A gang of German bank robbers trying to blow open an ATM machine used too much explosive and destroyed the entire bank. The blast reduced the bank building in the village of Malliss to rubble and damaged cars more than 100 yards away, yet the targeted ATM machine was left completely intact. “Something evidently didn’t work the way the robbers […]
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A growing numbers of drought-afflicted California farmers began hiring dowsers to locate underground water. “Scientists don’t believe in it,” said vintner Marc Mondavi, “but I do and most of the farmers in the [Napa] Valley do.”
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Portion of China’s carbon emissions that is produced by manufacturing goods for export: 1/4
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. . . the Ukrainian navy, after the Russian military seized control of the country’s combat-dolphin program, which had been based in Crimea. “Dolphins get used to the people they work with,” said a Ukrainian official. “It’s not so easy for them to change allegiance.”
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After decimating the Tanzanian elephant population, poachers have now killed half of the elephants in neighboring Mozambique in just five years. A survey by Mozambique’s government and the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society found that the herd has shrunk from 20,000 in 2010 to just over 10,000 animals today. “This decline is due to rampant elephant poaching in the country’s most important […]
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Almost one in five women—19.3 percent—has been raped, and 44 percent have suffered sexual violence, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly half of the women who were raped identified the perpetrator as a boyfriend or husband.
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A specimen of the world’s largest flower, the titan arum, is about to bloom at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. To attract carrion insects, the flower emits a stench botanists likened to “a very dead elephant.”
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The odds are 1 in 4 million that you’ll be on a bridge when it collapses at some time during your life.
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As diabetes rates rise worldwide, so does the illegal trade in human kidneys.The World Health Organization estimates that 10,000 black-market operations a year are being performed in places like China, Pakistan, and India, as doctors transplant kidneys purchased from poor donors for as little as $5,000 into richer patients paying up to $200,000.
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China has surpassed Mexico as the largest source of new U.S. immigrants. China was the country of origin for 147,000 immigrants in 2013, compared with Mexico at 125,000, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau study.
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