Man Run Over While Sleeping In Parking Lot

ROME (Reuters) – An Italian pensioner committed suicide after his wife fell into a coma, but just hours after he killed himself the woman woke up, Italian media reported on Saturday.

The 70-year-old man, Ettore, who had sat by his wife’s bedside for four months after she slipped into a coma following a heart attack, finally gave up hope and gassed himself in the garage of his family home.

Less than a day later, his wife, Rossana, woke up in her hospital bed in Padua and immediately asked for him.

The northern town of Padua lies just 40 miles from Verona

Dream On America

Jan. 31 issue – When the soviets withdrew from Central Europe, U.S. constitutional experts rushed in. They got a polite hearing, and were sent home. Jiri Pehe, adviser to former president Vaclav Havel, recalls the Czechs’ firm decision to adopt a European-style parliamentary system with strict limits on campaigning. “For Europeans, money talks too much in American democracy. It’s very prone to certain kinds of corruption, or at least influence from powerful lobbies,” he says. “Europeans would not want to follow that route.” They also sought to limit the dominance of television, unlike in American campaigns where, Pehe says, “TV debates and photogenic looks govern election victories.”

So it is elsewhere. After American planes and bombs freed the country, Kosovo opted for a European constitution. Drafting a post-apartheid constitution, South Africa rejected American-style federalism in favor of a German model, which leaders deemed appropriate for the social-welfare state they hoped to construct. Now fledgling African democracies look to South Africa as their inspiration, says John Stremlau, a former U.S. State Department official who currently heads the international relations department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: “We can’t rely on the Americans.” The new democracies are looking for a constitution written in modern times and reflecting their progressive concerns about racial and social equality, he explains. “To borrow Lincoln’s phrase, South Africa is now Africa’s ‘last great hope’.”

Much in American law and society troubles the world these days. Nearly all countries reject the United States’ right to bear arms as a quirky and dangerous anachronism. They abhor the death penalty and demand broader privacy protections. Above all, once most foreign systems reach a reasonable level of affluence, they follow the Europeans in treating the provision of adequate social welfare is a basic right. All this, says Bruce Ackerman at Yale University Law School, contributes to the growing sense that American law, once the world standard, has become “provincial.” The United States’ refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions to certain terrorist suspects, to ratify global human-rights treaties such as the innocuous Convention on the Rights of the Child or to endorse the International Criminal Court (coupled with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) only reinforces the conviction that America’s Constitution and legal system are out of step with the rest of the world.

From Ghetsuhm

A company commander at the Korea Army Training Center (KATC) in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province, forced conscripts in basic training to eat human feces.

The Army said Thursday it had arrested Capt. Lee, a company commander with the 3rd Regiment of the training center’s 29th Battalion, on charges of having forced conscripts to eat human feces because he was unhappy with the way the bathrooms had been cleaned.

On January 10, Lee discovered during an inspection of the center¡¯s bathrooms that two of twenty sit-down toilets had not been flushed. Witnesses say he went to the barracks and told 192 conscripts to stick their fingers in the feces and put them in their mouths.

THE TSUNAMI SONG.

There was a time, when the sun was shining bright
So I went down to the beach to catch me a tan
Then the next thing I knew, a wave 20 feet high
Came and washed your whole country away

And all at once, you can hear the screaming chinks
And no one was saved from the wave
There were Africans drowning, little Chinamen swept away
You can hear God laughing, ‘Swim you bitches swim.’

[Chorus]
So now you’re screwed, it’s the tsunami,
You better run and kiss your ass away, go find your mommy
I just saw her float by, a tree went through her head
And now your children will be sold to child slavery.

Audio clip: http://students.washington.edu/jeesuk/longer_hot97_tsunami.mp3

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