The Lo Zone

Devil's Revenge. Spontaneous Combustion. Hot sauces have names like that for a reason. Now scientists are testing if the stuff that makes the sauces so savage can tame the pain of surgery.

Doctors are dripping the chemical that gives chili peppers their fire directly into open wounds during knee replacement and a few other highly painful operations.

Don't try this at home: These experiments use an ultra-purified version of capsaicin to avoid infection - and the volunteers are under anesthesia so they don't scream at the initial burn.

How could something searing possibly soothe? Bite a hot pepper, and after the burn your tongue goes numb. The hope is that bathing surgically exposed nerves in a high enough dose will numb them for weeks, so that patients suffer less pain and require fewer narcotic painkillers as they heal.

"We wanted to exploit this numbness," is how Dr. Eske Aasvang, a pain specialist in Denmark who is testing the substance, puts it.

A group of crayfish spared themselves from being eaten by escaping from a restaurant.

German police in Stuttgart were called in when the crayfish escaped from an Asian restaurant.

The escape attempt was noticed by a pedestrian who spotted the crayfish scuttling down the street and notified authorities.

Apparently the crayfish had squeezed through gaps in the grating at the top of the tanks and escaped out the front door reports.

...and maybe this one needs to come back altogether.

Today, Mafia families in former strongholds like Cleveland [!!!], Los Angeles and Tampa are gone.** La Cosa Nostra---our thing, as its initiates called the mob---is in serious decline everywhere but New York City. And even there, things aren't so great: Two of New York's five crime families are run in absentia by bosses behind bars.

[...]

The Mafia's ruling Commission has not met in years. Membership in key cities is dwindling, while the number of mob turncoats is soaring.

"You arrest 10 people," says one New York FBI agent, "and you have eight of them almost immediately knocking on your door: `OK, I wanna cut a deal.'"

The oath of omerta---silence---has become a joke. Ditto for the old world "Family" values---honor, loyalty, integrity---that served as cornerstones for an organization brought to America by Italian immigrants during the era of Prohibition.

"It's been several generations since they left Sicily," says Dave Shafer, head of the FBI organized crime division in New York. "It's all about money."

Which doesn't mean the Mafia is dead. But organized crime experts say the Italian mob is seriously wounded: shot in the foot by its own loudmouth members, bloodied by scores of convictions, and crippled by a loss of veteran leaders and a dearth of capable replacements.

[...]

"Mob informant" was once an oxymoron, but today the number of rats is enormous---and growing with each indictment. And the mob's storied ability to exact retribution on informants is virtually nonexistent.

"There is no more secret society," says Matthew Heron, the FBI's Organized Crime Section Chief in Washington.

"In the past, you'd start out with the lowest level and try to work your way up," Heron continues. Now "it's like playing leapfrog. You go right over everybody else to the promised land."

A woman who stabbed her tied-up lover so she could drink his blood has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Tiffany Sutton told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge David Udall that she was sorry for the incident and said she never meant to hurt anyone, but received the stiff sentence anyway after he called the crime especially heinous.

Sutton, 24, pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in August. She was arrested by Tempe police in February after she repeatedly stabbed her lover during an alcohol- and drug-fueled sexual tryst.

According to police reports, the victim, 46-year-old Robert McDaniel, agreed to be tied up during sex but became alarmed and asked to be untied when Sutton pulled out a knife and said she liked to drink blood. Sutton then attacked him, slicing his leg, puncturing his arm, shoulder and back and cutting his neck and stomach. When he escaped, she chased him with a pickax.

Whatever gets you off, I guess.

Philadelphia is home to the least attractive people in the United States, a survey of visitors and residents showed on Friday.

The city of more than 1.5 million people was also found to be among the least stylish, least active, least friendly and least worldly, according to the "America's Favorite Cities" survey by Travel & Leisure magazine and CNN Headline News.

[...]

For unattractiveness, Philadelphia just beat out Washington DC and Dallas/Fort Worth for the bottom spot. Miami and San Diego are home to the most attractive people, the poll found.

Philadelphians' self-esteem has been undermined by national surveys showing they are among the fattest people in the United States. The American Obesity Association ranked the city in the top 10 for overweight people every year between 2000 and 2005.

A Mexican writer suspected of frying and eating pieces of his ex-girlfriend after strangling her has confessed to murdering the woman but denies being a cannibal, a government prosecutor said on Tuesday.

Police burst into Jose Luis Calva's Mexico City apartment last week and found fried human flesh on a dining table set with cutlery. They found more flesh in the refrigerator and an unfinished book by Calvo called "Cannibal Instincts."

The mutilated body of Alejandra Galeana, 32, was in the bedroom closet.

Calva told prosecutors he killed Galeana after an argument, then cut an arm and a leg off of her body so that he could dispense of it in parts.

"He denies having tasted her flesh," Mexico City's chief homicide prosecutor Gustavo Salas told reporters. "According to him, he thought it was better to cook the meat so he could feed it to the dogs."

On Friday night at New York's Roseland Ballroom, Nas announced the title of his next album: He said it will be called Nigga and released in December.

...and the Stop The N Word movement folks...

...will be at shutting this one down.

An elderly Turkish man was arrested in Austria on suspicion of shooting dead another Turk and cutting off his penis because he believed the victim was having an affair with his wife, police said Thursday.

A police statement said the 76-year-old Turk confronted the other man, 58, at a bus stop in Wimpassing near Vienna on Wednesday, shot him at close range, sliced off the man's penis with a kitchen knife and laid it beside him before fleeing.