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Post by Jason Giambi on Apr 28, 2009 11:48:57 GMT -5
There's a kid down here that's pitched 4 straight no-hitters for Mitchell HS, in Tampa. the FL state record is 6
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Post by Chris on May 5, 2009 12:34:17 GMT -5
Former Decathalon Champion Dan O'Brien plans to make an attempt to break the Guinness Book of World Records mark for the fastest game of HOPSCOTCH.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on May 5, 2009 13:29:42 GMT -5
Police: Beer Pong Game Prompts Fatal ShootingBRIDGEPORT, Pa — One man is dead and another in jail after what suburban Philadelphia police say was an argument over a drinking game that escalated into a fatal shooting.
Investigators say 24-year-old Joseph Jimenez fatally shot 25-year-old Scott Riley after they argued over a game of beer pong at a party on Friday night in Bridgeport, about 15 miles outside Philadelphia.
Authorities say the men began arguing over the game then met up outside, where Riley mocked Jimenez and challenged him to shoot.
According to a police complaint Jimenez drew a concealed .40-caliber handgun and fired, striking Riley in the neck. Riley died at a hospital.
Jimenez is being held without bail on first- and third-degree murder charges. It could not be immediately determined whether or not he has an attorney.
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Post by 9 on May 5, 2009 13:56:22 GMT -5
Beer pong = serious bidness. Nice Vulcan ears.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on May 5, 2009 19:55:34 GMT -5
Washington city may lay off drug-sniffing dog SNOHOMISH, Wash. – The Snohomish City Council may decide Tuesday night to trim the budget by laying off a member of the police force — Dixie the drug-sniffing dog. Dixie finds drugs and money for the reward of playing with a chew toy, but the 7-year-old shepherd-collie mix costs about $16,000 a year in vet care, food, grooming, kennel and training costs.
The Everett Herald reported Snohomish plans to keep its other police dog, Kizar. The German shepherd is needed to track criminals and is a younger dog.
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Post by 9 on May 6, 2009 9:06:38 GMT -5
Can the dog sue for age discrimination?
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on May 6, 2009 9:13:17 GMT -5
If he tried, I think he'd be barking up the wrong tree.
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Post by Lindsey on May 6, 2009 9:13:23 GMT -5
dude, Kizar is such a cool name for a dog. I would spell it Keyser, just for the full Usual Suspects effect.
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Post by jwmcc on May 6, 2009 9:21:51 GMT -5
Those dogs are useless anyway as Tom and I have pointed out on several occasions..
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Post by Jason Giambi on May 6, 2009 11:20:29 GMT -5
16k a year for training a dog that's trained?
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on May 6, 2009 11:37:17 GMT -5
Yeah, he needs to be trained to lick up spilled coffee off the floor.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on May 11, 2009 12:21:24 GMT -5
Boy Playing 'Cops and Robbers' Shot by Deputy
PALMDALE, Calif. — A 15-year-old boy playing "cops and robbers" with a toy gun was shot and wounded by a sheriff's deputy who mistook it for the real thing, authorities said Monday.
The boy, whose identity was not immediately released, was hospitalized in stable condition, Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy Jeff Gordon said.
"He's expected to fully recover," Gordon said.
Deputies answering reports of someone riding a bicycle and brandishing a handgun went to 20th Street shortly before 8 p.m. Sunday and spotted the rider, Gordon said.
They ordered him to drop the weapon but instead he pointed it at deputies, Gordon said.
One deputy fired a shot and hit the boy in the upper body, he said.
Gordon said the teen apparently had been playing "cops and robbers" using a replica gun that resembled a black semiautomatic pistol with brown grips.
Gordon said the gun lacked the orange tip that most toys carry to distinguish them from real weapons.
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Post by 9 on May 11, 2009 13:38:13 GMT -5
I was about to rip into the cops until I saw the phrase "pointed it at the deputies." The moron is lucky he's not in a plastic bag right now.
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Post by Chris on May 11, 2009 15:28:02 GMT -5
You know what...as tragic is this story is....you hear about this kind of thing SO MANY times.
