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.

Eight killed during Mass

An armed group killed at least eight people during mass in a drug rehabilitation centre in a Mexican border town late yesterday.

Nearby security forces allowed the attackers to flee, police in Ciudad Juarez said, quoting witnesses.

An armed group "entered (the building) shooting at people who were praying, killing or injuring many of them," the municipal office of public security said in a statement, quoting witnesses.

After the shooting, the assassins "fled, without rushing, down Barranco Azul avenue, where there was a group of soldiers and ministerial police who did nothing to detain them,'' the statement said.

At least eight people were killed, but the final tally could be higher, local police said.

Two people were killed in a nearby rehabiliation center last weekend, in a town where the country's drug wars are played out daily.

Federal authorities have deployed more than 36,000 soldiers across the country, including 2500 in Ciudad Juarez, in an effort to combat drug trafficking and violence, but some ,000 people have been killed so far this year.

Authorities attribute some 780 assassinations in Ciudad Juarez this year to turf wars between drug cartels.

Interesting Times Revisited

On this day in history, Lizzie Borden took an axe...and well, you know the rest. Lizzie Andrew Borden was a New England spinster who was the central figure in the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother on August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts in the United States. The slayings, subsequent trial, and the following trial by media became a cause célèbre. The fame of the incident has endured in American pop culture and criminology. Although Lizzie Borden was acquitted, she was widely believed to be guilty; no one else was ever arrested or tried, and she has remained notorious in American folklore. Dispute over the identity of the killer or killers continues to this day.

On the morning of August 4, 1892, Borden's father, Andrew Jackson Borden, and her stepmother, Abby Durfee Borden, were murdered in the family home. The only other people present at the residence at the time were Lizzie and the family maid, Bridget Sullivan. Emma Borden, Lizzie's sister, was away from home. The Borden sisters' uncle, John Vinnicum Morse, brother of Andrew Borden's first wife, was visiting at the time, but was also away from the house during the time of the murders.

That day, Andrew Borden had gone into town to do his usual rounds at the bank and post office. He returned home at about 10:45 a.m. About a half-hour later, Lizzie Borden found his body. According to Sullivan's testimony, she was lying down in her room on the third floor of the house shortly after 11:00 a.m. when she heard Lizzie call to her, saying someone had killed her father, whose body was found slumped on a couch in the downstairs sitting room. Andrew Borden's face was turned to the right hand side, apparently at ease as if he were asleep.

Shortly thereafter, while Lizzie Borden was being tended by neighbors and the family doctor, Sullivan discovered the body of Mrs. Borden upstairs in the guest bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Borden had both been killed by blows from a hatchet, which in the case of Andrew Borden, not only crushed his skull but cleanly split his left eyeball.