words fail me

just set up a cot in some psychiatrist's office for the kid

URBANA, Ohio, Dec. 19 - The police say a woman tried to trick her 7-year-old daughter and the community into thinking that the girl had cancer in order to raise money, going so far as to shave her head, give her sleeping pills and put her in counseling to prepare to die.

"By the time we get done, there's going to be a lot of charges," a police spokesman, Sgt. David Reese, said.

Sergeant Reese said the woman, Teresa Milbrandt, 35, told Champaign County officials this week that the cancer was a hoax. He said the police had collected cans placed at businesses to seek donations. The police also found fliers with photos of the girl advertising fund-raisers.

Ms. Milbrandt's husband, Robert Milbrandt, 44, is also under investigation, the police said.

Mr. Milbrandt said neither he nor his daughter knew the cancer was faked. He said he took his wife to a mental hospital on Tuesday.

The Milbrandts' daughter, Hannah, is staying with relatives.

Sergeant Reese said Ms. Milbrandt had researched the effects of leukemia, then gave her daughter sleeping pills and shaved her head to make it appear as if she were receiving chemotherapy.

Sergeant Reese said that the girl was ill but that her illness was not life-threatening.

The police began investigating about a week ago when school employees noticed that the girl's hair was cut or shaved, not falling out.

the front lines of biowar

A three-hour power failure at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center last weekend renewed concerns about the safety of the high-security government laboratory while it is being run partly by replacement workers during a five-months strike.

The loss of power and failure of all three backup generators raised fears for the first time that the containment of infectious pathogens could have been seriously compromised at the laboratory. The center, which is run by the United States Agriculture Department, studies highly infectious animal diseases like foot and mouth disease and African swine fever.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called yesterday for the laboratory to cease all operations until an independent safety review could be conducted.

Scientists familiar with the center said that since the diseases studied on the island do not, for the most part, affect humans, the risk to workers at the center and to residents of the nearby North Fork of Long Island was minimal. Several experts in infectious diseases said, however, that a power failure at such a facility for so long was extraordinarily unusual.

Welcome to the Hamptons

See the little island just off Orient Point?"


Oh, wait, I forgot, Saddam reads the blogs religiously looking for terror suggestions.

Well, I guess it must be OK. Location information helpfully provided by the USDA on the Plum Island Web page.



"View of Plum Island facility looking back to Orient Point, New York."

Now, given that West Nile (which came into this country via an infected bird imported by known terror sponsor the New York Zoological Society, AKA the Bronx Zoo) was being bruited about as a possible terrorist attack earlier this year in some of the less trusting corners of blogjournaltopiastan, and that the american people apparently want us to start chucking nukes around if people get sick, why don't lets settle the contract dispute, 'K?

schadenfreude, your slip is showing

Of course I didn't want a segregationist leading congress, but he was doing so much damage to his party, I could almost bring myself to wonder if it would be _so_ very bad if he... no. No. Not acceptable, as juicy as the last weeks' embarassments for the Republicans have been.

But now?

I'm so very, very glad that Jesse and Strom lived to see this.