This happens all the damn time...cops blasting kids with toy guns, adults with objects that appear to be guns.
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Post by elliejay21 on May 11, 2009 18:38:40 GMT -5
Back the truck up here... this is the LIBERAL MEDIA at it again! The headline reads: "Boy Playing 'Cops and Robbers' Shot by Deputy!" How different does it sound if it had read "Teenager Shot After Threatening Police With Fake Gun?" Seriously, this is no little kid... What is a 15-year-old doing playing "Cops and Robbers???" Either the kid is *special* or he's the kind of punk-ass teenager who WAS threatening towards the cop, and if the gun was real, he'd be getting tried as an adult for a capital offense.
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Post by Chris on May 11, 2009 22:11:07 GMT -5
People are morons.
I'm freaked out when I'm reaching in the glove box for my registration to hand to a cop, for fear he'll think I'm reaching for my piece! hahaha
Stupid ass kid.
Worst part....he'll sue and he'll win.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on May 19, 2009 6:59:52 GMT -5
Facebook Cuts Off Users With Fake-Sounding Nameswww.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520545,00.html NEW YORK — Alicia Istanbul woke up one recent Wednesday to find herself locked out of the Facebook account she opened in 2007, one Facebook suddenly deemed fake.
The stay-at-home mom was cut off not only from her 330 friends, including many she had no other way of contacting, but also from the pages she had set up for the jewelry design business she runs from her Atlanta-area home.
Although Istanbul understands why Facebook insists on having real people behind real names for every account, she wonders why the online hangout didn't simply ask before acting.
"They should at least give you a warning, or at least give you the benefit of the doubt," she said. "I was on it all day. I had built my entire social network around it. That's what Facebook wants you to do."
Facebook's effort to purge its site of fake accounts, in the process knocking out some real people with unusual names, marks yet-another challenge for the 5-year-old social network.
As Facebook becomes a bigger part of the lives of its more than 200 million users, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is finding that the huge diversity and vast size of its audience is making it increasingly difficult to enforce rules it set when its membership was smaller and more homogenous.
Having grown from a closed network available only to college students to a global social hub used by multiple generations, Facebook has worked over the years to shape its guidelines and features to fit its changing audience.
But requiring people sign up under their real name is part of what makes Facebook Facebook.
To make sure people can't set up accounts with fake names, the site has a long, constantly updated "blacklist" of names that people can't use.
Those could either be ones that sound fake, like Batman, or names tied to current events, like Susan Boyle.
While there are dozens of Susan Boyles on Facebook already, people who tried to sign up with that name after the 47-year-old woman became an unlikely singing sensation had more difficulty doing so.
Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt acknowledged that Facebook does make mistakes on occasion, and he apologized for "any inconvenience."
But he said situations like Istanbul's are very rare, and most accounts that are disabled for being fake really are.
"The vast, vast, vast majority of people we disable we never hear from again," he said. Because the exceptions are so rare, he said, prior notification is "not something we are doing right now."
Facebook, which is available in more than 40 languages (and growing), has only about 850 employees worldwide, so getting complaints answered can take a long time.
Istanbul, whose father is from the city of Istanbul in Turkey, said it took three weeks to get her account reinstated.
Without being able to log in for that time, she said she felt "completely cut off" from her contacts. Frustrated, she wrote e-mails, then mailed letters to 12 Facebook executives.
To keep in touch with her friends and monitor her business pages, Istanbul said she sort of "hijacked" her husband's account.
"I think they just assume you can't have an interesting name," she said of Facebook. "I kept my maiden name because it's such an interesting name, I didn't want to give it up. And now I am having to defend my name."
The suspension of Robin Kills The Enemy's account inspired a friend to create the group "Facebook: don't discriminate against Native surnames!!!" on the site.
The group has more than 3,200 members, including some with American Indian last names who've had their account disabled.
"If you deal with this kind of thing all the time, and on top of that Facebook wants you to prove your identity, ... it's adding insult to injury," said Nancy Kelsey, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, who started the Facebook group.
