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Tel Aviv search for mattress containing $1M life savings

10.51

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JERUSALEM (CNN.COM) -- It was supposed to be a pleasant surprise, but turned into the shock of a lifetime.

A woman in Tel Aviv, Israel, gave her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise gift, throwing out the old tattered bed her mother had slept on for decades. The gesture ended up bankrupting Annat's mother, who had stuffed her savings of nearly $1 million inside her old bed for decades, Annat told Israel Army Radio.

A massive search is under way at the city dump, where security has been beefed up to keep out treasure-seekers who have heard Annat's story in Israeli media.

Annat, who did not want to reveal the rest of her name, told Israel Army Radio that she woke up early Sunday to get a good deal on a new mattress as a surprise for her mother.

She fell asleep that night, exhausted after lugging up the new mattress and hauling down the old one to be taken out with the trash.

When her mother realized the next day what her daughter had done, she told her that she had been using the mattress to stash away her life savings and had nearly $1 million padding the inside of the worn-out mattress.

Annat ran downstairs, but it was too late. The garbage truck had already taken away the money-stuffed mattress.

Annat alerted the two major dump sites in the Israeli city in an effort to locate the bed, but so far she has had no luck. Yitchak Burba, one of the dump site managers, told Army Radio that he and his men are working relentlessly to try to help Annat find the million-dollar mattress among the tons of garbage at the landfill.

The publicity has triggered a wave of people also trying to find the mattress and its contents for themselves. Burba has increased security around the dump to keep them out.

Annat told Army Radio that when her mother realized her queen-sized bank had been tossed, she told her to "'leave it.'"

"'The heart is crying but you know we could have been in a car accident or had a terminal disease,'" Annat said her mother told her.

Annat is also taking the situation in stride.

"It's a very, very sad story but I've been through worse," she told Army Radio. "It's a matter of proportions in life ... people need to know how to accept the good and the bad in life."


 ---> Lanjut . . .

Le Dema 174

Coming Soon: Facebook Usernames

09.57

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From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn't reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like "id=592952074." That soon will change.

We're planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names. Your username will have the same privacy setting as your profile name in Search, and you can always edit your search privacy settings here.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you'll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You'll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.


Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer. Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop ("."). While usernames are currently available only for Romanized text, we're looking at how we might support non-Romanized characters in the future.

Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it. If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a username immediately because of steps we've taken to prevent abuse or "squatting" on names.

Be sure to check out this FAQ for answers to common questions, and if you're an administrator of Facebook Pages, get more details here. If you want to ensure you keep the rights for a trademark or other protected name, contact us here.
 ---> Lanjut . . .

Le Dema 174

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Israeli woman mistakenly junks $1 million mattress

09.21

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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.
 ---> Lanjut . . .

Le Dema 174

Island Paradises in America

09.15

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Gorgeous offshore destinations you may not know about
You come across three humpback whales on the ferry to Santa Cruz Island from the California mainland. Not the least bit troubled by our presence, they let you glide almost within touching distance before thrusting their tails out of the water and diving.

And so it goes on an isle that conjures California’s distant past, an American version of the Galapagos that harbors more than 700 species of plant and animal life. Pods of dolphins, sea lions basking on the stony shore; bright orange garibaldi and colonies of starfish inside half-submerged caves that can only be reached by kayak. The only thing missing are the Chumash Indians who lived here until well into the Spanish period.

Secluded, exotic, remote islands … in the United States? You may not realize it, but America is full of gorgeous islands, some of them reachable only by plane or boat and others surprisingly close at hand. Some have never been settled and others support thriving little communities. But all are places where you can chill out for a long weekend or maybe even the rest of your life.

Like Santa Cruz, some islands are nature havens. The ancient boreal forest on Michigan’s Isle Royale supports the sort of creatures that once roamed the entire Great Lakes region — moose, beaver, lynx and wolves. Hiking trails and water routes link primitive campgrounds that seem more like the Yukon then somewhere within a few hundred miles of Chicago.

Alaska’s Kodiak may be the second largest island in the United States (after Hawaii’s Big Island), but the vast chunk of wilderness is virtually uninhabited. More than half the island falls within the giant Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, home to the indigenous Kodiak brown bear, who fish for salmon along more than a hundred streams.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are posh private island resorts of the sort you expect in the South Pacific or Caribbean rather than right off the U.S. mainland. Florida’s Little Palm Island is like a Jimmy Buffett song come to life, cheeseburgers in paradise and margaritas all day long – although Kobe beef and Veuve Clicquot are also on the menu.

Developers tried turning South Carolina’s Daufuskie into a private island resort, but were largely rebuffed by island residents, who have fought a long and often contentious battle to save their palmetto paradise. The one exclusive gated community that did get built shares the rustic landfall with around 200 ordinary islanders, a mixed bag of artists and writers, fishermen and misfits who spurn the outside world. Singer John Mellencamp owns land on Daufuskie and is reportedly building a home.

Bygone island lifestyles are also making a stand on Sapelo off the Georgia coast. All of the island’s longtime residents trace their roots to African slaves who were brought to the island after the American Revolution to work the rice, indigo and cotton plantations. After the Civil War, they lived in seclusion for more than a century, blending African and American customs into a unique “Geechee” culture that still exists. Even today, the people of Sapelo live largely off the natural bounty of the island and surrounding waterways, allowing them to remain totally off the radar.

 ---> Lanjut . . .

Le Dema 174

Space Shuttle Atlantis lands safely at Edwards Air Force Base

08.36

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Space Shuttle Atlantis has landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Atlantis landed at approximately 11:39 a.m. (EDT).

Atlantis had spent just under thirteen days in space. Its mission, STS-125, was to make the final repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope before the shuttle fleet is retired. Over the course of the mission’s five spacewalks, the crew added two new science instruments, repaired two others and replaced hardware that will extend the telescope's life at least through 2014.

Atlantis arrived at Hubble on May 13. The crew performed five spacewalks on five consecutive days to repair and upgrade the telescope. Taking a total of almost thirty-seven hours of spacewalks, the repairs were one of the most extensive set of spacewalks on a single mission.


The landing was scrubbed twice after bad weather forced NASA to land Atlantis at Edwards AFB. Atlantis was originally scheduled to land on Thursday. The shuttle is scheduled to be transported back to Florida's Kennedy Space Center on the back of a modified Boeing 747 next week. It will cost NASA US$2 million to transport the shuttle.

The mission almost did not occur. First, after the Columbia disaster, there was extensive worry about whether a mission to Hubble made sense given that it would force the shuttle into an orbit in which the crew could not be easily rescued or rendevous with the International Space Station. There was also debate over whether the cost of the repairs would be worth the expense of the mission.

 ---> Lanjut . . .

Le Dema 174