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This is the astonishing moment a teenage driver desperately waved for help out of her window as a semi-truck dragged her car sideways along a Chicago highway. Footage recorded on Tuesday at around 11:40 a.m. by a motorist travelling on Interstate 294 northbound, in Cook County near milepost 30.25, shows clouds of dust rising from beneath the truck as it travelled along the road, pulling a 2005 black Honda Accord with it.

Egypt’s first female ship captain has revealed she was blamed by hordes of online trolls for blocking the Suez Canal despite being on a different ship hundreds of kilometres away. Marwa Elselehdar, 29, was working as a first mate in command of a ship in Alexandria when she started seeing online rumours which claimed she was to blame for the huge container ship that became wedged, blocking one of the world’s major shipping routes on March 23. Despite already captaining ships, Ms Elselehdar will take her final exam to attain a full Captain rank next month and hopes that she...

A woman drove through a fence at an apartment complex in Great Falls early Sunday. It happened at about 8 a.m. at the Fox Hollow apartments on 10th Street SW, behind the Best Western Heritage Inn. There have not been any reports of injuries. Molly Broxholm, an apartment resident, was woken up by the sound. She said that it appeared that the woman driving the excavator was topless at the time. According to Broxholm: "Woke up to the sound of crunching thinking someone was doing yard work until we hear people yelling, looked out the window and saw this, on...

An anonymous email came in over the transom this morning: Hi, Stacy. During the early weeks after the USS Fitzgerald was speared by a lumbering Philippine container ship, it was noteworthy that the captain and a couple of admirals were publically named, but not the actual officer in charge, the officer of the deck. (OOD) The other person who should have kept the Fitz out of trouble is the person in charge of the combat information center, the Tactical Action Officer. That individual is supposed to be monitoring the combat radar, which can detect a swimmer at a distance of...

How RAK, UAQ police saved the dayA 22-year-old Emirati woman was saved by police after her car was stuck in cruise control at 120kmph while she was heading from Sharjah to Ras Al Khaimah. Police risked their lives when they drove their vehicle in front of Aysha Hassan and told her to bang her car in the rear of their vehicle to slow it down. The frightened Aysha was reluctant to this but the trick worked and her car stopped. The woman's brakes stopped working near the National Paints Bridge in Sharjah. She phoned Umm Al Quwain police, who tried...

Women have passed men on the nation's roads. More women than men now have driver's licenses, a reversal of a longtime gender gap behind the wheel that transportation researchers say is likely to have safety and economic implications. If current trends continue, the gap will only widen. The share of teens and young adults of both sexes with driver's licenses is declining, but the decline is greater for young men, according to a study by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute. The study looked at gender trends in driver's licenses between 1995 and 2010. … Male drivers outnumbered women...

Spaces in a new car park in the Black Forest town of Triberg now come with male and female symbols. The spaces for women are wider and well lit, while those for men are close to concrete pillars and can only be reversed into. Explaining the policy, Mayor Gallus Strobel said it was a natural decision because men are better at parking than women. "In the new car park we found that two place were not rectangular, at an angle to the road and placed between walls and pillars; that makes parking difficult so we decided to allocate them to...

Danica Patrick on contraception mandate: ‘I leave it up to the government to make good decisions’

Last night, my wife, who is normally a lovely American-born Jewish girl, made me go to dinner with her judgmental, annoying, hyper-orthodox, cousin. They dissapprove of my Israeli sharp toungue, IAF-inspired language, and occasional lapses in what they consider proper bearing and behavior of Jewish people. Think: the "Church Lady" from SNL, but Jewish. Anyway, they made my bride nervous. They make me nervous. I showed up in a seperate car because I had to work Sunday. Well, my wife is on pins and needles, jumpy and worrisome because, well, they're mean to her, dissaprove of me, disapprove of our...

Joel Santos, 25, is in critical condition after he laid on the ground to keep his girlfriend from leaving, authorities said. A man is in critical condition after he was run over by a car while lying on the ground in front of it to keep his girlfriend from leaving Sunday morning in Orange County, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. FHP spokeswoman Sgt. Kim Montes said 25-year-old Joel Santos had had a verbal argument with his girlfriend and did not want her to go. Despite his urging, 26-year-old Gloribeth Santiago got into the passenger seat of her cousin Christina...

