The soaring numbers of new pagans may have been influenced by TV shows and films like “Harry Potter,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.” There has been record attendance at rites held near Stonehenge in the U.K. Maybe it’s disillusionment with wars waged in the name of religion or sexual predators in the church, or maybe it’s just a desire for good company.
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Eric Convey writes in the Boston Herald that Milton Hospital in Massachusetts seems to be the site of a miracle. First, one of the building’s windows showed what looked like a clear image of the Virgin Mary. Now, there seem to be two 6-foot-high crosses on the building’s smokestack. And an amazing green UFO has been seen every night in Russia for the past two years.
The image of Mary is covered by a blue tarp, which is removed from 5:30 to 8 p.m. daily, in order to reduce potential crowds, but the crosses on the smokestack can be seen anytime.
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You suffer from terrible allergies every spring, but how can this be? You don’t live in the country, you live and work in skyscrapers in the middle of a city. Scientists now say that tall buildings are one of the worst places for getting hay fever.
Spanish researchers studied 17,171 allergy patients who either lived in a tall building in the city or in the suburbs. They found that if the pollen is falling and you?re near an open window in a highrise building, you’re going to get a bigger dose of it than if you’re closer to the ground, out in the country. Dr. Alicia Armentia says, “On the basis of our local investigations, natural pollen sensitization appears to increase with the height of where the patient lived.”
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An alarming number of cases of cancer are turning up among former students of Beverly Hills High School in California, in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. Many of its graduates became movie stars. People blame the cancer on pollution from oil rigs that are set up next to the school’s athletic fields. Famous environmentalist Erin Brockovich, who had a movie made about her, is part of the legal team that’s filing a suit to have the rigs removed. They say the cancer rate among ex-students is 20 to 30 times higher than the national average.
Mike Edwards of Venoco, the company that owns the rigs, says, “I think what the tests show is that the air quality is safe for the workers, safe for the neighborhood, safe for the school.”
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