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Walt Disney Co., the world’s second- largest media company, lost a court bid to void the rights to the Winnie the Pooh characters held by Stephen Slesinger Inc.

U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ruled yesterday in Los Angeles federal court that Disney and the granddaughters of Pooh author A.A. Milne and illustrator Ernest Shepard can’t challenge a licensing agreement struck with Slesinger in 1983.

The ruling, disclosed on the court’s Web site today, eliminates a procedural hurdle to Slesinger seeking more than $2 billion in damages from Disney.

You know, in a sane world, they’d be in the public domain by now…

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A champion paraglider is being hailed as “the luckiest woman alive�? after being caught in a freak storm that sucked her to an altitude higher than Mount Everest.

Ewa Wisnierska is believed to have flown unconscious for almost one hour through a violent thunderstorm which catapulted her to the cruise altitude of a jumbo jet and left her body covered in bruises and shrouded in ice.

Incredibly, her paraglider came through the storm intact and she eventually landed 60 kilometres from her launch site. Ms Wisnierska, 35, was treated in hospital for severe frostbite injuries to her face but was otherwise unharmed after her ordeal.

But He Zhongpin, a Chinese paraglider who flew into the same storm, was found dead on Thursday, 75km from his launch site. He is believed to have suffocated or frozen to death after being sucked up into the storm’s centre.

Mr He had ten years experience in the sport and was a member of China’s national paragliding team. Police are now analysing data retrieved from his GPS instruments to map his exact flight path.

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There are reporters who mercilessly grill the candidates; for all his faults, NBC’s Tim Russert comes to mind. But too many reporters approach the race with a doctrinaire liberals or conservative perspective, and too many of the same questions get asked. “Do you regret your vote for the Iraq resolution?” “What would you do about Iran?” “Would you roll back the tax cuts?” Just as often, media will seize on a candidate’s gaffe or one thorny issue and pepper the candidate with the same line of questioning, again and again.

The following list doesn’t compile every question that should be posed to the 2008 candidates. It probably doesn’t compile all the best questions, the Roger Mudd-Ted Kennedy stumpers that could sink some of these already-seasick candidacies. It’s just a list of nags that the candidates might not have talking points for. And those are the sorts of queries they should be getting every day.