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(11/08/07 2:08am)
LOS ANGELES – David Mamet found an immediate outlet for his creativity during the Hollywood writers strike.\nIn a cartoon published Tuesday on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, Mamet played the labor dispute for laughs, appearing to lampoon Writers Guild of America strikers.\nThe cartoon, drawn in a rough scribble, shows two men, each wearing a “WGA on Strike” button. One, with sunglasses and a palm tree-decorated shirt, says: “Whaddaya think, will we end up on the breadline?”\n“I don’t touch carbohydrates,” the other cartoon figure responds.\nMamet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) and a screenwriter, also is creator and executive producer of the CBS TV series “The Unit.” \nThe show remained in production Tuesday, the day after the union went on strike against producers, but Mamet was observing the walkout, as was fellow executive producer Shawn Ryan, a show spokesman said.\nA request for comment from Mamet, 59, was made to his agent Tuesday but there was no immediate response.\nRyan, creator of “The Shield,” is a member of the WGA negotiating committee.
(11/07/07 5:02am)
Republican Greg Ballard scored a stunning upset Tuesday night, ending a months-long uphill climb to defeat two-term Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson and take leadership of the state’s largest city.\nBallard, who trailed in polling as recently as last month, led the Democratic incumbent by more than 5,000 votes with 93 percent of precincts reporting.\n“This is really unbelievable,” Ballard said in his victory speech. “I told everybody for so long that six months ago I was the only one who believed but now everybody believes.”\nAn Indianapolis Star/WTHR-TV poll of likely voters last month found Peterson with a lead of 43 percent to 39 percent for Ballard, a result within the poll’s margin of error despite Peterson having raised about $4 million and Ballard less than $300,000 by mid-October.\n“The Beatles used to say money can’t buy me love, but it doesn’t buy elections either,” Ballard said.\nBallard, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, capitalized on public discontent over property tax increases, a hike this year in the Marion County income tax and the city’s crime rate.\nIn the Fort Wayne mayor’s race, Democrat Tom Henry defeated Republican Matt Kelty, who was indicted on campaign finance and perjury charges.\nWith 96 percent of precincts reporting, Henry had 31,659 votes to Kelty’s 21,085.\nKelty’s August indictment dominated the mayoral campaign in the state’s second-largest city. Kelty, an architect who has never held public office, denies any wrongdoing in his reporting of $158,000 in loans to his campaign in which he won the GOP primary over a candidate who had the backing of nearly all elected Republican officials in Allen County.\nRepublicans have looked to retake the Fort Wayne mayor’s office after Democratic Mayor Graham Richard decided to not seek a third term.\nHenry, a former city councilman, said he wants to build upon many of Richard’s initiatives, including a $120 million downtown project that includes a new hotel, a privately built condominium and retail building and a new, city-owned baseball stadium.\nIn Muncie, the mayor’s race remained too close to call with all precincts reporting. Democrat James Mansfield Jr., director of the Muncie Visitors Bureau, led Republican Sharon McShurley by a nine-vote margin.\nRepublican Mayor Dan Canan did not seek re-election after three terms.
(11/02/07 1:26am)
BEDFORD – A coroner has ruled the death of Lawrence Circuit Court Judge Richard D. McIntyre was likely a suicide.\nLawrence County Coroner John Sherrill said an autopsy found that the 51-year-old McIntyre died from carbon monoxide poisoning. McIntyre’s wife found him unresponsive Tuesday evening in a sport utility vehicle parked inside a detached garage at their Bedford home.\nMcIntyre gained national attention during a months-long recount of his 1984 congressional campaign against Democrat Frank McCloskey. The Democrat-controlled House ruled McCloskey won in southern Indiana’s 8th District by four votes, prompting a Republican walkout at the Capitol.\nMcIntyre had been a judge in Lawrence County since 1988.
(11/02/07 12:24am)
NEW YORK – Hilary Swank must really trust Oprah \nWinfrey.\nThe Oscar-winning actress let the talk-show host chop off a little more than 9 inches of her hair during a segment that was to air Friday on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”\nThe TV shearing was done in the name of charity. Swank, 33, donated her locks to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, which works with the American Cancer Society to provide wigs at no charge to women suffering from hair loss caused by their cancer treatments.\n“Well, it’s taken months to get to this moment,” Winfrey said before getting down to business. “It involves a two-time Academy Award winner, a sharp object and me.”\nSwank, who won Oscars for her roles in “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby,” said she “wanted to find a way to give back.”\n“I’ve been growing it for the last six months to donate my hair,” she says. “I’ve been taking a lot of vitamins and taking really good care of it knowing that it would go to a woman \nin need.”
