From a town called Peculiar, Missouri, comes this too-good-to-be-true headline: Drunken Alderman Injures Three At Tractor Pull ARCHIE, Mo. — A man who serves as police commissioner, alderman and mayor pro-tem in Peculiar, Mo., was accused of getting drunk and plowing into three people at a tractor pull Saturday.
Our World
Nightmare for Parents of Missing Child
The Sunday Mirror has a rare interview with Kate McCann, mother of Madeleine McCann, the four-year-old who went missing at a Portugal resort on May 3. McCann fears that the Portugese police, who have botched the investigation from the beginning, are now focusing their investigation on her in order to make the case go away. It has been bad press for Portugal and even worse press for the Portugese police, who have made numerous glaring errors in the four months since Madeleine vanished from the family’s hotel room.
Bush drunk at APEC summit?
The AP reports that, while giving a speech in Sydney for the APEC summit, Bush referred to it as OPEC, thanked the Australian prime minister for sending Austrian troops into Iraq, and almost fell off the stage. Granted, the guy’s not known for his intelligent remarks, but this is a bit over the top even for dear old GW. I’m not even trying to be funny here. I think it’s quite possible he was hitting the Scotch before his speech. Speaking of funny, Samantha Schoech and Lisa Taggart, editors most recently of The Bigger the Better the Tighter the...
Talcum Powder & a Kinder, Gentler Section of the San Andreas Fault
In the wake of the 8.0 quake that devastated Peru yesterday, killing more than 350 people, the Chronicle reports that talc found deep in the San Andreas Fault may be the answer to a question that has confounded seismologists: why a 90-mile stretch of the San Andreas Fault has not been more prone to violent earthquakes. Scientists drilling more than 2 miles deep into the San Andreas Fault have discovered underground patches of talc, nature’s softest known mineral, that could help explain the absence of sharp earthquakes where the fault is “creeping.”…because the talc is so soft – the...
Coffee Kids
For the novel I’m working on now, I’m researching coffee–history, production, and modern growing, cultivation, and distribution practices. Although most of us coffee devotees possess a vague, back-of-the-brain consciousness of the suffering that coffee has caused historically throughout the world, we probably stop short of thinking about what our own coffee habit means to rural farmers and migrant workers. The fact is that more than 25 million acres are used worldwide for coffee production annually, and more than half of the global coffee supply is produced by small farmers (The Coffee Book, by Nina Luttinger and Gregory Dicum). The...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
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