BagOfNothing.com

When a customer of First Missouri State Bank recovered a zip-top bag of cash he’d misplaced during the ice storm last winter and the flooding in March, he got an unpleasant surprise.

The vinyl bag had been left in a wooden desk, unzipped, and he told Michelle Johns, manager of the Jackson branch, that it had been damaged by rodents.

He brought in the bag in August to see if anything could be done.

“I told him I’d take care of it because we were really busy that day,” Johns said.

When she and employees Cristal McCoy, Wendy Aufdenberg and Jamie Koch dumped out the contents of the bag on the bank’s long counter, most of the bills were mutilated beyond recognition and littered with bird feathers and rodent feces.

Federal policy dictates that both serial numbers, in the top right corner and the bottom left, are needed to get credit for the entire amount of the bill, so the employees set about the task of piecing together the shredded cash.

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The Hereford and Normandy breed cows were discovered by the ranch manager in the field.

A veterinary expert who examined the carcases said they had been killed by lightning hitting the wire fence bordering the field where the animals were stood. The incident occurred in Valdez Chico, near Montevideo, Uruguay.

In September, 53 cattle were killed by lightning in Katosi, Uganda. They had been seeking shelter underneath trees, according to local reports.

Lightning hits the earth an average 100 times per second, or 8.6 million times a day.

Each spark of lightning can reach over five miles in length, soar to temperatures of approximately 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and contain 100 million electrical volts.

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BAGHDAD — Iraq’s government has an unusual money problem as much of the world grapples with a credit crunch — it can’t spend its oil riches fast enough.

The U.S. is trying to change that by training Iraqi bureaucrats struggling to emerge from a centralized system in which nearly all decisions — from where to build a water-treatment plant to which workers would do the job — came from the top.

“Our efforts are devoted to helping the Iraqis spend their own money,” said Marc Wall, the U.S. Embassy’s coordinator for economic transition in Iraq. “We’ve zeroed in on it in the last year or two.”

The issue came to the fore over the summer when the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) predicted Iraq could finish the year with as much as a $79 billion cumulative surplus because of oil revenues and unspent funds from previous budgets.

The August report drew outrage in Congress, where lawmakers asked why the Iraqis haven’t spent more of their own money on reconstruction efforts while U.S. taxpayers shell out some $12 billion a month for Iraq — most for military operations.

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