(11/02/07 12:24am)
- From Associated Press reports\nLONDON – J.K. Rowling has completed her first book not to feature teen wizard Harry Potter – an illustrated collection of magical fairy stories titled “The Tales of Beedle the Bard.”\nOnly seven copies of the handwritten book have been made, Rowling said Thursday. One will be auctioned next month to raise money for a children’s charity, while the others have been given away as gifts.\nRowling drew the illustrations herself and provided the handwriting for the five stories that make up the collection of fairy tales.\n“The Tales of Beedle the Bard” is mentioned in the final Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” as a gift left by headmaster Albus Dumbledore to Harry’s friend Hermione, and provides clues that help destroy evil Lord Voldemort.\n“The Tales of Beedle the Bard’ is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years,” Rowling said in a statement.\nThe volume, bound in brown morocco leather and mounted with silver and semiprecious stones, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s on Dec. 13 with a starting price of $62,000. Proceeds will go to The Children’s Voice, a charity that helps vulnerable children across Europe.\n“Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final installment in Harry’s adventures, was published in July. The seven books have sold nearly 400 million copies and have been translated into 64 languages.\nRowling told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the book of fairy tales has helped her say goodbye to \nHarry’s world.\n“It’s not about Harry, Ron and Hermione, but it comes from that world,” she told BBC radio in an interview broadcast Thursday. “So it’s been therapeutic in a way.”\nRowling said she was working on a new book, “a half-finished book for children that I think will probably be the next thing I publish.”\nOn Wednesday, Rowling and the makers of the Harry Potter movies filed a lawsuit against RDR Books, a small U.S. publisher that plans to bring out a companion volume based on the Harry Potter Lexicon \nfan Web site.\nRowling has said she plans to produce her own encyclopedia of the wizarding world and says the book would infringe on her intellectual \nproperty rights.
(11/01/07 3:10am)
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider a dispute involving Elizabeth Taylor over ownership of a Vincent van Gogh painting. The painting is claimed by descendants of a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany.\nThe painting, worth millions, may be among the estimated 600,000 works of art that belonged to Jews and wound up in Nazi hands between 1933 and 1945.\nvan Gogh painted “View of the Asylum” less than a year before his suicide.\nMargarete Mauthner, a one-time owner of the van Gogh, left Germany in March 1939, having lost her livelihood and most of her property due to Nazi policies of economic coercion. Relatives of Mauthner, a noted translator and advocate of the arts, say the painting was among the property she lost to the Nazis.\nIn 1963 while living in London, Taylor bought the painting for about $236,000 at a Sotheby’s auction from the estate of a German art collector.\nTaylor’s lawyers say the record shows the painting was sold through two Jewish art dealers to a Jewish art collector, with no evidence of any Nazi coercion or participation in the transactions.\nThe family members say they didn’t discover they had a possible claim to the painting until 2001.\nMauthner’s heirs went to court to recover the artwork, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled that the federal Holocaust Victims Redress Act does not create a private right to sue. Mauthner’s relatives also are trying to recover the painting under California state law, but the appeals court ruled they waited too long to act.\nTaylor, 75, won Oscars for her roles in “BUtterfield 8” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” She was nominated for Academy Awards for “Raintree County,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Suddenly, Last Summer.”
