British-born Ian Usher, 44, decided to sell his house in the western city of Perth along with his car, motorbike, jet ski and all his other goods as a way of moving on after breaking up with his wife.

The “life package” included not only his tangible assets such as his clothes and DVD collection but the opportunity to take on his former job as a carpet salesman and the chance to meet some of his friends.

“The final price was 399,000 Australian dollars,” Usher told AFP Sunday after the seven-day sale on Internet auction site eBay ended.

Asked how he felt about the price, given that he had said earlier the near-new three-bedroom house was valued at 420,000 dollars alone and included thousands of dollars’ worth of electrical goods, he said: “Pretty good.”

“I thought it might have gone a bit higher at the end. But it’s a sale.”

Bidding on Usher’s “life” opened on June 22 at one dollar and offers quickly shot up to more than 2.2 million dollars, prompting the Yorkshire-born man to break out the champagne and celebrate.

But it was not long before he realised a registration system for bidding on the site had not been activated and the highest bids were not genuine.

After the fake bids were removed, bidding went back down to 300,100 dollars. “It’s been a pretty crazy week, but quite entertaining,” said Usher, who has promised to retain nothing of his old life beyond his passport, wallet and the clothes on his back.

“It’s not the usual week that I would have had.”

He did not reveal where he planned to start his new life.

The man, 42, was charged with disorderly conduct and simple trespass. He’s free after posting $2,500 bail.

Police spokesman Arnout Aben says the animals wandered in a group through a nearby neighborhood for several hours after their 5:30 a.m. breakout.

The animals were back at the circus later Monday after being rounded up by police and circus workers with the assistance of dogs. Aben says neighbors fed some of the animals — which he said was a bad idea — but they were tame and nobody was hurt.

Says Aben: “You have to imagine somebody rubbing his eyes first thing in the morning and saying, ‘Am I seeing things or is that 15 camels walking past?’”

“It’s not a male or female desire to have a child. It’s a human desire,” a thinly bearded Thomas Beatie said. “I have a very stable male identity,” he added, saying that pregnancy neither defines him nor makes him feel feminine.

Beatie, 34, who lives in Oregon, was born a woman but decided to become a man 10 years ago. He began taking testosterone treatments and had breast surgery to remove glands and flatten his chest.

“I opted not to do anything with my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day,” he told the talk show host. Beatie’s wife Nancy said she inseminated him with a syringe using sperm purchased from a bank.

Now, he said, his size 32 jeans are getting a bit tight and his shirts are a bit stretched.

Nancy, to whom he has been married for five years and who has two grown daughters by a previous marriage, also appeared on the show, saying the couple’s roles will not change once the baby is born.

“He’s going to be the father and I’m going to be the mother,” she said. Their marriage is legal and he is recognized under state law as a man.

The couple was shown on video provided by People Magazine, which collaborated with Winfrey on the show, showing the room that will be the baby’s nursery. Beatie said the little girl was going to be “daddy’s little princess.”

The couple was also filmed in their hometown of Bend, Oregon, where he underwent an ultrasound showing the baby in his womb.

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s inside me,” Beatie said while watching the ultrasound image. “We see her as our little miracle.”

His obstetrician, Dr. Kimberly James, who practices in the Oregon town, told Winfrey, “This is a normal pregnancy.”

She said Beatie stopped taking testosterone two years ago and his levels of the hormone are normal.

“This baby is totally healthy,” she said. “This is what I consider a normal pregnancy.”

The couple said they had been turned down by a number of other doctors before James agreed to take him as a patient.

The couple said an earlier attempt at pregnancy failed when he developed a tubal pregnancy, resulting in surgery that removed his Fallopian tubes.

The couple said they decided to go public with the pregnancy because they wanted to control the way the news got out. “We’re just going to have the baby now,” Nancy said. “If we have to, we’ll go hide.”

The couple runs a small business in Bend and has some savings, she said. In addition, Beatie is working on a book about his childhood, his mother’s suicide and his life growing in Hawaii where, as a girl, he was a teen beauty pageant contestant and earned a martial arts black belt.

Winfrey called the development “a new definition of what diversity means for everybody.”

(Editing by Peter Bohan and David Storey)

Popplewell, who has raised rattlesnakes and turtles at Bayou Bob’s Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch for more than two decades, surrendered to authorities Monday. He spent about 10 minutes in jail after the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission obtained arrest warrants on misdemeanor charges of selling alcohol without a license and possessing alcohol with intent to sell.

If convicted, he faces up to a year in jail and $1,000 in fines.

Popplewell said he will fight the charges. His intent, he said, is not to sell an alcoholic beverage but a healing tonic. He said he has customers of Asian descent who believe the concoction has medicinal properties.

“It’s almost a spiritual thing,” said Popplewell, 63.

But alcohol commission agent Scott Jones pointed out that investigators confiscated 429 bottles of snake vodka and one bottle of snake tequila. At $23 a bottle, that’s almost $10,000 worth of reptilian booze.

