By RAY HENRY, Associated Press Writer

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.

The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.

Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill

She was convinced of Oscar's talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn't eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.

Oscar wouldn't stay inside the room though, so Teno thought his streak was broken. Instead, it turned out the doctor's prediction was roughly 10 hours too early. Sure enough, during the patient's final two hours, nurses told Teno that Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.

Doctors say most of the people who get a visit from the sweet-faced, gray-and-white cat are so ill they probably don't know he's there, so patients aren't aware he's a harbinger of death. Most families are grateful for the advanced warning, although one wanted Oscar out of the room while a family member died. When Oscar is put outside, he paces and meows his displeasure.

No one's certain if Oscar's behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause. Teno wonders if the cat notices telltale scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him.

Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa's article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.

If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it's also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.

Nursing home staffers aren't concerned with explaining Oscar, so long as he gives families a better chance at saying goodbye to the dying.

Oscar recently received a wall plaque publicly commending his "compassionate hospice care."

Science writer Alicia Chang in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
On the Net: New England Journal of Medicine: - http://content.nejm.org/

We have something similar saying in nepali culture too but about dogs.
Like when dogs howl at night for no apparent reason... they say that the spirits of the dead are passing by. And they do that when someone is dying too. I guess they have that sixith sense that we humans have ocluded.

"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," - If they are your "loved ones", why keep them away from you, is my question.

BC, very interesting..and spooky..thanks for sharing.

A cuckoo's call outside one's window is also seen as an omen to death, a cat meowing all night long is believed to bring about bad-luck and so is a black cat that crosses one's path (why mostly cats??)…Hell, so many myths and so many I believe to be true!! Anyway, the article above was the front page of today's NYC's "Metro" paper and it also had something about the maid's urine episode from yesterday's thread!! Hahaahahha

I dont want that cat anywhere close to me.

Sept. 11 rescue dog with cancer dies By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press Writer

A black Labrador that burrowed through smoking debris after Sept. 11 and flooded rubble after Hurricane Katrina in search of survivors has died after developing cancer.

Owner Mary Flood had 12-year-old Jake put to sleep Wednesday after a last stroll through the fields and a dip in the creek near their home in Oakley, Utah. Flood said Jake had been in pain, shaking with a 105-degree fever as he lay on the lawn.

No one can say whether the dog would have gotten sick if he hadn't been exposed to the toxic air at the World Trade Center, but cancer in dogs Jake's age is common.

Some owners of rescue dogs who worked at ground zero claim their animals have died because of their work there. But scientists who have spent years studying the health of Sept. 11 search-and-rescue dogs have found no sign of major illness in the animals.

Many human ground zero workers have complained of health problems they attribute to their time at the site: the largest study conducted of about 20,000 ground zero workers reported last year that 70 percent of patients suffer respiratory disease years after the cleanup.

The city earlier this year added to its Sept. 11 death toll a woman who died in 2002 of lung disease, five months after she was caught in the dust cloud of the collapsing twin towers.

The results of an autopsy on Jake's body will be part of a medical study on the Sept. 11 dogs that was started by the University of Pennsylvania more than 5 years ago.

Flood adopted Jake as a 10-month-old puppy. He had been abandoned on a street with a broken leg and a dislocated hip.

"But against all odds he became a world-class rescue dog," said Flood, a member of Utah Task Force 1, a federal search-and-rescue team that looked for human remains at ground zero.

On the evening of the team's arrival in New York, Jake walked into a fancy Manhattan restaurant wearing his search-and-rescue vest and was treated to a free steak dinner under a table.

Flood eventually trained Jake to become one of fewer than 200 U.S. government-certified rescue dogs — an animal on 24-hour call to tackle disasters such as building collapses, earthquakes, hurricanes and avalanches.

After Katrina, Flood and Jake drove from Utah to Mississippi, where they searched for survivors in flooded homes.

In recent years, Jake helped train younger dogs across the country. He showed them how to track scents, even in the snow, and how to look up if the scent was in a tree.

He also did therapy work with children at a Utah camp for burn victims and at senior homes and hospitals.

"He was a great morale booster wherever he went," Flood said. "He was always ready to work, eager to play — and a master at helping himself to any unattended food items."

She said Jake's ashes would be scattered "in places that were important to him," such as his Utah training grounds and the rivers and hills near his home where he swam and roamed.(Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

292 911 calls land Florida man in jail

A man charged with dialing 911 to chat with dispatchers nearly 300 times in the last month remained in jail Wednesday. Cheveon Alonzo Ford, 21, was arrested Tuesday night and charged with making obscene and harassing telephone calls.

He told authorities he began calling 911 because "I have no minutes on my phone and 911 is a free call," the Escambia County Sheriff's Office said in a news release.

Ford was being held on a $50,000 bond Wednesday afternoon.

Officers used GPS coordinates from Ford's cell phone to track his location to the west Pensacola home where he was arrested, the Pensacola News Journal Reported.

"His phone service had been cut off and 911 was the only number he could dial from the phone," said Bob Boschen, communication chief for Escambia County.

Boschen said many of Ford's 292 calls were sexual in nature.

"When he would call and a male dispatcher would answer, he would hang up," he said. "Our policy says that if a caller is belligerent in nature we have to get enough information to process the call and then we can disconnect," he said.

