Authorities in Orange County are puzzling over a scientific mystery: Why did a woman's clothing catch fire after she put some rocks in her pocket collected on a San Clemente beach?
The 43-year-old woman suffered third-degree burns in the ordeal, a fire official said, after the cargo shorts she was wearing burst into flames on Saturday.
According to the Orange County Register, the woman had been at one of the Trestles beaches at San Onofre, where she pocketed two stones described as "the size of a hamburger patty, smooth and orange and green in color." At about 3:30 p.m. Saturday, an hour after returning from the beach to her home on Avenida De La Estrella, the woman was in her kitchen when the stones simply caught fire.
Stocks extended their declines in the final hour of trading Thursday, after Fitch took negative action on Greece's ratings amid concern over the nation's euro zone membership. Stocks were lower from the open following several dismal economic reports that put a damper on sentiment. Read more
Washington Republicans found themselves between a hoagie and a hard place on Wednesday, as they laid down demands for spending cuts at the White House over sandwiches but came away further than ever from getting a deal for the carved-down federal budget they're looking for.
The White House hoagie huddle came on the second straight day of budget battles in Washington, with the Senate voting down four separate budget blueprints, including the president's proposal and the GOP plan from Rep. Paul Ryan. Hours earlier at the White House, Obama hosted a meeting about the looming budget impasse with GOP and Democratic congressional leaders, in which the only agreement was a bipartisan thumbs-up for the sandwiches the president brought back from a local shop for lunch. Read more
This is not a law-and-order issue; it is a medical and a human rights issue. Being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I am receiving the absolute gold standard of medical care. But doctors cannot be expected to do what the law prohibits, even when they know it is in the best interests of their patients. When palliative care is understood as a fundamental human and medical right, marijuana for medical use should be beyond controversy.
Given my position as a sitting judge still hearing cases, well-meaning friends question the wisdom of my coming out on this issue. But I recognize that fellow cancer sufferers may be unable, for a host of reasons, to give voice to our plight. It is another heartbreaking aporia in the world of cancer that the one drug that gives relief without deleterious side effects remains classified as a narcotic with no medicinal value.
Foreclosure activity in the U.S. fell last month to its lowest level since the start of the credit crisis in 2007, driven largely by drops in states such as California, where the process occurs outside of the courtroom.
Foreclosure filings – default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions – were logged on 18,780 homes, according to RealtyTrac. That was a drop of 5% from the prior month and a 14% decline from April 2011. One in every 698 U.S. housing units had a foreclosure filing during the month.
States where a court order is not needed to take back a home appear to be bouncing back faster than those that need one. The Times wrote about the distinction between judicial and non-judicial foreclosure states in this 2010 article.
Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama's then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."
The booklet, which was distributed to "business colleagues" in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.
It also promotes Obama's anticipated first book, Journeys in Black and White--which Obama abandoned, later publishing Dreams from My Father instead.
Obama's biography in the booklet is as follows (image and text below): Read more
The Honduran newspaper El Tiempo reported yesterday that four people were killed and another four injured in the municipality of Ahuas (Gracias a Dios) during a attack on a boat navigating along the Patuca River on Friday near a place called Paplaya. The deceased victims included two young men, Emerson Martínez and Chalo Brock Wood, and two women, Candelaria Tratt Nelson and Juana Banegas -- both of whom were pregnant. According to Congressman Wood Grawell Maylo of the department of Gracias a Dios and the Mayor of Ahuas, Lucio Baquedano, the attack was carried out in the early morning by a helicopter unit consisting of Honduran police and members of the United Stated Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). They said that the unit mistook the targeted boat for another boat that was being used by drug traffickers. Read more
Unconfirmed reports suggest that the cause of the Bhoja Air Boeing 737 crash in Pakistan last Friday may have been a UFO sighting by the pilot.
A Russian news report on the crash posted on YouTube incorporates footage of three mysterious lights moving in formation, leading to speculation in the UFO community that blame for the tragic accident may lie with an extra-terrestrial craft.
A Baltimore County delegate said Wednesday that the governor should send in the Maryland State Police to control "roving mobs of black youths" at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, prompting a colleague to label the message "race-baiting."
The newspapers, in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida, Read more
Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a big speech in which he accused Obama of lighting a "prairie fire of debt." It's a good line, and it has received widespread media coverage.
Romney's speech has already been dissected by Jonathan Chait and Steve Benen. They note that it's entirely at odds with conventional understanding of how deficits work, and utterly disconnected from context, rendering it almost unquantifiably misleading.
Donna Summer -- the Queen of Disco -- died this morning after a battle with cancer ... TMZ has learned.
Not sure that this is newsworthy but rather par for the liberal course.
Well well. all of you anti corporation, big business haters out there in la la land....How will you 'square' this with your president who once told us he would prevent the sea from rising?
Theory: If you say you need "an articulate" or "literate" black person for your ad, you can't act offended when accused of racial bullshit. Read more
WASHINGTON -- A group of high-profile Republican strategists is working with a conservative billionaire on a proposal to mount one of the most provocative campaigns of the "super PAC" era and attack President Obama in ways that Republicans have so far shied away from.
Timed to upend the Democratic National Convention in September, the plan would "do exactly what John McCain would not let us do," the strategists wrote.
The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign. Read more
