Woman: Buried in snow for three days is alive

No one expected to find Donna Molnar alive.

Searchers had combed the brutal back country of rural Ontario for the housewife from the city of Hamilton, who had left her home three days earlier in the middle of a blizzard to grocery shop.

Alongside his search-and-rescue dog Ace, Ray Lau on Monday tramped through the thick, ice-covered brush of a farmer's field, not far from where Molnar's van had been found a day earlier.

He kept thinking: Negative-20 winds? This is a search for a body.

"Then, oh, all of a sudden, Ace bolted off," said Lau. "He stooped and looked down at the snow and just barked, barked, barked."

Lau rushed to his Dutch shepherd's side.

"There she was, there was Donna, her face was almost totally covered except for one eye staring back at me!" he said. "That was, 'Wow!' There was a thousand thoughts going through my head. It was over the top."

With one ungloved hand near her neck, Molnar, 55, mumbled and tried to scream as Lau yelled to other rescuers. Dressed in a leather coat, sweater, slacks and winter boots, Molnar was carefully extracted from a 3-foot-deep mound of snow that had apparently helped to insulate her.

Then, rescuers got their second shock.

"She was lucid, and said, 'Wow. I've been here a long time!' and then she apologized and said, 'I just wanted to take a walk, I'm sorry to have caused you any trouble,' " said Staff Sgt. Mark Cox of the Hamilton Police Department, one of the leaders in the hunt. "And we're all thinking this is incredible, this is really something."

"I've been doing search and rescue for seven years, and this is the wildest case I've had in finding someone alive," he said.

She was rushed to a hospital and immediately sedated to begin the agonizing steps of hypothermia treatment.

"I think the snow must have worked to trap her body heat, and that's what really saved her," Cox said. "This really speaks to what's possible."

Today's readers

Readers in:

Dublin, Hyderabad, Apeldoorn, Helsinki, Riyadh, Semarang, Sint-Truiden, Andorra La Villa, Sorel and Paris ...

as well as ...

Wentzville, Nashville, Fargo, Schenectady, Chapel Hill, Baton Rouge, Folsom, Orlando, Peachtree City and Cary ...

have all dropped by today to see what was what on Carolina Naturally.

Slavic Mayan obession

Here are the four Queens of a Soviet Era deck of cards with, for whatever reason, a Mayan Motif.

See more at English Russian.

Shrub to re-examine pardon

The shrub ordered one of 19 presidential pardons he granted earlier in the week to be re-examined.

The pardon was for Isaac R. Toussie, a 36-year-old New York developer who pleaded guilty in 2001 to making false statements in a Long Island mortgage fraud scheme.

Toussie and his father, also a developer, had previously been accused of conspiring with lenders and others to build and sell substandard homes -- a charge they denied.

According to a senior cabal official, the White House learned more about Toussie's case Tuesday night -- only hours after announcing his pardon.

Specifically, the White House learned, according to the official, "additional information about the nature of fraud [Toussie] carried out."

The White House also learned Toussie's father made numerous contributions to leading repugican politicians.

In 2008, Toussie's father donated almost $40,000 to Arizona Senator John McCain, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, and Virginia Representative Eric Cantor.

"Based on information that has subsequently come to light, the shrub has directed the [Justice Department's] pardon attorney not to execute and deliver a grant of clemency to Mr. Toussie," White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in a written statement.

"The pardon attorney has not provided a recommendation on Mr. Toussie's case because it was filed less than five years from completion of his sentence. The shrub believes that the pardon attorney should have an opportunity to review this case before a decision on clemency is made."

Bradford Berenson, Toussie's lawyer, issued a statement saying, "Isaac Toussie is deeply grateful that both the counsel to the shrub and the shrub himself found Mr. Toussie's pardon application to have sufficient merit to be granted.

"Mr. Toussie looks forward to the pardon attorney's expeditious review of the application and remains confident that the pardon attorney will agree with the shrub and the White House counsel."

Under Justice Department guidelines, an application for a presidential pardon will not be considered by the department's pardon attorney until a convict has been out of prison for five years.

