Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol has a son, TrippEaston Mitchell

Full Story At  Los Angeles Times

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol Palin and her boyfriend Levi Johnston are proud new parents of a baby boy, according to People.

His name is Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, says Colleen Jones, Bristol’s grandmother’s sister.

“We think it’s wonderful,” said Jones, the sister of Bristol’s grandmother Sally Heath. “The baby is fine and Bristol is doing well. Everyone is excited.”

6 bodies found, 2 people missing after Canadian avalanches

Full Story At CNN.com

(CNN) — The bodies of six of eight snowmobilers missing after avalanches in southeastern British Columbia have been found, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Monday.
Authorities found six bodies a day after avalanches in British Columbia, Canada.

Authorities found six bodies a day after avalanches in British Columbia, Canada.

Searchers will continue to look for the other two snowmobilers believed trapped in Sunday’s pair of avalanches near Fernie, British Columbia, Constable Louis Saule said.

All eight men — and three others who escaped — faced two avalanches Sunday afternoon about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) east of Fernie, a town in the Canadian Rockies about 300 kilometers (186 miles) southwest of Calgary, Alberta

Chinese firms to compensate tainted milk victims

Full Story At  Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese dairy firms that sold baby formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine will pay compensation to the families of nearly 300,000 children who were killed or sickened as a result, state media reported.

Twenty-two dairy producers will soon make one-off cash payments to the families, the Xinhua news agency cited the China Dairy Industry Association as saying on Saturday.

It did not disclose the size of the payments.

Coroner: Ninth body found in ruins of ‘Santa massacre’ home

jFull Story At  CNN.com

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — A ninth body has been found in the rubble of a home that was set afire after a shooting rampage by a man in a Santa Claus suit, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Friday.
A car exploded outside the home of Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, who is suspected in the deaths of nine people.

A car exploded outside the home of Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, who is suspected in the deaths of nine people.

On Thursday night a pipe bomb exploded in a rental car used by the man suspected in the Christmas Eve attack, police said.

The car was parked outside a Sylmar, California, home where Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45, committed suicide hours after he opened fire at a holiday party and then started a raging blaze inside a Covina, California, home, police said.

Investigators have yet to identify the charred bodies recovered from the burned house, which belonged to the parents of Pardo’s ex-wife. Eight bodies were found in the hours after the fire; the ninth person had been counted as missing. Video Watch how the massacre unfolded »

Woman buried in snow for 3 days found alive

Full Story At  CNN.com

No one expected to find Donna Molnar alive.

Searchers had combed the brutal backcountry of rural Ontario for the housewife from the city of Hamilton, who had left her home three days earlier in the middle of a blizzard to grocery shop.

Alongside his search-and-rescue dog Ace, Ray Lau on Monday tramped through the thick, ice-covered brush of a farmer’s field, not far from where Molnar’s van had been found a day earlier.

He kept thinking: Negative-20 winds? This is a search for a body.

“Then, oh, all of a sudden, Ace bolted off,” said Lau. “He stooped and looked down at the snow and just barked, barked, barked.”

Lau rushed to his Dutch shepherd’s side.

Pushing more docs to ditch prescription pad

Full Story At msnbc.com

WASHINGTON - The push for paperless prescriptions is about to get a boost: Starting in January, doctors who e-prescribe can get bonus pay from Medicare.

For patients, the benefits are obvious — from shorter drugstore waits to increased safety, as pharmacists no longer squint to decipher doctors’ messy handwriting.

But persuading U.S. doctors to ditch their prescription pads for electronic prescribing so far has been a long, uphill battle. Only about 10 percent of doctors are taking the plunge like Dr. Ted Epperly in Boise, Idaho, who’s adopting the technology now.

When Medicine Meets Marketing

Full Story At  Newsweek.com

Dallas Hextell was just a baby when his parents bought him a walker—not because he was late reaching a milestone, but because they worried he might never toddle on his own. At 9 months he had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a form of brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation in utero or at birth. A neurologist had told Derak and Cynthia Hextell there was no cure, that it was best to wait and see if their son improved. But Cynthia, after months of research, enrolled Dallas in a highly experimental trial at Duke University, where a pediatric-transplant surgeon infused him with a sample of his own stem cells harvested from his umbilical-cord blood. A few days later, Derak and Cynthia went home with their son, who was 18 months old and still not crawling, much less walking or talking. They “stared at him” for a week, says Cynthia. “One day he just started saying, ‘Mama, mama, mama.’ And I started crying.” The Hextells ended up donating the walker to another child. By 2, Dallas was not only walking unaided, he was chasing the family dogs.

Alaska governor’s office sent suspicious powder

Full Story At msnbc.com

JUNEAU, Alaska - An eighth letter containing suspicious powder and addressed to a governor’s office was intercepted in Alaska on Tuesday, and it bore a Texas postmark like suspicious mailings to other governors this week, officials said.

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