The race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination continues to heat up -- but in one Montgomery County, Pa. household, the debate turned violent.
Prosecutors say that two brothers-in-law tried to settle the presidential race on the kitchen floor of a Collegeville, Pa. home. Jose Ortiz, 28, is now behind bars on felony assault charges after prosecutors say he stabbed Sean Shurelds inside a home in the 100 block of Honeylocust Court.
District attorney Risa Ferman says a heated debate over the candidates escalated into violence: "One is a supporter of Barack Obama, the other is a supporter of Hillary Clinton, and an argument of words turned bloody when one brother-in-law tried to choke the other and the victim then responded with a knife and stabbed his brother-in-law in the stomach. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
02/25/2008 16:37 ||
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#1
Liberals fighting? Now that's entertainment an oxymoron. Are the police sure the alledged weapon wasn't just somebody's long fingernail? We are talking about Dhimmo supporters.
OMAHA, Neb. Police arrested 25-year-old Lisa Schuchard two weeks ago. She was charged with felony child abuse. Police said they originally went to the home near 34th and Hamilton to check on the well being of two children in the home, ages 4 and 2. Police reports indicate investigators discovered drugs, and even a shotgun within reach of the children. Police said after investigators removed the children from the home, the 4-year-old demostrated to officers how to smoke marijuana.
Police reports show officers found a shotgun by the couch that the children were sitting on. Officers said they also found baggies, marijuana residue and a marijuana pipe on the coffee table. The report said Schuchard and her live-in boyfriend, Christopher Gladden, both admitted to police they smoked marijuana on a daily basis.
Police said Schuchard will now face a hearing on her parental rights. After that display, she still has parental rights?
#4
Gk asks the pertinent question. If the shotgun is not loaded it's no more dangerous than a baseball bat and I really doubt a 4-year old could load a shotgun unless it's a double-barrel. So the shotgun is being added simply for scare value.
LONDON (Reuters) - A Buddhist monk from Japan was killed after slipping and falling under the blades of his runaway tractor lawnmower, an inquest into his death has found. Tragic story. May he rest in pieces peace.
The Reverend Seiji Handa, 50, was cutting the grass around his peace pagoda in the English city of Milton Keynes when the accident occurred last August.
He got out of the tractor to inspect something but the vehicle, which was pulling a multi-bladed grass cutting machine, slipped its handbrake.
The coroner's office in Milton Keynes, northwest of London, said it had recorded a verdict of accidental death.
Handa, from Niigata in Japan, came to Britain in 1978, when he began building a pagoda to promote peace. He had tended the pagoda with the help of nuns ever since. His main job was to trim the 12 acres of lawns around the monument. Seriously, this is a tragic accident. I reminds me we are all mortal and subject to lax safety proceedures. Be careful out there!
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
02/25/2008 12:51 ||
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An UnAmerican Airlines passenger died after a flight attendant told her he couldn't give her any oxygen and then tried to help her with faulty equipment, including an empty oxygen tank, a relative said. Actually, it was two oxygen tanks.
The airline confirmed the flight death and said medical professionals had tried to save the passenger, Carine Desir, who was returning home to Brooklyn from Haiti.
Desir, who had heart disease, died of natural causes, medical examiner's office spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said Sunday. Natural causes exacerbated by reckless disregard for human life, that is.
Desir had complained of not feeling well and being very thirsty on the Friday flight from Port-au-Prince after she ate a meal, according to Antonio Oliver, a cousin who was traveling with her and her brother Joel Desir. A flight attendant gave her water, he said. I hope she didn't have the eggs. Those are guaranteed to kill you, even if they microwave them until they are blue.
A few minutes later, Desir said she was having trouble breathing and asked for oxygen, but a flight attendant twice refused her request, Oliver said Sunday in a telephone interview. Why? I can't wait for the reasoning on this one to come out in public.
After the flight attendant refused to administer oxygen to Desir, she became distressed, pleading, "Don't let me die," Oliver recalled. "Aw, quit your whining. I know way more about your situation than you do.
Other passengers aboard Flight 896 became agitated over the situation, he said, and the flight attendant, apparently after phone consultation with the cockpit, tried to administer oxygen from a portable tank and mask, but the tank was empty. Hmm. Maybe Ever heard of the concept of an equipment check?
Two doctors and two nurses were aboard and tried to administer oxygen from a second tank, which also was empty, Oliver said. Makes you wonder if all those overhead oxygen masks are just there for decoration, doesn't it?
