BEIJING (AP)—A Cuban taekwondo athlete and his coach were banned for life after Angel Matos kicked the referee in the face following his bronze-medal match disqualification.

Cuban coach Leudis Gonzalez offered no apology for Matos’ actions during the men’s over-80 kg (176 pounds) match.

Matos was winning 3-2, with 1:02 in the second round, when he fell to the mat after being hit by his opponent, Kazakhstan’s Arman Chilmanov. He was sitting there, awaiting medical attention, when he was disqualified for taking too much injury time. Fighters get one minute, and Matos was disqualified when his time ran out. (more…)

SARAJEVO (AFP) - Bosnian police have impounded a pigeon after discovering prisoners used it to smuggle drugs into one of the country’s highest security jails, an official said Thursday.

“The guards suspected the animal might be involved in drug smuggling once they noticed four prisoners visibly intoxicated shortly after the pigeon landed on a prison window,” Zenica prison official Josip Pojavnik told AFP.

All four inmates had tested positive for heroin, said Pojavnik, adding disciplinary proceedings had been launched against the inmates. (more…)

ELKIN, N.C. - David Hayes’ granddaughter just asked him to hold her Barbie rod and reel while she went to the bathroom. He did. And seconds later he landed the state record channel catfish at 21 pounds, 1 ounce.

Alyssa’s father had bought the pink Barbie fishing rod for Christmas and she had caught a few bluegill before her grandfather hauled in the catfish. (more…)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A Puerto Rican man has been granted his wish to remain standing — even in death. A funeral home used a special embalming treatment to keep the corpse of 24-year-old Angel Pantoja Medina standing upright for his three-day wake.

Dressed in a Yankees baseball cap and sunglasses, Pantoja was mourned by relatives while propped upright in his mother’s living room.

His brother Carlos told the El Nuevo Dia newspaper the victim had long said he wanted to be upright for his own wake: “He wanted to be happy, standing.” (more…)

LONDON - Nils Olav already has medals for good conduct and long service. He made honorary colonel-in-chief of the elite Norwegian King’s Guard in 2005. And on Friday he was knighted. Not bad for a 3-foot tall penguin — actually, three of them.

A resident of Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, the original Nils Olav was made an honorary member of the King’s Guard in 1972 after being picked out as the guard’s mascot by lieutenant Nils Egelien. The guards adopted him because they often toured the zoo during their visits to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an annual military music festival, according to zoo spokeswoman Maxine Finlay. (more…)

LONDON - Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, has a new skyline — only it belongs to its Alabama namesake. Birmingham City Council distributed 720,000 leaflets that praised residents for exceeding recycling targets, carrying a message that read: “Thank You Birmingham.” The message appeared stamped across a photograph of the city’s skyline. But the photo was not of Birmingham, England, but of Birmingham, Alabama.
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BEIJING, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Swedish wrestler Ara Abrahamian threw down his greco-roman bronze medal in protest on Thursday after his bid for Olympic gold was ended by a decision denounced by the Swedish coach as “politics.”

Abrahamian took the bronze from around his neck during the medal ceremony, stepped from the podium and dropped it in the middle of the wrestling mat then walked off.

“I don’t care about this medal. I wanted gold,” he said. (more…)

CENTREVILLE, Mich. - A man accused of trying to steal a large Batman movie poster from a cinema lobby while dressed as the Joker has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of malicious destruction of property.

Twenty-year-old Spencer Taylor entered the plea Wednesday in St. Joseph County District Court.
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BEIJING (Reuters) - Italian police officer Francesco D’Aniello won an Olympic silver medal in double trap shooting Tuesday and appealed to the Italian government for a tax exemption on his reward money.

“I would sincerely hope that the (Italian) parliament would pass this law,” D’Aniello told a news conference when asked about the taxation back home, a question and answer translated from Italian back and forth through Chinese and English.

“We athletes go through major sacrifices to get to this level. It would be the right thing to do to remove the taxes from what we get here. It would be a very good thing,” he said, without stating the value of the reward.

Italy is among the many countries that offer lucrative financial rewards to their Olympic medalists. Greece, for example, offers about 190,000 euros ($277,000) for gold medals, 130,000 for silver and 70,000 for bronze.

CINCINNATI - An Ohio man who says he doesn’t trust paper money has delivered enough coins to cover half the price of a brand new pickup truck.

Employees at a dealership in the Cincinnati suburb of Springdale say 70-year-old James Jones plunked down 16 coffee cans full of coins Tuesday for a new Chevrolet Silverado. (more…)

BEIJING (Reuters) - The Sydney Olympics ran out. Athens doubled the number. So organisers of the Beijing Games are hoping 100,000 condoms will satisfy the needs of Olympic athletes.
While sex is not an Olympic sport it is expected to be an activity in the Beijing village housing 10,500 athletes, all of whom are in great shape and with plenty of free time on their hands once knocked out of the Games.

Athletes have received free condoms at every Olympics since Barcelona in 1992 to help raise awareness of AIDS, and Beijing is no exception.

“There are many young, strong, single people in the athletes’ village and, like everywhere, some will fall in love or other things so we need to make condoms available,” Ole Hansen, spokesman for UNAIDS China, told Reuters. (more…)

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese police have arrested a 20-year-old man who attacked and robbed two people after they stared at his Winnie-the-Pooh costume, officials said on Tuesday.

Masayuki Ishikawa was hanging out on a Tokyo street corner after midnight last month while wearing the cuddly costume, accompanied by two frien (more…)

BEIJING - One little girl had the looks. The other had the voice.
So in a last-minute move demanded by one of China’s highest officials, the two were put together for the Olympic opening ceremony, with one lip-synching “Ode to the Motherland” over the other’s singing.

The real singer, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, with her chubby face and crooked baby teeth, wasn’t good looking enough for the ceremony, its chief music director told state-owned Beijing Radio.

So the pigtailed Lin Miaoke, a veteran of television ads, mouthed the words with a pixie smile for a stadium of 91,000 and a worldwide TV audience. “I felt so beautiful in my red dress,” the tiny 9-year-old told the China Daily newspaper. (more…)

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AFP) - In the end, it was hackers at DefCon that got hacked.

After three days of software cracking duels and hacking seminars, self-described computer ninjas at the infamous gathering in Las Vegas found out Sunday that their online activities were hijacked without them catching on.

A standing-room crowd cheered admiringly as Tony Kapela and Alex Pilosov showed them how they were “pwned” by a simple technique that could be used to “steal the Internet.” (more…)

FERGUS FALLS, Minn. - Meet Hailey Jo Hauer and Xander Jace Riniker, both born at 8:08 a.m. on 8/8/08, weighing 8 pounds, 8 ounces, in neighboring states.

Xander, born at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is the eighth grandchild for his mother’s parents. And he’s not the only one in his family with an unusual birthday: His 2-year-old brother, Kael, was born on 4/5/06.

Lindsey Hauer thought staff at Lake Region Hospital in Minnesota were joking when they told her the time of her daughter’s birth. And then she got a call from the birthing suite noting Hailey’s weight. (more…)