News & Blues 8/11

Disaster Response

Initial cleanup of China National Petroleum Corp.’s oil spill in the
Yellow Sea (400,000 gallons) was hampered by inadequate equipment,
according to Chinese news media. “We don’t have proper oil cleanup
materials,” an official with the Jinshitan Golden Beach Administration
Committee told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper, “so our workers are
wearing rubber gloves and using chopsticks.” (Associated Press)

In the aftermath of British Petroleum’s oil spew in the Gulf of Mexico
(94 million to 184 million gallons so far), a worker on the oil rig that
caught fire and exploded, sparking the disaster, told a government
panel investigating the accident that the general safety alarm was
routinely kept on silent mode to avoid waking the crew with late-night
sirens and emergency lights. “They did not want people woke up at 3 a.m.
from false alarms,” chief electronics technician Mike Williams said.
(The New York Times)

When Catastrophic Oil Spills Aren’t Enough

A Pentagon report warned that trash in space might bring a halt to
commerce and communications on Earth. Noting that space is “increasingly
congested and contested,” the Defense Department’s interim U.S. Space
Posture Review explained that potential crashes between satellites and
debris—such as refuse from old rockets, abandoned satellites and missile
shrapnel—are threatening the $250 billion space-services market that
provides financial communication, global-positioning navigation,
international phone connections, Google Earth pictures, television
signals and weather forecasts. Scientists said that space collisions
could set off an uncontrolled chain reaction that might make some orbits
unusable because they are too littered with debris. (Bloomberg News)

Lawsuit Frivolity

After a night out with her husband, Melanie Shaker became angry with him
while walking along a Chicago street and tried to kick him. She lost
her footing and fell through the plate-glass window of a beauty salon.
Citing “severe injuries,” she sued the salon, claiming its window
violated the city’s building code by not being strong enough to “prevent
injuries from those coming into contact with it, including pedestrians,
intoxicated pedestrians {or} pedestrians on their way to or from a Cubs
game” who might trip and fall into the window. (Chicago’s WBBM News
Radio)

When asked to prune a sycamore tree on the grounds of a luxury hotel in
Lancashire, England, handyman Peter Aspinall, 64, climbed a ladder
placed against the branch he was removing instead of the tree trunk. He
sawed through the branch, which fell to the ground, followed by the
ladder and Aspinall. The injured worker sued the hotel. “It is an
unusual accident. Laurel and Hardy do that sort of thing,” the hotel’s
attorney, David Walton, told the court, which nonetheless awarded
Aspinall $2,977, blaming the hotel for not training him better how to
position the ladder. Aspinall had been on the job only two weeks, having
worked 24 years for British Aerospace. (Britain’s Daily Mail)

Social Inactivist

A suicidal man complained after he called an emergency helpline and was
transferred to a Church of Sweden pastor, who fell asleep while
listening to him. “I thought maybe he was taking notes, so I asked, ‘Are
you taking notes?’ I could hear his heavy breathing before he woke up,”
the 44-year-old man told the Barometern newspaper. The pastor wasn’t
awake long, and after another five minutes with no answer, the caller
hung up. He tried calling back but was placed on hold and hung up after
10 minutes. Monika Eckerdal Kjellstrom, who coordinates duty pastors for
the Church of Sweden, expressed regret but noted this wasn’t an
isolated incident. “This sort of thing should really not occur,” she
said, “but it does sometimes happen that people call and report that the
pastors have fallen asleep.” (Sweden’s The Local)

Too Big to Prosecute

After investigators with Canada’s Bank of Montreal assembled more than
35,000 documents pertaining to what could be the biggest mortgage fraud
in Canadian history, government authorities told the bank they weren’t
interested in pursuing a criminal investigation against more than 300
Albertans, including mortgage brokers, real estate agents, lawyers and
at least one member of parliament, whom the bank accused of generating
$70 million worth of phony mortgages in one year. “There just aren’t
enough police officers to investigate these crimes,” said Chris Mathers,
a corporate crime consultant and former Royal Canadian Mounted Police
officer. “If you double the number of investigators, you will just have
double the number of crimes being investigated and still have a whole
bunch stacked in a pile and waiting to go.” (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
News)

Little Things Mean a Lot

Authorities arrested Rolando Negrin, 44, a federal security screener at
Miami International Airport, who they said beat up a co-worker with an
expandable police baton. According to the arrest report, Negrin
explained that he endured repeated mocking about the size of his
genitals after his Transportation Security Administration colleagues
observed his private parts on one of the airport’s full-body imaging
machines until “he could not take the jokes any more and lost his mind.”
(The Miami Herald)

Tobacco Road

When researchers denounced R.J. Reynolds Tobacco for marketing Camel
Orbs, mint- or cinnamon-flavored dissolvable tobacco pellets that they
said too closely resemble Tic Tac breath mints and will appeal to
children because they can be eaten like candy, Reynolds official David
Howard noted, “Virtually every household has products that could be
hazardous to children, like cleaning supplies, medicines, health and
beauty products, and you compare that to 20 percent to 25 percent of
households that use tobacco products.”