(11/01/07 1:22am)
INDIANAPOLIS – Nearly every main demographic group of top college athletes exceeds the graduation rate for its student-body counterparts.\nAccording to federal graduation rates released Tuesday by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, 63 percent of Division I athletes who started college as freshmen in 2000 graduated in six years. That beats the graduation rate for all students at Division I schools by 1 percent and equaled last year’s percentage.\nWhite athletes had a 67 percent graduation rate, compared to 64 percent for white students overall. Black athletes also outperformed their student-body counterparts, 53 percent to 46 percent.\n“What these data show are that student-athletes are good students,” said NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson. “There tends to be a myth that student-athletes do not perform well in the classroom. The data simply suggests otherwise.”\nThe NCAA released federal statistics on graduation rates that do not account for transfer students. Earlier this month, it also released data termed “graduation success rates” that counted transfers and resulted in higher overall totals.\nThe federal statistics released Tuesday show that 49 percent of black male athletes graduated in six years, compared to 39 percent of their student-body counterparts. Female black athletes had a 63 percent graduation rate compared to 50 percent overall.\nThe data show that 74 percent of white female athletes graduated, compared to 66 percent overall.\nHispanic male and female athletes also graduated at higher percentages than overall figures for their ethnic groups. But white male and Asian/Pacific Island male students fell short of the overall percentages for their groups.\nThe federal numbers counted 18,346 athletes and 645,215 students overall at Division I schools and also included graduation rates for all Division I schools.\nChristianson said the NCAA is encouraged by the latest statistics but understands “that there’s room for improvement.”\nHe noted that the governing body for college athletics has raised eligibility standards for high school athletes who want to compete in college. It also requires students to earn 20 percent of their degree every year.\nEarlier this month, the NCAA released its graduation success rates, which the organization prefers to focus on because they count transfer students. They showed the overall graduation rate for men and women in all sports at 77 percent.\nThe individual rates for the three poorest-performing groups of athletes – men’s basketball, football and baseball – showed slight improvements for the second consecutive year.\nThis is the third year the NCAA has also released its own data.
(10/31/07 4:06am)
EDGEWOOD, Ind. – A man faces charges that he was drunk when he allowed his 10-year-old son to sit in his lap and drive his truck just before it plowed into a tree.\nPolice said Anthony T. Russell, 35, had a blood-alcohol content of 0.19 percent – more than twice the state’s legal limit to drive of 0.08 percent – when the truck crashed Saturday.\nAfter the crash, the boy was taken to an Anderson hospital and was found to have a broken rib.\nThe force of the truck’s impact into the tree was strong enough to break off the pickup truck’s steering wheel, police said in a probable cause \naffidavit.\nRussell was formally charged Monday with two felony counts of driving while intoxicated, one count of felony neglect and a misdemeanor drunken driving charge. He was being held Tuesday in the Madison County Jail on a $5,000 bond.\nWhen police officers arrived at the scene of the one-vehicle crash in Edgewood, just west of Anderson, they found Russell and his son outside the truck.\nRussell told officers he’d let his son sit on his lap to steer the truck and that it crashed into a tree as they were coming down a hill.
(10/31/07 4:05am)
CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. – A Wabash College freshman who fell to his death from a campus building may have slipped on the copper roof while trying to reach the peak, administrators believe.\nAn autopsy Monday showed that 19-year-old Patrick Michael Woehnker of Kendallville, Ind., died of blunt force trauma caused by the fall, said Montgomery County Coroner Darren Forman.\nWoehnker fell Sunday from the top of Goodrich Hall, an academic building that was closed at the time. He was with four other students on the roof when he got separated from them, authorities said.\n“Right now, we’re most likely looking at it as an accident,” said Crawfordsville Assistant Police Chief Hal Utterback. “We’re waiting on toxicology results to see if there was anything further.”\nPreliminary tests showed that Woehnker had a blood-alcohol content of 0.04 percent, he said. Final toxicology results will likely take four to six weeks.\nAdministrators believe the men used underground tunnels to get inside the building. Once they reached the rooftop observation deck, officials suspect Woehnker climbed over safety railings to get to the east side of the roof, where he slipped.\n“They’re extremely dangerous places to be. ... The building itself was secure,” said Wabash College spokesman Jim Amidon.\nWoehnker was a member of the swim team and Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. Counselors met with members of both groups Sunday, Amidon said. The swim meet Monday was canceled.\n“To be honest, the students are not handling this situation well,” Amidon said. “It’s hard for all of us.”
(10/30/07 1:28am)
CHEMNITZ, Germany – An exhibition of a unique collection of artworks by Bob Dylan, including variations of previously published drawings and sketches, has opened at a museum in this eastern German city.\nVisitors flocked to the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz museum Sunday to see the 170 colored versions of pictorial motifs by Dylan called “The Drawn Blank Series.”\nThe exhibit consists of drawings that Dylan produced between 1989 and 1992 and published in a book. Curator Ingrid Moessinger had 332 of the works specially reprinted and painted, and Dylan then selected 170 works for display.\n“Bob Dylan selected the works for the exhibit himself,” Moessinger said.\nThe pictures show scenes from daily life: portraits of women and men, still lifes, cityscapes and other places that Dylan, 66, observed during his travels. The exhibit runs through Feb. 3.\nArt historian Frank Zoellner said the works reflect Dylan’s music.\n“The landscapes are very peaceful,” said Zoellner, while noting depictions of interiors often lacked a center, giving them a sense of restlessness.\nA guiding theme in the drawings are variations of the same motives – much in the way Dylan performs his music, Zoellner said.\n“On stage, Dylan never plays any song the same way twice,” Zoellner said.
