Customs agents inspecting a shipment of plantains thought some of the green bananas seemed unusually hard and cut them open, finding more than 750 pounds of cocaine stuffed inside what turned out to be phony fruit. Smugglers molded the plantains out of glass fiber, filled them with cocaine and painted them to look like the real fruit, a large, green member of the banana family popular in the Caribbean and Latin America.

In January, Larry Green was hit by a car as he returned home from a grocery store. When he was examined at the scene, paramedics and a medical examiner declared him dead and his body was taken to a morgue. Two hours after the accident, the same medical examiner discovered Green was in fact still alive. Green was hospitalized for two months after suffering a severe head injury, a broken leg, and several other injuries.

An Australian woman has invented a 3-step toilet training system for cats called the "Litter-Kwitter. " Jo Lapidge successfully taught her family's Burmese cat, Doogal, to use the toilet. The Litter-Kwitter starts with a red toilet seat-shaped disc filled with cat litter and sitting on the floor next to the toilet, like a normal tray. Next the red disc is placed on the toilet so the cat can get used to jumping up onto the seat.

Devoted fans of elusive soft drink Surge have started a letter-writing campaign to Walmart Inc. and Coca-Cola bottling executives in hopes to get the beverage back on the market. The "fully loaded citrus soda" is no longer sold in bottles or cans and on rare occasions is spotted in soda fountains across the U. S. Fan site- www. savesurge. org offers Surge lovers' 500 pages of testimonials, photos of Surge memorabilia, even a recipe for making a surge-like drink at home. Two Arizona women have said they plan to head a petition signing at a country music festival this month. While a Norwegian man offers shipments or Urge, a Surge-equivalent sold in his country. Coca-Cola debuted the drink in 1997 to compete with the ever-popular Mountain Dew, offering a flavor that bordered between lemon-lime and orange and containing more caffeine than Coke or Pepsi. Sales of the drink began to dwindle around 2002. That's when web designer and surge devotee, Eric Karkovack started the website, which averages 500 hits a day. "I never expected when I started the Web site that it would still be going three years later," said Karkovack, 27, who hasn't had a swig of the bright green liquid since 2003. "I just figured that, like most of these sites that want to save something, that it would be a fad. " Twelve-packs of the drink have been know to sell on eBay for as much as $152. Coke spokesman Scott Williamson said Coke has no plans to raise Surge's profile. "If there were to be increased demand for Surge, we would consider making it more widely available," he said. In 2004, Surge sold 200,000 cases, a major drop from 69 million in '97. It's rival, Mountain Dew, sold 650 million cases in '04. If savesurge. org ultimately fails, Karkovack said the effort would not have gone to waste: The cause brought together a disparate group of people who, at least for a while, had a good time. v "It's more like a community than a Web site," he said.

Bangkok (AHN)- Known primarily as a "hell-hole" for foreign drug smugglers, Thailand's Lad Yao debuted their new look on Tuesday as they welcomed delegates from a United Nations conference. Some prisoners wore pink tutus and tight green t-shirts, and transvestites and acrobats put on a show. Prisoners were seen studying for degrees and expressed the desire to excel once they completed their sentences. Michael Platzer, a former U. N. official responsible for crime and justice, is disgusted with the prison's attempt to appear humane. "It's a system designed not to reintegrate people. There's no way you can rehabilitate someone after 30 years. You wife or husband is dead, your children have gone. Your life is over. " Visitors were restricted from seeing living quarters or from talking to Thai or foreign inmates for more than a few minutes.