2 tons of pigeon droppings in Swedish church tower

STOCKHOLM (AP) — A hatch on a Swedish church tower inadvertently left open for some three decades resulted in 2 tons of pigeon droppings amassing in the tower.

The church's property manager says the layer of droppings was 12 inches deep when it was discovered during a May inspection of the Heliga Trefaldighets Kyrka in Gavle, 105 miles north of Stockholm.

Lennart Helzenius said on Thursday that church staff had been shocked by the sheer number of bags of excrement cleaners were removing from the tower. He says the droppings filled 80 bags in the first round of cleaning, and then just as many in the second round.

Helzenius says the hatch had probably been left open since the 1980s.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

Christmas tree shipment dumped in Austrian garden

VIENNA (AP) — An early seasonal delivery went badly wrong in Austria when a truck was involved in a crash and dumped 14 tons of Christmas trees in a resident's garden.

Police in Vorarlberg state, at Austria's western tip, say the accident happened Friday night as a truck with a trailer loaded with trees drove through the town of Hohenems.

The trailer hit a wall, tipped over and landed in the garden of a house. A police statement Saturday said that the fire service dispatched 30 people to recover the hundreds of fir trees.

A passenger in the truck was injured and taken to a local hospital.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

Bloody bear paw baffles central Ill. authorities

DECATUR, Ill. (AP) — Authorities say a bloody severed body part found along a central Illinois bike trail belonged to a bear.

A walker found the mangled paw on Thanksgiving morning along the bike trail in Decatur. That triggered an investigation by the Macon County Sheriff's Office. Deputies closed part of the path Friday when it was determined the body part did not belong to a human.

The Decatur Herald & Review reports (http://bit.ly/ShoXnK ) authorities have turned the paw over to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources in hopes of discovering how it ended up along the bike path. There was no sign of the rest of the bear.

Sheriff's Sgt. Ron Atkins says there's no reason to worry about bears in the area.

Black bears have not lived in Illinois since the 1800s.

Information from: Herald & Review, http://www.herald-review.com

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

Ecuador officials reject donkey as candidate

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — The demand of dozens of citizens has been denied in the Ecuadorean city of Guayaquil: There will be no jackass running for the legislature.

At least 40 people paraded their candidate through the city's streets to the electoral council offices. Mr. Burro even wore a tie. But officials refused to even let them in the door on Thursday, even though backers had dummied up a mock voter registration card showing the candidate's photo superimposed on a man wearing a business suit.

Donkey backer Daniel Molina told local television stations the goal was to call voters' attention to the seriousness of the February election, not to insult any party.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

Shipping containers to become condos in Detroit

DETROIT (AP) — Plans are moving forward to use empty shipping containers to build a $3.4 million, 20-unit condominium complex in Detroit.

The Detroit Free Press reports (http://on.freep.com/XhdbOq ) a model unit and sales center will break ground in mid-December near the Wayne State University campus. First proposed in 2008, the project known as Exceptional Green Living on Rosa Parks stalled amid the national real estate market tumble.

Leslie Horn is CEO of Three Squared, the Detroit-based business that's working on the project. She says the sales center will help potential buyers understand shipping container architecture. The project would stack empty containers four high, cut in windows and doors, install plumbing, stairways and heating, and add amenities.

Horn says construction on the project is expected to begin in 2013.

Online:

http://www.threesquaredinc.com

Information from: The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

Mercury poisoning of Danish astronomer ruled out

KAREL JANICEK,Associated Press

PRAGUE (AP) — Ever since Tycho Brahe died suddenly more than 400 years ago, there has been mystery about whether the Dane whose celestial observations laid the groundwork for modern astronomy fell victim to natural causes or was murdered.

On Thursday, scientists who had exhumed his body said one thing is clear: if he was murdered, it wasn't with mercury, as many rumors had claimed.

"We measured the concentration of mercury using three different quantitative chemical methods in our labs" in the Czech Republic and Denmark, said Kaare Lund Rasmussen, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Southern Denmark.

"All tests revealed the same result: that mercury concentrations were not sufficiently high to have caused his death. In fact, chemical analyses of the bones indicate that Tycho Brahe was not exposed to an abnormally high mercury load in the last five to 10 years of his life," Rasmussen said in a statement.

The scientists didn't say what did kill the astronomer, but tests on the remains are still being conducted.

Brahe's death in 1601 at the age of 54 was long believed to have been due to a bladder infection. Legend said it was the result of his reluctance to breach court etiquette during a reception by leaving for a toilet. Kidney disease was another suspect.

But some speculated that he might have been poisoned with mercury, even at the hands of a king or a rival astronomer.

"Brahe's famous assistant (astronomer) Johannes Kepler has been identified as a possible murder suspect, and other candidates have been singled out for suspicion throughout the years." said Jens Vellev, a professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, who heads the Czech-Danish team of scientists that conducted the research.

Some even contend that a cousin of Brahe's killed him on the orders of Danish King Christian IV for allegedly having an affair with the king's mother.

Tests conducted in 1996 in Sweden, and later in Denmark, on samples of Brahe's mustache and hair obtained in a 1901 exhumation, showed unusually high levels of mercury, supporting the poisoning theory.

But Vellev wasn't satisfied with that conclusion and he won permission from the church and Prague authorities to reopen the tomb, saying the remains needed to be analyzed with contemporary technology.

His team opened Brahe's tomb in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square two years ago.

Tests on Brahe's beard and bones resolved the mercury question, Vellev said, but work is still being done on his teeth and that could determine his cause of death.

Brahe was born in 1546 at his family's ancestral castle in Scania, then part of Denmark, and he studied astronomy at the University of Copenhagen and in Germany. He worked at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II at a time when Prague was an imperial city.

In 1572, Brahe detected a new star in the constellation Cassiopeia. At the time the heavens were thought to be unchanging, so his discovery was startling. The next year, he became the first astronomer to describe a supernova, or exploding stars.

The exhumation also shed light on another mystery linked to Brahe — his artificial nose.

The astronomer had part of his nose sliced off in a 1566 duel with a fellow nobleman while a student in the German city of Rostock, and the missing piece was replaced by a metal plate.

"Surprisingly, our analyses revealed that the prosthesis was not made of precious metals, as was previously supposed," Vellev said. He said the samples contained "traces of equal parts copper and zinc, which indicates that the prosthesis was made of brass."

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.