The latest party circuit princess to wow the night clubs and festivals of France with her DJ skills is a British granny who took a shine to the decks after going to a birthday disco for her grandson.
Clad in her leopard-skin shrug and dark sunglasses,
69-year-old Ruth Flowers has conquered French clubland from the Cannes Film Festival to the top Paris nightspots with a mix of old-school hits, electrobeat and bling-bling style.
"It started really when my grandson had a birthday party ... they always have a little disco, don't they, after the party," Flowers told Reuters, lounging on a white sofa in a Paris hotel in a green satin bomber jacket and trademark shades contrasting with her white hair.
A Liberal senator has used the permanent abolition of the death penalty in Australia to call for Indonesia to spare the lives of members of the Bali nine, saying the use of capital punishment is not reflective of a civilised society. The Federal Parliament today passed laws that ensure the death penalty can never be reintroduced by any state or territory in Australia.
Both sides of politics supported the move, which is seen as largely symbolic.

Crowds of baccarat-obsessed Chinese punters crammed inside the world’s largest casino, the Venetian Macau, witnessed on Wednesday the mega-casino’s latest claim to fame as the world’s largest "house of cards".
Kneeling at a quiet spot not far from the cavernous gaming floors of the casino, Bryan Berg, an American architect placed the last of 218,792 playing cards onto his paper edifice — a replica of the Venetian Macau — to break his own Guinness World Record for the largest house of free-standing playing cards.
Senator Nick Xenophon's bid to have an inquiry into the tax-free status of religious and charitable groups, including the Church of Scientology, has failed.
Senator Xenophon today moved a motion in the Senate calling for an inquiry into whether the organisations should be subjected to a public benefit test, like that in the UK.
He was prompted by complaints from former Church of Scientology members, and said he had received "hundreds" more allegations since first raising the issue.
A 35-year-old Canadian who uses a wheelchair was beaten in Sydney, Australia, on Tuesday and is in hospital in serious condition, according to police reports.
Heath Proden is from Manitoba but has been in Sydney since November on an extended visit with his girlfriend.
He was waiting to catch a train at a city station at about 11 p.m. local time when he was approached and verbally assaulted by two teenage boys, the New South Wales police said on their website.
After being confronted by the teens, Proden tried to leave the station via an elevator but was punched in the face by one of the boys and knocked from his chair, police said.
The teenagers allegedly then stomped on Proden and hit him on the head and body with metal bars, including one from his wheelchair.
Righteo Ladies and Gents. Straighten your ties, tilt your stubbled chins toward the media and get ready to tip your way to Collingwood's 15th premiership. As usual, the comp is hosted by the good folks at footytips.com.au. Either follow the link directly to the competition or search for it from the main page. If you don't have a footytips account, sign up for one. The password for the competition hasn't changed in the last six years and is "lemurs" (without the quotes, obviously)
Small, battery-powered gadgets make powerful computing portable but unfortunately, there's still a continual need to recharge the batteries of phones and other gadgets by hooking them up to a tangle of wires. Fortunately the latest technology trends proposed a way to cut the cords by wirelessly supplying power to devices and Nokia researchers have developed a new technique for powering mobile devices that could draw enough power from ambient radio waves or kinetic energy to keep a smartphone topped up.
Nokia has filed a US patent application for a phone that can work continuously without requiring to be plugged into a wall socket for a recharge, just buy a phone, signing up for a good data plan and enjoy in unlimited freedom because you’ll newer need a charger again, sounds great isn't it?
Go out on patrol with the Army Men!
There’s an important mission in Andy’s bedroom – time to send in the green Army Men! Hopping along on their removable stands, these brave toy soldiers never leave a man behind. Good thing they’ve brought their Jeep, stretcher and all their equipment with them! Includes 4 minifigures.
* Includes 4 Army Men minifigures, jeep and stretcher
* Soldiers' jeep equipped with spare tire
* Ages 6+
* Jeep measures over 3" (8cm) long
A car that runs on coffee is unveiled today - but it certainly won't take the grind out of commuting.
And at between 25 and 50 times the cost of running a car on petrol, the invention won't please any motor industry bean-counters either.
Nicknamed the Car-puccino, it has been created using a converted 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco bought for £400 and chosen for its resemblance to the time-travelling DeLorean in the movie Back To The Future.
Some serious PC gaming is about to come to Macs, with Valve announcing that its Steam platform will support Apple computers in April.
Valve says it’ll treat the Mac as a “tier-1″ platform, meaning that its games and all updates will be released simultaneously for Windows and Mac. A new feature called Steam Play will let people play the same game on a Windows PC and a Mac for no added cost, with saved games transferring between computers.
Valve’s a heavy hitter in PC gaming, with iconic first-person shooters such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead. And Steam, a platform for digital game downloads and online play, has 25 million members. That number will soon inflate with Mac support, and there’s a good chance other game developer will give Mac ports more serious consideration; DICE, the maker of recent blockbuster Battlefield: Bad Company 2, is already mulling a Mac version.
A postal worker who chopped off his wife's head after she refused to have sex with him for more than 20 years was today sentenced to 18 years in prison for murder.
