DENVER — Jon Hutt was doing logging work all alone in a remote Colorado forest when his six-ton trailer fell onto his right foot.
The pain was excruciating, no one was around to hear his cries for help and he couldn’t free himself from the big piece of equipment. So he pulled out his 3-inch pocket knife and cut off his toes to get free.
“It hurt so bad,” the 61-year-old Hutt said, “I would cut for a while and then I had to rest.”
Hutt then climbed into his semi tractor-trailer, his foot wrapped in a shirt, and began driving for help. Hutt’s ordeal was first reported in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.
Hutt, who runs a crane business and does logging “for fun,” had gone into the woods by himself on Aug. 19 to retrieve a pile of fallen aspen trees to cut for winter firewood. A trailer that was attached to his truck slipped and landed on his foot.
The wiry, 180-pound man told The Associated Press that he began cutting off his toes about 30 minutes later when he realized no one could hear his cries. Hutt said he couldn’t reach his cell phone, which was in his truck and out of range anyway.
Hutt told his wife he would be back in several hours from a job 50 miles away, but he did not know when she might start searching for him.
“I cut off my boot to see my foot, and once I realized how bad it was, I started cutting off my toes,” Hutt said.
Once he freed himself, Hutt stopped the bleeding with the shirt and drove toward his home outside Montrose, about 175 miles southwest of Denver. He called for help once he was in cell phone range. An ambulance met him on the way.
Hutt said authorities retrieved his severed toes and took them to the hospital, but doctors said the toes couldn’t be re-attached because they were too badly mangled.
“They told me there was no hope for them. They said there was nothing to attach the toes to,” he said.
Half of Americans drink daily soda, sweet beverage
ATLANTA — Half of Americans drink a soda or sugary beverage each day — and some are downing a lot.
One in 20 people drinks the equivalent of more than four cans of soda each day, even though health officials say sweetened beverages should be limited to less than half a can.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the figures Wednesday in a report said to be the government’s first to offer national statistics for both adults and kids.
Sweetened drinks have been linked to the U.S. explosion in obesity and related medical problems, and health officials have been urging people to cut back for years. Some officials have proposed an extra soda tax and many schools have stopped selling soda or artificial juices.
But advocates say those efforts are not enough, and on Wednesday a coalition of 100 organizations announced a new push. The effort includes the American Heart Association and the some city health departments who plan to prod companies to stop the sale of sugary drinks on their property or providing them at business meetings — as Boston’s Carney Hospital did in April. There will also be new media campaigns, like one starting soon in Los Angeles that will ask “If you wouldn’t eat 22 packs of sugar, why are you drinking it?’
The new CDC report may be ammunition. It found:
• About half the population drinks a sugared beverage each day.
• Males consume more than females, with teenage boys leading the pack. On average, males ages 12 through 19 drink the equivalent of nearly two cans of soda each day.
• Poor people drink more than the more affluent. Low-income adults got about 9 percent of their daily calories from sugary beverages; for high-income adults it was just over 4 percent.
• Blacks get more of their calories from sweetened beverages than other racial and ethnic groups.
The study is based on in-person interviews of more than 17,000 people in the years 2005 through 2008. They were asked to recount everything they ate and drank in the previous day. However, diet sodas, sweetened teas, flavored milks and 100 percent fruit juice did not count.
Healthy-eating recommendations call for people to limit sugary beverages to about 64 calories per day. That’s a little less than half of a 12-ounce can of regular Coca-Cola, which is 140 calories.
In other terms: An average can of sugared soda or juice has 10 to 12 teaspoons of sugar.
US appeals court considers wiretapping lawsuits
SEATTLE — Lawyers for civil liberties groups asked a federal appeals court Wednesday to revive two groups of lawsuits claiming the government has monitored the communications of millions of Americans without warrants since 9/11.
The cases involve the federal government’s widely expanded efforts to track down terrorists following the attack a decade ago — efforts that included, at minimum, the interception of international communications that could include members of al-Qaida or other extremist groups.
The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics allege that the surveillance was much broader than that. They cite among other things a declaration from a longtime AT&T worker that the company had allowed the National Security Agency to build a room in one of the company’s buildings and route copies of customers’ communications there.
The government has never confirmed or denied collecting communications from millions of U.S. citizens without warrants.
“We can’t allow the government to stack the deck against ordinary Americans,” EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said Wednesday. “We need to protect against officials who overstep limits on their power.”
WikiLeaks: Breach has exposed unredacted US cables
LONDON — Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said that its massive archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been exposed in a security breach which it blamed on its one-time partner, Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
In a 1,600-word-long editorial posted to the Internet in the early hours of Thursday morning, WikiLeaks accused the Guardian’s investigative reporter David Leigh of divulging the password needed to decrypt the files in a book published earlier this year.
The Guardian and Leigh both denied wrongdoing.
Copies of the files appeared to be circulating freely around the Web, although The Associated Press could not immediately determine their authenticity.
WikiLeaks said in its statement that Leigh had “recklessly, and without gaining our approval, knowingly disclosed the decryption passwords” in his book on the organization, published by the Guardian back in February.
WikiLeaks said that knowledge of the leaked passwords had been spreading privately for months, but that the organization was forced to come out with a statement Thursday after news of the breach began spilling into the press.
“Now that the connection has been made public by others we can explain what happened and what we intend to do,” the group said, claiming that it had tried to warn the State Department about what was happening.