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As I write, five persons are dead and over forty injured at the Waukesha Christmas Parade - a strange sentence to find oneself putting down in print. The injured include dozens of children, and the dead number members of Milwaukee's Dancing Grannies. Waukesha is a town of about 70,000 about fifty miles from the world-famous Kenosha.I switched on CNN this morning to find out the latest, and they weren't covering the story. So I take it the facts are not helpful to "the narrative". Is it in The New York Times? Why, yes, on page 22:SUV Plows into ParadeThese sick...

A Long Island criminal defendant tried faking his death to avoid sentencing, but the phony death certificate his lawyer submitted had a glaring spelling error that made it a dead giveaway for a fraud, prosecutors said Tuesday. Robert Berger, 25, of Huntington, New York, now faces up to four years in prison if convicted in the alleged scheme. That's in addition to pending sentences for earlier guilty pleas to charges of possession of a stolen Lexus and attempted grand larceny of a truck — punishment prosecutors say he was looking to avoid.

Ethiopia’s brutal Marxist dictator, known as the African Pol Pot, became the first fallen leader to be found guilty yesterday of genocide in his own country after a 12-year trial.Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former President, who fled to Zimbabwe in 1991, was accused along with top members of his military Government of killing thousands during his 17-year rule. The period was marked by vicious crackdowns on opponents, disastrous wars with neighbouring countries and rebel groups and devastating famines in which starvation was used to force peasants into submission. “Members of the Derg [Government] who are present in court today and...

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Enrique Salinas, the youngest brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was found dead in a car on the outskirts of Mexico City on Monday, with a plastic bag tied over his head in an apparent murder, officials said. Authorities said there indications that Salinas had been killed as part of an attempt to extort him or get information out of him. "Generally, if you put a bag over someone's head, you're often not trying to kill them, but rather extort them or get some information out of them," said Alfonso Navarrete Prida, the...

Who will be next? This is undoubtedly the scariest time we have been in since America was founded. We have been here for about a week. Where we are right now makes the Cuban missile crisis or major terrorist attacks, by comparison, look like little more than daily news. One of the reasons I can see it and so many can’t is because I threw out my cable television over 30 years ago. If I want news, I go looking for it from reliable sources. I don’t sit in an easy chair and let some propagandist posing as an anchorman...

Thirty-four bodies have been found inside Resorts World Manila, which was attacked by a lone gunman in the early hours of Friday morning, according to a local official. The victims did not appear to have been shot, but indications were that they had suffocated, Bureau of Fire Protection, Southern Police District Director P/Supt. Tomas Apolinario said in an interview ....

Over twenty years, fear has already devoured important pieces of Western culture and journalism. They all disappeared in a ghastly act of self-censorship: the cartoons of a Danish newspaper, a "South Park" episode, paintings in London's Tate Gallery, a book published by the Yale University Press; Mozart's Idomeneo, the Dutch film "Submission", the name and face of the US cartoonist Molly Norris, a book cover by Art Spiegelman and Sherry Jones's novel, "Jewel of Medina", to name just a few. Most of them have become ghosts living in hiding, hidden in some country house, or retired to private life, victims...

Ol'd Ted is gone but not forgotten.

Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy stood for sleaze. Bloated and drunken, he used his standing in the Kennedy clan to chase vulnerable women - which brought his dream of reaching the White House to a shameful end. He was the youngest of the four Kennedy brothers, and by far the longest lived. Incredibly, he was in line to inherit his brother John F. Kennedy's legendary presidency, but his chances were dashed following the drowning of the pretty, young campaign assistant Mary Jo Kopechne. Forever known as the Chappaquiddick Incident after the Massachusetts island where it took place, the scandal in 1969...

I’m not sure how the politics work here. My sense is as follows: The media’s allowed to mention Chappaquiddick in its obits of Teddy in the interest of completeness, but references should ideally be buried near the end of the piece under plenty of “health care was the cause of his life” pap. Kennedy is not, however, to be “attacked” by conservatives intent on reminding people that progressives’ newest secular saint left a woman to drown in his car, as this would be disrespectful to the dead (Teddy, that is, not Mary Jo). Where does Rollins fit, though? He’s no...