Phillippe Cousin decapitated wife Nicole after suffering a "mid-life crisis" sparked by the fact he was approaching 50 and had not fathered any children.
In a fit of rage during an argument, the postal inspector took a kitchen knife to her neck and hacked off her head. He then calmly telephoned police and told an officer: "Excuse me for disturbing you, I've killed my wife."
When the police arrived at his home in Arras, northern France, he told them: "I'm sorry for all this extra work which I've given you. My wife shouted my name out, I decapitated her. I'm not mad, you know."
The Lost Boys actor Corey Haim has died aged 38, the Los Angeles coroner's office has confirmed.
A spokeswoman said he passed away in the early hours of Wednesday morning at Providence St Joseph Medical Centre. A post-mortem will determine the cause of death and no other details have been released as yet.
Haim starred alongside Kiefer Sutherland in The Lost Boys, about a group of friends who do battle with a band of teenage vampires.
Corey Haim has died of an apparent drug overdose. He was 38. The actor - who had been in rehab around 15 times - was discovered unresponsive by his mother at her Oakwood, California, apartment in the early hours of this morning. Four prescription medication bottles were recovered at the scene, according to TMZ.
On the eighth of February 1912, a small group of officials arrived at City Hall Park on Manhattan’s Broadway street. The men gathered at one grassy corner of the park grounds, where a long-neglected iron grating protected the entrance to a seemingly unremarkable ventilation shaft. The heavy, rust-encrusted grille was pried from its resting place, and with lanterns in hand the men descended one by one into the cavity. About twenty feet below the pavement the group emerged into an eight-foot-wide brickwork tube, the end of which was beyond the immediate reach of the lights. The sturdily-constructed tunnel was a relic from the years following the American Civil War, and it had remained virtually forgotten beneath the streets of New York since its main entrance was sealed sometime around 1880.
In an age when the death penalty has been abolished in most of the developed world, and is often frowned upon even where is practiced, it might seem difficult to believe that barely a century ago executions were not only the norm but were put unashamedly on public display. In the American Old West, capital punishment was, by comparison with today, meted out in spades. Lynching from trees and other forms of tough justice were the order of the day, and be hanged with scruples like wrongful convictions and the idea that such practices only ape the culture of violence they condemn.
The tiny freshwater hydra has no eyes but it will contract into a ball when exposed to sudden bright light. David Plachetzki and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have found that hydras "see" light using two proteins closely related to those in our own eyes.
"If you look at something as complex as an eye, you might be at a loss to explain how the whole structure evolved at once," says Plachetzki, now at the University of California, Davis. "But if you look at its components you can start to piece together how it happened."
Rod and cone cells in the human retina contain proteins called opsins that change shape when light strikes them. This causes another type of protein, an ion channel, to generate an electrical signal along nerves connecting the eye to the brain – a process called phototransduction.
Hydras have the same types of opsins and ion channels as we do. Plachetzki's team found that they make them together in nerve cells. Moreover, they found that a drug that blocks those channels stopped hydras responding to light, showing they are used for phototransduction. "This is conclusive evidence that these animals, the Cnidaria, have light sensitivity based on this kind of opsin and transduction, just as we do," says Dan Nilsson of the University of Lund in Sweden
The subtle art of listening, allegedly the keystone of successful marriages, has a defensive role in the chaos of war, too. A Dutch firm is shopping to world militaries a tiny device that listens for screams, gunshots, mortars and even warplanes. It doesn't listen in the conventional sense, but instead measures the 3D movement of individual air particles in order to determine the x, y and z coordinates of whatever made the noise in question.
To do this, Netherlands-based Microflown Technologies is using technology that it developed, called acoustic vector sensing (AVS). The sensor is smaller than a match head. At its heart are two platinum strips, each 200-nanometers thick (about 600 atoms across) by 10 micrometers wide. They're stretched parallel across a gap and heated to 200 degrees Celsius when operating.
Air particles flowing past the strips cool them unevenly. The pattern of cooling and heating is analyzed by signal-processing software, created by Microflown, in a compact PC, such as the CompuLab fit-PC2.
Hans-Elias de Bree, who invented AVS and who co-founded Microflown, says a soldier near-instantaneously sees not only where the sound originated, but also information about the sound, such as what make of weapon.
Andrée Peel, who died on March 5 aged 105, was a much-decorated heroine of the French Resistance; known as Agent Rose, she helped dozens of British and American pilots escape from occupied Europe and only escaped death at the hands of the Nazis by the skin of her teeth.
During her three years with the Resistance – during which she was known first as Agent X and then as Agent Rose – Andrée helped save the lives of more than 100 Allied pilots. Her team used torches to guide Allied planes to improvised landing strips and smuggled fugitive airmen aboard submarines and gunboats on remote parts of the coast, often feeling their way in the dark past German coastal shelters.
The work was extremely dangerous. Any family found harbouring an Allied airman risked being shot and in 1943 Andrée herself was forced to leave Brest after a comrade (who had been forced to watch his family being tortured by the Gestapo) informed on her.
So if you agree that murder is a bad thing, why is it any different when it's committed by a...
Australia abolishes the death penalty forever... Wait, what?
astro on 11-03-2010