, but the fire dept will also check your smoke detectors.

Two Americans and a German won the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for optical research giving extremely accurate measurements that could one day be used in deep space travel or three-dimensional holographic television.

Police arrested a 40-year-old man accused of taking off his pants at a fast-food restaurant then sitting down and eating other people's food. Lower Paxton Township Police arrested David Waller on charges of indecent exposure and disorderly conduct. Police said he went to the restroom and exited moments later with his shorts around his knees. He then sat down at a booth where two women and a 6-year-old boy were sitting and started to eat their food, police said.

Half a dozen Mexico City prostitutes have been arrested for using eye drops containing a sleep-inducing drug to knock out and rob their clients, leaving at least five men dead.

A regional supermarket chain has pulled a halloween decoration from its shelves after one of the decorations burst into flames on a family's dining room table.

A judge has ruled that the victims of a 2002 fire in Lanesboro cannot sue the city for damages. Authorities said former Lanesboro police chief John Tuchek set the blaze in an attempt to impress his former girlfriend by rescuing her from the fire.

A substitute teacher in Lake County, Fla., was terminated and banned from teaching in the county after he ripped out a student's insulin pump during class apparently thinking it was a ringing cell phone, according to a Local 6 News report.

A California family's black labrador jumped up and ate its owner's $6,000 anniversary ring as the woman was admiring it with a friend. Barbara Wiesner said she had handed the ring to her friend when her dog, King, grabbed and swallowed the diamond.

Stunned Colin Cousins returned from a pub night out to find this Vauxhall Astra "buried" nose-down in his driveway. The fork-lift driver was greeted by the amazing sight just before his 49th birthday. But he quickly realised it was a revenge act by chum Ady Feeney, landlord of his local - Southampton's Bridge Tavern. Colin was among regulars who re-painted the pub as a prank.

A Texas grand jury indicted Rep. Tom DeLay on a new charge of money laundering Monday, less than a week after another grand jury leveled a conspiracy charge that forced DeLay to temporarily step down as House majority leader.

Vitaly Matyukhin is an Arkhangelsk resident who has not seen the sun for fifteen years. Neighbors shun his household, while his little son cannot understand why he always have to wrap up in warm clothes before seeing his dad. Suffering a rare disorder - he cannot stand the heat and sunlight - Matyukhin has been confined to a self-built giant fridge for over 15 years now.

Another ghoulish New Orleans entrepreneur is seeking to trademark the word "Katrina" so that he can slap it on a "prepared alcoholic cocktail."