LOS ANGELES, Kalifornia - September 18, 2011 - Texas Rep. Ron Paul won a Kalifornia straw poll, the state Republican Party announced in a statement Saturday night.

A total of 833 ballots were cast during the straw poll, the statement said.

Paul won with 44.9% of the votes, Texas Gov. Rick Perry came in second with 29.3% of the votes, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney came in third with 8.8% of the votes.

MELBOURNE, Australia - September 17, 2011 - Forget “I spy” and hand-held video games; a team of developers is working on technology that will entertain little ones in the back seat with holograms controlled by motion sensors.

The technology, which is similar to Microsoft's Kinetic system, is being developed by the Games and Experimental Entertainment Laboratory (or GEElab as it is more affectionately known) at Victoria's RMIT University.

WASHINGTON - September 10, 2011 - This past Thursday, Terrahawk, LLC  showed off its Mobile Utility Surveillance Tower (MUST) to members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate along with their staffs.

With MUST, law enforcement agencies can quickly set up a mobile surveillance tower for emergency response, crowd control, or general surveillance.

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today: your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

VIENNA, Austria - September 7, 2011 - The emotional moment a group of chimpanzees saw daylight for the first time after being kept in a laboratory for their whole lives has been caught on film.

The video shows the animals edging out of the door hesitantly at first and looking curiously up at the sky.

But they then appear to celebrate their newfound freedom by hugging each other and laughing.

ATHENS, Greece (PNN) - September 1, 2011 - Tax evasion in Greece threatened to take organized form on Thursday when café and restaurant owners refused to pay a 10-point VAT rise, as a deep recession clashes with the government’s increasingly desperate search for revenue.

The steep rise in value added tax on the hospitality sector from 13%- 23% is part of a package of fiscal measures agreed to in return for the country’s second financial rescue by European Union partners.

But for many of Greece’s ubiquitous cafés and souvlaki stands, which have already seen a 20-40% decline in business in the past year as customers rein in spending, the VAT rise is the final straw.

TRIPOLI, Libya - September 1, 2011 - Moammar Qaddafi warned from hiding Thursday that tribes loyal to him were well-armed and preparing for battle, hours after terrorist rebels hoping for a peaceful surrender extended the deadline for loyalist forces to give up in the long time Libyan leader's hometown.

LONDON, England - September 1, 2011 - It will cost £220,000 to produce and will probably have the slippery texture of squid or scallops. But scientists are salivating over the prospect of the world’s first test-tube burger, which could be less than a year away.

Sausages and other processed meat products could swiftly follow, although pork chops and sirloin steaks will be much more problematic.

ROME, Italy - August 31, 2011 - If you’re a small town mayor unhappy with your national government, there’s one thing you can do: declare independence and start issuing currency with your face on it. Just ask the mayor of Filettino, Italy.

Italy is right in the middle of the larger sovereign debt crisis going on in Europe, which is shaking the confidence of markets across the globe. The Italian government has issued a number of austerity measures to get its books in order, including plans to merge the governments of towns with less than 1,000 people to cut costs. That’s a total of 1,963 towns.

But Luca Sellari, the mayor of Filettino, Italy, is fighting back. Rather than give in to the national government’s demands, Sellari wants his central Italian town of 598 to become an independent state under a monarch. Who would be the monarch, you ask? Well, Sellari, of course.

ITHACA, New York - August 30, 2011 - Whether a research team at the esteemed Cornell University falls into the insane category remains to be seen, but they may be skating along the edge of sanity - and perhaps playing a deadly form of quantum Russian roulette - with the entire universe at stake.

What has created this disconcerting state of affairs?

Certifiably brilliant scientist Mordechay (Moti) Fridman and his tenacious team of "time bandits" have succeeded in punching a hole in the fabric of time by compressing and decompressing it.