He had undergone a rare heart transplant seven years earlier in which a new organ was paired with the diseased one. The two hearts had developed independent rhythms and doctors attempted drug therapy to correct the problem.

While he was under the doctors’ watch, both of the man’s hearts stopped beating and he lost consciousness. After a jolt with a heart defibrillator miraculously brought him back to life doctors replaced his pacemaker but left both hearts intact, capping one of the most bizarre medical cases in recent memory.

“We haven’t ever seen anything similar to this case before,” the New York Daily News quoted Dr Giacomo Mugnai as saying in an email to MSNBC.com.

The double-heart attack took place in 2010 and the man is still reportedly in a good condition and no further arrhythmias have since been reported. This incident was reported in the latest issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

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Shannon Johnson, 34, of Colorado was advised of the charge against her via a video hookup from the jail where she is being held on a $100,000 bond, said Jennifer Finch, spokeswoman for the Weld County District Attorney’s Office.

Johnson requested a public defender during the brief hearing and another hearing was set for later in the month, Finch said.

Under questioning by police after the boy died at a Denver-area hospital last September, Johnson admitted she placed the baby in the bathtub and went into another room to play the Facebook game Cafe World.

She also checked in with friends and watched videos on the site while the boy bathed alone, according to an affidavit filed in the case.

When she didn’t hear any sounds from the boy after 10 minutes, she found him slumped over face down in the bathwater making “gurgling” sounds, according to the affidavit. Johnson then called 911, and the boy was airlifted to the hospital where he was pronounced dead from drowning.

When police arrived at Johnson’s home they found a laptop opened to Facebook.

Johnson told police that she frequently left the boy unattended in the bathtub because he was “independent,” he liked to be left alone, and she didn’t want him to be a “mama’s boy,” according to the affidavit.

Police also questioned the boy’s grandmother, who said he suffered a seizure while she was baby-sitting him a month before he died. She told police she warned her daughter about leaving her grandson alone in the tub after the seizure.

When police asked Johnson about the wisdom of leaving a young child with a history of seizures alone in water, Johnson admitted that “it was so stupid.”

She faces up to 48 years in prison if convicted.

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McDonald’s will offer “McWeddings” at three restaurants in Hong Kong, and will also host anniversary events, according to the Chinese-language Oriental Daily.

“Traditional weddings use cherries for the newlyweds to eat together and kiss. We will have French fries for them to kiss,” the English-language newspaper South China Morning Post quoted Helen Cheung at McDonald’s as saying.

“People said they’d dated here (McDonald’s restaurants), or met here, and wanted to get married here … We see this as a business chance,” said Cheung, McDonald’s director of corporate communications and relations in Hong Kong.

McDonald’s started to accept reservation last week, Oriental Daily reported, adding at least one Hong Kong couple planned to take the chance as they often dated at McDonald’s before they were engaged recently.

No price tag is mentioned in local media reports for the new “McWedding” service.

The traditional big Chinese wedding plan has become a growing burden for many young Hong Kongers.

A table for 10 persons at a five-star hotel restaurant in Hong Kong can easily cost more than HK$10,000 ($1,300) and traditional Hong Kong families usually like to host a dozen or more tables.

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A six-year-old boy with 15 fingers and 16 toes has undergone surgery to remove his extra digits. The unnamed Chinese child had four fingers on one hand and three on the other fused together. He now has ten fingers and ten toes following a six-and-a-half hour operation at a hospital in Shenyang, Liaoning, to remove the surplus 11 digits.

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Computer simulations, part of a larger study on how winds affect water, show wind could push water back at a point where a river bent to merge with a coastal lagoon, the team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado at Boulder said.

“The simulations match fairly closely with the account in Exodus,” Carl Drews of NCAR, who led the study, said in a statement.

“The parting of the waters can be understood through fluid dynamics. The wind moves the water in a way that’s in accordance with physical laws, creating a safe passage with water on two sides and then abruptly allowing the water to rush back in.”

Religious texts differ a little in the tale, but all describe Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt ahead of a pharaoh’s armies around 3,000 years ago. The Red Sea parts to let Moses and his followers pass safely, then crashes back onto the pursuers, drowning them.

Drews and colleagues are studying how Pacific Ocean typhoons can drive storm surges and other effects of strong and sustained winds on deep water.

His team pinpointed a possible site south of the Mediterranean Sea for the legendary crossing, and modeled different land formations that could have existed then and perhaps led to the accounts of the sea appearing to part.