Ford never asked dispatchers for help or indicated he was in trouble.
(Information from: Pensacola News Journal, - http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com)

Hey, does this water taste funny to you?

Vinay Jain knew his tap water tasted funny, but he wouldn't have guessed his family had been drinking treated wastewater used for watering lawns.

That turned out to be the case at his suburban-Raleigh home, the discovery coming after workers shut off an irrigation pipe in Jain's neighborhood. His neighbors had tap water but couldn't get their sprinklers to work, while Jain's sprinklers worked fine — but the taps inside his house ran dry.

It's unclear how the piping got switched.

"We believe that this is a unique situation," Cary Public Works head Mike Bajorek said.

About 500 homes in the town have irrigation systems served by reclaimed water. As a precaution, Cary officials were going house to house to check for similar problems.

Jain, meanwhile, isn't pleased his family had a reversed connection for nearly five months.

"In a place like Cary, it never even occurred to me that this might even be a possibility," said Jain, 37. "This gives the impression of a Third World country."

State regulations ban water systems from using the treated wastewater for drinking water. Cary officials said the risks are low, and that someone must drink a lot of water in one sitting to get an infectious dose of coliform bacteria.

Still, Jain and his wife, Priyanka, said they are second-guessing their children's claims of stomach aches at dinner.
(Information from: The News & Observer, - http://www.newsobserver.com)

Odd candidates spice up Japanese national election By Takanori Isshiki

A fixed smile on his face, a middle-aged Japanese man dances to blaring '80s dance tunes on top of a van in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya district.

Passers-by look on quizzically.

But for Mac Akasaka, 58, a former businessman running in an election for parliament's upper house Sunday without the backing of any major political party, the dancing is no joke.

"Low-profile candidates like me need some kind of twist to get attention from the public, otherwise nobody would listen to my speech no matter how hard I try," Akasaka told Reuters.

"So I started dancing before the speech."

Resorting to wacky campaigns is not uncommon in Japan, where lesser-known candidates say a 50-year-old election law hampers efforts to get their messages across to the masses.

The law prohibits candidates from using visual images that can reach a large, unspecified number of people, and has been interpreted to ban campaigning on TV and on the Internet.

Akasaka has also grabbed voters' attention with his quirky "smile therapy" exercises, in which he massages the edges of his mouth higher with sweeping hands.

He advocates "smile power" to revive the Japanese people's hearts, and calls his one-man organization the "Smile Party."

Another independent candidate is managing to win grins from voters, if not necessarily ballots, with his offbeat campaign.

Yoshiro Nakamatsu, the self-proclaimed inventor of the floppy disc and more than 3,000 other gadgets, is back campaigning after a failed bid for the Tokyo governorship in March.

In his campaign pledge, the 79-year-old Nakamatsu -- who calls himself "Dr NakaMats" -- boasts that his newly invented "HOD" technology for converting water into fuel for cars can help fight global warming.

His Web site says his aphrodisiac "Love Jet" perfume is guaranteed to turn around Japan's rock-bottom birth rate.

For most voters, such offbeat candidates are fun to watch, but not to put in office.

"Though their efforts should be respected, I don't think just blaring their names helps to boost their campaign," said Kiyokazu Anbiru, 42, who heads a charity.
(Additional reporting by Chisa Fujioka)
(Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.)

I was watching the cat thing in the program ' THE VIEW" on abc a while ago. I liked the point one of the hostesses made. She said that ' what if this cat is killing these people'. Well, that's the good point although that's not true. But another way of looking at it.I believe that animals have some sense of sensing the future.

Wasting time at work? You're not alone: survey

Americans who feel bored and underpaid do work hard -- at surfing the Internet and catching up on gossip, according to a survey that found U.S. workers waste about 20 percent of their working day.

An online survey of 2,057 employees by online compensation company Salary.com found about six in every 10 workers admit to wasting time at work with the average employee wasting 1.7 hours of a typical 8.5 hour working day.

Personal Internet use topped the list as the leading time-wasting activity according to 34 percent of respondents, with 20.3 percent then listing socializing with co-workers and 17 percent conducting personal business as taking up time.

The reasons why people wasted time were varied with nearly 18 percent of respondents questioned by e-mail in June and July said boredom and not having enough to do was the main reason.

The second most popular reason for wasting time was having too long hours (13.9 percent), being underpaid (11.8 percent), and a lack of challenging work (11.1 percent).

"While a certain amount of wasted time is built into company salary structures, our research indicates that companies with a challenged and engaged workforce can expect more productivity in return," said Bill Coleman, chief compensation officer at Salary.com.

While the amount of time wasted at work seems high, Coleman said the numbers have improved, with the amount of time wasted dropping 19 percent since Salary.com conducted its first annual survey on slacking at work in 2005. Then workers reported wasting 2.09 hours of their working day.

"I think (the decline) is really a result of the economy and that there's more business, more work available and less time to sit around wondering what you are going to do with your day," Coleman told Reuters. (Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.)

When SPAM warlords killed and continue to kill 30,300+...they don't give warning!

They are bastards and all their family members are killer terrorists living out of the blood of dead Nepali people!!!!!!