At least 62 people were killed and 150 wounded Wednesday when a bomb ripped through an outdoor market area in eastern Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said.

Michael Jackson died.

 

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close Guantanamo, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate suspected terrorists indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

    Such an order would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

  Michael Jackson died.

 

On May 31, 2008, a suicide bomber plowed into Kevin's Humvee, killing two of his buddies and severely wounding another. As she lay curled in a fetal position, surgeons working on an operating table halfway across the world saved her son by removing part of his skull and 85 percent of the left side of his brain.

The daredevil skateboarder is among thousands of U.S. troops who have suffered brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Pentagon estimates indicate as few as 180,000 or as many as 360,000 troops have endured brain trauma ranging from a mild concussion to severe, penetrating head wounds.

Military experts and doctors say it is the signature injury of the war.

"I try not to think back to that desolate time," Kammerdiener, 43, said in early June. "I just can't go back there."

BLEAK DAYS

Kevin, bleeding internally, with a fractured left ankle and burns over 25 percent of his body — including his entire face — was airlifted from Afghanistan to Germany and then to Texas.

Two days after the attack, Kammerdiener and her daughter, Brianna, 24, reached the burn unit at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. They were taken to a young soldier who had no lips, wore goggles to protect his scorched eyelids and breathed through a ventilator.

Kammerdiener did not recognize her son.

She later wrote in her online blog, Mended Wings, that she thought it might be someone else until Brianna recognized her younger brother's toes poking out from the bandages covering his body.

"Darn her for being so sensible when I needed to think that the Army messed up and Kevin was somewhere eating slop in a tent," she wrote.

Kammerdiener fainted and fell to the floor, so doctors carried her out. After steadying her nerves, she went back to her son and resolved to devote her life to his recovery.

She's been with him since.

"Kevin is lucky to have her," said Ronnie Ritzert, 21, Kevin's friend since high school. "It would be nice if every wounded soldier had someone like her.

"I don't think he'd be alive without her."

TOUCH AND GO

Within days, Kevin suffered a stroke, and subsequently, the first of several emergency surgeries to remove fluid from his brain. He went into a coma and fought respiratory and spinal fluid infections.

His lips grew back, but he could not talk. Doctors could not gauge the damage to his sight and hearing. They said he might never recover, let alone walk or return to any semblance of his old self.

It was mentally draining, Kammerdiener said.

" I hate this. I hate the fact that my family has to go through this ... I have moments where I just want to run away from all of this — which makes me feel like an utter failure as a parent," she blogged.

One day at a time, she marked each small victory and huge setback in her online diary to update family and friends in East Brady and Armstrong Cable co-workers in Butler. She had no time to call them.

By late June, Kevin's burned eyelids were stitched shut. He had meningitis and a yeast infection in his mouth.

On his birthday, July 6, she sat on a garbage can in his hospital room and cried as she watched him turn 20 in his bed.

"I couldn't help but think that this is what all of his birthdays could end up being like," she wrote.

TURNING CORNERS

With a shunt in his brain to drain excess fluid, Kevin in late August was transferred to a military facility in Florida, the Tampa Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center.

On Sept. 8, he drank eight sips of Pepsi from a spoon. Four days later, he spoke his first word, "Hi," and within a week, he used it universally.

"He gets mad trying to tell me something and just screams, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi," Kammerdiener wrote.  He said--

Well, forget it everybody, because Michael Jackson died!