(10/29/07 2:16am)
SPENCER, Ind. – High school students who created a business plan detailing the market potential they see in the rising demand for goat meat in Indiana will get a $28,000 school district loan to open a goat farm.\nSpencer-Owen school board members voted 5-2 Thursday to finance the seven-acre farm, which will be run by Owen Valley High School students about 15 miles northwest of Bloomington.\nThe students will work together to raise and market Boer goats to Indiana’s growing number of ethnic groups that favor goat meat. They’ll pay back the loan through their meat sales.\n“I was skeptical at first whether we could make it work, but the more we got into it, I realized all the support we had,” said Owen Valley junior Kameron Blake. “We had to convince people it would work.”\nThe students already had taken bids for construction of a 30-by-50-foot barn and a fence around seven acres near McCormick’s Creek Elementary School, where the district owns 83 acres.
(10/25/07 3:52am)
BANGKOK, Thailand – David Copperfield canceled upcoming shows in Southeast Asia following an FBI search of his Las Vegas warehouse and a casino theater where he regularly performs.\n“His management sent an e-mail to organizers Sunday to inform that his shows will be postponed indefinitely,” Kittiyong Achawaphong of RSi Dream Entertainment said Monday. The company organized the 51-year-old magician’s shows in Thailand.\nCopperfield was also scheduled to perform in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore in the coming weeks. The cancellations came after FBI agents conducted searches in Las Vegas last week following allegations that Copperfield “forced himself” on an unidentified woman.\nCopperfield’s lawyer, David Chesnoff, said the allegations “are false because David Copperfield has never forced himself on anyone.” Neither law enforcement officials nor Chesnoff has provided details about the investigation.\nReached Monday, Chesnoff said the shows were canceled because tour operators in Asia defaulted on their contracts.\n“Those are serious allegations,” Chesnoff said. “But there’s no truth to them.”\nPromoters of some of the Asian shows are trying to negotiate with Copperfield’s management to reschedule the performances or recoup some of their losses.\n“We are told by Copperfield management that David’s show had been canceled by the artist,” said Peter Basuki, whose company was organizing the Jakarta show.\n“They said they would like to find any other available time to perform in Jakarta,” Basuki said. “With this cancellation, we have lost more than $1 million for advertising and other preparations. Business is business. We want to make a profit. But this is making us \nlose money.”
(10/25/07 2:17am)
INDIANAPOLIS – Another case of antibiotic-resistant staph infection has been diagnosed at an Indiana school, boosting the number of school-related cases statewide to at least 12, state health officials said Wednesday.\nA staff member at Northwest High School in Indianapolis was infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, said Indianapolis Public Schools spokeswoman Kim Hooper. Four other cases were reported at four other schools in the district, she said.\nLake Central High School in northern Indiana also reported a case, sending a note home with parents on Tuesday warning that a student had been diagnosed. The school planned disinfections as a precaution.\nTwo students in southern Indiana and two in the Fort Wayne area recently were diagnosed with the staph infections, which are resistant to front-line antibiotics. Two students in Richmond and one in Brown County are said to have been infected with the so-called “superbug.”\nA Marion County Jail inmate also reported having contracted it.\nMRSA does not respond to penicillin and related antibiotics but can be treated with other drugs. The infection can be spread by skin-to-skin contact or sharing an item used by an infected person.\nThe MRSA strain and other staph infections have spread through schools nationwide in recent weeks, health and education officials have said.\nThe current rash of cases might be related to the fact that the infections have been in the news, experts said.\n“There’s really not much new,” said Dr. Christopher Belcher, a pediatric infectious disease specialist with Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital at St. Vincent in Indianapolis. “This has been a problem that’s been increasing in prevalence over the last seven to 10 years and really what’s new here is the public awareness of it.”
