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About the time you're celebrating the Fourth of July, Lena Haddix will be en route to Iraq. She's a 73-year-old great-grandmother who recently finished a six-month deployment to Kuwait and then signed up for a six-month deployment to Baghdad. Haddix is a store manager for the Army & Air Force Exchange Service and volunteered to work overseas because she wants to support the youngsters in the military. "I'm doing it for our troops," Haddix said in a telephone interview from her home in Lawton, Okla. "I was a little late getting started because I raised a family first. But now...

RICHMOND -- A 55-year-old woman acting as a surrogate for her daughter gave birth to triplets Tuesday. Tina Cade delivered her own grandchildren -- the two boys and one girl -- by Caesarean section at Bon Secours St. Mary's Hospital. She experienced "mild complications," which the hospital said is not uncommon for such surgery. Cade carried the babies for her oldest daughter, Camille Hammond, who suffers from endometriosis, a condition that affects the lining of the uterus and makes it difficult to become pregnant. Hammond and her husband, Jason, both doctors at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had tried for...

LONDON (AFP) - Most people would think they were supremely unlucky to be struck by a falling meteorite while out in their back garden. Yet great-grandmother Pauline Aguss is just grateful the rock only grazed her arm. The 76-year-old was hit by a swiftly-falling fragment of rock while hanging out washing in her garden in the county of Suffolk, the Sun newspaper reported in its Wednesday edition. If the golf ball-sized fragment is confirmed as originating from space, Aguss will be the first Briton ever known to have been struck by a meteorite. Aguss told the newspaper that she had...

After I mentioned how much I would enjoy a weekly thread for moms, I heard back from many of you expressing interest in the idea. Well, let's give it a go! Here is the initial problem:If such a thread were left entirely to my care, it would be posted three or four times a year, not weekly. I am woefully undisciplined when it comes to this kind of management.Possible solution #1: We have a round-table style of posting with different mothers volunteering to post the upcoming week's thread.Possible solution #2: Supermom steps up to the plate and offers to take...

CLINTON, Ill. Dec. 11 — A woman accused of drowning her three young children in a car submerged in a lake had asked her mother to take custody of two of them just months before their deaths, the mother said Thursday. Two hours after Amanda Hamm cried as a judge read the first-degree murder charges against her, her mother, Ann Danison, said she couldn't help but wonder if she could have averted the tragedy. "She was my only child. My only grandkids. I don't have any more," Danison said, her voice breaking. "And I'll never have them." Six-year-old Christopher Hamm,...

Grandmother's killer set to be executed 01/22/2003 Associated Press HUNTSVILLE, Texas - Condemned murderer Robert Lookingbill never has wavered on his insistence he didn't bludgeon to death his 70-year-old grandmother more than a decade ago in South Texas. Yet barring a last-minute reprieve, he is resigned to facing lethal injection Wednesday for Adeline Dannenberg's 1989 fatal beating with a steel bar as she slept in her San Juan home. "They're doing me a favor," Lookingbill said recently from death row. "The other side offers more than this life." AP Robert Lookingbill Lookingbill, 37, would be the third convicted killer...

GARFIELD, N.J. -- An 80-year-old woman was mauled to death by two pit bull dogs that she had known since they were puppies, Bergen County authorities said Tuesday. Wounds caused by claws or teeth covered more than 80 percent of Julia Mazziotto's body, and the medical examiner found she had also suffered a broken right wrist, county Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said. Blood soaked her clothing and was spattered on the walls and floor of her apartment, he said.

Missing Florida girl's caretaker has used at least 33 aliases 05/13/2002 Associated Press MIAMI - Doubts are mounting about the woman who says a child-welfare worker took 5-year-old Rilya Wilson from her home last year and never returned her. An Associated Press review of court records from past criminal and civil cases involving Geralyn Graham shows that she has used at least 33 aliases and that lawyers in the past have questioned whether she was a con artist or severely mentally impaired. A judge in one case thought both might apply. "She has certainly presented herself in a way...

A judge Tuesday sentenced a 62-year-old grandmother to three years in prison for negligence in the death of a toddler who was beaten to death by the woman's 15-year-old granddaughter. Jacqueline Clark was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the April 23, 2001, death of Devin Wilder. The granddaughter also is serving a sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Devin and his sister, Makenna, were removed from their parents' custody because of suspected child abuse. Later, it was determined Makenna had so many broken bones because she suffered from brittle bone disease and there had been no abuse. Clark apologized to Devin's parents...