Eideard

French solo sailing star Florence Arthaud fell off her boat during a toilet break but was saved from the Mediterranean waters by rescuers after she called her mother by mobile phone.

Ms Arthaud, winner in 1990 of the Route du Rhum single-handed transatlantic sailing race, was located and rescued near the island of Corsica thanks to a headlamp and the GPS system on her phone.

A small wave hit the boat and knocked her overboard while she was taking a toilet break without her usual harness, she said.

“I quite simply fell into the water while preparing to take a pee,” the 54-year-old told BFM television.

Ms Arthaud, alone on her 10-metre (33ft) yacht The Argade II when she fell overboard, managed to hold her phone, encased in a waterproof covering, above water and call her mother in Paris to raise the alarm. Her mother alerted a rescue team, which set off in search of the sailor.

She spent almost two hours in the water before being rescued. And probably won’t pee over the side of the boat for a while, I’ll bet.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Four people were pulled out alive Monday from the rubble of the Turkey earthquake after one managed to call for help with his mobile phone…

Dozens of people were trapped in mounds of concrete, twisted steel and construction debris after hundreds of buildings in two cities and mud-brick homes in nearby villages pancaked or partially collapsed in Sunday’s earthquake.

Worst-hit was Ercis – an eastern city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border that lies in one of Turkey’s most earthquake-prone zones – where about 80 multistory buildings collapsed.

Yalcin Akay was dug out from a collapsed six-story building with a leg injury after he called a police emergency line on his phone and described his location, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. Three others, including two children, were also rescued from the same building in Ercis 20 hours after the quake struck, officials said…

As over 200 aftershocks rocked the area, rescuers searched mounds of debris for the missing and tearful families members waited anxiously nearby. Cranes and other heavy equipment lifted slabs of concrete, allowing residents to dig for the missing with shovels. Generator-powered floodlights ran all night so the rescues could continue.

Aid groups scrambled to set up tents, field hospitals and kitchens to help the thousands left homeless or too afraid to re-enter their homes. Many exhausted residents spent the night outside, lighting fires to keep warm…

The bustling, larger city of Van, about 55 miles (90 kilometres) south of Ercis, also sustained substantial damage, but Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin said search efforts there were winding down. Mr Sahin expected the death toll in Ercis to rise, but not as much as initially feared. He told reporters rescue teams were searching for survivors in the ruins of 47 buildings where dozens could be trapped, including a cafe…

More than 2,000 teams with a dozen sniffer dogs were involved in search-and-rescue and aid efforts.

Several countries offered assistance but Mr Erdogan said Turkey was able to cope for the time being. Azerbaijan, Iran and Bulgaria still sent aid, he said.

I decided a long time ago that life was tough enough without adding earthquakes to the potential of forces completely out of your control that could affect your life.

Pressure from Twitter users has made Air Canada fix a terminally ill boy’s wheelchair after it was damaged during a flight, his family has said.

Appeals for help from the aunt of 10-year-old Tanner Bawn went viral on the micro-blogging website.

An airline spokesman said they had acted as soon as they had heard about it. It has now promised to send the boy to Disney World…

Tanner Bawn’s $15,000 wheelchair arrived at New York’s La Guardia Airport in pieces, during a trip to the city for a charity run…

The airline is reported to have contacted an overnight repair centre after hearing about the boy’s problems from other Twitter users and had the specialised chair returned to Tanner a day later.

“I’m impressed with how Air Canada has stepped up. But I’m still distressed that it took the internet shrieking loudly at them for it to happen,” Mr Bawn’s aunt, blogger Catherine Connors, told the Globe and Mail newspaper.

She added: “If my sister and Tanner had been here on their own with no blogging or without the vast social-media network to help them, it wouldn’t have turned out this way.”

Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick said the airline had acted as soon as they had heard about the problem…

Air Canada has promised to make permanent repairs when the group returns home to Kamloops, British Columbia.

Two thoughts:

OTOH, a bajillion Tweets makes a helluva impression!

“There is no shame in being the party of no,” former Alaskan governor and future television documentarian Sarah Palin told an adoring audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans last Friday. That, however, is a matter of debate. Newt Gingrich, for example, says he would prefer to be a member of “the party of yes.” Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal thinks differently. He wants to be part of the party of “hell, no.” There is time for the Republican leadership to be having this debate because, well, they’re not doing much else.

