An estimated crowd of 30,000 revelers welcomed the summer solstice at the megalithic Stonehenge ruins in Salisbury Plain at dawn Saturday. Rain and mist did not deter throngs from welcoming the sun rise above the ancient monument, one of Britain's national icons, on the longest day of the year.

A firm formed by Silicon Valley executives is trying to produce in commercial quantity genetically-modified bug waste that is similar to crude oil but cheaper, cleaner and renewable. LS9 Inc. is planning to build by 2011 demonstration-scale and commercial-scale plants that will produce the so-called Oil 2. 0, which is composed of excrement from altered industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli bacteria. So far, the company's laboratory can produce the biofuel in small amounts, enough to fill a beaker, but has yet to test a 264-gallon (1,000-liter) fermenting machine that can produce the equivalent of one barrel of the fuel per week.

MP Pierre Poilievre of Nepean-Carleton threatened on Monday to block Ontario's funding of sex change surgeries under the province's health insurance system. "People are waiting too long for basic cancer treatment and MRIs and the Liberal government found money for the (Dalton) McGuinty sex change program instead," Polievere told the Ottawa Sun.

A 39-year-old homosexual threatened to sue medical staffs at a government hospital in the south of Manila, capital city,over a YouTube video clip of his rectal surgery, officials said Thursday. The YouTube video clip showed the medical staff laughing while removing the blue canister stuck from the patient's rectum during sexual intercourse, at the Vicente Sotto Medical Memorial Center (VSMMC) in Cebu City, south of the Philippines on January 3.

Abuse of government-issued credit card privileges made the headlines in the U. S. and Canada this week. A few days after the U. S. General Accountability Office reported widespread charging of unauthorized items among federal employees, a Canadian bureaucrat made news by charging $230,000 to her state-issued credit card to buy souvenir coins which she deposited in her personal bank account. Veronica Topic, 24, later withdrew the money, purchased electronic gadgets and auctioned it on eBay. The Canada Border Services Agency employee even had the gumption to have the laptops, Palm Pilots and other gizmos delivered to her office, which caused raised eyebrows among her officemates.