State Glance
CAMROSE, Alberta — A Canadian woman who lost her engagement ring 13 years ago while weeding her garden on the family farm is wearing it proudly again after her daughter-in-law pulled it from the ground on a misshapen carrot.
Mary Grams, 84, said she can’t believe the lucky carrot actually grew through and around the diamond ring she had long given up hope of finding.
Grams said she never told her husband, Norman, that she lost the ring, but told her son. Her husband died five years ago.
“I feel relieved and happy inside,” Grams said this week. “It grew into the carrot. I still can’t figure it out.”
Her daughter-in-law, Colleen Daley, found the ring while harvesting carrots for supper with her dog Billy at the farm near Armena, Alberta, where Grams used to live. The farm has been in the family for 105 years.
Daley said while she was pulling the carrots and noticed one of them looked strange. She almost fed it to her dog but decided to keep it and just threw it in her pail. When she was washing the carrots she noticed the ring and spoke to her husband, Grams’ son, about what she had found.
They quickly called Grams. “I said we found your ring in the garden. She couldn’t believe it,” Daley said. “It was so weird that the carrot grew perfectly through that ring.”
Grams said she was eager to try the ring on again after so many years. With family looking on she washed the ring with a little soap to get the dirt off. It slid on her finger as easily as it did when her husband gave it to her.
“We were giggling and laughing,” she said. “It fit. After that many years it fits.”
Arizona anti-voucher referendum on track to ballot
PHOENIX — State election officials say 97 percent of the more than 111,000 signatures turned in to block Arizona’s ambitious school voucher program expansion have passed an initial certification. That’s far more than needed to halt the new law until the November 2018 general election.
The review now shifts to Arizona’s 15 county recorders. They will check a random 5 percent sample of the 108,224 certified signatures to determine if enough are valid.
Recorders have 15 working days to check about 5,400 signatures and have to validate about 70 percent of them for the law to remain blocked.
Elections Director Eric Spencer late Friday said the nearly all-volunteer group Save Our Schools Arizona that collected the signatures did a “pretty marvelous job.”
Voucher backers are expected to pursue a vigorous court challenge.
McCain completes round of radiation, chemo for brain cancer
PHOENIX — The daughter of U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona says the 80-year-old lawmaker has completed the first round of radiation and chemotherapy as he battles an aggressive form of brain cancer.
Meghan McCain also tweeted Friday afternoon that her father’s “resilience & strength is incredible. Fight goes on, here’s to small wins.”
McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008 and a six-term senator, was diagnosed last month with glioblastoma.
Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix say they removed a blood clot above the senator’s left eye and managed to remove all of the tumor that was visible on brain scans.
McCain says he expects to return to Washington next month.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — An assailant wielding a samurai sword and carrying a Chinese flag in his bag injured a guard outside Taiwan’s presidential office building on Friday in what authorities are calling a politically-motivated attack.
The 51-year-old man, identified by his surname, Lu, was overpowered by other guards and prevented from entering the nearly 100-year-old structure in the center of the capital. It wasn’t immediately clear if President Tsai Ing-wen was in her office at the time of the attack.
The guard was being treated for a wound to his neck.
The official Central News Agency said Lu had stolen the sword from the nearby Armed Forces Museum by smashing a glass display case with a hammer.
The agency said a Chinese flag was found in Lu’s bag and quoted a police as saying that he told officers he committed the attack to “demonstrate my political position.”
No further details were given, although a small minority in Taiwan actively support China’s claim to sovereignty over the self-governing island democracy. Tensions have risen between Taipei and Beijing since Tsai’s election last year because of her refusal to agree that Taiwan is an inherent part of China.
A large majority of Taiwanese support maintaining the island’s de-facto independent status and political violence has become relatively rare in Taiwan in recent years, limited mainly to fisticuffs between ruling and opposition party lawmakers in the legislature.