Desir was put on the floor, and a nurse tried CPR, to no avail, Oliver said. A "box," possibly a defibrillator, also was applied but didn't function effectively, he said. In retrospect, perhaps insisting the doctors stay out of the way and running her over with the cleanup cart a couple of times didn't help, either.
"I cannot believe what is happening on the plane," he said, sobbing. "She cannot get up, and nothing on the plane works." Take heart, gravity still works. And so do lawyers.
Oliver said he then asked for the plane to "land right away so I can get her to a hospital," and the pilot reluctantly agreed to divert to Miami, 45 minutes away. But during that time, Desir died, Oliver said. "Sir, remember that whiney passenger I told you about? She just croaked."
"She did? Cool! Since she doesn't need to go to the hospital we might still be able to make it to JFK in time to avoid getting in trouble for being too late!"
"Her last words were, 'I told you I was sick! I cannot breathe,'" he said. I'll bet it won't be long before we hear AA echoing something like that, too.
Desir, 44, was pronounced dead by one of the doctors, Joel Shulkin, and the flight continued to Kennedy International Airport without stopping in Miami, with the woman's body moved to the floor of the first-class section and covered with a blanket, Oliver said. "Ma'am, we've decided to go the extra mile and upgrade you to first class because of all the inconvenience."
Isn't JFK over 1000 miles north of Miami? I'm no pilot, but wouldn't it make sense to land ASAP and sort it out then rather than carry on with the show? UnAmerican Airlines spokeswoman Sonja Whitemon circled the wagons wouldn't comment Sunday on Oliver's claims of faulty medical equipment. Shulkin, through his attorney, Justin Nadeau, declined to comment on the incident out of respect for Desir's family. [Note: That's PR-speak for "We are waiting for when we feel enough of the shoes dropped before we develop an excuse that meets all of the myriad legal requirements to necessary to slither out from under as much of the responsibility for the results of our miserable performance as we can manage".]
#3
Desir, who had heart disease, died of natural causes, medical examiner's office spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said Sunday.
I'm sure Grayhound is better equipped. /sarcasm off
The airlines can't be tagged to cover all emergencies and with "Two doctors and two nurses were aboard" to administer far better than any flight attendant, someone is demanding a heck of a standard. Oxygen wasn't the problem - "a nurse tried CPR, to no avail". Her time was up.
And thanks to a lack of cabin inspections and empty oxygen bottles, they will certainly "hit the lotto" big time. Insurance coverage will protect the airlines from the law suite, but the FAA will hang it in their arss for the empty bottles. COST...? Passed alongs to the air traveling public of course.
#5
The cost has already been passed along to the traveling public in the form of substandard and non-functional equipment. This will remain the case so long as the traveling public prefers to pay less than to shoulder the costs of better regulation or of choosing a carrier with higher standards.
#6
There is no excuse for empty oxygen bottles. None. If it takes the FAA and the tort lawyers dropping the hammer on American Airlines, so be it. No excuse for this.
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/25/2008 9:57 Comments ||
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#7
The public, when buying a ticket, can't see whether the oxygen bottle is full or the flight attendant is trained in for medical emergencies. That is where regulation and enforcement comes in and government responsibility kicks in.
Posted by: ed ||
02/25/2008 9:59 Comments ||
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#8
Well, I hate to take the part of the airlines on this, but people in severe medical circumstances should not be flying commercial airlines. This woman supposedly had her own oxygen, which didn't function. Was it leaking ? Pure oxygen emitted into a cabin could detonate the entire plane. She should been on a private flight or remained on the ground until her conditions improved. The fact that neither the airlines' own oxygen or defibrillator was functioning is pitiful, but not surprising. As costs tighten for the airline industry, they take many shortcuts. What I worry about when I step on is who has really inspected that plane for air worthiness. Most likely no one. I really worry now when I hear the turbines spin up, whether anyone has looked at these engines at the required intervals. It's going to get worse for all of us. Airplanes are not broken down busses. There's 35000 feet of difference.
