Hulleye Comes By!

so you remember the case of the disappearing bee’s (sorry, i didn’t mean to sound like franklin w. dixon there)? well turns out they found a theory behind it.

Scientists have found a new prime suspect in the deaths of about a quarter of America’s honeybees, a mystery that could take a multibillion-dollar toll on the nation’s agricultural industry.

Months of genetic testing have fingered a virus that was first reported in Israel just three years ago and may have passed through Australia on its way to the United States. The correlation between Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus and the mysterious bee disease — known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD — was reported Thursday on the journal Science’s Web site.

so i’m assuming most of my readers know what a fatwa is. if not, you can read up on it here. here’s a list of some of the stupidest fatwa’s that have been passed in previous years. example below.

Who: Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University

What: Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007. He based his reasoning—which was quickly and widely derided in the Egyptian press, in the parliament, and on Arabic-language talk shows—on stories from the Prophet Mohammed’s time in which, Atiya maintained, the practice occurred. Although Atiya headed the department dealing with the Prophet’s sayings, al-Azhar University’s higher authorities were not impressed. They suspended the iconoclastic scholar, and he subsequently recanted his ruling as a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”

i swear i am not making this up. forget worrying about big brother for yourself. now cows in india have to carry photo id’s around with them.

Authorities say crime syndicates find it easy to tamper with branding or tattooing of the cattle — hence the idea for photo identity cards which should be difficult to falsify.

Valid for two years, each laminated cattle ID card displays the picture of the animal and its owner. It also carries vital information about the animal, such as its colour, height, sex and length of horns.

It carries the owner’s name and address and sometimes other details about the animal — like one “horn missing” or “half tail lost”.