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German police kill runaway calf with machine gun

German police said Friday they used an automatic weapon to shoot a calf that tried to escape from a slaughterhouse. The unnamed calf absconded Thursday after being delivered to a slaughterhouse in the city of Fulda, in central Germany. "It seized its opportunity to flee as it arrived at the abattoir," police said. The calf ran for several miles across fields and was getting close to a railway line and a main road. The calf was less lucky than Butch and Sundance, 2 pigs who became national heroes in Britain last month. They were rounded up after 8 days on the run and will spend the rest of their days in an animal sanctuary.

Next Internet hopes to cut through tangled Web

Buried near the end of President Clinton's State of the Union address was a pitch for funding the Next Generation Internet (NGI), an initiative most Americans still know little about. NGI advocates hope it will transform today's slow and sometimes unreliable Internet into a high-speed, multimedia superhighway within the next 3-5 years. Many of the Internet's most glamorous promises such as worldwide video teleconferencing, virtual classrooms and diagnosing disease from half a globe away have been impossible on any sizable scale because the traffic signaling and routing systems are not sophisticated enough.

Gold medalist in snowboarding tests positive for marijuana

Snowboarding, making its official Olympic debut in Nagano, produced the biggest controversy of the Games Tuesday night.Canada's Ross Rebagliati tested positive for traces of marijuana after winning the gold medal in the men's giant slalom Monday and has been asked by the International Olympic Committee to return his medal. The Canadian Olympic Association is appealing the decision and a ruling is expected in the next 24 hours. Rebagliati, who admits smoking marijuana but says he has not used the drug since April 1997, claims the positive test was the result of "second-hand smoke." There is support for Rebagliati's appeal since marijuana is not considered a performance-enhancing drug.A huge welcome-home bash planned for Rebagliati is still on, even though he has been disqualified. Rebagliati's friends in his hometown of Whistler, British Columbia, ridiculed an announcement by the IOC in Nagano that the snowboarder had been disqualified after winning the sport's giant slalom in Nagano. They said he had not used pot since 1997. "It's ridiculous," said Graham Turner, a friend who used to race with Rebagliati and the sponsor of his team. "Is an athlete not supposed to be with his friends? (Marijuana) is a social thing. You come across it any time in a ski resort." Turner said Rebagliati, like other members of the snowboarding team, had cleaned up their acts in response to orders from the coach. Should Rebagliati be stripped of the medal, the gold will go to Thomas Prugger of Italy, who finished two-hundredths of a second behind Rebagliati in Monday's event. Switzerland's Ueli Kestenholz will trade his bronze medal for silver and Dieter Krassnig of Austria, who finished fourth, stands to gain the bronze.

'Castrating' drug study

A drug may offer sexual predators relief from pedophilia and other aberrations, says an Israeli study out today. Other medications used to achieve so-called "medical castration'' only work some of the time. This one, the synthetic hormone triptorelin, worked in every case, though the study was small and did not involve a control group not taking the drug.

Standards groups to adopt Apple format

An international standards body has chosen Apple Computer Inc's QuickTime File Format as the starting point for developing a new format for transmitting digital, audio and video signals, Apple said. The International Standards Organization has adopted a proposal by Apple, International Business Machines Corp, Netscape Corp, Oracle Corp, Silicon Graphics Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc to use QuickTime for the MPEG-4 specification. MPEG-4 is an emerging digital media standard currently being defined by ISO's Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) that will enable users to view and manipulate audio, video and other forms of digital content.

AUDIOBOOKS BORN AS SERVICE FOR BLIND

The American Foundation for the Blind and the Library of Congress were pioneers in the field of recorded books, offering them in the form of record albums primarily as a tool for the visually impaired. But with the advent of the cassette player and a lengthening commute for many drivers -- clocked by the American Automobile Association at an average of 22.4 minutes each way -- books on tape were recognized as offering motorists a break from the radio menu of news, talk or music. John Levy, chief financial officer of the Audio Book Club, said that when his company began a Book-of-the-Month-Club-style service in 1989 the target audience was ``people who liked to read but didn't have the time. Now we're also seeing people coming in strictly for the entertainment value. They're tired of the radio and they're turning to audiobooks as a new form of entertainment.