| 3-month sentence for fatal crash
Black said that falling asleep at the wheel is included in the definition of reckless driving, but a manslaughter conviction requires that the driver was aware of the dangers of falling asleep.
Black recalled a case in which someone had been awake for nearly 24 hours, was driving 20 miles home and dozed off multiple times before causing an accident. "In that case he caught himself drifting four or five times," Black said. "He knew that what he was doing could hurt someone." Wilk told police he wasn't any more tired than usual on the day of the accident. It was only five miles from his home to work at Busch Gardens.
Moved by the fact that a life was lost, Killilea ordered Wilk to jail. She noted that the more stringent sentence was because the "end result was the unintentional death of someone else."
"I think the whole thing is just terrible," Scott said.
Surprise! Impatient infant can't wait to be New Year's baby; Damian ...
Just to be sure, Cassista's partner, Raymond Lavoie, started timing the contractions. "When I first started they were about six minutes apart, but then they got to five minutes and by the time they reached four minutes I wasn't prepared to wait any longer. I said 'let's load up the car and go.'" They dropped off their five-year-old daughter, Mercedes, at Cassista's sister's home and went to the hospital. Less than five hours later, at 8:03 a.m., she was holding her new son and the first baby born at the hospital in 2008. Wrapped in a white hospital blanket with a knitted tuque covering his black hair, her son Damian Yvon Lavoie was snoring softly. The sleeping infant was unaware of the excitement and commotion around him.
Oliver's Twist: A year of sports horrors, except in San Antonio
For sports fans, the temptation is to brush away 2007 like so much lint off a lapel. To look back over the past 12 months is to survey an athletic landscape littered with enough lunacy, wrongdoing and downright moral ineptitude to leave us cowering behind our couches. All too often, the scariest thing on television was SportsCenter, which dedicated more time to law and order than TNT. On the calendar, it became the Year of the Boor, including Tim Donaghy, Michael Vick, Floyd Landis, Marion Jones, Pacman Jones, O.J. Simpson and Don Imus among a list of louts no Mitchell Report could hold. In the wake of all of it, we found ourselves yearning for the good old days when Janet Jackson's boob was the only thing we had to fear. In total, the blood and bedlam outranked the balls and bats, and even the most ardent among the masses turn toward 2008 with forced optimism.
'Miracle' recovery for window cleaner who fell 500 ft
A window cleaner who fell 47 storeys from the top of a Manhattan tower block is now awake, talking, and expected to walk again after a recovery that doctors have called a "miracle". Alcides Moreno, a 37-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant, fell almost 500 feet when the scaffolding beneath him collapsed just under one month ago on December 6. Mr Moreno's 30-year-old half brother, Edgar, who was working with him, landed on a fence and died instantly as his body was cut in half, but Mr Moreno survived and was rushed to New York Presbyterian Hospital. Dr Herbert Pardes, the president of the hospital, described Mr Moreno's condition on arrival as a "complete disaster". Both legs, his right arm and his right wrist were broken. He had severe injuries to his chest, his abdomen and his spinal column and internal bleeding in his brain.
Dec 28th
Well, it's almost time for me to head off to Australia. Tomorrow, actually, but this might be my last chance to get in a blog before then. I will try to blog while there but won't promise. Christmas is over and it was quite a pleasant one. My son visited from Las Vegas and he said he had a good time. It looks like he is set on going back to college full time to qualify as an accountant. He did one class last semester and got an A, so it looks like he should do OK in that field. He has quite a bit of money coming to him for education from the time he spent in the United States Air Force; at least enough for about two years of college. We spent Christmas Eve morning at my wife's parents then headed to Pensacola Beach, Florida to where my wife's sister and family live. Lots of gifts were handed around and we all ate and drank too much.
McCain's poised to bury ugly past in South Carolina
COLUMBIA, S.C. — There are few if any states as freighted with history for John McCain as South Carolina. It was here in 2000 that the senator from Arizona came, riding his 18-point victory over George W. Bush in New Hampshire. And it was here, in the fortnight of their bitter struggle, that Bush reversed the outcome and put an end to McCain's hopes of reaching the White House that year. John Courson, the veteran Republican state senator from Columbia and former member of the Republican National Committee, had a close-up view of that struggle as part of the state political establishment supporting Bush. So it was a significant moment for him, and for McCain, that Courson was the master of ceremonies at the McCain rally in downtown Columbia that closed his 2008 pre-primary campaign on a rainy Thursday afternoon.
Technology possibilities for the next decade
People will be able to do anything on a hand-held that they can now do on a desktop computer. In fact, they'll be able to do even more, as mobile gadgets increasingly come equipped with global-positioning-system gear that can track your every move. As you drive around, for instance, you might get reviews of nearby restaurants automatically delivered to a screen in your car - maybe even projected onto the windshield. The spread of GPS hints at another big change on the horizon. We're going to be under a lot more pressure to make our personal information public - everything from where we surf online to where we're standing at a particular moment. Companies will offer us special deals and other incentives so that we'll let them track our activity. That information, in turn, will let the companies present us with a steady stream of intensely focused marketing whenever we go online, turn on our cellphone or even walk into a store.
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