Community ClicksLibel me not
Briton Robert Dee, feeling humiliated at being called the “world’s worst tennis pro” by London’s Daily Telegraph (and other news organizations), sued the newspaper for libel last year. After taking testimony in February 2010, the judge tossed out the lawsuit in April, persuaded by Dee’s having lost 54 consecutive international tour matches (all in straight sets). Fearful of an opposite result, 30 other news organizations had already apologized to Dee for disparaging him, and some even paid him money in repentance, but the Telegraph had stood its ground (and was, of course, humble in victory, titling its story on the outcome, “’World’s Worst’ Tennis Player Loses Again”).
Crisis continues
Mexican police, raiding a suspected hide-out of drug kingpin Oscar Nava Valencia in the city of Zapopan in December, found the expected items (weapons, drugs, cash) but also 38 gold- or silver-plated guns emblazoned with ornate designs and studded with diamonds, which it placed on public display in May. Included were seven bejeweled assault weapons.
>>> In war-torn Gaza, with little relief from the tedium of destruction and poverty, the Mediterranean Sea offers some relief, especially for about 40 people who belong to the Gaza Surf Club, riding waves on secondhand, beaten-down boards. While the waves might not be as challenging as those in Huntington Beach, Calif., the surfers nonetheless must be skilled enough to avoid the estimated 60 million liters of raw sewage that Gaza City, with no practical alternative, has routinely emptied into the sea.
>>> Bolinas, Calif., north of San Francisco, is famously reclusive, even to the point of residents’ removing state highway signs pointing to the town, hoping that outsiders will get lost en route and give up the quest.
It limits its population to about 1,500 by officially fixing the number of municipal water hookups at 580, but in April, one of the meters became available when the city purchased a residential lot to convert to a park.
The meter was to be sold at a May auction, with a minimum bid of $300,000.
Oops!
Milton High School beat Westlake, 56-46, for the Georgia 5A boys’ basketball championship in March. Westlake’s chances evaporated during the pre-game warm-ups, when their Georgia-player-of-the-year candidate Marcus Thornton was forced to sit after spraining his ankle leaping to ceremonially hip-bump a teammate.
>>> Two North Carolina surgeons were issued official “letters of concern” in January for a 2008 incident in which they performed a C-section on a woman who was not pregnant. They relied on an intern’s confused diagnosis and followed an ultrasound with no heartbeat and several obviously failed attempts to induce labor.
Uh-oh!
A recent French documentary in the form of a TV show called “Game of Death” mimics the notorious 1950s human-torture experiments of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who would coax test subjects to administer increasingly painful jolts of electricity to strangers to assess their obedience to an “authority figure,” even if contrary to their own moral codes. As in Milgram’s experiments, the Game of Death “victims” were actors, unharmed but paid to scream louder with each successive “shock.” According to a BBC News report, 82 percent of the game’s players were willing torturers, a higher percentage than Milgram found, but the TV show’s subjects had greater encouragement, cheered on by a raucous studio audience and a glamorous hostess.
