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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Birth on Bolivian plane; baby gets free flights

A Bolivian airline is giving free flights to a child born on one of its airliners.

Spokesman Jerry Holters says the girl was born two weeks early as the Transportes Aereos Militares plane headed toward La Paz at an altitude of 24,000 feet on Sunday. A doctor and a nurse who were passengers on the flight helped out.

Holters says the military-run commercial airline known as TAM will give the child free domestic flights until she reaches age 21. She’ll also get a scholarship through high school at a Bolivian Air Force school.

The child is named Tami in honor of the airline. She and her mother were in good condition at a local hospital on Tuesday.

Czech doctors left foot-long instrument in patient

It took five long months for a Czech woman to discover the reason for her pain: Doctors had left a foot-long medical tool inside her abdomen.

This month, doctors at a clinic in the southeastern town of Ivancice discovered their colleagues had forgotten to remove a spatula-like surgical instrument from the woman following gynecological surgery in September.

Top regional official Michal Hasek apologized Zdenka Kopeckova, 66, and said Monday that the region, which is in charge of the clinic, plans to compensate her.

Clinic head Jaromir Hrubes blamed "a series of individual failures" and said four employees had been punished.

CT24 news television reported that the woman, who complained repeatedly to her doctors about the pain, plans to sue.

Giant Snake Found in China Scares Man to Death


A photo purporting to show a dead 55-foot snake has been making the rounds online, accompanied by a story that almost too outrageous to believe.

The photo and story originally appeared in the People’s Daily, which serves as the official newspaper for the Communist Party in China. It stated that the snake was one of two that were awakened by local workers digging up huge mounds of earth in preparation for a new road that was to cut through the forest that lay just outside of Gupiing city in the Chinese province of Jiangxi.

While one snake, which was reported to be 55-feet long and weigh approximately 300kg, became a casualty of the bulldozers digging, another one, described as a gold boa, appeared supposedly bearing its fangs, causing the workers to flee in terror.

The driver of the bulldozer, however, is said to have been paralyzed with fear. When the workers returned, he was so sick he could barely move, and eventually died at the hospital, presumably of a heart attack.

Despite the story and the accompanying photo, the local government has deemed it all a hoax, due in part to the distinct lack of native boas in that area. It was also thought the coelacanth was extinct until one was discovered in 1938, so to completely dismiss the story as a hoax is to laugh in the face of just how darned scary and unpredictable nature can be.

We’ve all seen the movie Anaconda. Where’s Jon Voight when you need him?

Woman Self-Immolates to Protest the Destruction of Home


Protesting comes in a variety of forms. From simply standing on the corner chanting and holding signs to climbing up a tree and refusing to come down (like Darryl Hannah), expressing one’s disapproval for something is one of the most unique forms of expression.

On November 13, 2009, similar to the Thích Quảng Đức playbook of protesting, Tang, a woman in the Jingniu district of Chengdu city, threatened to lite herself on fire to protest being evicted from her residence and the subsequent demolition of the building.

She poured gasoline over her entire body and screamed “Don’t come up here. Don’t push me. Otherwise I’ll die in front of you.”

Tang then followed through with her threat and set herself on fire. She died 16 days later in a hospital.

Although blurry, the pictures of incident from HNCNN.com reveal the woman standing atop the smoking building located on Tianhuizhen Street, dousing herself in gasoline and setting herself on fire.