Daughter and two teenagers held over fatal stabbing of mother

By Calvin Palmer
A Texas woman was found dead in her home by police after three teenagers were pulled over in South Dakota driving her car.
 
The body of Susan Bailey, 43, was found upstairs in her home in Roanoke, 30 miles northwest of Dallas.  She had been stabbed multiple times in the neck, according to Tarrant [...]

Manners come before meltdown

By Calvin Palmer
Picture the scene: a blazing building; a child screaming for help at an open window; a firefighter spots the girl and shouts to a colleague, “Get that ladder over here!”  The colleague looks back at him blankly and doesn’t move.  Moments later, the girl is gone from the window.  She has been engulfed [...]

Bail-out deal put on hold for holiday

By Calvin Palmer
They like to drag things out in America.  Ice hockey’s Stanley Cup and baseball’s World Series are both decided over seven games.  So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the $700 billion bail-out for the financial sector didn’t pass through Congress at the first attempt.
 
It’s not like the Super Bowl, although Nancy [...]

Mother kept children’s bodies in freezer

By Calvin Palmer
Police in Maryland made a grim and chilling discovery on Saturday when they were called to home in Lusby, 50 miles southeast of Washington D.C., to investigate a report of child abuse. The remains of two children, encased in ice, were discovered in a freezer in the basement.
Renee Bowman, 43, told police the frozen remains [...]

House rejects $700bn bail-out plan

By Calvin Palmer
The U.S. House of Representatives has failed to pass the proposed $700 billion bail-out plan to stave off financial crisis.  It voted 205 to 228 against.
 
House Democrats voted 140 to 95 in favor.  The Republicans voted 65 to 133.  And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was blamed for the failure by delivering an inflammatory [...]

Sniper shoots prisoner inside jail

By Calvin Palmer
It sounds like the stuff of a fast-paced movie thriller.  A prisoner, who faced interrogation about a murder, is exercising in the prison yard when a shot rings out; the prisoner falls dead and denies the authorities the information they sought.
 
Only in this instance, the scenario was not the product of a screenwriter’s vivid imagination.  [...]

House votes as Europe’s crisis grows

By Calvin Palmer
The U.S. House of Representatives will vote shortly on measures that will mark the biggest intervention in the U.S. economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
 
Those members of the House who are opposed to the $700 billion bail-out of U.S. banking sector need to look beyond their own backyard.  It is all [...]

Financial rescue plan goes to the vote

By Calvin Palmer
The days of negotiation are over.  A $700 billion rescue plan for Wall Street will go before the House of Representatives for a vote this morning.
 
The plan includes measures to purchase bad assets and an insurance program to underwrite others.  It also requires the government to gain an equity stake in companies that benefit [...]

Ghost Town extracts both laughter and emotion

By Calvin Palmer
Since the success of The Office and Extras, their star and creator Ricky Gervais has been bombarded by film scripts from Hollywood casting him as the lead.  He rejected them all until Ghost Town came along.
 
This supernatural romantic comedy (if such a film genre didn’t exist before it does now) may well be [...]

Polls give Obama TV debate victory

By Calvin Palmer
Most political commentators, at least those with a more independent streak to their commentaries, saw last night’s first presidential TV debate as a victory for Democrat Barack Obama over his Republican rival John McCain.
 
Two polls, conducted after the debate, also seem to support the view of an Obama victory, although in one a [...]