#9
Need more information on this. True, people with severe medical problems should not be flying on regular carriers, but nothing in the story indicates the passenger had a problem getting on board or eating a meal. I see many people walking around, doing business & leading what looks like a normal life wearing either O2 bottles or small O2 concentrators. Being dependent on small supplements of O2 nowadays is not a big deal. Have seen nothing in the stories about passenger having her own supply of O2 with her, but O2 concentrators are not a big risk for fire/explosion. The O2 level in an airliner's cabin normally drops with altitude, even with a pressurized cabin: most normal people can take this especially when they're sitting and inactive. If their internal blood O2 level were to be measured, it would be significantly lower when the liner is at 35,000 feet than at sea level, but normal people can tolerate this. However, everyone will get sick when their internal O2 level falls low enough for a long enough time. The exact O2 level and elapsed time varies, and even the healthy & fit can fall ill to this form of altitude sickness in flight. Trying to digest a meal puts a strain on the circulatory system by diverting blood to the GI tract, this can push a marginal person over the line into a circulatory crisis of some sort. Even apparently healthy people can become critically ill from the lower O2 levels in airliner cabins, and only O2 supplementation or a return to lower altitudes will help. This type of problem is (IMO) one reason airliners carry O2 tanks in the first place, development of this kind of symptomatic hypoxia isn't predictable. One of the big Denver health institutions used to have a special facility at Stapleton airport for just this eventuality, and several passengers would be treated there every year for this kind of problem. (No reason to think they aren't still doing this at DIA.) Nothing was said in the story about a change in altitude: the pilot could have increased in-cabin O2 levels simply by descending several thousand feet -- as obtuse as the flight crew appeared to be, this was most likely never even considered.
I agree with SteveW -- there is absolutely no excuse for the empty O2 bottles, or (if it happened) for an AED with discharged batteries.
#10
I can't put my finger on it, but somehow my spider sense is tingling. Maybe I'm just becoming allergic to AP stories, but I'm not buying it - yet. In the meantime, feel free to vent your Web-based outrage until we actually have some confirming facts.
#11
A deep dark corner of my mind is wondering if their is any money to be gained in a third world country by stealing pressurized oxygen bottles and replacing them with empty ones, possibly known leaky ones.
#12
RJS may be onto something....please note they were coming from Haiti. Not that that excuses the crew's poor performance or the empty bottles. Something's amiss though.
Isn't JFK over 1000 miles north of Miami?
Heck, Atlanta's ALMOST 1000 miles north of Miami.
Posted by: BA ||
02/25/2008 13:41 Comments ||
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#13
No excuse for continuing the flight. If indeed the O2 bottle(s) was / were empty and there are records that say otherwise, then somebody is in deep-doo-ddo. My Mom requires supplemental O2 and her Dr. advised her against a flight to Seattle from Michigan for a wedding; unless"... she wanted it to be her last hurrah..." So until we see additional info, the PAX may have brought it upon herself; or at least exacerbated her condition.
I don't see any excuse for the flight attendant's refusal for the O2 request either. That will be interesting.
#14
American Airlines Statement Regarding Death of Passenger
FORT WORTH, Texas, Feb. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- American Airlines is very saddened over the death of passenger Carine Desir on Flight 896 from Haiti to New York's JFK Airport last Friday and extends its deepest sympathy to the grieving family.
We are investigating this incident, as we do with all serious medical situations on board our aircraft, but American Airlines can say oxygen was
administered and the Automatic External Defibrillator was applied.
Among the preflight duties of our highly trained Flight Attendants is a check of all emergency equipment on the aircraft. This includes checking
the oxygen bottles -- there were 12 in this particular aircraft. We stand behind the actions and training of our crew and the functionality of the onboard medical equipment. We are also grateful to medical volunteers on this flight who came to the aid of a fellow traveler during flight.
#16
I think we are going to have to wait until the investigation is complete on this one. We have the word of Ms. Desir's brother and cousin that the oxygen bottles were empty and the defibrillator didn't work. How did they know for sure? Could it be the victim did not speak English and could not communicate that she could not breathe? There are many unanswered questions. They probably won't be answered until the inevitable lawsuit.
Posted by: Rambler in California ||
02/25/2008 18:48 Comments ||
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#17
coming from Haiti? I suspect she was already dead but reanimated as a zombie. It's all the rage down there. Zombie/lawsuit/insurance scam...trust me on this
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/25/2008 20:46 Comments ||
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Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
Posted by: Abu do you love ||
02/25/2008 21:20 Comments ||
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#2
FREEREPUBLIC > HAS AN OCEAN CIRCULATION COLLAPSE BEEN TRIGGERED? + DUST IN THE WEST [USA] HIGHER THAN IN PAST TWO CENTURIES.