Forty years ago Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy (D-MA) attended a funeral for a 28-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Her death is eerily unremarked, mostly unremembered today, at least in mainstream media. Yet the story left untold is the tragic stuff of a Joseph Conrad novel. As a date in history, July 18 is not particularly noteworthy. Not much happened on that date since the Brits and tempestuous storms decimated the Spanish Armada in 1588. On July 18, 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in an overturned, submerged Oldsmobile in a back channel off Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. The anniversary of her death is...

PLYMOUTH – Mary Jo Kopechne was much more than a victim at a bridge. She was a central figure in the events that led to the end of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s presidential aspirations. She was one of a few women known as the “Boiler Room Girls” who helped Sen. Bobby Kennedy become a front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968. She helped write his speeches and was involved in high-level campaign strategy. She was an intelligent, capable, fun-loving young woman who also liked the ocean, roller coasters and medium-rare burgers. Kopechne was buried 40 years ago today from...

The Incident that saved America from a Teddy Kennedy Presidency occurred forty years ago today. As true American heroes Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were streaking their way to the Moon on Apollo 11; the Hero of Chappaquiddick earned his (yellow) stripes by allowing the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne. No autopsy was performed on Ms. Kopechne's body; however there was some evidence discovered by the funeral director and presented by the District Attorney that Mary Jo suffocated in an air pocket. If confirmed this should have make Senator Kennedy's behavior that night rise to the crime of...

Saturday, July 18th, was the fortieth anniversary of the day that Mary Jo Kopechne drowned at Chappaquiddick (an island part of Edgartown,Massachusetts) in a car driven off a bridge by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.). And, still, questions linger. What did Kennedy do that night? Was he intoxicated? Why wasn’t he prosecuted? The one question still pondered by political observers on all sides: did what is known universally known as “the Chappadquiddick incident” keep Kennedy from being elected President? Clearly, it did. For younger readers who know Kennedy -- now 77 and battling cancer -- primarily as the premier voice...

Sometime around midnight, on July 18, 1969 Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile 88 off of a small bridge on Chappaquiddick island, into eight feet of chilly water. The vehicle landed upside-down. While Kennedy managed to free himself from the wreck and swim to safety, his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne was left in the car to drown.

Sometime around midnight, on July 18, 1969 Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile 88 off of a small bridge on Chappaquiddick island, into eight feet of chilly water. The vehicle landed upside-down. While Kennedy managed to free himself from the wreck and swim to safety, his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne was left in the car to drown. Once he reached shore, Kennedy claims to have made seven or eight attempts to rescue Kopechne, but could not free her. Kennedy then walked back to the cottage where he and four other men, were partying with several young women known as the “Boiler...

Earlier this week, ABC, CBS and NBC all noted the tenth anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. That Kennedy was an “icon” according to CBS’s Harry Smith, and “the Prince of Camelot” to ABC’s Chris Cuomo, a former cousin-in-law. Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, killed July 18, 1969 after leaving a party with Senator Edward Kennedy. That night, Kennedy drove his car off a bridge, and left the scene with Kopechne still in the submerged vehicle; he did not call the police until the following morning. Over the course of...

Just past midnight on Saturday, July 19, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy drove his black Oldsmobile sedan off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha's Vineyard, just off Cape Cod. The Senator escaped a watery death, but a passenger in his car, twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, did not.

NOTE: At the time a hero was walking on the moon, a coward was walking away from a woman trapped underwater in an airpocket. It was only 6 feet of water. Because the anniversary falls on the weekend, if you want to acknowledge the anniversary with a call to the Chappaquiddick Lifeguard's office, you need to do it today. Doug from Upland will be doing what he usually does on this date - calling the office and gurgling water - (202) 224-4543. Be creative and have fun! =================================================== 40th anniversary of Mary Jo Kopechne’s drowning at Chappaquiddick...Kennedy's story still doubtful...

Ted Kennedy Couldn't Confess to Mary Jo's Family: Book By XANA O'NEILL Updated 10:46 AM EDT, Tue, May 19, 2009 Ted Kennedy couldn't bring himself to confess to the family of the woman he killed in a car accident how she died. A new biography "Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died" reveals the longtime senator has been tormented by guilt for more than four decades and visited the parents of Mary Jo Kopechne twice after her death but could never speak of how she died, the New York Daily News reported. "Ted had us come to his house in...