Yonkers police say 22-year-old Long Island resident Angelica Buchanan was found Saturday standing bottomless in a street near her car. They say she was so drunk she had to be hospitalized.

Police say she claimed she wasn’t wearing pants because she needed to use the bathroom. They’ve charged her with driving while intoxicated, unlicensed operation of a vehicle and marijuana possession.

A telephone message left at her family’s Rockville Centre home Tuesday night hasn’t been returned.

Earlier this month a Westchester County man was accused of using a doughnut shop’s drive-through lane while not wearing pants. He’s charged with public lewdness.

“We’re starting a collection of pop culture and Americana items,” said Monty Kerr of Austin, Texas. “We thought this was a fantastic one.”

Kerr owns TriviaMania.com and said he will likely send someone to Virginia to pick up the flake by hand, so it won’t be damaged. This isn’t the first corn flake that Kerr has tried to buy. He said he purchased a flake billed as the world’s largest, but that by the time it was delivered it had crumbled into three pieces.

Security managed to get the man and the horse out of the hospital, with “just a few scuff marks,” she said.

The hospital has a pet visitation policy, but it’s for dogs and cats, not horses.

“On Kauai, we have a very warm inviting atmosphere at Wilcox,” Yukimura said. “We just hope people understand this is not a place for a horse.”

The man’s good intentions were further dashed when his relative was brought out to see the horse.

“That’s not my horse,” the patient said to hospital staff.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/didereaux/

this is the sorta stuff that comes from renting old TV series from NetFlix! heheh

“I guess it will be up to a judge to decide, but it’s in our possession right now as proceeds from a drug transaction,” Deleo said of the winning ticket.

David, 46, remained in custody Monday in the Hancock County Jail on drug trafficking charges. An official at the jail said David was not available for comment.

She hit the jackpot in mid-December with an assortment from Hershey Co. that was accompanied by a personal note.  “I couldn’t believe it. I laughed more than anything. All that fuss over little old me,” Emerson told the Bangor Daily News.

The story about how the low-income elderly endure harsh Northeast winters gave a snapshot of Emerson’s life: married for a half-century, grandmother and great-grandmother to 52, former aide at a nearby nursing home, now struggling to live on a $683-a-month Social Security check.

The final line disclosed her secret: “My greatest vice is Hershey bars.”  This weekend, Emerson displayed what remains of her chocolate collection at her kitchen table.  “This isn’t even all of it. I’ve given boxes and boxes away,” she said. “I couldn’t enjoy it if I wasn’t able to share.”  Besides, she said, “I can only eat so much chocolate.”

“I don’t anticipate this will ever happen again,” said Dina Cellini, who oversees the display, “but we may need to rely on technology to save our savior.”

The Mary and Joseph statues will also be fitted with GPS devices, she said.

The devices are being bought using residents’ contributions and Cellini’s own money.

Cellini has also installed a Plexiglas screen in front of the display.

Twice in her life Southey was surprised with a wedding ceremony on Christmas Eve, both times to Francis Southey.

Her future husband planned their original wedding for Christmas Eve 1942 while he was stationed in Sherman, Texas, awaiting orders to ship off to Europe during World War II.

“I didn’t know I was getting married, I just went to spend Christmas with him and I got down there, he had the wedding all arranged,” said Ruth Southey, 85, who lives at the Waterford Senior Living facility.

On Monday, staff at the senior facility arranged the same surprise for their 65th anniversary. The couple renewed their vows in front of three generations of teary-eyed family and friends.

At the ceremony, Francis Southey, 90, reminisced about how the first wedding almost didn’t happen.

“She said that she wasn’t going to marry me,” he said. “She said she didn’t wanted to get married. She wanted a wedding, a big wedding, but I didn’t have any money.”

To Ruth Southey, her 65th anniversary is a milestone she always sensed would come.

“As my mother always said, when you are married, you are married for life and that’s what we did,” Ruth said. “It’s just life, that’s what it is. Just life.”

Eunice Lopez has been charged with bigamy, accused of marrying 10 men between 2002 and 2006 without divorcing any of them, federal immigration authorities say. The Miami Herald reported Saturday that a records search by the newspaper found seven additional marriages under the bride’s name and birth date.

Lopez arrived in South Florida from Cuba in 2002 and was a legal U.S. resident.

“I can tell you that none of the individuals she married had any type of residency,” said Terry Chavez, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade office of the state attorney.

Prosecutors say she charged her husbands an unspecified amount to help them secure immigration status and continued asking the men for money long after the wedding, threatening to expose them if they didn’t pay.

Chavez said the state attorney’s office began investigating after being tipped off by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Lopez was released on $18,000 bond. Her last known address was in Hialeah, just north of Miami. A telephone listing for her could not be located, and it was not known whether she had an attorney.