Randy Schmitz nearly died. There was some very hot sauce involved. But it's not what you think. This sauce -- it saved his life.
Schmitz was on vacation in Myrtle Beach last summer with his family. They went into a hot sauce emporium called The Pepper Palace. That's where Schmitz decided to take a challenge and sample Flashbang. The makers bill it as the world's hottest sauce.
He signed a waiver, dipped a toothpick in the sauce, tasted it and then went five minutes without drinking water.
"It was pretty darn hot, even though it was just a very, very tiny amount," Schmitz tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "I was getting a real headache. I was just feeling really nauseous. So my wife walks me outside on the boardwalk and has me sit on a bench. Next thing I know I'm in a hospital on a stretcher covered in vomit and I had no clue what happened."
What happened was that Schmitz had a seizure. He'd never had one before, so doctors gave him an MRI. That's when they discovered a malignant brain tumour.
The seizure was linked to the tumour. But the tumour had been growing for years without Schmitz having any inkling it was there. So it's likely that the sauce triggered the seizure.
"Technically there's no 100 percent proof that it was the sauce that caused it," Schmitz says. "But everyone, the doctors, everyone involved thinks that it did because it would just be a crazy, weird coincidence if I happened to randomly have it at that time."
His doctors were able to remove the tumour. He's since had five weeks of radiation. He's now in his last month of chemotherapy -- and he's cancer-free.
Three former Venezuelan government officials who defected from Hugo Chavez's regime spoke to the Brazilian magazine Veja about an alleged alliance between Argentina, Venezuela, and Iran, which included a deal in which Argentina would get Interpol to remove from its database the names of Iranians suspected of bombing a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994.
Alberto Nisman, an Argentine prosecutor, had been investigating the deadly bombing before he was found dead in his apartment in January with a gunshot wound to the head. He was about to testify to Argentina's legislature that the administration of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had helped cover up Iran's hand in the bombing.
Nisman alleged that the Fernandez regime engaged in the cover-up to secure an oil-for-grain deal with Iran (Argentina is energy poor), but Veja's sources take it a step further. They say the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez helped broker a deal between Argentina and Iran that secured cash for Argentina (including funds for Fernandez's 2007 presidential run) and nuclear intelligence for Iran on top of derailing the AMIA probe.
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Also in January 2007, Ahmadinejad and Chavez allegedly hatched the plan for "aeroterror," as Chavistas came to call it. It was a flight from Caracas to Damascus to Tehran that was made twice a month. It flew from Caracas carrying cocaine to be distributed to Hezbollah in Damascus and sold. The plane then went to Tehran carrying Venezuelan passports and other documents that helped Iranian terrorists travel around the world undetected.
The reality, of course, is that the Fed’s successive doses of QE since late 2008 have been designed to keep the lid on the dollar, deliberately reining in the greenback in a bid to boost US competitiveness and limit the value of the vast debts America now owes its foreign creditors – not least China.
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The perpetually moribund eurozone economy of recent years ... to say nothing of a currency union that stumbles from crisis to systemic crisis, means euro-QE is now, apparently, OK. In other words, the eurozone can finally get its own back on the US and Britain by attempting to print its way to a cheaper currency, winning back some competitiveness. That’s the theory, anyway.
What we’re seeing, then, is the West’s very own version of “currency wars”. For almost half a decade, the big emerging markets have complained bitterly – and often publicly–- about mass money-printing by the world’s “leading economies”. The likes of Brazil and China have highlighted, rightly, that Western QE has lowered the relative value of their carefully accumulated dollar and sterling reserves (and debts) against local, emergent currencies such as the yuan and the real.
Now, with eurozone leaders engaging in fully blown QE, and rejoicing at the euro’s fall against the dollar, currency wars are taking place not just between the developed world and the emerging markets but between the developed nations themselves. Japan, of course, is also part of this intra-G7 currency conflict, having lately launched an astonishingly extreme QE programme designed to pump up the Bank of Japan’s balance sheet from just over 20pc to no less than 75pc of annual output within three years.
As such, the world’s leading economies have reduced themselves to blatantly competing less on the quality of what they produce, than on the speed with which they can depreciate their currencies against one another.
Troy Earl Smith was found with a gunshot wound to the chest at 1pm on Thursday in the coastal city of St Petersburg.
The 25-year-old was pronounced dead later in hospital.
Detectives believe a handgun in his jacket pocket discharged as he rode his bike.
For UK mechanic David Evans it was definitely not a hard nut to crack. A client called his shop in Poole Keynes complaining that her Honda Civic wouldn't accelerate past 60 km/h. When he popped the hood and removed the air filter he found the engine was full of nuts.
"We brought her the bag of nuts and told her, 'This is the problem with your car.' She was gobsmacked."
Evans says the driver recognized the nuts. They were the same ones she was leaving out for animals in her back garden.
Evans used a vacuum at his shop to suck the nuts out of the engine. He ended up filling a grocery bag with the squirrel's quarry.
Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing.
