News & Politics

Fortunately we live within walking distance of school, because we admittedly have a overly active imagination which leads to paranoia about sticking our kid on a school bus for a lengthy ride. And a tragic story like this one from Cottonwood, Minnesota doesn’t help that one bit (even though the bus driver does not appear to be at fault):

A school bus and several other vehicles crashed in southwestern Minnesota on Tuesday, killing four students and injuring more than a dozen others, authorities said.

The bus was hit by a van around 3:25 p.m. on a highway south of Cottonwood. The bus then hit a pickup and tipped on its side, State Patrol Lt. Mark Peterson said.

At least 14 people were hurt. Thirteen students were treated at nearby hospitals.

News of the crash swept through Cottonwood, a small town of about 1,000 people about 121 miles southwest of Minneapolis.

Bindi Irwin was noticeably absent from the New York Toy Fair, where she was to launch her new doll — her mother, Terri, was there in her place. Why? Because the venue where the event takes place, The Javits Center, doesn’t allow children for the exposition. Of course they would have let in little Bindi, but Terri would be having none of that:

“They said they would make an exception for Bindi,” Terri told the Post. “I said, ‘No, thank you. I don’t want Bindi to grow up being the exception.’ ”

Instead, Bindi later showed off her doll - which plays recordings of her urging kids to protect wildlife - at FAO Schwarz.

A spokeswoman for the fair pointed it was just for buyers - not children.

“It is really not a place for children,” she said, adding, “Right now, there is some very serious business taking place.”

Terri Irwin has also told news.com.au that Bindi is a “normal little girl”.

Buried at the bottom of the story is a little tale about her brother Bob’s “right of passage”:

As well as the doll launch, Terri is back in the news telling of son Robert’s first snake bite.

Terri told AP the four-year-old was not alarmed at all when he was bitten by a baby boa constrictor recently.

“He picked one of them up and it bit him on the finger, and he was so proud to have copped his first hit,” Terri said.

“He said, ‘I hope it wasn’t venomous’, so I assured Robert I wouldn’t actually let him play with venomous snakes,” she said.

The couple’s nine-year-old daughter, Bindi, was first bitten by a snake when she was 18-months old, Terri told AP.

If you believe in bad karma, we can’t think of a better way to bring it on than ripping off a couple Girl Scouts. We bet these jerks kick puppies for fun, too.

A pair of con artists ripped off a Girl Scout group when they exchanged a fake $100 bill for cookies, police said.

The unknown couple handed over the bill Friday night at a supermarket, telling the girls it had been washed when asked about why it looked so strange.

“It felt and looked wrong and it was a quarter of an inch shorter than a $1 bill,” said Jil Hennessey-Seabolt, the cookie director for Junior Girl Scouts Troop 2121. Hennessey-Seabolt said the Girl Scouts gave the couple $93.50 in change after the purchase.

You have to be pretty sick to walk into a house and murder someone, but to use a corkscrew to do it? Whomever committed this act is one twisted individual (no pun intended, we swear to god) that needs to be found and locked up FAST. What a painful and horrific way to die.

The victim, a father of six, lived in the home for nearly 30 years. His 11-year-old daughter was the one who found him.

They checked in on the girl’s dad, Murat Saint Hilaire, Wednesday night, because they were worried.

They hadn’t heard from the 55-year-old in days and he missed work.

They never imagined what they’d find.

“She said ‘Call 911, call 911,’” Renelique said. “‘Because I don’t like what I saw,’ she said, she went inside and said ‘Something happened. He’s dead.’”

The little girl found her dad’s lifeless body on the bedroom floor.

The murder weapon: a corkscrew lodged in his head.

Well, they were really good chips:

Dillon County deputies say an argument between a brother and a sister over a bag of potato chips led to a shooting.

WBTW-TV reports that the incident happened Tuesday night. According to deputies, a 10-year-old boy shot his nine-year-old sister in the face with a shotgun.

Investigators say the two were arguing over the chips. Authorities say at some point, the boy left the room, got a shotgun out of his father’s room, and shot the girl in the face.

Michael Layne marched into Notre Dame Elementary in Portsmouth, Ohio, where his wife, Christy Layne, teaches, and shot her right in front of her class. Mr. Layne then fled the school, and SWAT teams have surrounded a house where they believe he’s barricaded himself. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, Layne stabbed his girlfriend earlier this morning, too. Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed! We’re sure the parents at that school are thankful the situation didn’t take its potentially much worse Virginia Tech-esque turn.

Before 9 a.m. this morning, the girlfriend of the suspect was stabbed on 11th Street, about five blocks from Notre Dame Elementary School. The man then went inside the school and shot his estranged wife in her classroom, Portsmouth police said. The woman has been teaching at the school for 19 years.

The girlfriend was taken to Grant Medical Center, where she was in stable condition. The estranged wife was in critical condition at Cabell Huntington Hospital in Huntingon, W. Va.

The man fled the school. A short time later, there was reports of shots fired on Argonne Road, where police believe the suspect barricaded himself. SWAT teams have been at the house since around 10 a.m.

The victim had a restraining order against her estranged husband, and he has prior domestic violence charges against him. The couple has grown children.

An “underworld” tipster pointed private investigators to a reservoir outside of where the McCann family vacationed in Portugal, claiming the little girl had been raped and murdered and dumped there.

Correia said contacts told him that the girl was raped, murdered and her body dumped within 48 hours of her disappearance, the Daily Mail reported.

The lawyer said he believed she was killed, weighted down and thrown from a pumping tower into the reservoir, the paper said.

“I am convinced this is the place. It’s not overlooked, it has easy access by car and if you threw the body from the tower the water is 55-feet deep there,” Correia told the Daily Mail. “The divers have already found a cord tied in knots down there, right below the tower. I have given it to the police.”