(10/24/07 3:27am)
LaPORTE, Ind. – A baby was abandoned twice in one night- first by her mother, who left the child with a man who gave her a ride, and then by the man and his wife, who left the baby at a hospital, police said.\nThe 5-month-old girl, who was dirty and hungry but otherwise in good heath, was placed in foster care after Sunday’s events, police said.\n“The main thing is the baby is safe,” said LaPorte Police Chief of Detectives Dennis Behenna.\nPolice said Michael Williams was driving home from work in LaPorte early Sunday when he was stopped by a woman he knows holding her baby. She asked the man to give her a ride to Gary, and when they arrived the woman exited the car and asked Williams to take her baby.\nWilliams told police he suspected the woman was on drugs and agreed to keep the child. After he arrived home, however, he and his wife wrapped the baby in a blanket, attached a note, drove to a Portage hospital and left the baby on an emergency room counter.\nA hospital worker found the baby and notified child welfare officials, who placed her in foster care, police said.\nThe child’s grandmother later reported her daughter and the child missing. The mother checked into a Gary hospital for treatment, police said, and later called police wanting her child back.
(10/24/07 12:56am)
FREDERICK, Md. – These giant skeleton keys can’t be used to pick locks, but they could soon be opening some jailhouse doors.\nFour men were arrested and charged with stealing one of 30 fiberglass keys installed throughout Frederick’s historic downtown in tribute to national anthem author Francis Scott Key.\nAuthorities said the stars-and-stripes number was taken by four men who smiled and waved at witnesses as they loaded the 6-foot item into a pickup truck.\nThe piece was recovered at the home of three men, ages 28 to 31, who were arrested along with a 36-year-old companion and charged with theft greater than $500, police said.\nIt was the second key stolen – bystanders foiled a third theft attempt – since the keys decorated by local artists were unveiled in August. At least 10 have been vandalized with spray paint and one was broken into pieces during a street festival Oct. 7.\nStill missing is a key painted by Gail Padgett and Roni Nehemias to look like the Maryland flag. It disappeared over the weekend from outside the Maryland School for the Deaf, police said.\n“It’s mostly goofy people who are drunk, usually, and it’s something new for them to mess with,” Officer Rebecca Huegel said.\nKey, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is buried in Frederick. The keys will be auctioned off Nov. 1 to benefit the Frederick Arts Council.
(10/22/07 2:56am)
GYEONGJU, South Korea – Suzann Pettersen was prepared for another challenging round in the cold and wind. The Norwegian star ended up holding yet another trophy Sunday without even hitting a shot.\nPettersen won the Hana Bank KOLON Championship for her fourth LPGA Tour victory of the year when high wind and unplayable conditions on the putting surfaces forced tournament officials to call off the final round at Mauna Ocean resort.\n“I guess it has to kind of sink in that I actually won this tournament,” Pettersen said. “Of course, it’s not the way I want to win. You want to complete the tournament as it is originally set up, but this time the last round wasn’t playable.”\nThe Solheim Cup player opened with a 3-under 69 on Friday and shot a 72 on Saturday in wind and cold to take the lead at 3 under. She’s the first non-South Korean winner in the six-year history of the event.\n“I feel very fortunate to break the Korean streak,” Pettersen said. “Of course, it’s not the way we wanted to end this tournament. It felt like I played 36 great holes. I fought every day and it was very hard.”\nSouth Korea’s Eun-Hee Ji finished a stroke back, compatriots Seon Hwa Lee and Jeong Jang followed at 1-under and Hyun-Hee Moon was fifth at even par. Top-ranked Lorena Ochoa, coming off her seventh victory of the season last week in the Samsung World Championship, tied for 12th at 3 over after rounds of 72 and 75.\n“I’m disappointed and I think a lot of other people are disappointed that we didn’t get to finish the tournament, but I’m very happy,” Pettersen said. “It’s nice to be back in Korea.”\nThe course was deemed unplayable after days of strong wind on the greens that were already severely stressed by more than 20 inches of rain.
(10/22/07 2:09am)
U.S. and Iraqi forces, backed by Polish army helicopters, swept through Shiite militia strongholds south of Baghdad Saturday, rounding up dozens of militants and killing two. The prime minister met with the provincial governor, who called for reinforcements to root out “the criminals.” Iraqi police said 30 suspected fighters linked to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army were grabbed in a pre-dawn house-to-house search by U.S. and Iraqi raiders in two eastern neighborhoods in Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad.