Toussie was sentenced in September 2003 to a five-month prison sentence, as well as three years of supervised release.

CNN's attempts to reach Toussie's lawyers on Wednesday have been unsuccessful.

The Presidential pardon lists are being closely monitored in the final weeks of the shrub's and cabal's junta, particularly to see whether Lewis "Scooter" Libby will be granted the presidential favor.

Other notables who asked for pardons include former Representative Randall "Duke" Cunningham, a repugican from California, who was convicted of receiving bribes; publishing executive Conrad Black, convicted of fraud; former junk bold salesman Michael Milken; former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, convicted of accounting fraud; and Taliban American John Walker Lindh.

Charles Winters, who died almost 25 years ago, was one of the 19 people given a pardon earlier in the week. His son worked towards a presidential pardon for his dad, who had helped smuggle weapons to Jews fighting in what was then Palestine in the late 1940s.

A Protestant from Boston, Massachusetts, Winters spent 18 months behind bars. He was the only U.S. citizen to serve time for helping fly weapons to Jews struggling to create Israel.

A 20th person received a commutation of a life sentence for possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute. That individual, Reed Raymond Prior, was ordered released from prison in February 2009. He will have served more than 12 years.

Do you smell fish?

Do you smell fish or Through the Looking Glass Darkly.

Connell was told his plane may be SABOTAGED !!! Threats from Rove over Ohio Election Fraud Case

Curiouser and curiouser, just curiouser and curiouser!


And ... the plot gets thicker.

Some live to tell their story:

National News Briefs; Senator Lands Airplane After Propeller Falls Off

Senator Lands Airplane After Propeller Falls Off

Published: May 10, 1999

Senator James M. Inhofe made an emergency landing on Saturday after the propeller of the small airplane he was flying fell off.

Mr. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, was not injured, said his press secretary, Danny Finnerty.

Mr. Inhofe said he had been in the air about 10 minutes when the propeller dropped off.

Mr. Inhofe, who has been a pilot for 41 years, glided for about eight miles before landing at an airport here.

Mr. Finnerty said the F.B.I. had been asked to investigate because ''propellers don't just fly off airplanes every day.''

Also, Rove Threat to Blackmail GOP IT Mastermind Triggers Immunity Request to Ohio AG by Election Lawyers

Shrub pardons Toussie

The shrub has pardoned Isaac Toussie, who five years ago scammed hundreds of families in an illegal mortgage scheme.

It's perfect symbolism for the shrub's 'legacy', and it won't be among the top ten of the insane pardons we'll see from this White House before January 20th.

Read month at Washington Monthly.

The Occupation of Iraq

Iraqis, tired of the American occupation are looking into legal action against Americans under the new agreement signed by the shrub.

The families of three men who were killed last week during a search of a grain warehouse want to press charges against American soldiers under the terms of a new security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq.

The security document protects American soldiers so long as they're on U.S. bases or on missions, so it's unlikely that the families can base their claims on it, though they plan to press their case with the help of international lawyers.

Nonetheless, their charges are a preview of some of the nettlesome questions that are likely to arise as the U.S. yields more authority to Iraq under the terms of the pact, which takes effect January 1, 2009.

It's questionable whether this will be allowed, and of course, it's questionable whether America will abide by the terms of the agreement.

Read more in the McClatchy Newspapers.

Soldiers bring suit

16 American soldiers have filed suit against former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, alleging that the war profiteer knowingly exposed US troops to carcinogens.

Read more at ThinkProgess.

They just keep on fucking us!

The shrub and the cabal have found some more Americans they can fuck over -- survivors of Americans killed by Libyan terrorists nineteen years ago.
Family members sued and won, but the Bush-Cheney State Department has nullified the lawsuit to help cozy up relations with the new, improved Libya.

Read the rest in the Washington Post.

This is too RICH!

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (r) says McCain's biggest campaign mistake was shielding her from the press.
And she doesn't return the shrub's calls.

Raise your hand if you want Palin to run for President in 2012. Oh, if the repugicans would be so kind as to oblige!

