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(06-12) 04:00 PDT Santiago, Chile –
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger meets President Michele Bachelet today in Sacramento, the two leaders are expected to discuss trade and energy issues. But the sister of the lone American citizen still missing from the days of Chile’s military dictatorship hopes the California politician will ask her to find out what happened to her brother.
Boris Weisfeiler is among the some 1,100 people who “disappeared” under suspicious circumstance during the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-90). With the same dogged determination of Ed Horman, the father who sought to find his American journalist son that became the topic of the 1980 movie “Missing,” Olga Weisfeiler has single-handedly kept her brother’s plight in the media spotlight.
Over the years, she has held news conferences, asked witnesses to come forward and placed newspaper ads with a picture of her brother that read: “Have you seen this man?” She has also met with dozens of officials, including U.S. ambassadors, judges, and then-Defense Minister Bachelet.
These days, she hopes a new short film about her brother’s disappearance entitled “The Colony” will spark a renewed effort to find him. Last month, the film was shown at the Santa Cruz Film Festival, and it can be seen at www.stevenjlist.com. The film’s director, Steven List, contacted Schwar- zenegger’s office and he says gubernatorial aides assured him that they “will look into the case.”
“An inquiry by Schwarzenegger in such a setting will put pressure on public officials here and in Chile to discover what really happened to my brother and who is responsible for it,” said Weisfeiler, 64 who lives in Newton, Mass., and has made seven trips to South America.
Even though Chilean courts have convicted more than 100 people for human rights abuses since democracy was restored in 1990, human rights groups have criticized Chilean and U.S. officials for doing little to find out the whereabouts of Weisfeiler.

sfgate.com

KOLOMA, 21 May 2008 (IRIN) - An elderly woman sits under one of the few scrawny trees in a parched landscape as she and 8,000 other displaced people wait for aid workers to begin handing out some 100 tonnes of flour, salt, sugar, and cooking oil.
The woman’s name is Hawa Brahim and the displaced site is Koloma, near the town of Goz Beida in Chad’s southwest.
Brahim tells IRIN she has no idea how the food arrived here. "They bring it; we eat it," she says.
‘All I know is that back in my hut I have 10 hungry mouths that need feeding,’ she said.
More than 50,000 tonnes of international food aid finds its way to this remote region each year to feed hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees and displaced Chadians. But how does it get there?
The process starts by identifying the need then designing a food aid package, requesting donations, purchasing the food, transporting it, assessing its impact, reporting back to donors and doing it all over again.
At each stage there are complications, Moumini Ouedraogo, WFP deputy country director in Chad told IRIN. "People don’t understand how it works, not even our partners," he said.
"[They think it is as if] you are walking into a shop and buying a few cans [but] it’s not like that at all,’ he said. ‘It’s a very long process."
The time it takes between when a donor decides to donate food and the moment the recipient receives it can take more than one year.
The cooking oil Hawa Birhim is about to receive in Koloma started life more than 15 months earlier, when Food for Peace director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Jeffrey Borns sat in his office in Washington DC and signed Order # 81707503 for a total of 925 tonnes of the oil.

reliefweb.int

I’ve always loved Dolly Parton. There’s the voice, the face, old and new (before all the plastic surgery it was beautiful, now it’s fascinating), the strength, the outlandish outfits, the glitz and the glamour, the cartoon body, invisible husband, rumoured affairs, intelligence, the giddy laugh like a yelping pup, and that bizarre mix of downright dirty talk and god-fearing wholesomeness.
And, of course, there are her songs. Like all the true country greats, Parton can sum up situations and emotions with brilliant economy. Take Jolene, one of her classics and a staple of any karaoke night. “Please don’t take him, just because you can,” the singer pleads to her rival in love, Jolene. Eight words, and you have everything - the desperation, the sense of inferiority, the appeal to Jolene’s better nature, or possibly even to her sense of sisterhood. Jolene is a beautifully crafted short story; one that could have been written by Carson McCullers. The song is a hymn to her rival’s beauty (the ivory skin, the flaming locks, the smile like a breath of spring), a humiliating confession (”He talks about you in his sleep/There’s nothing I can do to keep/From crying when he calls your name”) and, ultimately, a plea for compassion addressed straight to Jolene. At a first listening, the song may appear to be about a weak woman, but her honesty, her fighting spirit, the power of her love and her words make her anything but a victim.
Parton often turns traditional country on its head. The title and melancholia of I Will Always Love You suggests a woman clinging to her man, but, in fact, it’s about a woman walking away. She sings, “I will always love you”, not as a wail of grief but as parting solace to the weeping man she leaves behind. Typically, her songs, with their ecstatic crescendos, extol the positive - domestic idylls, the work ethic, God and self-assertion. She can be horribly saccharine, cheesy as Brie, but her powers of description are awesome. By the end of My Tennessee Mountain Home, you can see not only the junebugs and glowing fireflies, but you can hear the crickets and smell the honeysuckle of her childhood, too.