The model requires a U-shaped formation of the Nile River and a shallow lagoon along the shoreline. It shows that a wind of 63 miles per hour, blowing steadily for 12 hours, could have pushed back waters 6 feet deep.

“This land bridge is 3-4 km (2 to 2.5 miles) long and 5 km (3 miles) wide, and it remains open for 4 hours,” they wrote in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

“People have always been fascinated by this Exodus story, wondering if it comes from historical facts,” Drews said. “What this study shows is that the description of the waters parting indeed has a basis in physical laws.”

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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) raised objection to the picture.

Fashion photographer Terry Richardson shot the cover.

In addition to the revealing meat outfit, Lady Gaga wears a small slab of beef on her head like a beret.

“Lady Gaga’s job is to do outlandish things, and this certainly qualifies as outlandish because meat is something you want to avoid putting on or in your body,” News.com.au quoted Ingrid Newkirk of PETA as saying.

“No matter how beautifully it is presented, flesh from a tortured animal is flesh from a tortured animal. Meat represents bloody violence and suffering, so if that’s the look they were going for, they achieved it,” she added.

Inside the magazine, the singer appears in photos and in an interview as her male alter ego, an Italian mechanic named Jo Calderone.

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Ares, near Bordeaux, southwestern France, decided to try and attract Martians to its triangular “UFOport” with its very own fake Martian craft.

The man-made UFO “landed” on the strip and is believed to attract any hesitant extraterrestrials in search of a runway.

The UFO port was opened in 1976 reportedly after a vote by local councilmen.

The councilmen also passed a law exempting aliens from local taxes and authorised them to participate in French boule or mud-skating tournaments.

The 1300-dollar it cost to build the UFO port has proved money extremely well spent.

As many as 20,000 tourists visit Ares every year; some willing to take photographs near the UFO port while others are sci-fi buffs keen to soak up the atmosphere.

“The reactions are sometimes very serious,” the Daily Telegraph quoted Jean-Guy Perriere, the town”s mayor as saying.

“One American wrote in the 1980s to congratulate the council and express his anger at President Reagan for failing to do the same thing.

“There is an unknown world in this universe whose limits are beyond our comprehension,” he added cryptically.

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Twenty-two-year old Wu Xiaoyan’s parents have been unable to afford the medical costs and have had to watch helplessly as their beloved daughter’s face twisted out of shape – leaving her looking like one of the creations from the Avatar movie.

Doctor Liao Quiqing from the hospital that is treating her in Lishui Zhejang, Southern China said: “She now has a severe facial deformity – a Fibrous Dysplasia.

“She cannot breathe through her nose or smell and can no longer see properly. She is very brave and doesn’t complain but she must be in a lot of pain.

“Because her tumor has already occupied two-thirds of the face we want to remove it and then carry out chemotherapy and radiotherapy.”

But the family that has already spent £10,000 on treatment cannot afford the extra £20,000 needed to complete the surgery.

All the family members are farmers and have little more than £100 a month income each. In addition her mother has been incapacitated after a stroke and the father is struggling to look after her and continue to make a living.

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The traffic jam, which spans several miles along the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway, reportedly stems from road construction in Beijing. As of Tuesday, Aug 24, the jam has hit the 10-day mark.

Quoting an official of Zhangjiakou city’s Traffic Management Bureau, an international news agency reported that the traffic jam won’t be finished until the middle of next month (Sep 2010).

Zhang Minghai, director of Bureau general office said that the jam, that spreads across 60 miles (100 kilometers), with cars moving little more than a half-mile (one kilometer) a day at one point has improved since this weekend.

The traffic jam began on last Saturday, Aug 14 along the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway, which records a 40 per cent surge in traffic volume every year.

According to the authorities, the traffic congestion escalated after coalfields were discovered in Inner Mongolia.

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Fourteen-month old Song Sheng of Jinhu, eastern China, will never be able to enjoy these luxuries, as he suffers from Lamellar ichthyosis, a rare genetic condition that left the poor child born without pores, causing his entire body to develop scales. This unfortunate outcome is due to his inability to sweat. He is instead cooled down through the use of giant bathtubs filled with ice.

Sadly, this primitive method of maintaining one’s cool, as it were, does little to alleviate the massive amounts of pain the poor child is in at all times. According to his father, Song Dehui, if they run out of ice, he develops a fever.

Sadly, there is no cure, though it can be treated. Despite this, Song Dehui is holding out hope for a cure, be it in the form of a folk remedy or a miracle.

A donation system has been set up at Journals Without Borders.

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