South African Internet billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, 27, is training for a space trip to the International Space Station, according to a Russian news agency. Shuttleworth is undergoing medical tests at Russia?s space city of Zvezdny (which means Star City), the main Russian cosmonaut-training center. The announcement was made two days after Rosaviakosmos Yury Koptev, the head of Russia?s space agency, announced that no space tourists would be launched to the ISS until 2006.
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An invasion of army worms is turning lawns throughout the Northeast a sickly brown. Experts are baffled, and can only guess that the source of the infestation was the winds of Tropical Storm Allison.

?People are calling and saying that they went away on Friday and that when they came back on Monday the lawn was gone, except for the bits of clover,? says Karen Bernhard, assistant horticulturist and entomologist with the extension office in Lebanon County, PA. ?They haven’t been this bad in the Northeast in over 25 years,? says John Buechner, director of technical services for Lawn Doctor. ?We’re finding them from central Pennsylvania up through Boston.?
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This week’s Inside Interview features Whitley Strieber reading a chapter from his new book, the Last Vampire. Whitley has returned to fiction to try to uncover the hidden meaning of some of his experiences.

His early fiction–the Wolfen, the Hunger, Black Magic, the Night Church and Catmagic–all eerily foreshadowed his close encounter experiences in different ways, almost as if he had some unconscious knowledge of the Communion events long before they happened.
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Scholars have been searching for years to find out what caused a worldwide catastrophe in the middle of the 6th century. A cryptic entry in the Winchester manuscript of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle notes that on Feb. 15, 538 AD ?the sun grew dark from early morning until 9 a.m.?

There had been many solar eclipses in the previous half millennium, but this was the first to be recorded among the important events, such as battles and coronations. In the chronicles of Annales Cambriae of Wales, the entry for 537 AD records King Arthur?s death, yet it gives equal weight to a strange plague in Britain and Ireland. Ten years later, this ?yellow? plague was considered responsible for destroying the kingdom of Maelgwyn the Great.
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