Read more at Crooks & Liars

Warning: Uncontrollable fits of hilarious laughter will ensue spontaneously while reading the rest of this joke ... er, excuse me news story.

Science News

Professor pioneers DIY adjustable glasses that do not need an optician

It was a chance conversation on March 23 1985 ("in the afternoon, as I recall") that first started Josh Silver on his quest to make the world's poor see. A professor of physics at Oxford University, Silver was idly discussing optical lenses with a colleague, wondering whether they might be adjusted without the need for expensive specialist equipment, when the lightbulb of inspiration first flickered above his head.

What if it were possible, he thought, to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be "tuned" by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?

More than two decades after posing that question, Silver now feels he has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable - to offer glasses to a billion of the world's poorest people by 2020.

Read the rest here.

Cousin Marriage OK by Science

In an age of sexual liberation, marriage between cousins remains taboo, at least in the United States — and from a scientific perspective, laws against the unions are a socially legitimized form of genetic and sexual discrimination.

That argument, raised Monday in an editorial in Public Library of Science Biology, may turn the stomachs of people raised to disapprove of any form of incest. But dispassioned analysis suggests that cousin marriage is no more troubling than childbearing by middle-aged women.

"Women over the age of 40 are not prevented from childbearing, nor is anyone suggesting they should be, despite an equivalent risk of birth defects," write zoologists Hamish Spencer and Diane Paul. Bans against cousin marriage, they say, should be repealed, "because neither the scientific nor social assumptions that informed them are any longer defensible."

Thirty-one states outlaw marriage between first cousins, making the United States the only developed country in which the practice is regularly banned. Most were passed in the Civil War's aftermath — not, say Spencer and Paul, to reduce the chance of defects caused by combination of deleterious genes, but as part of a radical expansion of government authority over private lives.

Read the rest here.

Lusitania

Divers at the wreck of the Lusitania have found four million rounds of US-made bullets in the ship's holds.

So it appears that the Germans were telling the truth, 94 years ago.
When the passenger ship Lusitania went down in May 1915, western media and politicians portrayed it as an attack on a passenger ship, the slaughter of innocent citizens.
Germany maintained that the ship was carrying weaponry as well as passengers, making it a legitimate military target.

The German position, of course, has always been dismissed.
In addition to infuriating the English and becoming a central theme in military recruiting drives, the attack on the Lusitania helped gain Americans' sympathies for the British, culminating in the US entry into the war.

For generations, the sinking of the Lusitania has been taught to schoolchildren as, basically, well a war crime.
That was yesterday's story and, no doubt, and that will be tomorrow's story, but today the facts suggest something different.

Read more in the London Daily Mail

Clown made to remove costume, hand over toy handcuffs

David Vaughan, aka PC Konk the clown, was made to strip down to his underwear at Birmingham Airport, England when his costume set off the metal detectors. He was booked to do an in-air charity show for disadvantaged children. Apparently, PC Konk was good humored about it. From The Guardian:

A piece of metal on his costume set off the security alarm, prompting security guards to confiscate his plastic handcuffs and order him to strip down to his shorts and T-shirt.

Staff also demanded he put the liquid for his plastic bubble-blowing saxophone into a clear sealed plastic bag.

"I'd made sure I'd bought plastic handcuffs and a plastic whistle but I hadn't realised that the costume had a metal band – I thought it was plastic," said Mr Vaughan, from Shard End, Birmingham.

Clown strip-searched before children's charity flight

Traveling by air this holiday.

It could be annoying if you are to meet any of the following according to a USAToday poll:

The most annoying people to adults are ...

Those that let their kids run around - 59%

Thrust back their seat during meal - 46%

Insist on chatting - 45%

Smell of strong perfume/cologne - 39%
(Funny ... body odor wasn't on the list)

Are not prepared at security checkpoint - 37%

Today's horoscope says:

You'll get more done in minutes now than you did in hours before.

Cool.

Daily Conundrum

Talk about Irony!
If you read the sign to know not to read it you have broken the law.
Whereas if you ignore the sign (as most people do ignore signs) then you have complied with the law.
Or is this another of those Conundrum things?!