Six divers found an approximately 5-yard-long piece of nylon cord in their search, the Daily Mail reported.

Shannon Bloomfield, 12, of Bletchley, Bucks, UK, loved riding horses since she was a small child. She was eagerly awaiting her 13th birthday, as that’s the age to qualify in more prestigious three-day equestrian events. There was even talk that Shannon was good enough to make it into the 2012 Olympics. Then tragedy struck during training:

She had almost completed the course when her horse, Poppy, failed to negotiate the penultimate fence.

It fell awkwardly, trapping the young rider, as horrified spectators looked on. Shannon was pronounced dead at hospital.

Yesterday, her parents, Darren and Wendy, both accomplished riders, paid tribute to their “sports-mad” daughter.

Mr Bloomfield, of Bletchley, Bucks, who sometimes competed in events alongside his daughter, said: “From the day Shannon sat up, she sat on a horse and even then she wanted to jump.

“She loved all sports, and the pony club got her into tetrathlon, which is running, shooting, horse riding and swimming. For that she had to learn to swim in weeks.

“Whatever she did in life, she always gave it her all. Even on the day she left us all she had to win her class.”

Tomas Delgado, the Spanish businessman who sued the parents of the boy he ran over and killed, apparently had a change of heart and has decided to drop the lawsuit. Who are we kidding — this guy obviously has no soul, and was simply embarrassed by all the negative attention:

On Wednesday, Delgado’s lawyer announced that his client decided to ditch the case because of media pressure, Spanish National Radio reported. He spoke outside the court in the small town of Haro in northern Spain to a crowd of several hundred people.

“We’re very happy,” said Anton Iriondo, father of the cyclist.

Susan and Ian Ratner are claiming that after getting lost for over three hours on a day hike at Camp Glen Gray with their four kids, they came across a park ranger who they say refused to help them:

The family later told police that the caretaker at Camp Glen Gray Campgrounds wouldn’t give them a ride or a cell phone. The family says he told them to use a pay phone.

Caretaker Drew Baumgardt tells the Record of Bergen County he did not deny the lost family aid.

The family eventually made it out of the woods by following the sound of police sirens.

A woman who was jailed in Columbia by a leftist rebel group, was inpregnated by one of the rebels several years after she was held hostage. Eight months after giving birth, they took her infant away from her and placed the baby in foster care. Now her son is almost 4 years old and the freed mother is longing to be reunited with him.

I can’t think of any worse torture than having your infant taken away for political reasons. I hope mother and son are back where they belong as soon as possible…

(CNN) — A woman who was held hostage for nearly six years in Colombia waited Friday for a dramatic reunion with her 3-year-old son.

Clara Rojas gave birth to a boy, fathered by one of the rebels, two years after she was taken hostage. The insurgents took the infant away from her when he was 8 months old. Three years have passed since Rojas last saw her son; he’s nearly 4 and in the custody of Colombia’s child-welfare agency.

When rebels freed Rojas on Thursday, she strode into a jungle clearing and climbed aboard a helicopter with a photo of her son dangling from her neck.

Suspected of having a mental illness (no duh!), a 31 year old mother in Germany is suspected of killing all 5 of her young children, ranging from previously reported infant deaths to the new slayings which included the rest of her children, ages 3 - 9.

Since we hear about this so much, I have to wonder, is it safe to leave children with mothers who are mentally ill??? It’s not fair to the children to take a gamble. Mentally ill mothers must be closely monitored and not left alone with their children. I don’t know how to monitor that, but we owe it to these children to make some safety protocols on their behalf.

(CNN) — Police in Darry in northern Germany found the bodies of five children Wednesday, and a spokesman said their 31-year-old mother is the prime suspect in the slayings.

The children were between 3 and 9 years old. Police said the mother appears to suffer from a mental illness, and was taken to a mental health facility.

The parents of Megan Meier, who committed suicide after being bullied online, want the person who they deem responsible, neighbor Lori Drew, to serve jail time.

Drew, the mother of an ex-friend of Megan’s, admitted in a police report to setting up a fake MySpace profile of a boy named “Josh Evans”, which she then used to tease Megan calling her “fat” and a “slut”. Now the community wants something done:

“You cannot as an adult sit there and do that and hide behind a computer. It is a criminal act. We want to see her go to jail,” said Tina Meier, Megan’s mother.

Now others are calling for justice in the case. Prosecutors say they are reviewing the case to determine whether anyone will be charged with a crime.

Last week the board of aldermen in the Meiers’ hometown, Dardenne Prairie, Mo., passed a law making Internet bullying a misdemeanor in the town.

“It’s time that we do something against this. On all levels, the state and federal level,” Dardenne Prairie Mayor Pam Fogarty said.

Well, we’ll never know if her would be child could have been resposible for inventing a way to diminish polluting gases or reduce global warming.

The real question, isn’t she and her boyfriend still creating pollution??? Why is her polluting body any more important than anybody’s elses? Even if she’s careful, she is still polluting the planet in some way or another.

Whatever…

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.

While arson was always suspect in the current ravishing Southern California fires, it now seems that it wasn’t the act of some psycho with malicious intent, but instead it was a young boy playing with matches (and who has obviously never heard of Woodsy the Owl):

The boy, whose name and age were not released, confessed to starting the Buckweed fire, north of Los Angeles, on October 21 but claimed it was an accident.

Diane Hecht, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said: “He admitted to playing with matches and accidentally starting the fire.”

The boy was released to his parents, and the case will be be presented to the district attorney’s office. He is believed to be under the age of 13, according to Reuters.

He is SOOOOOO grounded.