| Sounds of Summer: NT intervention
NADINE WICKER: It's good, high school. Good fun at school. You learn, get more education, you know.
SARA EVERINGHAM: Nadine Wicker was trying to regularly attend school in spite of the difficulties.
NADINE WICKER: It's really hard sometimes with families and friends, when you get friends and all that.
SARA EVERINGHAM: What do you mean it can be hard?
NADINE WICKER: Fighting, people yelling, families drinking and smoking.
SARA EVERINGHAM: And in spite of pressure from her peers.
NADINE WICKER: There's too much sniffing. I used to sniff when I was 12, I used to smoke, drink but I stopped them now.
SARA EVERINGHAM: The conference had workshops for the girls not only on drugs and alcohol but also domestic violence and sexual abuse.
His big breakthrough
In January 2006 an entire show paid tribute, with laughs and tears, to his dad, who had died the day before. Of course, he generally dwells on not-so-weighty life issues, such as a recent meditation on movie-going when he voiced plans to see "The Spiderwick Chronicles." "I don't really know what a spiderwick is," Ferguson admitted. "I think it's a combination of Spider-Man and Wikipedia: He fights crime and gives you the wrong answer for everything." Ferguson, who hits the road lots of weekends, spoke one recent Saturday night backstage at an auditorium in Sparta, N.J. Soon he would have a house full of fans convulsed in 80 solid minutes' worth of laughter. At 45, Ferguson is not only a talk-show host and standup comic, but also an actor, writer and musician of sorts: At 16 he quit school "mainly to drink" and joined a punk-rock band on drums.
Rural Nueces in need of EMS
BISHOP One day last August, Irene Delgado's neighbor in the Fiesta Ranch colonia complained of chest pain. "He treats me like I was his daughter and he was saying, 'M'hija, I'm dying,' " Delgado said. The neighbor's wife had already called 911. A few minutes later, Delgado did the same. Then she called a constable, Jack Caughman, stationed in nearby Bishop. Caughman also got on the phone and called dispatchers. And he called again. About 40 minutes later, an ambulance dispatched from Alice, 40 miles away, arrived to take Delgado's neighbor to the hospital in Corpus Christi. The neighbor survived, but his ordeal remains a stark reminder of how long residents in rural parts of Nueces County can wait for ambulance service. The national standard for ambulance response is eight minutes, but many areas of the county are so isolated from ambulance services that meeting that response time is not possible.
Aussie military planes provide flood aid
AUSTRALIAN defence force planes have joined a critical aid mission for thousands of flood victims in Papua New Guinea, as looting broke out in hard-hit Oro province. Last week's floods left thousands homeless, and officials fear the death toll of about 160 could rise dramatically unless food and clean water supplies quickly reach survivors. There are security fears in Oro province, north of the capital Port Moresby, after looters made off with a rice shipment and local MPs were accused of commandeering relief supplies for their own villages. Australia today sent in two C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and two smaller Caribous to start distributing AusAID supplies, including water purification tablets, emergency shelters, blankets and generators.
Water tank hopes spring a leak
The Jim's Water Tanks debacle, stranding about 5500 Queenslanders sweating on rainwater tank deposits between $300 and $500 paid as far back as April, has unravelled even further. After a nine-month wait for the first batch of the much-vaunted, half-moon rainwater tanks to arrive from China, the Ipswich plastics experts enlisted to assemble the 88 tanks away from public view have abandoned the task after concerns about poor-quality products. Staff at Plastic Mend have spent the past four days struggling to assemble only about 15 tanks – described by Jim's Water Tanks as akin to a Ferrari – as they wrestled with large gaps in joins that didn't fit. Echoing concerns from tank suppliers about poor-quality, Chinese-made products, Plastic Mend owner Mark Kelly yesterday said the materials were so bad his three-person team could not weld some parts together.
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