She said Facebook should remedy the problem so that it "wouldn't be so offensive" each time a real name is deemed fake.
"Native American surnames mean something," she said. "They are points of pride, points of identity. It's not someone trying to make up a fake name."
Istanbul's sister, Lisa Istanbul Krikorian, also got locked out of her Facebook account, which she opened a year and a half ago. So she opened another one that omits her maiden name.
Their mother and their cousin, who both joined the social network more recently, were not even allowed to sign up under their real names.
"They had to misspell their last names," Alicia Istanbul said, so that Facebook's system of weeding out fake accounts wouldn't recognize them. Her mom added an extra "n" to spell "Istannbul," and her cousin added an "e" to become "Istanbule."
The last name Strawberry also raises a red flag with Facebook, so to get around the namebots many Strawberrys have resorted to misspelling their names — to "Strawberri," "Sstrawberry" or "Strawberrii."
But that makes it difficult to reconnect with old classmates and long-lost friends, something Facebook prides itself in helping facilitate.
"No one is going to find you if your last name is spelled wrong," Istanbul said.
Unlike many other social networks, Facebook wants a real name behind each person's account. Bands, brands and businesses are supposed to use fan pages and groups; regular accounts are for real people.
Facebook says its "real name culture" is one of the site's founding principles. It creates "accountability and, ultimately, creates a safer and more trusted environment for all of our users," Schnitt said. "We require people to be who they are."
Once the site disables an account it deems fake, its holder has to contact Facebook to prove it is real.
In some cases, the company may require that the person fax a copy of a government-issued ID, which Facebook says it destroys as soon as the account is verified.
Yet an informal search on Facebook shows that efforts to weed out fake names may be a Sisyphean task.
A recent search for "stupid," for example, turned up more than 27 people matches, most looking dubious at best. They join some 20 "I.P. Freely" accounts and 13 "Seymour Butts."
Although many of the fake accounts are created as sophomoric humor or as a vehicle for malicious activity, others are to protect users from having their postings create problems when they later look for jobs or apply to school.
Facebook has extensive privacy settings, but they are complicated and many people don't know how to properly use them.
Steve Jones, professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said having real people behind personal accounts helps Facebook maintain credibility.
"If they let fake names and accounts proliferate people are going to take it less seriously," he said.
Still, he believes that Facebook should notify the holders of purportedly fake accounts.
"The first step in any sort of takedown action is to notify," he said. "What's the rush? Why not give somebody 24, 48 hours?"
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Post by yanksgooner on May 19, 2009 8:23:23 GMT -5
facebook is gay. I almost feel sorry for people who say their whole social network revolves around it. That's worse than your only social outlet being the bleachers.
They deserve to be deleted!!
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Post by Chris on May 21, 2009 12:57:34 GMT -5
A new study from Water Quality And Health Council indicates that 1 in 5 people admit to urinating in swimming pools.
Center For Disease Control suggests practicing good hygiene, staying out of water when infected with bacteria or viruses, and avoiding swallowing pool water.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on May 23, 2009 23:22:15 GMT -5
Passer-by pushes suicide jumper in south China
BEIJING – Chen Fuchao, a man heavily in debt, had been contemplating suicide on a bridge in southern China for hours when a passer-by came up, shook his hand — and pushed him off the ledge.
Chen fell 26 feet (8 meters) onto a partially inflated emergency air cushion laid out by authorities and survived, suffering spine and elbow injuries, the official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday.
The passer-by, 66-year-old Lai Jiansheng, had been fed up with what he called Chen's "selfish activity," Xinhua said. Traffic around the Haizhu bridge in the city of Guangzhou had been backed up for five hours and police had cordoned off the area.
"I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interest," Lai was quoted as saying by Xinhua. "They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."
Xinhua said Lai was "taken away by police" but did not elaborate.
A police officer who answered the telephone Saturday at a station close to the bridge confirmed the incident and said it was under investigation. He refused to give any other details and hung up.
According to Xinhua, Chen wanted to kill himself because he had accrued 2 million yuan ($290,000) in debt from a failed construction project.
