Poor Mojo's Newswire

At least 200 deaths and thousands of illnesses are known to be related to the town’s exposure to the mine’s billowing dust clouds of vermiculite, which by dint of geological bad luck was layered millions of years ago with naturally occurring asbestos.

Prosecutors say that the mine’s owner, W. R. Grace & Company, which is also a defendant, and its managers knew as far back as the 1970s that asbestos was mixed with the vermiculite and that this posed a risk to their workers, but that they conspired to continue releasing it into the air and to misrepresent the peril.

The company’s own medical studies of its miners, the government says, create a paper trail that will prove the charges of wire fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and violations of the Clean Air Act.

The median home price in a nine-county region of Northern California dived a remarkable 45.5 percent from a year ago. The figure stood at $300,000 last month, compared to $550,000 in January of 2008, San Diego-based DataQuick said.

In a six-county region of Southern California, the median price plummeted nearly 40 percent to $250,000 last month, from $415,000 in the year-ago period.

Buyers around the state moved to scoop up foreclosed homes at steep discounts. In Northern California, sales increased 41 percent in January from a year earlier. That figure jumped 53 percent in Southern California.

One of pop superstar Michael Jackson's brothers, Marlon, is involved in a controversial plan to develop a $3.4bn slavery memorial and luxury resort in Badagry, Nigeria.

The historic slave port is to be transformed through the bizarre combination of a slave history theme park and a museum dedicated to double Grammy-winning pop-soul group the Jackson Five.

The idea is that the band will help attract African-American tourists keen to trace their roots back to Nigeria.

Weighing one tonne and comprising more than 200,000 building blocks, the enormous statue - one of the largest Lego models yet built - will be part of a new L3 million attraction at Legoland Windsor, in Berkshire.

The Pharaoh followed in the footsteps of Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead, who floated down the Thames in 2007 to mark the opening of the Tutenkhamun exhibition in London.

It was the end of a long voyage for the model, which has travelled 1,395 miles by truck and boat from the Czech Republic to the theme park's Kingdom of the Pharaohs, which opens on March 21.

Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country's most reckless driver have emerged, the Irish Times reports.

He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.

However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

But then his cover was blown.

WASHINGTON—A majority of African-Americans surveyed in a nationwide poll this week reported feeling "deeply disturbed" and "more than a little weirded out" by all the white people now smiling at them.

First witnessed shortly after President Obama's historic victory, the open and cheerful smiling has only continued in recent months, leaving members of the black community completely unnerved.

"On behalf of black people across this nation, I would like to say to our white brethren, 'Please stop looking at us like that,'" said Brown University psychology professor Dr. Stanley Carsons. "We're excited Barack is president, too, and we're glad you're happy for us. But giving us the thumbs up for no reason, or saying hello whenever we walk by, is really starting to freak us out."