Magic Moment: It took medical technology and...

Magic Moment: It took medical technology and a little holiday magic to bring a New Jersey woman out of a 19-day coma. Barbara Rozmester of Hoboken is still weak from her ordeal, but doctors say she apparently suffered no brain damage. She lapsed into a coma behind the wheel after a blood clot lodged in her heart. Another driver used his car to stop hers. A relative at the Vatican asked the Pope to say a prayer. “You could say it’s a miracle,” says her husband.

Directory Assistance: A North Carolina newspaper took only 10 minutes and two phone calls to do what the Internal Revenue Service said it could not do--find Paul Fidishun. The agency owed him a $300 tax refund, but said he couldn’t be found. So the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record decided to see just how hard it would be to track down Fidishun. The IRS said he lived in Julian; a call to his number in the 1989 phone book showed he had moved. The next call went to the first of only two Fidishuns in the Greensboro book. His mother answered.

Curtain Raiser: Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., where Winston Churchill warned that an “Iron Curtain” was descending on Eastern Europe, wants Mikhail Gorbachev to talk about how he raised it. Gorbachev has been invited to speak at a spring symposium about the end of the Cold War but has not confirmed yet. Said a cautious but hopeful President J. Harvey Saunders: “Nothing is definite.”

Mean Moment: Two days after a jewel-encrusted icon was stolen at gunpoint from a New York church, thieves took a marble statue of St. Bernadette from a grotto outside St. Edmund’s Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn. “It was built by the parishioners with their own hands,” says the parish secretary. “It’s very sad that people could be so mean.”