music.guardian.co.uk

A southern Utah woman is recovering after being scalped while riding on a go-cart.
Dawn Tiatia was riding go-carts at her daughter’s birthday party at a park in Saint George, Utah, a few weeks ago. A big chunk of her hair got caught in the machine’s drive shaft and was ripped off her head.
After spending several days in the hospital, she made a full recovery. The park says there are signs warning about long hair getting caught in the machines.
This is not an isolated incident. Two years ago the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning for riders to immediately stop using these types of go-carts until they can be retro-fitted because of this problem.
Experts say to avoid this type of injury riders should: Wear a hair net, make sure your helmet is fitted to you so that loose hair doesn’t fall out. Not wear loose clothing of any kind. Also look at the go-cart to see if it has an axle cover, chain cover, and engine cover to prevent anything being sucked into the go-cart.

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WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — “After a while, you kind of get used to it.” That’s what Kory McFarren says about having his girlfriend live in his bathroom for so long that her body became stuck to the toilet seat.
McFarren says Pam Babcock had a phobia about leaving the bathroom. After she went in, he says “time went by so quick” that he can’t pinpoint exactly how long she was in there.
He says Babcock wasn’t sitting on the toilet the entire time. He says she moved around, bathed and changed clothes. He also brought her food and water and they talked.
But she wouldn’t leave, and McFarren says he finally called police for help last month when Babcock began acting groggy and disoriented.
McFarren says he should have gotten help sooner, but Babcock’s an adult and made her own decision.
Babcock is reported in fair condition at a Wichita, Kansas, hospital. McFarren says she has an infection in her legs that has damaged the nerves and she could end up needing a wheelchair.

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Grand Coulee Police
2/24 - An Omak man, stopped for a routine traffic incident, was allegedly found to have a small amount of marijuana in his possession. Reportedly, the officer found a “blunt” in the ashtray, and the drug dog Wylie found a drug smoking device and a plastic bag with marijuana in it in the front seat.
2/25 - Police responded to a call from a person in an apartment house who said there was a strong odor of urine coming from one of the apartments and that a dog hadn’t been seen in a week. An elderly woman answered the door when police arrived and said everything was okay.
- A man who told police he had lived in the area all his life was pulled over for going 35 mph in a 20 mph school zone. The officer told the man if he had lived here that long he should know the speed limit. He was advised to go back and look at the 20 mph sign, then was cited.
2/26 - An Elmer City man was arrested and transported to Grant County jail due to an incident at Stuck’s Tavern. The man, 37, had created an incident inside the tavern where he allegedly touched a female customer, let air out of two tires outside and was finally found over by the middle school. He was cited for malicious mischief, fourth-degree assault with sexual motivation, possession of marijuana and of drug paraphernalia.

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“DID you see they’re trialling a hovercraft service on the Clyde from Glasgow to Dunoon?” said the chap in the pub last night.
“Ah, well,” said his mate. “At least when it stops in Greenock no-one can steal the tyres.”
A WOMAN having coffee with her pal in the West End told her that she had been walking past her flat and noticed that there was a “for sale” sign up at the houses either side of hers.
“I know,” said her pal. “I’m thinking of putting a sign up stating, Was it something I said?’ “
Norman Horne, visiting Wellington in New Zealand, noticed that one of the city’s Indian restaurants was on Tinakuri Road, and he wondered: “Could they not get a trained chef?”
TALKING of restaurants, a reader tells us: “I was in a Chinese take-away in Newton Mearns when I noticed a starter called Au Yuk. Not surprisingly, I just stuck to the chicken and sweetcorn soup.”
COUNCILLORS mangling the language reminds Liam Chalmers in Dumfries of once talking to a local councillor who was so upset at a decision taken by the council’s chief officer that he announced he was considering taking the matter to “the local government omnibusman”.

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