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Lt. Col. Albert Zakaib, the 3rd Corps Support Command officer in charge, holds an Iraqi baby who survived a vehicle collision on May 20. On May 29, after a diligent search, Marines and Armed Forces delivered the orphaned baby (by Iraqi cultural standards) to his mother. Story and photo by by Sgt. Judith Dacosta 3rd Combat Support Command Public Affairs On the evening of May 20, two individuals, a five-month-old boy and an adult male, were injured in a collision. Troops brought both individuals to a checkpoint manned by Iraqi army forces and U.S. Marines. Once the patients arrived at...

The girlfriend of an Australian passenger stranded in Kazakhstan after an emergency landing has told how her boyfriend helped the pilot communicate with ground control. Jacquie, who asked for her full name to be withheld, spent "the most unrestful 24 hours in my life" at the weekend after discovering that her boyfriend Michael's flight from Sydney to London failed to arrive at its destination. Michael was on board British Airways flight BA10, which took off from Sydney airport on Friday afternoon. After a stop-over in Bangkok, the flight crew noticed a fire warning light in the cockpit. The jet, carrying...

BY DEREK KRAVITZ, Associated Press Writer 5 minutes ago MANSTON, England - Adventurer Steve Fossett completed the longest nonstop flight in aviation history Saturday, flying 26,389 miles in about 76 hours, but he had to land early because of mechanical problems. Ground control said Fossett, 61, broke the airplane distance record of 24,987 miles while his lightweight experimental plane was flying over Shannon, Ireland. He then was forced to land the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer at Bournemouth International Airport, in southern England, instead of at a military air strip in nearby Kent because of generator problems. The millionaire adventurer completed...

Probably the most remarkable success in America’s space program (outside of being able to put humans on the Moon in 1969 after just eight years), has to be the story of two robotic rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, trucking around on Mars for more than two years. No one appears more surprised at their longevity than the teams of scientists and engineers who built and still operate these remarkable machines, except possibly the film crew that set out to chronicle their adventures for Walt Disney and IMAX. "Roving Mars" takes us all on an unforgettable journey to the Red Planet, piggybacking...

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 24, 2006 – The key to escaping a tedious life is to maintain a positive attitude, the wife of a Navy physician and diver said. "Always view life as an adventure, and that's true whether you're in the military or not," Meredith Leyva said. Leyva and her husband, Lt. Fernando Leyva, live in Pensacola, Fla., where Fernando is finishing his residency while assigned to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. It's the family's sixth duty station since they married six years ago. In 1998, Leyva used her experience as a military spouse to set up a Web site...

After a decade of waiting, young space enthusiasts across the country are celebrating a new plan that will take them and their colleagues to the Moon and on to Mars. "I have been waiting a long time for NASA to go beyond low Earth orbit!" said 26-year-old aerospace engineer Alicia Evans, "If they need volunteers, I am there." The new plan is set to fit within the current NASA budget, a major change from space exploration programs of the past. Loretta Hidalgo, 31-year-old president of the Space Generation Foundation, says, "What it will give us is more bang for our...

IRVINE, Calif. - Irvine the sea lion is taking a breather after swimming nearly five miles up a creek channel into the civic center. Her journey was an Orange County distance record for wayward sea lions. Irvine the city is in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. "This is the farthest inland we've ever picked up a sea lion," said Michele Hunter of the nonprofit Pacific Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, where Irvine was taken after her capture. "We have seen some marine animals out in the Back Bay before," Hunter said. "They may have been following some fish or...

FORT A.P. HILL, Va. (Army News Service, July 27, 2005) – About 42,000 Boy Scouts and adult leaders from around the world have arrived at the National Scout Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill, Va., and following an accident July 25 in which four adult leaders were killed, activities continue with an added emphasis on safety. A safety review was conducted by the joint task force supporting the jamboree after the four scouting leaders were electrocuted while setting up their tent. Both scouts and about 2,000 service members of the task force have been cautioned to adhere to all safety procedures,...

LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- After a long search, Wolfgang Petersen finally has a crew for his big-budget remake of "The Poseidon Adventure." Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum and Mike Vogel have boarded the Warner Bros. picture, while Andre Braugher is in negotiations to join the cast.

Above a drugstore on a busy street on the edge of Downtown Los Angeles is a former Masonic temple. Inside are stuffed polar bears mid-roar, Amazon spears and expedition flags from all over the world. It's not your usual room, but then again, the men who gather here every Thursday evening are not your usual inhabitants. Not even close. Welcome to the Los Angeles Adventurers' Club, a bastion of testosterone old and young, a place where the men are men, the jokes are usually ribald, and the tales, for the most part, are true. At a recent meeting, men ranging...