Officials have amplified their argument that the Communist government is the proper guardian of the Dalai Lama’s succession through an intricate process of reincarnation that has involved lamas, or senior monks, visiting a sacred lake and divining dreams.
Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet. Their anger welled up on Wednesday, as it had a day earlier.
Zhu Weiqun, a Communist Party official who has long dealt with Tibetan issues, told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday that the Dalai Lama had, essentially, no say over whether he was reincarnated. That was ultimately for the Chinese government to decide, he said, according to a transcript of his comments on the website of People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper.
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The idea of Communist Party officials defending the precepts of reincarnation and hurling accusations of heresy at the Dalai Lama might have Marx turning in his grave.
Sitting on the desks of central bank governors and regulators across the world is a scholarly report that spells out the vertiginous scale of global debt in US dollars, and gently hints at the horrors in store as the US Federal Reserve turns off the liquidity spigot.
This dry paper is the talk of the hedge fund village in Mayfair, and the stuff of nightmares for those in Singapore or Hong Kong already caught on the wrong side of the biggest currency margin call in financial history. "Everybody is reading it," said one ex-veteran from the New York Fed.
The report - "Global dollar credit: links to US monetary policy and leverage" - was first published by the Bank for International Settlements in January, but its biting relevance is growing by the day.
It shows how the Fed's zero rates and quantitative easing flooded the emerging world with dollar liquidity in the boom years, overwhelming all defences.
This abundance enticed Asian and Latin American companies to borrow like never before in dollars - at real rates near 1pc - storing up a reckoning for the day when the US monetary cycle should turn, as it is now doing with a vengeance.
Contrary to popular belief, the world is today more dollarized than ever before. Foreigners have borrowed $9 trillion in US currency outside American jurisdiction, and therefore without the protection of a lender-of-last-resort able to issue unlimited dollars in extremis. This is up from $2 trillion in 2000.
The emerging market share - mostly Asian - has doubled to $4.5 trillion since the Lehman crisis, including camouflaged lending through banks registered in London, Zurich or the Cayman Islands.
The result is that the world credit system is acutely sensitive to any shift by the Fed.
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Powerful undercurrents in the world's financial system are swirling beneath the surface. Some hope that the European Central Bank's €60bn blast of QE each month will keep the asset boom going as the Fed pulls back, but this is a double-edged effect for the world as a whole. It pushes the dollar yet higher. That may matter more in the end.
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Nobody should count on a Fed reprieve this time. The world must take its punishment.
In 2005, a series of jokes starting circulating online, possibly inspired by the American comedian and broadcaster Conan O'Brien. Deliberately absurd, and focussing on Norris's virility, manliness and all-round heroism, a typical "Chuck Norris fact" runs like this: "Chuck Norris has never won an Academy Award for acting... because he's not acting." Or: "Chuck Norris can divide by zero."
The popularity of "Chuck Norris facts" mushroomed and today a Twitter account (@chuck_facts) dedicated to providing fans with a stream of facts has 270,000 followers. Norris himself has admitted to finding the jokes amusing and said that his favourite "Chuck Norris fact" is: "They wanted to put Chuck Norris's face on Mount Rushmore, but the granite wasn't hard enough for his beard."
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So without further ado, I'd better get on and pick some of the best "Chuck Norris facts" – before a roundhouse kick greets me on the way out of the office.
3) The easiest way to determine Chuck Norris's age is to cut him in half and count the rings. (Norris commented: "Three years ago, at the end of a Nightline interview, ABC host Bill Weir asked me my age and I told him 66. Then I added with a smile, 'I like to say I'm 39, with 27 years of experience.'")
4) Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.
6) Chuck Norris knows Victoria's secret.
7) If Chuck Norris was a Spartan in the movie 300, the movie would be called 1.
11) Chuck Norris once kicked a horse in the chin. Its descendants today are known as giraffes.
13) Chuck Norris can delete the Recycling Bin.
14) Chuck Norris has already been to Mars. That's why there are no signs of life.
The number of Americans who live in a household with at least one gun is lower than it's ever been, according to a major American trend survey that finds the decline in gun ownership is paralleled by a reduction in the number of Americans who hunt.
According to the latest General Social Survey, 32 percent of Americans either own a firearm themselves or live with someone who does, which ties a record low set in 2010. That's a significant decline since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when about half of Americans told researchers there was a gun in their household.
The General Social Survey is conducted by NORC, an independent research organization based at the University of Chicago, with money from the National Science Foundation. Because of its long-running and comprehensive set of questions about the demographics, behaviors and attitudes of the American public, it is a highly regarded source of data about social trends.
If you’re like me, halfway through a typical long run you get a yearning that’s both thirst and hunger. The only thing that can satisfy it? An ice-cold...tomato? That's what Japanese food producer Kagome is banking on with its new Wearable Tomato machine.
The Wearable Tomato resembles a mechanical backpack that, with the push of a button, dispenses one of seven medium-sized tomatoes in its reserve. Weighing a hefty 17.6 pounds, it’s not suited for lithe runners, which is why Kagome also created a mini version that tips the scales at six pounds and dispenses 12 cherry-sized tomatoes.
