Athletics chief faces quit calls over Semenya

A South African government minister called on Leonard Chuene to resign after the national athletics chief admitted he knew Caster Semenya had undergone a gender test prior to the world championships. Chuene was forced into a humiliating climbdown after previously denying that Semenya had been tested before going to Berlin to win the women’s 800m title.

Share

Girl gorillas go ape for French pinup hunk

You don’t want to monkey around on a blind date — especially if your friends are also taking an interest in the same dark handsome stranger. So when three female gorillas at London Zoo heard that they would soon be visited by a brooding French hunk — well, they went a bit bananas The latest development in Anglo-French relations sees Yeboah, a 20-stone 12-year-old leave his current home at La Boissiere Du Dore Zoo, Pays de la Loire, northwest France and head for the British capital by the end of the year.

Share

New photo shows healthier Fidel Castro

A new photo of ailing Communist leader Fidel Castro surfaced on Sunday — the second in 10 days — revealing a more healthy-looking man than in prior photos. Published in Cuba’s state-run youth newspaper, Juventud Rebelde, the photo shows Castro, 83, meeting with Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa

Share

Why Does Facebook Hate Babies?

Facebook hates babies. I found this out last night when I logged on as Laszlo Stein, my three-month old son who has been faithfully posting adorable photos and angry commentary since his second-trimester sonogram, back when his listed interests were just kicking and drinking his own urine. In his time on Facebook, he threatened to pee on some, cut others and once posted — next to a photo of him gummily smiling and wearing a kimono — this response to my wife’s friend Nancy’s comment that she met another baby named Laszlo: “OMG! That’s so awesome! We should form a Facebook group! Just kidding.

Share

Dolly Parton: ‘I know I’m a bit over-exaggerated’

"Never wear your make up to bed," implore the beauty editors. But Dolly Parton was never one for following conventional advice on looking good. She sets her own standards, from her striking sculptured hair to the bright lashings of eyeshadow caked on a face that she has admitted in the past owes a lot to modern surgery

Share

Kate Gosselin breaks silence in interview

Even with their divorce pending, Kate Gosselin said — when asked if she still loves her soon-to-be ex Jon Gosselin — "When I think back to the Jon I knew — yes, suffice it to say." However, the star of TLC’s “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” who continues to wear her wedding ring, said that’s not because of any hope of reuniting with Jon. Speaking on Monday’s “Today Show” in her first live TV interview since her marriage ended seven weeks ago, Kate broke into tears as she told the program’s Meredith Vieira that the ring remains on her finger because “I don’t want to upset [the children].” The sextuplets and twins, all under the age of 10, “know that it’s my ‘married to Daddy’ ring,” she said. Repeatedly describing herself as “determined to hang in there,” Gosselin, 34, said “I am as well as can be expected” and prepared to deal with whatever life hands her.

Share

Was Robert Capa’s Famous Civil War Photo a Fake?

“If your pictures aren’t good enough,” Robert Capa once remarked, “then you’re not close enough.” For more than 35 years, Capa’s 1936 photograph “Death of a Militiaman” — arguably the most enduring image of the Spanish Civil War — commanded worldwide acclaim and helped establish Capa as the archetypal modern war photographer. But beginning in the 1970s, researchers and historians began to challenge the picture’s veracity and raise questions about Capa’s reputation: Did the famous photograph capture the militiaman at the moment of his death, or was it staged Now comes a claim that new and “indisputable” evidence determines once and for all that the photograph is a fake. “We tried to reconstruct the events exactly as they would have to have occurred for Capa’s photo to have been taken during a military conflict,” says Ernest Alos, the reporter for Cataluna’s daily El Periodico who has led the latest inquiry.

Share

Does photo found in cell show children’s grave?

Police wonder whether a photograph found in a prison cell a decade ago might lead to the bodies of two children who disappeared and are believed to have been murdered. Karen and Michael Reinert, who lived with their divorced mother in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, were 11 and 10 when their mother was murdered and they vanished in June 1979.

Share