-In August, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration dropped all charges against a doctor who has been at the center of a prescription-drug fraud case because, said prosecutors, they have too much evidence against him and not enough space to store it. The U.S. attorney in northern Iowa said her office needs to clear out the 400,000 paper documents and two terabytes of electronic data (the latter of which under current technology takes up little space but in DEA's antiquated computer system hogs 5 percent of the agency's worldwide electronic storage). The accused, Dr. Armando Angulo, has lived since 2004 in Panama, which will not extradite him.
The Litigious Society
-If Megan Duskey's parents had been with her that night in 2010, they perhaps would have insisted she (dressed as the comic book hero Silver Spectre) not try to slide down the railing during the Halloween-themed ball at Chicago's Palmer House Hilton hotel, but she did slide down, and she fell four floors to her death. Nonetheless, in July 2012, the parents filed a $500,000 lawsuit against Hilton and other entities, claiming that the death of Ms. Duskey at age 23 was the hotel's and the sponsors' fault.
Democracy in Action
-Didier Peleman, 41, is a major-party candidate for the city council in Ghent, Belgium, and, like most, has champions and detractors. Though he has been active in "community work" for 11 years, Peleman is candid about a mental disability that noticeably slows down his speaking and writing and which some voters fear impedes his reasoning ability. His Party said it is important that people with disabilities challenge constraints.
-A July battle in the House of Representatives pitted austerity-driven members striving to cut $72 million in spending on NASCAR against North Carolina House members determined to keep the money in. (Most NASCAR teams are headquartered in the state, as is the Charlotte Motor Speedway and the NASCAR Hall of Fame.) More than a third of the money would go to the National Guard for sponsoring driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. The North Carolina legislators believe military recruitment will suffer unless the race-car connection is maintained.
Ironies
-Karma: (1) In July a 30-year-old man suspected of skipping out on a bar bill at the Hilton Garden Inn in Manchester, N.H., did not make it far. As he tried to hop an iron fence, he impaled his leg and eventually required eight firefighters to rescue him using hydraulic cutting tools. (2) Greyston Garcia, 26, who was cleared of murder charges in January under Florida's "stand your ground" defense (even though he had chased the victim more than a block to stab him to death after the man took his radio), was inadvertently killed in June by random gang gunfire in Miami.
NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com.