Saudi authorities have re-arrested an activist who defied a ban on female drivers in the conservative kingdom, a security official said Monday... Through Facebook, the campaigners set June 17 as the day all women should drive their cars. The page, called "Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself," was removed after more than 12,000 people indicated their support for the call. The campaign's Twitter account also was deactivated. Al-Sherif was detained for several hours on Saturday by the country's religious police and released after she signed a pledge agreeing not to drive. ...Khobar prison chief Ayoub ben...

> Thankfully, Silvestro wasn't seriously injured in the accident, though she did suffer second-degree burns to both hands. Track crews and safety personnel rushed to her assistance and put out the blaze. She had reportedly been clocked at speeds well over 200 miles per hour just prior to the accident. >

Two sisters from the northwestern B.C. community of Kitimat have both had close encounters with moose on the loose. A month ago, Yvonne Studley, 49, was badly injured when she hit a moose with her vehicle, so last Friday her sister decided to visit her in Vancouver General Hospital. But sister Connie Everitt, 51, also hit a moose and ended up in hospital. In the first accident a month ago, Studley was on her way home from a business trip when a moose ran in front of her car. The animal went through the windshield and landed on her, breaking...

A shopping centre in China's Hebei province has built a car park with wider spaces that it says is designed especially to suit women drivers. The women-only car park in Shijiazhuang city is also painted in pink and light purple to appeal to female tastes. Official Wang Zheng told AFP news agency the car park was meant to cater to women's "strong sense of colour and different sense of distance".

Flight controllers were revamping plans Wednesday for the remaining spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour's visit to the international space station, after a crucial tool bag floated out to space during a repair trip. The briefcase-sized tool bag drifted away from astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper on Tuesday as she cleaned and lubed a gummed-up joint on a wing of solar panels on the space station. She and fellow astronaut Stephen Bowen were midway through the first of four spacewalks planned for the mission. The tool bag was one of the largest items ever lost by a spacewalker. As Stefanyshyn-Piper cleaned up...

One of the enduring mysteries of aviation lore is the disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared with their aircraft somewhere in the Pacific Ocean during their attempted around-the-world flight in July 1937. Earhart's ill-fated journey began in Southern California, where her specially modified Lockheed Model 10 Electra was built. Among those who helped create that aircraft was Don Fowble, a young engineer and mechanic on the Lockheed assembly line. Now 93 and a resident of Arcadia, Fowble's story is one of the first-person accounts of Earhart's attempt and the massive search effort featured...

That age-old stereotype about dangerous women drivers is shattered in a big new traffic analysis: Male drivers have a 77 percent higher risk of dying in a car accident than women, based on miles driven. And the author of the research says he takes it to heart when he travels - his wife takes the wheel. "I put a mitt in my mouth and ride shotgun," said David Gerard, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher who co-authored a major new U.S. road risk analysis. The study holds plenty of surprises. _The highway death rate is higher for cautious 82-year-old women than...

See for example this thread first. A story of which I am fond Girl drives her car into a pond... while on a cell phone! (It sank like a stone.) But it doesn't say if she's a blonde!

Danica Patrick's new car got a grand introduction on Tuesday. She took it on a short ride through the Chicago streets before officially unveiling the No. 7 Motorola she will drive for Andretti Green Racing next season. ``It's black, it's sort of sleek, it looks fast,'' Patrick said. And it resembles a batmobile. She hopes it performs like one, too. Patrick rode to stardom in 2005 when she finished fourth at the Indianapolis 500 and was the IRL rookie of the year. But this year was difficult. Teammate Paul Dana died after crashing during a warm-up for the season-opener at...

A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China's Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday. No injuries were reported although both vehicles were slightly damaged, it said. The woman, identified only be her surname, Li, said her dog "was fond of crouching on the steering wheel and often watched her drive," according to Xinhua. "She thought she would let the dog 'have a try' while she operated the accelerator and brake," the report said. "They did not make it far before crashing into an oncoming car."...