(10/19/07 12:43am)
MUNCIE – A sanitation worker who said he attached nooses to his trash truck as a Halloween decoration has been suspended for 30 days without pay after co-workers complained.\nThe worker, whom officials declined to identify, placed two nooses on a rearview mirror inside his truck, said Bill Smith, interim administrator of the Muncie Sanitary District.\nFellow workers who handle the city’s trash collection noticed the nooses Tuesday afternoon. Smith said about 60 percent of the district’s 30 workers are black.\n“We’re pretty well convinced this was not racially motivated,” he said. “Having said that, it was very insensitive.”\nNooses, a racially charged symbol of the lynching violence of the segregation era, have turned up recently in a high school courtyard in Jena, La., on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University, in a tree at the University of Maryland and in a Coast Guard cadet’s bag.\nWith that in mind, driver Fred Lewis, who is black, said he and many others assumed someone was sending a hate message.\n“That’s your normal reaction,” Lewis said.\nThe tension lingered until Wednesday morning, when supervisors called a meeting with the district’s entire work force. At that meeting, the worker, who is white, said he tied the nooses from rope he found inside the cab because he’s fond of Halloween decorations.
(10/19/07 12:42am)
RICHMOND, Ind. – Crews worked to disinfect Richmond High School’s locker rooms and gymnasium after a student developed a staph infection possibly from the same antibiotic-resistant strain blamed for the death of a Virginia student this week.\nAthletic director Chris Rodal said the case was “athletic-oriented” and all of the locker rooms in Tiernan Center were cleaned Wednesday night. Student athletes took their uniforms home to launder them, Rodal said.\nRichmond Community Schools Superintendent Allen Bourff said other areas of the high school also were disinfected.\nOfficials were awaiting results of a culture test that would verify whether the strain was Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, he said.\n“It’s not been confirmed, but we have been acting on this as if it were confirmed,” Bourff said Thursday.\nThe Richmond student, a senior whose identify was not released, was diagnosed with the infection Tuesday and has been under a physician’s care, Bourff said.\nIn Bedford, Va., a high school student died Monday after being hospitalized for more than a week with an MRSA strain of staph.\nMRSA does not respond to penicillin and related antibiotics but can be treated with other drugs. The infection can be spread by skin-to-skin contact or sharing an item used by an infected person, particularly one with an open wound. The MRSA strain and other staph infections have spread through schools nationwide in recent weeks, health and education officials have said.\nBourff said he was confident that precautions at the high school about 70 miles east of Indianapolis would prevent the infection’s spread.\nFreshman Michael Lydick estimated more than a quarter of his classmates were gone before the school day ended on Wednesday.\nLydick said he made it to the end of the day, but would’ve gone home if he had been able to contact his parents. He said he felt “nervous and kind of scared” after school officials announced the infection on \nWednesday.\nDetails on Thursday’s attendance at the 1,600-student school were not immediately available.
(10/18/07 4:05am)
SCHERERVILLE, Ind.– An online video of pet cockatoo dancing to a Backstreet Boys song has a northwestern Indiana couple dealing with some worldwide attention.\nIrena and Chuck Schulz have more than 30 birds in their home, but the cockatoo, Snowball, is the star.\nWhenever they play the 1997 song “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” the 11-year-old medium sulfur-crested Eleonora cockatoo lifts his legs, squawks and bobs his head, flashing his bright yellow crest to the beat.\nTelevision programs “Inside Edition” and “The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet” have featured Snowball’s moves. The couple says people from around the world have contacted them after seeing the bird dancing on the video-sharing site YouTube or elsewhere.\nThe couple runs a rescue shelter for birds called Bird Lovers Only Rescue.\n“He makes a great spokesbird for the rescue,” Chuck \nSchulz said.\nSnowball joined the family a couple of months ago. The man who dropped him off brought a CD and said to watch \nSnowball’s reaction.\nIrena Schulz said she almost fainted at the sight of the bird dancing to the beat.\n“I’m thinking, ‘What on Earth is this? This is unreal,’” she said.\nIrene Schulz said most of their birds can be adopted to a good home, but not Snowball.\n“He’s my baby,” she said. “He will stay here and be loved.”\nSnowball’s video can be found at http://www.youtube.com.