HOW TO PURIFY WATER

Lost in the wilderness near a river or lake, half the battle is over. In order to safely drink this water, you need to purify it. Boiling is the best and easiest way to make fresh water safe -- 10 minutes at a steady boil is a good rule of thumb. Of course, boiling water means you need a source of fire and a container of some kind. If you don't have a container, you can probably find one or more of these items:

• Aluminum can
• Tin can
• Large shell
• Plastic bottle
• Glass jar

Use your shirt or other cloth to filter out large bits of sediment before boiling. Believe it or not, plastic bottles do work for boiling. One method is to completely fill the bottle with water, cap it and drop it into some hot coals. The lack of air in the bottle should keep it from melting. If you don't have enough water to fill the bottle, suspend it above the fire with rope or vine so the flames just touch the bottom. The risk of boiling in a plastic bottle is that your bottle and main collection device may be gone. If you can't start a fire, leave the water in the sun in a clear container to help kill bacteria.

Purification tablets are another way to purify water. You can find them at hardware stores, also many companies manufacture them, and they're mandatory in any survival kit. Purification tablets use either iodine or chlorine to treat the water. Many people are allergic to iodine, so make sure you know if you are before you use them. Murky water often needs more than one tablet to make it safe, and any tablet needs at least 30 minutes to be fully effective. Like with boiling, it's best to give the water some type of an initial straining. Warm water is also safer to drink, so if it's from a cold mountain stream, allow it to heat up a little in the sun first.

Drop the tablet in the bottle, swish some of the water onto the cap and the mouth's threads. After boiling it or treating it with tablets, pour the water back and forth between two containers. It will add oxygen and improve taste.

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SOLDIER KILLS COMRADES

A U.S. soldier fired on fellow troops Monday, killing five before being taken into custody, the U.S. command said.The White House said President Barack Obama is shocked by news of the shooting.White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday that the shooting was a "terrible tragedy" and that Obama plans to meet with Defense Secretary Gates later in the day to discuss the matter.Gibbs said the president's heart goes out to the victims' families and that he wants to know what happened.

The shooting occurred at Camp Liberty, a sprawling U.S. base on the western edge of Baghdad near the city's international airport and adjacent to another facility where Obama visited last month.A brief U.S. statement said the soldier "suspected of being involved with the shooting" was in custody but gave no further details. It was unclear what provoked the attack."Any time we lose one of our own, it affects us all," U.S. spokesman Col. John Robinson said. "Our hearts go out to the families and friends of all the service members involved in this terrible tragedy."Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called the shooting an "unexpected and tragic event," adding that the incident is under investigation.The names of the deceased are being withheld pending next-of-kin notification and release by the Defense Department.Separately, the military announced Monday that a U.S. soldier was also killed a day earlier when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Basra province of southern Baghdad.The death toll from the Monday shooting was the highest for U.S. personnel in a single attack since April 10, when a suicide truck driver killed five American soldiers with a blast near a police headquarters in Mosul.Attacks on officers and sergeants, known as fraggings, were not uncommon during the Vietnam war as morale in the ranks sank. However, such attacks are believed to be rare in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.In 2003, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar was sentenced to death for killing two officers in Kuwait just before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq of 2003.In June 2005, an Army captain and lieutenant were killed when an anti-personnel mine detonated in the window of their room at the U.S. base in Tikrit. A National Guard sergeant was acquitted in the blast.Additionally, there have been several cases recently of gunmen dressed as Iraqi soldiers opening fire on American troops, including an attack in the northern city of Mosul on May 2 in which two soldiers and the gunman were killed.Also Monday, a senior Iraqi traffic officer was assassinated on his way to work in Baghdad. It was the second attack on a high-ranking traffic police officer in the capital in as many days.A car cut off Brig. Gen. Abdul-Hussein al-Kadhoumi as he drove through a central square in the capital and a second vehicle pulled up alongside and riddled him with bullets, police said, citing witnesses. Al-Kadhoumi was director of operations for the traffic authority.The gunmen were armed with pistols equipped with silencers, the police added on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.Incidents involving gunmen armed with sophisticated weapons, including silencers, have been on the rise since a string of high-profile robberies in April.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM CONTRACTING H1N1 Swine Flu

As the swine flu sweeps the world we are all concerned with protecting ourselves and our families from contracting this virus. There are many ways that we can be pro-active and protect ourselves and families. First we must understand how the virus is spread. Whenever a person who has the virus coughs, sneezes, spits, blows their nose or even talks and laughs the virus escapes their body in their respiratory secretions. It is spread by droplet infection. That means that the tiny droplets of moisture from their mouth and nose escape and carry the virus with them. These droplets in the air are then breathed in by others or land on surfaces and the virus is there, waiting for a victim. Once the virus enters another person's system it must fight that person's immune system to cause illness. Since this is a new virus strain, people do not have immunity to it and our immune systems frequently fight a losing battle and the the newly infected person becomes ill. There is currently no vaccine in the world that can be taken to prevent contracting this virus once it has entered your body. It will take several months to develop a vaccine. To avoid contracting the illness, we must break the chain of infection and contamination. So, what can we do to break that chain. Here are some simple steps we can all take to keep that virus away.

Plane Crash The Only One Who Lived

On Christmas Eve 1971, German teenager Juliane Koepcke sat next to her mother in the window seat of a Lockheed Electra. She had just graduated from high school in Lima, Peru, and was on her way to Pucallpa, where she and her mother would rendezvous with her father, biologist Hans Koepcke. But the plane never made it. The Electra hit a freak storm, and the 17-year-old girl looked out the window to see the right wing aflame. She turned to her mother, who said, "This is the end of everything." The last thing Juliane remembers is feeling herself whirling in midair.

She awoke three hours later, still strapped into her seat, in the Amazon. Miraculously, she had only fractured her collarbone, gashed her right arm, and lost vision in one eye. She began looking for her mother, but all she found were empty seats and a row of three young women, covered in flies. Of the 92 people on board, Koepcke was the lone survivor. Although in shock, she remembered her father's advice: Heading downhill in the jungle leads to water, and water leads to civilization. Koepcke bushwhacked along the rainforest floor, frequently hearing planes above, but she had no way to signal them. On the tenth day, she came across a hunter's hut, outfitted with salt and kerosene, which Koepcke used to clean worms out of her skin. The next day, a group of Peruvian hunters arrived. They took her to the town of Tournavista, where a local pilot flew her to her father, in Pucallpa.

"She was in the middle of the jungle," says Herb Golder, who in 1998 revisited Peru with Juliane—now 50 and a zoologist living in Germany—while working as assistant director on Wings of Hope, Werner Herzog's documentary about the ordeal. "And this 17-year-old girl in a torn miniskirt and one sandal walks out alive."