Lead Stories
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In June a man who suffered serious brain damage when he was hit by lightning in the parking lot of Cincinnati’s Kings Island amusement park filed a lawsuit against the park. According to the man’s lawyer, Drake Ebner, the park has a “duty of ordinary care” to warn its patrons against heading out to their cars when a thunderstorm is approaching. (Ebner has yet to claim that the park has a responsibility to inform people lightning is dangerous.)
The mayor of Cedar City, Utah, has been publicizing an annual festival (to be launched next April) by concocting a fanciful back story: that in the 10th century, Vikings exploring the Pacific discovered a coral island, which was later split from its base by earthquakes and carried by a tsunami to where Cedar City now stands; that the Vikings flourished there for generations, until the American government swindled them out of their land in the 19th century; and that present-day authorities hope to make amends by granting the Vikings’ descendants ownership of Cedar City during each ten-day festival. Most everyone understood this “history” as playful nonsense, but several residents of nearby Saint George contacted the mayor claiming to be Vikings or suggesting that a fictional cave full of Viking artifacts had been on their property. When the mayor explained the joke, they accused him of a cover-up.
London’s Daily Mirror revealed in May that Harold Shipman, aka Doctor Death–who’s serving a life sentence for killing 15 elderly patients (and whose total number of victims is believed to exceed 200)–had been allowed to assist sick prisoners in the hospital wing of the Frankland jail in County Durham, England. Said one prison source, “This man has spent his career secretly killing old people. Just imagine some poor guy’s face when he looks up from his wheelchair and sees Doctor Death is pushing it.”
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