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COUPLE GETS MARRIED ON 100TH BIRTHDAY

For some people, it's never too late for love. That's certainly the case for Forrest Lunsway and Rose Pollard, an Orange County, Calif. couple who were married this March 19, Forrest's 100th birthday. With a combined age of 190--Rose is a spring chicken--they're believed to be the world's oldest newlyweds. A spokesman for the Guinness Book of World Records said they had been informed of the wedding and are set to verify it as a record. For 27 years, Forrest smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, and he still drinks the odd glass of wine or whiskey and 7-Up, he said in a recent interview with the The Daily. He attributes his longevity to never having had a desk job: He spent his youth trapping animals and selling their fur in Kansas before moving to California, where he worked as a pipe welder. You can watch a video of them here: Both Forrest and Rose had been married before, but were single when they met back in 1983 at a senior's dance. Though they soon started dating, wedding bells seemed unlikely. 'I told him up front I had no intention of getting married," Rose said. "But then one day he asked me 'how come we never got married? and I said 'because you never asked me.'" ''So he got down on one knee and said, 'Well I'm asking you now, just set the date.' I told him, 'I'll marry you on your 100th birthday.' And I did." And being on the older side, the couple also has some wisdom to share on how to make a marriage work. Rose, 93, told The Daily: 'Take your time and get to know one another. Get to know if you like all the things that person stands for. ... Be forgiving and patient and say I love you once in a while." Rose also told The Daily that their advanced age means that she and Forrest don't have many of the anxieties that can be a challenge for other newlyweds. "That's one of the things we can forget about--time. Because time doesn't mean that much." And it's time well spent together: They both love ballroom dancing, and they want to kayak in Alaska and walk the coast of California. "We've got many happy years left as I intend to stick around until I'm at least 110," Forrest said. "You've got to use it or lose it." CORRECTION: The original version of this piece misstated Rose's age; it is 90, not 93. (The Daily)

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Osama bin Laden is dead and buried at sea - conspiracy theory or true? May 2, 2011 1:31 PM EDT It may not be true that Osama bin Laden is dead and buried at sea, according to two Pakistani TV stations and some Americans, who feel he is still alive.

U.S. President Barack Obama announced on Sunday night that dreaded terrorist and al Qaeda leader bin Laden was killed in "a firefight" with U.S. forces led by the CIA. bin Laden was reportedly killed - shot on the head - in a mansion that was stormed by U.S. forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Soon thereafter, to respect Islamic rituals and practice of burying a body in 24 hours, the U.S. forces smuggled his body out of Pakistan and buried it at sea. A senior U.S. official said that as it was difficult in finding a country where his body could be buried, they decided to bury him at sea. Must Read A policeman walks in front of the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in AbbottabadPakistan slams US for killing Osama bin Laden without its permission White House Press Secretary Jay CarneyOsama unarmed when killed: US official Sponsorship Link How to make money from gold investment The AFP reported Pakistan television stations as saying that the lower half of Laden's face in the circulated death photo (source of photo unknown) is from one of his handout photos. The upper half of his face may be from another picture of dead body. A member of the AFP photo lab analyst examined the image and confirmed that in the death photo, the beard and the lower part of the image were most probably copied from one of bin Laden's handout photos and pasted onto the image of a different dead body. Even among Americans, some still believe bin Laden is alive and well as neither the Talibans nor al Qaeda has come out with an official statement that bin Laden is dead. One reveler in Time Square quipped that this is just a well-crafted media propaganda to boost Obama's flagging ratings before elections. "If Osama was really been killed and buried at sea, why aren't clear evidence being produced? Why isn't the government showing us clear photos or videos of his dead body? Is he really dead? I doubt whether his body has been thrown into the sea," the reveler, who identified himself only as 'Nick' said. Meanwhile, even if it is true that bin Laden is truly dead and truly buried at sea, it has failed to appease Islamic scholars, who claim that only those who died at sea, away from land, can be buried at sea. As bin Laden died on land, he should have been buried on land, according to Islamic rites, that include placing the body in a grave with the head pointed toward the holy city of Mecca. Moreover, Muslim prayers have to be recited and the body need to be ritually washed, as is usually required by Islamic law. And, even if the body is buried at sea, it needs to be wrapped in a shroud and buried only after a brief Islamic service is held, the scholars said. The scholars feel the Americans have humiliated the Muslims by disregarding Islamic practice and customs. "The Americans want to humiliate Muslims through this burial, and I don't think this is in the interest of the U.S. administration," Omar Bakri Mohammed, a radical cleric in Lebanon, said. "It is not acceptable and it is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea. The body of bin Laden should have been handed over to his family to look for a country or land to bury him," another Islamic scholar from Iraq, Abdul-Sattar al-Janabi, who preaches at Baghdad's famous Abu Hanifa mosque, said. "They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam," Mohammed al-Qubaisi, Dubai's grand mufti, said about bin Laden's burial. "Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances. This is not one of them." Another Muslim scholar also said a simple solution would have been to hand over bin Laden's body to his family or bury him in an unmarked grave. "What the Americans have done is forbidden by Islam and could alienate Muslims further and anger them. It could trigger a retaliation," the scholar said. OTHER UNANSWERED QUESTIONS -> bin Laden's eye-catching mansion was around 1000 yards away from what is Pakistan's version of West Point military academy. Did Pakistan intelligence really not know that bin Laden was living in their midst? If Pakistan knew of bin Laden's whereabouts, did Pakistan double-cross United States by not sharing the information even after receiving billions of dollars in aid? -> A U.S. national security official said "This was a kill operation." Why would the U.S. forces want a "kill operation" when bin Laden would be a million times more valuable if captured alive? And if indeed it was a "kill operation," why did the U.S. forces give bin Laden a chance to surrender, an offer which bin Laden supposedly refused, as reported by different media? -> U.S. officials say the "firefight" lasted about 40 minutes. According to Muslim practice, a body should be buried in 24 hours. In the case of Saddam Hussein, his sons' bodies were embalmed and not buried within 24 hours. According to John Brennan, counter-terrorism advisor, "the burial of bin Laden's remains was done in strict conformance with Islamic precepts and practice." Why would U.S. forces act with such urgency and "respect" in burying the body of a person, who has killed over 2,500 Americans and snatched away the dreams of millions of others? Is it really true that the U.S. forces would simply bury the body of the world's most wanted man at sea? -> Assuming that bin Laden's body was buried at sea, why did the U.S. forces act so hurriedly? They had 23 hours and 20 minutes to do away with his body - sufficient time for them to even transport the body to the United States, confirm the identity of the body properly and then dispose of the body. -> Assuming bin Laden's body was indeed buried at sea, why can't the U.S. government release any official photo/video clip of bin Laden's body being buried at sea? -> Assuming that U.S. forces had buried the body of bin Laden at sea, what did they do with the bodies of his son(s) and brother(s) and other terrorists who were killed in the raid? Were those bodies also buried at sea or laid in unmarked graves or brought to the United States? Indeed, reports of bin Laden being killed and his body being disposed off so suddenly and quickly when the U.S. could not even find his trace for nearly a decade are somewhat hard to digest. Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/140347/20110502/osama-bin-laden-is-dead-and-buried-at-sea-true-or-conspiracy-theory.htm#ixzz1LLiLNz4e

