Evan Brown’s Links of Interest

This is the most horrifying thing that I have read in quite a while: an Italian teacher who got fed up with a rambunctious seven-year-old student took a pair of scissors and cut off his tongue!

Fortunately, the boy’s tongue was able to be stitched back (it is unknown how well it functions), but the poor child is severely traumatized. According to the parents, he has nightmares and is terrified of sharp objects. It may take a long time for him to recover psychologically from this (if ever).

And get this: the female teacher, who was actually a substitute, claims that it was an accident! How do you accidentally cut off someone’s tongue?

The school where the incident took place has suspended the woman, and an investigation is underway.

Link: Monsters and Critics

American officials have announced that they plan on holding discussions with Iraq and its neighboring countries, including Syria and Iran. The international meetings, scheduled to take place over the next two months, will be the highest-level contact that U.S. and Iranian authorities have had in over two years.

Link: New York Times

At 161 weeks, tennis champ extraordinaire Roger Federer now holds the record for longest consecutive time spent as number one in the ATP rankings, which have existed since 1973. On Monday, Federer passed the previous record set by Jimmy Connors between 1974 and 1977. Besides Federer and Connors, the only other two men to spend more than a hundred weeks at number one are Ivan Lendl (157) and Pete Sampras (102).

Link: Tennis.com

A suicide bomber has killed nineteen people and wounded eleven outside Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting the air base at the time of the explosion but was safe inside. A Taliban spokesman claims that the attacker was attempting to get to the Vice President.

Link: Breitbart.com

A 1909 tobacco card of baseball great Johannes Peter “Honus” Wagner has been sold for an incredible $2.35 million. The card, once owned by hockey player Wayne Gretzky, is one of only about sixty in existence that features “The Flying Dutchman.”

Wagner, who played as a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was one of the first players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and is considered one of the greatest players in the history of the sport.

Link: MSNBC

The Reverend Al Sharpton wants a DNA test performed to determine if he is in fact a descendant of a slave that had been owned by a member of Strom Thurmond’s family.

A short while back, Sharpton was asked if he wanted his genealogy traced by professional genealogists from Ancestry.com. He agreed to it, and they discovered that Coleman Sharpton, believed to be the reverend’s great-grandfather, had been a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was the great-great-grandfather of the late senator from South Carolina (a little confusing, I know).

This connection between the families of Sharpton and Thurmond is interesting in its own right, but more so because Thurmond ran for President as a segregationist in 1948, and Sharpton ran for President in 2004 on a civil rights platform.

Link: Fox News

At the 79th Academy Awards ceremony, Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth won Oscars for both best documentary and best song (“I Need to Wake Up” by Melissa Etheridge).

The former Vice President’s film about “the overriding world challenge of our time” (that would be global warming according to Gore, not poverty, terrorism, human trafficking, or any of the other issues which one might think are more deserving of that moniker) has convinced millions of people of the imminent destruction of the planet at the hands of evil carbon dioxide-producing humans. Alas, few people have been spurred to actually do anything about it.

Link: ABC News

After six nominations, filmmaker Martin Scorsese has finally won an Academy Award for best director. Scorsese’s movie The Departed not only earned him his first directorial Oscar at last night’s Academy Awards ceremony, but it also won best editing, best adapted screenplay, and the coveted best picture of the year.

Link: Philadelphia Inquirer

Tom Vilsack, who was the first Democrat to enter the race for President, is one of the first to get out. The former governor of Iowa has been struggling against the likes of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, and he was unable to raise the funds necessary to continue to compete.

It is nice to know that Vilsack is grounded enough in reality to realize that his chances were slim. Many candidates become so obsessed with the desire for political power that they are unable to see clearly (Joe Biden and Chris Dodd are two excellent examples).

Link: CNN

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut describes himself as an Independent Democrat these days since losing the Democratic primary last year to the anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. Lieberman did beat Lamont in the general election but still caucuses with the Democrats despite being rejected by his party.

While Lieberman has no intention of leaving the Democratic Party right now, a cut in war funding by the majority party may change his mind. The senator has admitted that continued opposition to the Iraq War by his fellow Democrats may prompt him to switch his political affiliation to the Republican Party. Although Senator Lieberman differs with most Republicans on social issues, he has been a very strong supporter of the war effort in general and specifically, President Bush’s plan to send additional troops into Iraq.

Link: Politico

New Zealand authorities have announced that a fishing crew caught a Colossal Squid in the freezing Antarctic waters of the Ross Sea. The Colossal Squid is the largest known species of squid.

Official measurements of this particular squid have not been made public, but it is estimated to be 990 pounds and thirty-nine feet long (450 kilograms and 12 meters in SI). If correct, that would make this specimen 330 pounds (150 kilograms) heavier than the next biggest squid ever discovered.

Link: Discovery Channel

Britain may be reducing its troop count in Iraq, but the country is about to send one of her princes into the war. Prince Harry, who is third in the line of succession to the British Throne, will be deployed to Iraq along with his regiment.

Troop Commander Wales, as he is known by his regiment, the Blues and Royals, is a second lieutenant in the British Army. The young prince has expressed a desire to serve alongside his comrades when the regiment is deployed this spring.

Link: MSNBC