Unusual illnesses not uncommon for adventure tourists. Kevin Keogh spent the morning doing ordinary chores. By afternoon, he was climbing out the window of his Mercedes and onto the roof as it sped down a busy street. Standing on top of the car, his arms outstretched as if he were surfing, he jumped to his death. What would make the chief financial officer for the city of Phoenix do something so bizarre? .....

Archaeologists excited over old toilets Posted Thu, 20 Jan 2005 Excited archaeologists are sifting through the contents of 150-year-old New Zealand toilets to get a better understanding of the everyday lives of early settlers. Although there is plenty of oral and written history, there are gaps which can only be answered by lifting the lid on the sanitary habits of pioneering families, they say. About 30 of New Zealand's leading archaeologists arrived in Wellington on Thursday to start a five-week project to collect and document information from historic sites along an inner-city bypass route. The old toilets, locally referred to...

As long as I am confessing less than elevated interests today, I might as well admit that I really enjoyed the new film National Treasure. This is probably the first Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie I have ever praised, unless you count Team America, which is a parody of his extravagent explosion-filled action movies, acted by puppets. Sure, it is a highly-implausible adventure film, but it has a number of redeeming values. It is first-rate storytelling, with nary a dull moment, and a mostly coherent narrative line. It is basically a treasure hunt, comparable in many ways to Raiders of the Lost...

German men want partners to be more adventurous in the bedroom Tue Sep 28, 2:39 PM ET BERLIN (AFP) - Seventy percent of German men want their partner to be more adventurous sexually, according to a survey entitled "What do men expect from an ideal partner?" carried out for a local magazine. According to the survey published in "Journal Fur Die Frau," (Journal For The Woman) more than half of the 1,000 men questioned would also like their partner to be able to distinguish between important and unimportant purchases. The survey also revealed that 51 percent of men would like...

In his final "Sermon By the Sea" given in 1959 at Asilomar, California, Ernest Holmes shared with us his vision of the outcome of global well-being, the human species and Earth transformed by the consciousness that he had articulated as Science of Mind. His Sermon is a prescription for planetary resurrection, a prophetic, millennial assertion of the role of Religious Science in bringing about the world's rebirth: [Science of Mind] is the most direct impartation of Divine Wisdom that has ever come to the world, because it incorporates the precepts of Jesus, and Emerson, and Buddha, and all the rest...

Climber Ofira Zucker, 22, was constantly striving to reach new heights and take on new challenges, her mother Miri told The Jerusalem Post Wednesday. She told her parents in their last conversation that she was going to be the first Israeli woman to reach the summit of the Alpamayo peak in Peru. She came within 150 meters of what became her final goal. Zucker, an Ashkelon resident, and Guy Ben-Ze'ev, 23, of Haifa, died in an ice avalanche Monday morning in the Peruvian Andes. Four Germans, one Peruvian, one Irishman, and an Argentine were also killed. Zucker described her daughter...

Buenos nachos, y’all. My alter ego Luis Martinez and I have been knocking down shots all night in honor of the anniversary of some event important to Luis. I don’t savvy Spanish too good but it seems to have something to do with Luis’ misspent youth and a certain young lady named…and I just got smacked upside the head while Luis took over the backspace key. Now, this theme park is not for us gringos except maybe as observers. Luis dreamed this up as a way to make the long trek north more interesting for its participants. Do you have...

Few Dead Astronauts By Michael Levine © 2003 Even as a Soyuz capsule safely returned two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut from the International Space Station today, I still hear people asking whether there’s anything in space that was worth losing the seven Columbia astronauts. Seventeen space travelers have lost their lives in the NASA space program – three on the ground in their Apollo One spacecraft fire in 1967, seven Challenger astronauts lost on blastoff in 1986, the seven Columbia astronauts lost on their final descent on February 1, 2003. We know of four Soviet cosmonauts lost...

There may still be orbiting the Earth a small space capsule with a dog named Laika. The Russians sent the animal up to see if cosmic radiation would instantly kill anything living which left the Earth's atmosphere. The little dog died, but not from cosmic rays. Of all the deaths associated with our journey outwards, that is the only one which horrifies me. Laika didn't volunteer for anything. The luck of the draw, fate, put the small black and white creature in the cold depths of space where it died alone and terrified. The Columbia astronauts, on the other hand,...