As the world turns...

Let's start out today with something funny, since the next two stories aren't.

Not too long ago I posted a story about a drunken Welsh rugby fan who lopped off his testicles, living up to a bet after seeing his team upset England. Here's the next sign of the Apocolypse...

BACKWELL GIVES ONE UP FOR THE TEAM

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - An Australian professional football player said Tuesday he plans to have one of his fingers amputated in an attempt to improve his game.
Brett Backwell, who plays Australian rules football for Glenelg, a suburb of the city of Adelaide in South Australia state, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. he has suffered from pain and restricted movement since he broke his left ring finger three years ago.
Doctors had suggested fusing the bones in the finger, but Backwell rejected the proposal.
He said he believed that amputating the finger was the only way to stop the pain and allow him to keep playing.
“To chop a finger off, that’s a bit drastic,” Backwell told the ABC. “But I love my footy (football), and love playing sport, and if that’s going to help me to succeed at this level then it’s something you’ve just got to do.”

Classic. Speaking of footie, my men's team is - Liquid Charlie's RAIDERS - in the playoffs on Saturday. We dominated men's league - our only losses (4) came when we played with eight or fewer players - and led the league in goals for and against... watch for pictures next week.
Anyways, to more Hurricane Katrina coverage. These two stories just warmed my heart, and showed how the system is really working to help those American people who need it most.



SAUSAGE - LOOTED OR NOT - LANDS CHURCH LEADER IN JAIL

ONE COSTLY SAUSAGE
Originally uploaded by smoove_J.

KENNER, La. (AP) - Merlene Maten undoubtedly stood out in the prison where she has been held since hurricane Katrina.
The 73-year-old church deaconess, never before in trouble with the law, spent two weeks among hardened criminals. Her bail was a stiff $50,000 US.
Her offence?
Police say the grandmother from New Orleans took $63.50 US in goods from a looted deli the day after Katrina struck. Family and eyewitnesses insisted Maten was an innocent woman who had gone to her car to get some sausage to eat only to be mistakenly arrested by tired, frustrated white officers who couldn’t catch younger looters at a nearby store.
Despite intervention from the nation’s largest senior citizen lobby, volunteer lawyers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and even a private lawyer, the family fought a futile battle for 16 days to get her freed.
Not Maten’s diabetes, not her age, not even her lifelong record of community service could get the system moving. Even the store owner didn’t want her charged.
“She has slipped through the cracks and the wheels of justice have stopped turning,” her attorney Daniel Beckett Becnel III said, frustrated.
Then, hours after her plight was featured in an Associated Press story, a local judge ordered Maten freed Thursday on her own recognizance, setting up a sweet reunion with her daughter, grandchildren and 80-year-old husband.
“I’m just gonna hug her and say `Mom, I’m so sorry this had to happen,'“ Maten’s tearful daughter, Elois Short, said shortly after getting the news. “I wouldn’t want this to happen nobody’s mother, to have lived a good life for 73 years and then you wind up in a prison and nobody wants to hear your story.”
Maten must still face the looting charge at a court hearing in October. But the family, armed with several witnesses, intends to prove she was wrongly arrested outside the hotel in this New Orleans suburb where she had fled Katrina’s floodwaters.
“There were people looting, but she wasn’t one of them. Instead of chasing after people who were running, they (police) grabbed the old lady who was walking,” said Short, who works in traffic enforcement for neighbouring New Orleans police.
The path to freedom was complicated amidst the chaos of Katrina. Maten has been moved from a parish jail to a state prison an hour away. Her daughter had evacuated to Texas. And the original judge who set $50,000 bail by phone - 100 times the maximum $500 fine under state law for minor thefts - hadn’t returned a week’s worth of calls.
Becnel, family members and witnesses said police snared Maten in the parking lot of a hotel where she was retrieving a piece of sausage from the cooler in her car to grill so she and her frail 80-year-old husband, Alfred, could eat.
The parking lot was almost a block from the looted store, said her defenders. Police Capt. Steve Carraway said Wednesday that Maten was arrested in the checkout area of a small store next to police headquarters.
The arrest report is short and assigns the value of goods Maten is alleged to have taken at $63.50. The items are not identified.
“When officers arrived, the arrestee was observed leaving the scene with items from the store. The store window doors were observed smashed out, where entry to the store was made,” police reported.
Maten’s husband was left abandoned at the hotel, until family members picked him up. He is too upset to be interviewed, the family said.
Christine Bishop, the owner of the Check In Check Out deli, said that she was angry that looters had damaged her store, but that she would not want anyone charged with a crime if the person had simply tried to get food to survive.
“Especially not a 70-year-old woman,” Bishop said. Short, Maten’s daughter, did not witness the incident. She said her mother has led a law-abiding life. She is a deaconess at the Resurrection Mission Baptist Church and won an award for her decades of service at a hospital, Short said.
“Why would someone loot when they had a car with a refrigerator and had paid with a credit card at the hotel? The circumstances defy the theory of looting,” said Becnel, Maten’s lawyer.

GRANDMOTHER FIRED FOR MISSING WORK DURING HURRICANE TO TAKE CARE OF INFANT

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - When forced to decide between caring for her 18-month-old granddaughter while the child’s parents were stranded in New Orleans or showing up for her job, Barbara Roberts chose to be a grandma.
And for that, she was fired. Roberts, 54, had driven more than 300 kilometres from her home in Mount Vernon, Mo., to Columbia on Aug. 27, the Saturday before hurricane Katrina came ashore, to care for granddaughter Trisana for a couple of days.
Her daughter, Tina Roberts, and son-in-law, Chris Hardin, were in New Orleans. It was supposed to be a weekend business trip for the couple, and Roberts, who had used up her allotted time off in her assembly line job at Positronic Industries, had planned to be back to work on Monday.
Her daughter had even arranged for another baby sitter to spend Sunday night with Trisana so Roberts could get home in time. But when her son-in-law tried to schedule the flight home on the afternoon of Aug. 27, he was told all flights had been cancelled because of the approaching hurricane.
“There was a Category 5 hurricane with a bull’s-eye on our butts, so we called Barb and said we didn’t know when we would be coming home,” said Hardin, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. “We truly didn’t know what would happen down there.”
With no other relatives in the area to take care of the child, Roberts said she had no choice but to call work on Aug. 29, the day the hurricane hit, and tell her boss that she would be missing a few days.
“There was no decision to make - it was already made,” Roberts said. “My daughter could have died down there. This was family. You don’t walk out on a child - especially my grandbaby.”
Hardin and his wife spent several days locked down in a hotel - safe from the chaos that befell most of New Orleans after the levees broke - and finally made it back to Columbia on Thursday, Sept. 1. Shaken up, they asked Roberts to stay one more day. She says she was told on the phone that she was going to be fired. And on Sept. 6, she was.
“All I know for sure is that I had missed so many hours, and then this came up,” Roberts said. “Usually you have a certain amount of vacation time, and I had used it up. You’re also allowed so many unpaid days off, and I’d used them up, too. Fact is, I missed the allotted time and I got fired.”
In response to questions about Roberts’ termination, John Gentry, president of Positronic Industries, said only that the company had made cash donations to relief efforts for hurricane Katrina victims and refused to talk about Roberts.
The company manufactures electrical connectors.
Hardin said his mother-in-law’s firing was “absolutely unethical.”
“People speak of family values, and I don’t see what’s a more central family value than a grandmother stepping up in this sort of situation,” he said. “I sit here trying to imagine what kind of world it would be if grandmothers didn’t make that decision.”