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Petra the swan reunited with her pedalo lover Last Updated: 1:13am GMT 29/03/2008 Petra the swan, who fell in love with a swan-shaped boat only to abandon it for a real bird, has returned to her faux friend after being cruelly dumped. Officials at a zoo in Munster, Germany, where Petra has been spending the winter, took her to a nearby lake to be with the white paddleboat. Petra the swan and her plastic pedalo lover In recent months, Petra, a black swan, had struck up a relationship with a real white swan. However, he abandoned her last weekend –...

MUENSTER, Germany - Petra the black swan has been reunited with her beloved swan-shaped paddleboat after a failed romance with a real bird. Officials at a Muenster zoo where Petra has been spending the winter took her to a nearby lake Friday and released her next to the paddleboat — shaped like a giant white swan. Petra became so attached to the boat back in 2006 that she refused to leave its side. When winter came around, she and the boat were taken into the zoo. In recent months, Petra had struck up a relationship with a real white swan....

AL ASAD, Iraq, May 14, 2007 — Deployment is a time when the support of family becomes more important to service members. Letters, phone calls and e-mails act as a connection to family, to the life left back in the states. Every now and then, a servicemember gets lucky enough to serve alongside a brother or a sister. Even rarer is the opportunity to visit and spend time with a parent who works at a different base. Spc. Marcos Zavala, a heavy equipment operator with the 618th Airborne Engineers Company deployed to Mosul, Iraq, was recently able to spend a...

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Dec. 15, 2006 – Christmas came early this year for the Skeen family as they celebrated what Joanna Skeen called the best gift she could ever ask for: the safe return of her husband. Staff Sgt. Michael Skeen, his wife, Joanna, and daughter, Lillian, have already started celebrating Christmas now that they’re together again after Skeen’s 16-month deployment to Iraq with the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team. Photo by William D. Moss  '(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Army Staff Sgt. Michael Skeen and his fellow 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team soldiers returned to Alaska this...

CAMP TAQADDUM, Iraq (Feb. 26, 2006) -- For men and women in the U.S. military, good-byes are one of the hardest parts of deploying to foreign lands, as servicemembers must bid farewell to loved ones. However, for one father and his son, a deployment to Iraq didn’t mean good-bye, but rather a fortunate crossing of their paths. For nearly a month, Chief Petty Officer Nestor A. Lazaga, 53, and his 22 year-old son, Petty Officer 3rd Class Mark G. Lazaga, have had the unique experience of spending time together in a combat zone while stationed together here. The younger Lazaga,...

BATON ROUGE, La. — In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader. They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love. Thousands of human stories have...

<p>The mother, Luz Cuevas, had been told the child died in a fire six years ago in Pennsylvania, but she discovered the girl allegedly had been kidnapped by a family acquaintance and was living not far away.</p> <p>The child, named Delimar, was 10 days old when her mother last saw her in December 1997. Cuevas saw the girl, now 6, at a birthday party in January and was struck by the child's resemblance to her and her other children. A DNA test proved Cuevas was the child's mother.</p>

By Anthony Loyd After Saddam Hussein's notorious chemical gas attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja in 1988, Mahmoud Fatah didn't know if his family was alive or dead. Our reporter tells the extraordinary story of his quest to find them. THERE WERE FEW second chances in Halabja. The very word has become synonymous with the worst excesses of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime, and a justification for the imminent invasion of Iraq. Whole families died in each other’s arms on March 16, 1988, in the worst documented chemical attack since the Second World War, succumbing to a combination of blistering...