Burn Victims

A second man has died of injuries suffered when he and a friend accidentally set off a load of fireworks last month while they were driving. Antonio Robinson, 27, died at the Melbourne hospital where he had been since the accident that burned him over 40% of his body, police said. Robinson and Artavis Walker, 23, were lighting fireworks and throwing them out their car's windows the night of June 28 when a cigarette fell into the back seat and set off the remaining fireworks.

Scores of rebels armed with assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades attacked a refugee camp in northern Uganda, killing 192 people and wounding dozens more, local officials said Sunday. Saturday's attack on Barloonyo camp in Lira district was one of the worst in recent years by the Lord's Resistance Army, which has been fighting the Ugandan government for 18 years.

When it came time Saturday to go home after months of convalescence from severe burns suffered in the disastrous Cedar fire, the horse named Yankee got fidgety. He nudged his owner with his nose and made a snickering sound. The horse that had initially been frozen in pain and shock has come a long way. "Yankee has his personality back," said John Van Zante, an official at the Helen Woodward Animal Center. "He's been a good patient so long, now he's ready to be Yankee again."

Society may not be quite ready for the day when a dead person's face is recycled for the living -- but that day is coming nonetheless. Such an operation would give new life to someone severely disfigured by burns, cancer or an accident, allowing the person to exist free of the stares and shock their appearances often evoke. The procedure would be more straightforward than the many reconstructive surgeries such victims usually must endure.

Sending a strong message to landlords, a Los Angeles jury ordered the owners of a Hollywood apartment building to pay nearly $6 million Wednesday to a 9-year-old boy who was severely burned trying to warm his hands on the open flame of a gas stove because the apartment's heater did not work. The jury of eight women and four men decided that Nathan Korman and Korman Center Enterprises should pay $2.5 million in general damages plus $3.

Harry Waizer talks in a whisper about getting back to work. His vocal cords were charred in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, possibly when he inhaled burning jet fuel, and now he is pondering how to put his extensive experience in corporate tax law to use, even though his voice is weak and he is distracted by pain. For Mary Jos, the ability to concentrate comes and goes.

A truck traveling down a busy freeway with a crew of painters was engulfed in flames in a blaze that may have been started by a cigarette igniting fumes from paint thinner or lacquer. One man was killed and 12 others riding with him in the back of the truck were critically burned. Witnesses said the workers piled out of the truck screaming, their clothing on fire and their lungs seared by toxic fumes.

Zubaida Hasan, 11, bounces across the playground at Round Meadow Elementary School in Calabasas with her best friend, Emily, a million miles from her nomadic family in Afghanistan. Before you see the scars, you notice her eyes. Big, black, brilliant eyes that tell you she was given up for dead but never doubted her own survival. On the short ride home to Hidden Hills, a gated ranch community with a guard station, she's a little too shy to do her usual sing-along with Freddie Mercury and Queen.

An Iraqi baby who suffered serious burns in a fire at her home near Basra arrived in Britain for medical treatment, a Defense Ministry spokeswoman said. The blaze was not caused by military action against Iraq, she said. Six-month-old Mareyam Ailan flew with her parents aboard a British military plane to Cyprus, and then joined injured British soldiers on a charter flight to Liverpool. Her parents asked British forces for help when Iraqi doctors could not treat her severe burns.