Cemetery workers charged after allegedly dumping corpses

Four cemetery workers have been charged with illegally dismembering human bodies after digging up more than 300 corpses and dumping them in a pit in order to resell the graves.

Illinois police discovered the decomposing bodies at the historic Burr Oak cemetery in Alsip where a number of prominent African Americans are buried, including Emmett Till, the 14 year-old boy whose lynching in 1955 for flirting with a white woman helped galvanise the civil rights movement, and blues legend Dinah Washington.

"What we found was beyond startling and revolting," the Cook county sheriff, Tom Dart, said.

The police say the bodies were dug up and dumped in an overgrown area fenced off from the rest of the cemetery, 20 miles south of Chicago. The graves were then resold with the four arrested workers believed to have made about $300,000 over several years.

Relatives of the dead descended on the cemetery to discover if their loved ones had been disinterred. They included Simeon Wright, a cousin of Till, who told the Chicago Tribune: "I've got several generations of my family buried there, and I've never had any problems. ... But this is a pretty ghoulish story."

Dart said that Till's grave appears to have been undisturbed but he was not sure about Washington's or that of the heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles.

The principal target appears to have been older graves that had not been visited for many years so that the removal of the bodies would not be noticed by relatives.
Dart said the FBI has been called in and that forensic medical examiners are working to identify the remains.

"I've been in this business for 35 years, and I have never heard of employees committing these kinds of terrible acts," Vickie Hand, treasurer of the Illinois Cemetery & Funeral Home Association, told the Chicago Tribune. "There's no words that can express it; it's just absolutely unbelievable."

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"King of Pop" Michael Jackson Dead at 50

(RTTNews) - Pop star Michael Jackson has died.

The Los Angeles California Coroner's Office confirmed that the well-known "King of Pop" was pronounced dead at the UCLA Medical Center.

The initial cause of death, officials said, was cardiac arrest.

Sources said the 50-year-old Jackson was transported to the hospital from his nearby rental home in Bel-Air shortly after an emergency call at 12:30 PM Pacific Time (3:30 PM Eastern).

Jackson was reported to be in a coma at the time of transport.

The L.A. Times reported that when paramedics arrived at the home, Jackson was not breathing.

Word of Jackson's death caused a crowd of hundreds of reporters and others to form at the hospital.

The Los Angeles Police Department said it has opened investigation into Jackson's death, although they said there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

The L.A. County Coroner's Office will determine an official cause of death.

Jackson's death comes as the entertainer was preparing to kick off a comeback on July 13, including a series of 50 sold-out shows at London's O2 Arena.

Jackson was believed to be heavily in debt. He had not toured since 1997 and had not released a new album since 2001.

Jackson's professional career began at age 8 when he began performing with the family band called "The Jackson 5."

Jackson is survived by three children, sons Prince Michael 7, and Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., 12, and daughter Paris Michael Katherine, 11.

by RTT Staff Writer

Read more here.

Michael Jackson
1958 - 2009

When I See Kitties Fly

By Daily Mail Reporter

While most cats are renowned for having nine lives, these moggies are clearly living on a wing and a prayer.

The cute little devils began sprouting bumps on their backs, which later turned into wing-like growths, during a recent spell of hot weather in China's Sichuan province.

One cat owner, known only as Feng, claims her cat's wings are a result of stress after he was 'harassed' by females looking to mate.

'At first, they were just two bumps, but they started to grow quickly, and after a month there were two wings,' she told Huashang News.



'Many female cats in heat came to harass him, and then the wings started to grow.'

And while she says her lovable Tom is no devil, his wings, which contain bones, make him look more like a 'cat angel'.

But genetic experts claim there is nothing angelic or magical about the condition, which doesn't hinder the cat's quality of life.

They say the wings can form through poor grooming, a genetic defect or a hereditary skin condition.

Afghan spider forces Army family out of home

By Stephen Adams

Days after Rodney Griffiths returned home from a four-month tour of Helmand province with 16 Air Assault Brigade, the family's pet dog Bella mysteriously died.

Son Ricky, 16, then spotted the giant spider, prompting the soldier's wife Lorraine to move the family out of their four-bedroom army home in Colchester, Essex.

Mother-of-four Mrs Griffiths, 37, said: "Ricky saw a huge spider and screamed to his sister Cassie. They tried to put a pint-glass over it but it was too big, they poked it with a coat hanger and the spider bit it. The dog came in, jumped on the bed and barked at it. The spider hissed and Bella went running out whimpering."

Days later the family took Bella to the vet with a high temperature and swollen stomach. She had to be put down. Mrs Griffiths said she thought her death "too much of a coincidence" although the vet could not say why the dog died.

After scouring the internet for spider descriptions they decided the culprit was a camel spider.

She said: "I think it must have hitched a lift back with my husband in June."

Read more here

More Monster Summer Fun

The Canadian Press

FORT CHIPEWYAN, Alta. — Information about a mutated fish caught downstream from Alberta’s oilsands region will be sent to a joint government-industry group that monitors the health of rivers and lakes.

The 2.5-kilogram goldeye caught last week in Lake Athabasca has two mouths, one beneath the other.


Two boys pointed the deformed fish out to Stuart Macmillan, Parks Canada’s manager of resource conservation at Wood Buffalo National Park, who studied it before handing it over to the Mikesew First Nation.

“We had just pulled up to the dock and some kids came over and said, `Hey, we’ve got a fish over here with two mouths,” Macmillan said Tuesday.

“It was really unusual. The fish has an obvious abnormality. I had never seen anything like that myself before. I can’t speculate on what might have caused it.”

Read more here.

The Mad Blood Stirring: A Collection of Songs about Monsters, Mayhem, and the Strange Summer of 2008

Track Listing

1. Our Day Will Come - Patti Page
2. The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning - Smashing Pumpkins
3. Summer In The City - Quincy Jones
4. Armageddon 2000 - The Groovie Ghoulies
5. Astro Zombies - Various Artists
6. Time of the Season - The Zombies
7. Summer Samba - Astrud Gilberto
8. Summer Breeze - Seals & Croft
9. Summerfire - BU
10. I'm Gonna Make Love (Even When I'm Dead) - Isaac Hayes
11. Happiness is a Warm Gun - The Beatles
12. Summer Sun - KOOP
13. The Long Road - Eddie Vedder
14. Black Celebration - Monster Magnet
15. The Great Gig in the Sky - Pink Floyd
16. Summertime Cowboy - Husky Rescue
17. Eve of Destruction - Barry McGuire
18. Justify My Love (The Beast Within Mix)
19. Black Hole Sun - Soundgarden
20. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)- Dave Stewart
21. It's The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - R.E.M.

More Monsters Popping Up

What's brownish-purple, goes to the beach and stinks of rotting flesh?

New York's celebrity-obsessed Hamptons summer season got even sillier this week when a strange-looking, very dead creature washed up on a beach in Montauk at the far eastern end of New York's Long Island.

On Tuesday afternoon, a photo was posted on Gawker, the Big Apple's reigning gossip blog, which treated the Montauk monster with characteristic respect: "Good Luck With Your Hell Demons."

The animal looks like a bloated, hairless dog, except that it's got an eagle-like beak, a prominent brow ridge and a curiously elongated front paw.

Read more here.

Is this Bigfoot?

Two US professional Bigfoot hunters claim to have found a body of the legendary creature and will present evidence of the astounding discovery to the world's press and scientists tomorrow.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, who run Bigfoot expeditions, say they found a dead Bigfoot in the woods of north Georgia, in the southeast of the US, about two weeks ago and have put the carcass in a freezer.

Read more here.