Eideard

A New York grocery clerk, fearing he might be late for work, jumped onto city subway tracks to haul an injured passenger to safety after he fainted, authorities said.

The victim was taken to a local hospital after his rescue on Sunday by Carlos Flores, who said he leaped to save the man so he would not be late for work.

“I was thinking, if he gets hit I can’t go to work. It’s Sunday. I can’t miss out. It’s a time-and-a-half day,” Flores was quoted as saying in the New York Daily News.

A Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokeswoman said the incident, while heroic, was dangerous.

“We do not recommend that people jump down to the roadbed,” spokeswoman Deirdre Parker said on Monday.

This dude is entirely too honest.

Much of the old presidential campaign gang has moved on. The governor he made famous — Sarah Palin, his vice-presidential pick in 2008 — is the one exciting crowds these days. He is facing the possibility of a primary challenge at home, one more reminder of his uneasy relationship with his own party.

Yet at the age of 73, one year after his defeat by President Obama, Senator John McCain of Arizona is trying to make the most of the platform where he has always been most comfortable, the United States Senate.

The Republican Party’s leadership vacuum has given Mr. McCain an opening, and he is charging through it, tacking right on some issues and loudly embroiling himself in battles with the White House and Democratic leaders over health care, stimulus spending, foreign policy and the style of the Obama presidency…

He doesn’t do loud very well.

Mr. McCain has cut back his dealings with many of the people who were at his side while he was running for president. Steve Schmidt, his campaign manager, has returned to California, while Mike Murphy, a longtime adviser, has not talked to him since last summer, according to associates of both men. Mark Salter, his closest aide, alter ego and book collaborator, has left Mr. McCain’s Senate staff and gone into private business, and now speaks to him about once a week…

Don Bivens, the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, said he believed that Mr. McCain would be vulnerable in a general election…“I think he’s taken a hard turn to the right,” Mr. Bivens said of Mr. McCain. “There’s no maverick left. There’s no bipartisan guy left. He’s just sort of a Republican attack dog, and as a result I think he’s made himself vulnerable here because we’re pretty much a middle-of-the-road kind of state…”

But Mr. McCain has also distanced himself from some long-held positions: he once backed measures to deal with climate change, which made his criticism of Mr. Graham’s bill so striking. He denounced efforts to curb Medicare costs by Congressional Democrats a year after he said such cuts were critical.

I think McCain has returned to the inevitable fold that wraps together most Republicans: hypocrisy, anti-intellectualism, anti-science populism, just another corporate lapdog.

He thinks that saying the same crap as his peers – but louder – will make him sound different. If he wasn’t trying so hard to grab support from teabaggers, I’d almost feel sorry for him.

The city council in East St. Louis, Ill. voted to lay off a police officer just minutes after they honored him for apprehending a slaying suspect.

East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks Jr. called officer Kristopher Weston, 28, before the city council to praise him for his work following the robbery of a grocery store.

Less than 5 minutes later, the city council unanimously approved budget cuts that will eliminate the jobs of five police officers, five firefighters and a number of other employees at the end of the month.

Weston, who has been on the force for 10 months, has little seniority which means he will most likely be one of the officers laid off.

“It was nice to be recognized,” he told the Post-Dispatch. “I’ll just leave it at that.”

During a recession, whenever – the last two categories of staff you should let go are police and teachers. The former protect your life, day-by-day, The latter are building your community’s future.

Sometimes the video is slow loading. Don’t be impatient.

Using Safari, when you get to the TV site, you may have to double-click to get the vid to load.

A real American hero.

Demonstrators wave Turkish and Palestinian flags welcoming Turkey’s PM home
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew home to a hero’s welcome on Friday after walking off the stage following an angry exchange over the Gaza war with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The episode Thursday had all the overtones of a diplomatic incident, ruffling relations between Israel and a Muslim ally that is playing a key role in Middle East peace efforts…

Erdogan did not seem apologetic, either.

“I only know that I’m responsible for protecting the honor of the Turkish Republic, the Turkish nation from A to Z,” Erdogan said as he returned to Istanbul. “I am not a leader of a tribe. I am the prime minister of the Republic of Turkey. I do whatever I need to, so I did it, and will continue to do so. This is my character. This is my identity.”

“It was a matter of my country’s respect and prestige. Therefore, my attitude should have been clear,” he said. “I couldn’t have allowed anyone to hurt the prestige and especially the honor of my country.”

Live television footage showed crowds waving Palestinian and Turkish flags at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport while chanting slogans in support of the prime minister. Banners proclaimed Erdogan the “delegate of the oppressed” and said: “Let the world see a proper prime minister.” The passions reflected widespread anger over the Gaza war in Turkey, a secular nation whose population is mostly Muslim.

Contempt for the Israeli, Peres, was evident across the board at Davos. Speaker after speaker attacked the actions of Israel in Gaza. Like it or not, the rationales Israel offers for continued occupation of land from the 1967 War don’t hold water in most of the world.

Passengers on the US Airways flight that crash-landed into the Hudson River Thursday afternoon praised the actions and courage of the pilot, a safety consultant with 40 years of experience in the aviation industry.

Sources tell CNN that Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger was piloting US Airways flight 1549 from New York’s LaGuardia airport to Charlotte, North Carolina, when at least one of the plane’s engines failed…

Sullenberger’s wife told CNN that she was stunned to hear the news from her husband after it was all over.

“When he called me he said, ‘There’s been an accident.’ At first I thought it was something minor, but then he told me the circumstances and my body started shaking and I rushed to get our daughters out of school…”

The crash-landing has…earned the former fighter pilot and private safety consultant accolades from state and government officials.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg commended the pilot for not leaving the plane without checking to make sure every passenger had been evacuated.

He has been a pilot with US Airways since 1980, following seven years in the U.S. Air Force.

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Guitar Hero has turned millions of people into rock stars with plastic guitars. But can they shred on a Nokia?

The answer is a resounding yes.

Cellphone carriers are rolling out a mobile version of Activision’s rock music game, and customers are subscribing at a pace that could make it the most successful console-to-cellphone crossover game in history. As the cellphone rapidly emerges as the next computing platform, cellphone games would seem to be a natural application…

As of May, the latest period for which M:Metrics provided data, Guitar Hero’s mobile version ranked at No.9, but it had climbed from No.85 in three months. It will go further. Hands-On Mobile, which adapted the game on behalf of Activision, said it would introduce Guitar Hero III Backstage Pass, a new version of the game for Sprint and AT&T customers with other carriers to follow.

I’m not a gamer. I can only comment that improving technology for gamers improves it for everyone.

Web browsing should get faster. Richer colors and a lot more detail will magically appear. All’s right with the world.