On Thursday, he made his way to the Haizhu bridge, where 11 other people have tried to take their lives since April.
Lai volunteered to talk Chen down but was turned away by police, Xinhua said. Lai then broke through the cordon, climbed to where Chen sat, greeted him with a handshake, then pushed.
Photos in the Beijing Morning Post showed Lai, shoeless and in a T-shirt, saluting after Chen fell.
The paper said Lai was released on bail Friday but did not give any details. It said he had been on medication for "a mental illness" for decades and had been on his way to a hospital for his pills.
Chen was recovering in the hospital, Xinhua said.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 2, 2009 10:35:07 GMT -5
Microsoft's New Search Engine Puts Porn in Motion
Your kids may get a bang out of Bing — and that's not a good thing, Internet safety experts warned on Monday.
Bing, Microsoft's new search engine (www.bing.com), went live in the U.S. this weekend, aiming to challenge and possibly unseat industry titan Google.
But bloggers and Internet safety experts quickly discovered that one of Bing's "features" is that it takes only a few clicks for anyone — of any age — to view explicit pornographic videos without even leaving the search engine.
In its bid to beat Google, Microsoft has unveiled a slate of convenient features for Bing, including an "autoplay" tool that lets users preview videos simply by hovering a mouse over them.
That asset may become a liability, because users can get a taste of porn videos on Bing instead of having to go to a smutty Web site — an innovation other search engines have yet to offer.
Technology blogger Loic Le Meur noticed the issue early Monday after testing video search on Bing.
What he found was a cornucopia of pornography that he said transformed the search engine into its very own pornographic Web site.
"You are now on a porn site without leaving Bing. Amazing," Le Meur wrote on his blog.
Bing, like other major search engines, lets users set filtering preferences at one of three levels — strict, moderate or simply off.
Online safety advocates argue that search engines need to do much more to cut off underage access to pornography — because the filters can be circumvented easily with just one click.
"It's a no-brainer for any kid," said Donna Rice Hughes, president and chairwoman of Enough Is Enough, a group that works to help parents protect children from online porn.
"From the standpoint of the new state-of-the-art search engine, [the video preview] is a really neat thing of course," Hughes said. "The flipside of that is that you've got an abundance of pornography out there."
Content-filtering companies have also been reviewing Bing — and have found the same gaping problems.
With adult-content filters turned off, "Bing.com does at this point allow users to watch pornographic videos without ever leaving the site," said Forrest Collier, CEO of InternetSafety.com.
Parental filtering software such as SafeEyes, which is produced by Collier's company, can block any explicit or unwanted search results, he said.
CyberPatrol, another major safe software manufacturer, confirmed to FOXNews.com that its early tests had successfully blocked all illicit media during searches with Bing.
Hughes, the director of Enough Is Enough, said Microsoft and other search engines "need to make their filtered searches much more prominent and have an option for password protection" that parents could use to prevent kids from switching the controls around.
Microsoft said in a statement that it was up to users to turn off the filters, and provided instructions on how to toggle the settings on its blog.
"By default, Bing filters out explicit image and video results. Consumers must take action to turn off the Safe Search filter in their settings in order for explicit image or video content to appear in Bing's results," the statement read.
Other major search engines like Yahoo and Google come up with similar video and image results when electronic filters are turned off — but don't provide automatic playing of videos within the search-results page.
The abundance of pornography is something child health experts say is simply a fact of life.
"Kids can access pornography on the Internet no matter what the search engine is," Dr. David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, told FOXNews.com.
Walsh said it's particularly important that kids be protected from the worst excesses of pornography during their formative years.
"Because they're at the very age when they are developing their whole attitudes about sex and sexuality," he said, it's bad for them to be visiting porn sites, "where sex is basically a commodity to be bought and sold and where women are treated like objects. The attitudes that they're going to pick up there are not the attitudes we want them to have for life."
Protecting kids from pornography or other potentially harmful materials must ultimately rest with parents, Walsh added.