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ARMADILLOS???

Armadillos Can Transmit Leprosy to Humans, Federal Researchers Confirm By GARDINER HARRIS Published: April 27, 2011 o Armadillos have never been among the cuddly creatures routinely included in petting zoos, but on Wednesday federal researchers offered a compelling reason to avoid contact with the armored animals altogether: They are a source of leprosy infections in humans. Related * Health Guide: Leprosy Using genetic sequencing machines, researchers were able to confirm that about a third of the leprosy cases that arise each year in the United States almost certainly result from contact with infected armadillos. The cases are concentrated in Louisiana and Texas, where some people hunt, skin and eat armadillos. Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is an ancient scourge that has largely disappeared, but each year about 150 to 250 people in the United States and 250,000 in the world contract the illness. As long as the disease is identified relatively quickly, treatment with antibiotics — a one- to two-year regimen with three different drugs — offers an effective cure. But every year dozens of people in the United States do not recognize their skin lesions for what they are early enough and suffer lifelong nerve damage as a result. Part of the problem is that doctors sometimes fail to consider leprosy in patients who have not traveled to parts of the world where the disease is endemic, like India, Brazil, Africa, the Philippines and other islands in the Western Pacific. Two-thirds of leprosy patients in the United States are people who have either lived or worked in such places before coming down with the illness. But in a given year, about 50 to 80 people who have symptoms consistent with leprosy tell their doctors that they have not traveled to such areas or had any contact with someone with a leprosy infection. And in these patients, doctors may mistakenly dismiss consideration of a leprosy infection. “These patients have always been a puzzle,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Now researchers are hoping that their study leads doctors to ask one more question of patients who have skin lesions that are numb in the center: Any armadillos in your life? Leprosy now joins a host of other infectious diseases — including flu, H.I.V./AIDS and SARS — that are known to have jumped from animals to humans. Flu is thought to have first crossed to humans from migratory waterfowl several hundred years ago. H.I.V./AIDS first crossed from a chimpanzee about 90 years ago. Dr. Fauci said that about 70 percent of new emerging infectious diseases were known to have animal origins. But one of the interesting aspects of leprosy is that transmission seems to have gone in both directions. Leprosy was not present in the New World before Christopher Columbus, and armadillos are indigenous only to the New World. “So armadillos had to have acquired it from humans sometime in the last 400 to 500 years,” said Dr. Richard W. Truman, a researcher at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, La., and an author of the armadillo study, which was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Some studies have shown that as many as 20 percent of armadillos in some areas are infected with leprosy. Armadillos now range from Colorado to North Carolina and have a similar habitat to opossums. Few armadillos live long enough in the wild to be seriously affected by the infection, Dr. Truman said, but those in laboratories suffer many of the same problems as humans and eventually die of liver and kidney failure. The microbe that causes leprosy, Mycobacterium leprae, is a fragile one. It does not grow in laboratory petri dishes, and survives only a week or two in moist soil. Indeed, the only animals in which it is known to flourish are humans and armadillos, and researchers have long used armadillos to grow the disease, although its presence in armadillos predates such research. Because of this, researchers have speculated that some share of human leprosy cases reported in the United States and other parts of the Americas resulted from contact with armadillos, but there has not been definitive proof until this study. The fragility of the leprosy bacterium suggests that infections result from something more than casual contact with an armadillo, Dr. Truman said. “The important thing is that people should be discouraged from consuming armadillo flesh or handling it,” Dr. Truman said.