Driver establishes school bus hierarchy
Long Island, N.Y., bus driver Michael Cianci, 38, was charged in April with child-endangerment for allegedly setting up a hierarchical social structure to enforce discipline among the Tottenville sixth-graders who rode what he called his “Death Cheese Bus.” Cianci, who was the “Emperor,” had a 12-tiered ranking system, from “Lord” to the low-end “Speds” (“special education” students). Police said Cianci permitted his high-ranking enforcers to rough up misbehaving kids.
? China’s Xinhua news agency reported in March that the police department in Nanjing has gone beyond fingerprints and now has a data bank of smells taken from criminals and crime scenes to aid police dogs in investigations. Officials say that storing the scents at minus-18 degrees Celsius retards degradation for at least three years, and already, they say, the bank of 500 odors has led to the identification of 23 suspects.
? In March, on state highway 2 near Papamoa, New Zealand, police stopped a 32-year-old man driving 75 mph, with no license and also no arms, having kept relatively good control with one foot on the gas and the other on the steering wheel. He told officers he had been driving that way for years without incident, a fact that amazed police and an amputee interviewed by the New Zealand Herald. The man still got a $106 ticket.
Unclear on the Concept
The Nigerian Football Association advised its referees in March that they could accept money from teams (since “bribery” is considered part of the way of life in Nigeria), but that they should only pretend to agree to treat the briber favorably because they have a duty to call a game fairly.
Advances in Textiles
An Arizona company told the technology Web site CNet.com in April that it has created a polyester fabric that neutralizes shots from a Taser gun, basically forming an electric loop on the cloth and sending the charge back into the gun. G2 Consulting Co.’s Thor Shield is now marketed only to law enforcement and military agencies, for their own personnel to wear. (2) Professor Greg Sotzing of the University of Connecticut at Storrs is developing clothing with electromagnetic polymers that can be manipulated to change colors while being worn, allowing the user to style himself depending on mood or whimsy (according to an April report in New Scientist).
Least Competent Surgeons
(1) Children’s Hospital of Orange County (Calif.) announced new rules to guard against wrong-site surgery after a January incident in which doctors opened up the wrong side of a child’s skull to remove a brain tumor, only to realize, after finding no such tumor, that it was on the other side. (According to the surgeons, they merely sewed up the first site and proceeded to the correct side, without complication.)
(2) Dr. Mary Ellen Beatty was suspended and fined $20,000 by the Florida Board of Medicine in April for a wrong-finger surgery, her third wrong-site error in five years.
Recurring Themes
Latest serendipitous injuries: In March, Donald Batsch, 54, was shot in the abdomen during a robbery in Bakersfield, Calif., but during surgery, doctors discovered a tumor that surely would not have been identified until much later.
And in Southampton, England, in March, college professor Ronald Mann had a heart attack while driving, and his car smashed into a tree, but his body’s banging against the steering wheel acted like a defibrillator and restarted his heart. (Doctors said that if the car had had an airbag, Mann would be dead.)
Thinning the Herd
People Who Shouldn’t Have Played with Matches:
(1) An unnamed man in his 80s, whom neighbors said “hated everybody,” was killed in Downey, Calif., in January after attempting revenge by putting an explosive in a neighbor’s home but accidentally setting his arm on fire, which then set off his bomb.
(2) A 49-year-old woman died in a fire in Milwaukee in January when, trying to get her boyfriend’s attention, she stood angrily beside his bed and flicked lit matches onto his sheet-clad body, until a fire started. She was eventually overcome with smoke, but the boyfriend and the five others in the house survived.
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