Obstructing their Democratic rivals’ every move may yet prove to have been an ingenious gambit on the part of congressional Republicans, but there is no question that it carries a cost. With Tax Day upon us, we got to thinking: Just how much money are taxpayers spending on the Republican Party’s commitment to doing exactly nothing? How much would Americans have saved if the Party of Lincoln’s emissaries to the 111th Congress had simply mailed a one-page note to Democrats on January 3, 2009, inscribed with a single word—“no”?

Republicans continue to pull down their taxpayer-funded salaries, enjoy their taxpayer-sponsored benefits, and accept tax-free donations to think tanks. What has all of their subsidized inactivity cost the nation? Many of the answers can be found in the congressional budget, but we decided to do the math for you.*

RTFA. The details are there.

Grand total cost to the American taxpayer for the Republican “NO” = $1.34 billion.

Major social networking websites have been criticised for not introducing a help button for children to report concerns about grooming and bullying.

Jim Gamble, from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), hit out at the sites as one site, Bebo, adopted the button. He said there was “no legitimate reason” why other sites like MySpace and Facebook had not done the same.

Ceop – the UK law enforcement agency tasked with tracing online sex offenders – says its Report button receives 10,000 hits a month on other websites. Clicking the button allows users to contact specially trained Ceop officers for advice. It also provides details of local police and links to 10 other sources of help including Childline.

The person that goes on with harmful intent – whether it’s the bully or whether it’s the paedophile – they know when they see it that there is an active deterrent here

Gamble added: “I am applauding Bebo – it’s taken us three years to get here. But I don’t understand – and there is more than Facebook in this – I don’t understand the logic for the others not following suit.”

Surely, the big social networking sites can afford to include a simple, easy means for a young ‘un to reach out for aid.

BTW – watch the video all the way to the end

When Sean Dolan saw signs being carried by homeless people, he saw an opportunity.

He and his father wanted to drive people to a Web site, so they created PimpThisBum.com as a marketing tool and gave a homeless man a sign with the Web site’s address to hold while panhandling in Houston.

Their idea worked.

Visitors seeing the sign flocked to the site and in less than two months Dolan received $50,000 in donations and pledges through the site for the man, including a five-week alcohol treatment program donated by Sunray Treatment and Recovery based near Seattle, Washington.

“We knew that the same campaign with a sincere appeal and a Web site like helpthehomeless.com would be ignored,” he said. “We knew that if we insulted people’s sensitivity or appealed to their humor on a subject as sensitive as this we would get their attention.”

Kevin Dolan, with more than two decades of marketing and sales experience and his son, Sean, a Web-savvy college student with a small video camera and a passion for volunteer work, got the site off the ground with the help of Timothy Dale Edwards. He has been homeless and living under a busy Houston overpass for more than four years.

The Dolans’ offer to Timothy Edwards would be a hard one for any homeless person to refuse: $100 cash per day guaranteed, perhaps even more if the campaign was successful. All Edwards had to do was carry a homemade sign advertising www.PimpThisBum.com while he panhandled each day.

Interesting tale. There’s a lot more to it than I’m posting here as a teaser. Read it and reflect.

When a thief opens your laptop, he could get a shock when it starts to shout “Help, I’ve been stolen!” or, perhaps, something ruder. But that’s one of the options provided by Front Door Software’s $30 Retriever program for Windows XP and Vista.

The software displays your contact details and lets you make the finder or thief an offer, such as “$50 for my safe return”. However, if you log on to a web site to say your PC is missing or stolen, that message will appear in a red and yellow on the laptop’s screen. It reappears every 30 seconds, to be really annoying. You also get the option to switch on a second password prompt.

In the background, Retriever tries to connect via Wi-Fi to report its loss.

And now it has the option to sing out a pre-recorded message: “Help, this laptop is reported lost or stolen. If you are not my owner, please report me now.” If you want something stronger, you can record it yourself.

I think I would have it shout. “Stop me. I’m being used for child porngraphy!”

Saving the children always works in Congress. Har!

A Japanese woman and her six-month-old baby escaped unhurt from a knife-wielding thief this week after the mother calmed him down with a cup of tea and a chat.

The 30-year-old Tokyo woman was walking along a corridor in her apartment building with her daughter when a man brandishing a knife demanded money.

When the housewife told him she had none, the man barged into her apartment. Hoping to calm him, the woman made the thief a cup of tea`, whereupon he put his knife away and began a 20-minute monologue about his life.

The woman then gave the man 10,000 yen ($93.34) and ran outside to call the police from a pay phone, the report said.

Police rushed to the scene, but the thief had fled and is still being sought.

The moral of the story is, of course, you should at least have a cellphone – and a teapot.