hShark victim's story

hShark victim's story
CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- A British surfer attacked by a great white shark described Wednesday how he kicked and lashed out wildly to free his leg from the shark's jaws, which sliced his flesh "like a knife through butter." Chris Sullivan, above, was surfing with friends Monday when the 13-foot shark attacked. "It came up slow and I saw its eyes and it looked really dark gray," said Sullivan, sitting in a wheelchair at a clinic Wednesday. "I turned and I saw the underneath of its belly. Then I saw its mouth. Then it grabbed hold of my leg." "I started lashing out, hitting it. I think I kicked it. I pulled the leg out. It felt like a knife through butter and I thought 'oops,'" said the schoolteacher who has traveled the world in pursuit of his surfing passion. Sullivan, 32, said he managed to stay on his surf board and catch a wave back to shore, where a local veterinary surgeon who had also been surfing applied an emergency tourniquet to his leg. Sullivan needed 200 stitches in his calf.
Stem cell measurepasses Mass. Senate
BOSTON -- The Massachusetts Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday in favor of a bill to promote stem cell research in the state while outlawing human reproductive cloning and imposing a series of new regulations on the cutting-edge field. The measure, which passed 35 to 2, has generated intense lobbying on both sides of the issue and will now goes to the House, where opposition is expected to be stronger. It also faces a likely veto from Gov. Mitt Romney, R, if a key provision is not removed. The debate here comes as several states and other countries are competing to attract and establish life sciences research centers, while trying to address ethical concerns that led the Bush administration in 2001 to restrict federal funding to studies of stem cell lines already in existence at the time.
Border volunteers gather
TOMBSTONE, Ariz. -- Hundreds of volunteers, some of them armed, are expected to take up positions along the Mexican border Friday and begin patrolling for illegal immigrants -- an exercise some fear could attract racist crackpots and lead to vigilante violence. Organizers of the Minuteman Project said the civilian volunteers, many of whom were recruited over the Internet, will meet first for a rally in this one-time silver mining town, then fan out across 23 miles of the San Pedro Valley to watch the border for a month and report sightings of illegal activity to Border Patrol agents. Minuteman field operations director Chris Simcox described the project as "the nation's largest neighborhood watch group."
hGrave graffiti in Israel
NEGEV DESERT, Israel -- Israeli police officers erase graffiti that in Hebrew reads "Hitler" on the grave of Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion on the Negev Desert in southern Israel. Around the same time, the phrase "Neo-Nazi Hail Beilin" was sprayed in the courtyard in front of a Jerusalem monument erected in memory of Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, Shmuel Ben-Ruby, a Jerusalem police spokesman, said Wednesday. The reference to Yossi Beilin, the head of the dovish Yahad political party, has led police to believe that ultranationalist Jews could be responsible for the graffiti, Ben-Ruby said.
Quake toll hits 1,000
GUNUNG SITOLI, Indonesia -- Firefighters freed a man trapped in a crumpled house on remote Nias island on Wednesday, 36 hours after he was buried in rubble. As the first foreign military help arrived, officials said an estimated 1,000 people had died in the region's latest large earthquake. Later, a magnitude-6.3 quake was reported off the west coast of northern Sumatra, the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said.
Combined dispatches
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