Donald Kowalski

Sharon Kowalski, a 31-year-old woman who loved to golf, fish, ski, play basketball and ride motorcycles, now lies in a Minnesota nursing home, a profoundly brain-damaged paraplegic barely able to speak or move. But around her rages a vicious, four-year court battle over her custody between her father and a woman who says she is her lover.

Sharon Kowalski, a 31-year-old woman who loved to golf, fish, ski, play basketball and ride motorcycles, now lies in a Minnesota nursing home, a profoundly brain-damaged paraplegic barely able to speak or move. But around her rages a vicious, four-year court battle over her custody between her father and a woman who says she is her lover.

A legal guardianship battle between the parents of a brain-damaged woman and her lesbian lover has concluded with neither side being chosen. St. Louis County District Judge Robert Campbell on Wednesday appointed a longtime friend of Sharon Kowalski to be her legal guardian while she stays in a nursing home. He rejected Karen Thompson's plea to manage the affairs of and live with her lover.

A state appeals court on Tuesday granted guardianship of a brain-damaged woman to her lesbian lover, whose petition had been denied by a lower court even after she built a wheelchair-accessible house and offered at-home care. "There aren't words to express the hell the system has put us through," Karen Thompson said after the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that she was the most qualified person to act as Sharon Kowalski's guardian.

To you, McDonald's may be just a hamburger chain. To Jackie Woodward, director of global marketing for the 22,000-unit company, it is much more. It's cookie jars, handbags and T-shirts emblazoned with images of McDonald's and its characters. In short, Woodward said, it's a "lifestyle brand." Such items are "an extension of the McDonald's experience into the home," she said. They "enhance the McDonald's brand, and ultimately the McDonald's restaurant business."