D *** NG IT, WE CANNOT CONFIRM OR DENY THAT THESE NEWS ARE RELIABLE , OR NOT - WE KNOW, BUT WE DON'T, WE KNOW, BUT WE DON'T, WE KNOW, BUT WE DON'T............................................................................................@AND DON'T YOU FORGET WHAT WE NEVER TOLD YOU [BUT SSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHH WE DID, OR DIDN'T WE, BUT WE DID, BUT WE DIDN'T, WE DID, DIDN'T WE, BUT.......................................@???].
D *** NG IT, WE DIDREN'T, AS CLEAR AND UNDENIABLE AS WE ATTACKATREATED IN IRAQ-ME.
DHAKA - Bangladeshs election commission began on Sunday a second round of talks with political parties aimed at setting the stage for a national vote this year. The election would put Bangladesh back on the road to democracy after an army-backed interim authority imposed emergency rule at the beginning of 2007.
Those who met commission officials for talks were Bikalpa Dhara (alternative stream) made up of breakaways from major parties and the small left-wing Bangladesh Samajbadi Dal, both hoping for a berth in parliament in polls expected around year-end.
Sundays discussions were part of a second round of talks with dozens of parties including the Awami League led by detained former prime minister Shaikh Hasina. The Awami League is due to see the commission on Monday.
But a meeting with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of another detained former prime minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, has not been scheduled yet, as the party tries to end internal feuds and restore unity. We shall wait (to invite the BNP until they come up as one group and under a unified leadership, one election official said at the weekend.
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/25/2008 00:00 ||
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A video of French President Nicolas Sarkozy telling a bystander to "get lost" has become a hit on the Internet. Sarkozy was filmed by a journalist from the daily Le Parisien on a walkabout at the annual farm fair in Paris on Saturday. Sarkozy offered his hand to a man who said: "Don't touch me, you are soiling me." In reply, Sarkozy said, without dropping his smile: "Get lost, dumb ass."
The video was posted on Le Parisien's website www.leparisien.fr.on and by midday on Sunday it had been seen by more than 350,000 people, a spokeswoman for the newspaper said. "It has created quite a controversy," she said. The video is the first to come up when searching for Sarkozy on Dailymotion and YouTube.
Sarkozy's popularity ratings are in freefall and his hands-on style of government is attracting growing criticism. In November, Sarkozy had a heated exchange with fishermen during protests against rising fuel costs. The president challenged a fisherman who had insulted him. "Come down and say that," Sarkozy, elected in May, was quoted as saying. "Don't think that by insulting me you will solve fishermen's problems." After the incident, Sarkozy said he refused to have insults hurled at him and would only accept a dialogue between "civilized people."
Francois Hollande, head of the Socialist party, said Sarkozy was not behaving like a head of state and called on him to improve his behavior. "One should not get into a brawl...One does not call down a fisherman or a worker to explain what he said, one does not get into a fight with someone who does not want to shake your hand," Hollande said on pay-TV channel Canal plus. Sarkozy's spokesman, David Martinon, declined to comment on the fair incident.
The number of people satisfied with the president fell 9 percentage points in a month to 38 percent, according to an Ifop poll in the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche.
#6
There is a danger here, however: national political figures are supposed to be above this. One can get away with this occasionally, but only occasionally. No one wants to have a national leader who is a bore. Reagan (for example) understood this, and only rarely snapped at people. Ditto GWB. Even Bill Clinton understood that he had to keep his anger under control, and mostly did so in public.
So Sarko had his fun, but it should be the last one of these for a while.
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/25/2008 9:55 Comments ||
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A 38-year-old Jerusalemite whose cells carry defective BRCA2 genes is apparently the first woman in the world in an advanced state of pregnancy with fetuses that were screened for the mutation as three-day-old embryos and selected for implantation when shown to be healthy.
Without the screening, the significantly higher risks for breast and ovarian cancer in females and slightly higher risk of prostate and breast cancer in males could have produced a malignant tumor in her children after they reached adulthood.
The breakthrough in-vitro fertilization plus pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) of fraternal twins - performed at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem's Ein Kerem - offers hope to many defective-gene carrier couples around the world of having children free of their mutation. Beyond This Horizon
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
OMAHA, Neb. Police arrested 25-year-old Lisa Schuchard two weeks ago. She was charged with felony child abuse. Police said they originally went to the home near 34th and Hamilton to check on the well being of two children in the home, ages 4 and 2. Police reports indicate investigators discovered drugs, and even a shotgun within reach of the children. Police said after investigators removed the children from the home, the 4-year-old demostrated to officers how to smoke marijuana.
An 
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