The difference, insisted Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff, chair of the
American Academy of Pediatrics Tobacco Consortium, “is that kids
potentially will be watching grown-ups ingesting these products. The
last time I checked, we don’t have adults drinking toilet bowl cleanser
in front of their kids.” (The New York Times)

Above and Beyond

Two Japanese police officers spent six evenings in a row hiding in a
closet before finally nabbing a 16-year-old boy suspected of stealing
862 yen ($9.72) in Wakayama Prefecture. (Japan Today)

Joseph M. Veladro, 28, spared the world another lawyer by telling police
in Port St. Lucie, Fla., that he stole more than $300 in merchandise so
he’d be charged with a felony that would keep him from going to law
school. (West Palm Beach’s WPTV News)

No Peeking

After students at a Pennsylvania high school were charged with child
pornography for circulating cell phone images of a sex act on school
grounds, school officials found themselves being investigated for
examining the video images. Parents complained that officials at
Susquenita High School who confiscated pornographic images and videos
from the students “passed around” and viewed the offensive material. “Of
course, one or two people had to see the images to determine what they
were, but if more than one or two top administrators saw them, there
better be a good reason why,” Perry County District Attorney Charles
Chenot said, adding that employees who showed the images to people not
involved in the investigation could face the same charges as the seven
students involved. (Harrisburg’s The Patriot-News)

Ironies of the Week

After Wisconsin state troopers needed tire spikes to stop a
tractor-trailer whose driver refused to pull over, authorities said the
44-year-old driver appeared to be sleep-deprived. His cargo: energy
drinks. (Minneapolis’s KMSP-TV News)

New York City fire investigators blamed a blaze that gutted five
businesses and required 140 firefighters to extinguish on a worker
installing a fire-safety door at a pizza shop. The worker, an employee
of Ideal Fire Safety Systems, said his welding torch apparently set some
grease on fire. (New York Post)

Way to Go

Investigators said a car traveling at 92 mph ran off the road in
Willowick, Ohio, then hit an embankment and went airborne. The car flew
173 feet, crashed into the side of an apartment building between the
third and fourth floors, bounced off and landed in a parking lot, where
police found the driver, Carmen Ritacco, 26, dead. (Cleveland’s WEWS-TV
News)

An out-of-control sport utility vehicle veered across a median strip and
six lanes of traffic in Fairfax County, Va., before jumping the curb
and hitting two bicyclists on a bike path. The Dodge Durango killed one
cyclist, 18-year-old Abdel Ouahid Chadli, and injured another before
crashing into a tree, killing driver Gary Anthony Thorne, 31. The
incident occurred on National Bike to Work Day. (The Washington Post)

When Randal Grubb, 63, leaned out of his SUV to pick up mail he dropped
onto the road in front of his home in Spring Township, Pa., he fell out
of the vehicle, which then dragged him down the street and pinned him
against a concrete wall. Grubb’s wife, a passenger, wasn’t able to stop
the vehicle from rolling forward and called authorities, who pronounced
Grubb dead at the scene. (Johnstown’s WJAC-TV News)

Recidivist of the Week

Just one month after Douglas Gardner, 54, was released from a Vermont
prison, where he spent nearly 20 years for a fatal drunk-driving crash,
state police charged him with DUI when he drove a car down an embankment
in Highgate. (The St. Albans Messenger)

Practical Plane Geometry

Secret Service agents questioned Alabama high school geometry teacher
Gregory Harrison, whose lesson in parallel lines and angles used the
example of assassinating the president. Joseph Brown, a senior in the
geometry class at Jefferson County’s Corner High School, said Harrison
“was talking about angles and said, ‘If you’re in this building, you
would need to take this angle to shoot the president.’” Special agent
Roy Sexton decided the teacher’s remarks didn’t constitute a credible
threat, but school Superintendent Phil Hammonds said, “We are going to
have a long conversation with him about what’s appropriate.” Afterward,
Harrison publicly apologized as part of a negotiated settlement that
lets him keep his job. (The Birmingham News)