The tornadoes that stretched from northern Kansas to southern Alabama amassed a death toll of 39 people, with Kentucky sustaining the greatest loss of life with 21. After the chaos, there was some happy news for a North Carolina family, where a 7-year old boy who was sucked out of his house by a twister and dropped 350 feet away by the side of a road has returned to his parents from the hospital.
Jamal Stevens came away with only minor injuries after the tornado destroyed his parents’ home in Charlotte and carried him to a spot near Interstate 485, where his family found him within minutes.
Jamal’s grandmother Patricia said afterward, “I’ve never seen or heard anything like that. It sucked out the walls. It was a terrible sound. I never want to go through that again. I don’t want anyone to ever go through that again.”
Stevens was asleep on a sofa downstairs when the tornado arrived. Her daughter-in-law and her four young grandchildren were all upstairs. She said there was a loud noise, and her daughter-in-law began passing the children downstairs.
She hid with the 3-year old twins behind the sofa while their mother went back upstairs for Jamal and his 5-year old sister.
That was when the force of the storm hit and Stevens says the “walls were sucked out.”
The twins were under some rubble but unharmed. The 5-year old was blown into the next door neighbor’s yard and also fine.
After Jamal was found, all were taken to the hospital and soon released.
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Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh apologized to Georgetown student Sandra Fluke on his Web site, saying, “in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize.”
Several days after criticizing a Georgetown student who advocated for the availability of birth control and calling her a “slut,”
The controversy began on Limbaugh’s show when he criticized Fluke over her support of the Obama administration’s new policy on contraception. He fueled the fire when he repeated the charges the next day, saying: “Well, what would you call someone who wants us to pay for her to have sex? What would you call that woman? You’d call ‘em a slut, a prostitute or whatever.”
Limbaugh later retracted on his Web site saying, “For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.”
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When the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed over 13,000 last month, it was the first time it had reached the level since back in 2008, just before the nation’s financial debacle began. Less than a year later, in March of 2009, the Dow had lost nearly half its value, down to near 6,500.
Another painful result of the recession and financial crisis has been the nation’s job market. Ten percent of the nation’s workforce was reported out of work in October of 2009, the highest level since 1983. Today, that percentage is 8.3. According to the Labor Department, Latinos, who make up 15 percent of the nation’s workforce, have accounted for one half of the gains in jobs since the beginning of 2010. It’s because Latinos hold large numbers of positions in growth areas like health care and manufacturing.
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At least one heroic story came out of the devastating storms last week. An Indiana mother saved the lives of her two children when she covered them as their house collapsed. Joe Decker was at work and communicating with his wife Stephanie through text messages about the deadly storm and had told her that a tornado was headed right at their home. Stephanie gathered her 8-year-old son, Dominic, and 5-year-old daughter, Reese, and went to the home’s basement.
Then she “just stopped texting me,” Joe Decker told reporters from outside his devastated home on Sunday afternoon. “She was on top of them.”
When the storm passed, neighbors came to Stephanie Decker’s aid.
She lost one leg above the knee and the other above the ankle and is in stable condition at a hospital in Louisville.