"I don't know that search engines can be programmed to do the job that parents need to," he said.
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Post by 9 on Jun 2, 2009 10:54:03 GMT -5
They should rename it Bada-Bing.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 3, 2009 8:26:47 GMT -5
In the USA TODAY state-by-state blurbs yesterday, there was a mini tawdry tale about a couple arrested for possessing some chemicals used to whip up meth. Kansas couple. The guy was 19....his "girlfriend" was 14.....and they had a 20 month year old kid.
Groan.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 3, 2009 8:28:21 GMT -5
There's a kid down here that's pitched 4 straight no-hitters for Mitchell HS, in Tampa. the FL state record is 6
Baseball America just did a piece on him, he lost it next go-round, I believe in the 3rd inning. On top of that, he ended up giving up another couple of hits, walked 5, and lost - and his team was eliminated from some tourney or another cause of it.
He is apparently a likely prospect for this years draft, as a vaunted member of the high-school kids that may look to turn pro.
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 3, 2009 13:37:15 GMT -5
Melissa Joan Hart Disses Cancer-Stricken Farrah Fawcett
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 AP
Melissa Joan Hart should learn to keep her voice down.
The former "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" star was overheard off-camera at KTLA in Los Angeles on Friday saying how she'd been hoping last week that cancer- stricken Farrah Fawcett wouldn't die — and thus bump Hart off the cover of People magazine.
Hart is on this week's cover posing in a bikini after recently los ing 42 pounds. Hart appeared on KTLA to promote her new ice cream.
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Post by 9 on Jun 3, 2009 14:01:31 GMT -5
Classy broad.
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on Jun 3, 2009 14:13:30 GMT -5
I think Hart has a legit complaint. Farrah should stick around another week.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 10, 2009 9:42:01 GMT -5
The ultimate in feel-good stories.
Israeli woman mistakenly junks $1 million mattress
JERUSALEM – An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress she said had almost $1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites on Wednesday.
The woman told The Associated Press that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise present on Monday — and threw out the old one.
The next day, she said, she remembered that she had hidden her life savings inside the old mattress. "I woke up in the morning screaming, when it hit me what happened," said the Tel Aviv woman, who asked not to be identified.
She went to look for the mattress, but it had already been hauled away by garbage collectors, she said. Searches at three different landfill sites turned up nothing.
She said the money was in U.S. dollars and Israeli shekels. She refused to say how she acquired such a large sum. "It was all my money in the world," she said. There was no way to verify her claims, and she refused to disclose key details.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said he was not familiar with the case and no report had been filed.
The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the woman searching through garbage at a dump in southern Israel. The picture shows the woman, dressed in a white top and black pants with her back to the camera, picking through a huge pile of trash that fills the frame about 10 feet in all directions.
Yitzhak Borba, the dump manager, told Army Radio that his staff was helping the woman, saying she appeared "totally desperate." He said the mattress was hard to find among the 2,500 tons of garbage that arrives at the site every day.
He said the increased security at the site to keep would-be treasure hunters away.
The woman said the money had been stashed in a mattress because she had had "traumatic experiences with banks" in the past. She would not elaborate.
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Post by 9 on Jun 10, 2009 9:55:21 GMT -5
This has to be the dumbest human on Earth. I wish I had $1 million so I could forget where it was.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 11, 2009 11:00:38 GMT -5
Woman Who Avoided Air France Tragedy Killed in Car Wreck Days Later
An Italian woman was killed in a car crash in Austria just days after she narrowly avoided becoming a victim of the Air France plane crash.
Johanna Ganthaler and her husband Kurt were on vacation in Brazil and were supposed to take Air France Flight 447 back to Paris. But they missed the doomed flight and took a different one home instead.
All 228 people onboard the Air France jet were killed when it crashed in the Atlantic Ocean. Authorities are still examining what may have been the cause.
The Ganthalers' vehicle crashed after veering across a road in Kufstein, Austria, according to Italian news agency ANSA.
The car swerved into an oncoming truck and Johanna Ganthaler was killed. Her husband was seriously injured.
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