>B.C. severed feet mystery deepens

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The Ogopogo. The Bermuda Triangle. Mermaids. The ocean has always been a trove of mysteries, most of which remain unsolved. The latest head-scratcher that’s leaving everyone from police to oceanographers baffled are a series of sneaker-clad right feet that have washed up on shorelines along islands in British Columbia.

There have been four in less than a year. All feet were wearing socks and shoes. Two of them were size 12. The latest one was found on May 22 on Kirkland Island in the Fraser River. “It’s certainly a mystery we intend on solving,” Constable Annie Linteau with the RCMP E Division told the media recently. “It’s certainly very unusual.” The first in the series was found nearly a year ago on Jedidiah Island. Within days, another right foot was found inside a man’s Reebok sneaker on Gabriola Island. The third was found on the east side of Valdez Island in early February.

The origin on any of the remains is still unknown.

Linteau said that there’s no evidence the feet were severed or removed from the victims’ legs by force. Police say DNA testing is being done on the latest foot, and DNA profiles have been conducted on the others. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer based in Seattle, Wash., said when a human body submerged in the ocean, the main parts like arms, legs, hands, feet and the head are usually what come off the body. But he’s still baffled by how the exact same part — a right foot — could wash up repeatedly. “It’s not unusual for body parts to wash up along the United States or Canada,” he said. “There’s so many accidents, like boating. That’s not unusual. It is unusual to find four bodies over the course of the year and just right feet.”

He said his theory is that the feet came along as a result of an accident that might have happened up along the Fraser River, that washed down and spread out along the Straight of Georgia. Ebbesmeyer said he would urge the police to trace the shoes back to the store they were purchased. “There’s a lot you can do with the serial number of a shoe and I’m assuming the RCMP are doing that,” he said. –ca

>Shoe found with human remains matches one found last year

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A shoe found with human remains Saturday morning near the shoreline of Lake Travis matches a shoe found about a mile away, close to Windy Point Park, in November, Travis County sheriff’s office spokesman Roger Wade said Tuesday.

About 10 a.m. Saturday, a boater called 911 after the tennis shoe was discovered on land a few feet from the lake, in an area between Hippie Hollow and the Oasis restaurant that is accessible only by boat, Wade said. Detectives with the sheriff’s office went to the scene to collect the remains, Wade said, and they searched the area for other evidence but did not find any.

Wade said he could not say what type of remains was found inside the shoe. Remains also were found in the shoe discovered earlier, he said. Wade said investigators think that the DNA is from the same person. The remains were sent to the University of North Texas for analysis, Wade said, adding that detectives would not speculate on who the person was until they receive results. – sm

>Heartbroken man climbs into morgue freezer

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A Taiwan man grieving over the death of his girlfriend climbed inside a morgue freezer to be with her and was only pulled out alive half an hour later, media and an official said on Tuesday.

The 41-year-old man was discovered on Monday when workers detected an unusually high temperature in the freezer and realized the hatch was not securely fastened.

“A morgue manager opened the hatch, saw two people lying inside, felt scared enough to yell out and then even cried,” the Liberty Times reported. “She didn’t stabilize for a long time.”

The man took a drug before entering the freezer to speed what appeared to be suicide attempt, local papers said. They said his girlfriend died on Friday from an overdose of sleeping pills.

The morgue would step up security to ensure that family and others who come by to identify bodies do not stay too long, morgue administrator Chang Lung-ching said. – wp

>In Book, Ex-Spokesman Has Harsh Words for Bush. Bush in tears?

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President Bush “convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,” and has engaged in “self-deception” to justify his political ends, Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, writes in a critical new memoir about his years in the West Wing.

In addition, Mr. McClellan writes, the decision to invade Iraq was a “serious strategic blunder,” and yet, in his view, it was not the biggest mistake the Bush White House made. That, he says, was “a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

Mr. McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” is the first negative account by a member of the tight circle of Texans around Mr. Bush. Mr. McClellan, 40, went to work for Mr. Bush when he was governor of Texas and was the White House press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006.

The revelations in the book, to be published by PublicAffairs next Tuesday, were first reported Tuesday on Politico.com by Mike Allen. Mr. Allen wrote that he bought the book at a Washington store. The New York Times also obtained an advance copy.

Mr. McClellan writes that top White House officials deceived him about the administration’s involvement in the leaking of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. He says he did not know for almost two years that his statements from the press room that Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr. were not involved in the leak were a lie.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush,” Mr. McClellan writes. “He too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

He is harsh about the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, saying it “spent most of the first week in a state of denial” and “allowed our institutional response to go on autopilot.” Mr. McClellan blames Mr. Rove for one of the more damaging images after the hurricane: Mr. Bush’s flyover of the devastation of New Orleans. When Mr. Rove brought up the idea, Mr. McClellan writes, he and Dan Bartlett, a top communications adviser, told Mr. Bush it was a bad idea because he would appear detached and out of touch. But Mr. Rove won out, Mr. McClellan writes.

A theme in the book is that the White House suffered from a “permanent campaign” mentality, and that policy decisions were inextricably interwoven with politics.

He is critical of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her role as the “sometimes too accomodating” first term national security adviser, and what he calls her deftness at protecting her reputation.

“No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean,” Mr. McClellan writes, adding that “she knew how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems, and come out looking like a star.”

Mr. McClellan does not exempt himself from failings — “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be” — and calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

He does have a number of kind words for Mr. Bush, particularly from the April day in 2006 when Mr. Bush met with Mr. McClellan after he learned he was being pushed out. “His charm was on full display, but it was hard to know if it was sincere or just an attempt to make me feel better,” Mr. McClellan writes. “But as he continued, something I had never seen before happened: tears were streaming down both his cheeks.” – nytimes

>Test this: Send a picture from your cell phone to my blog.

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Test of 2 at once, originally uploaded by xeno735.

If you send more than one pic only one makes it. Post a photo to this blog by sending to lure09number2blog@photos.flickr.com. Leave a comment here letting me know if you try it and it doesn’t work.