Like a grim, mass shooting hat trick, gun violence continued this past week. A Tulsa man killed his surgeon and three others at a hospital because of continuing pain after a recent back operation. Then two people were shot at a cemetery south of Milwaukee to which the city’s exasperated mayor said, “The violence has got to stop!” Later in Iowa, two church members were gunned down in the parking lot of their church. The County Sheriff Captain said, “I wouldn’t say I’m shocked.”
To round out the week of “only in America” headlines, a man in Wellston, Missouri used his pistol to hold up another man and steal his assault rifle as the victim was walking out of a grocery store (Missouri has “open carry” laws). The victim went to his car, got another gun, a pistol, and shot at the gun theif (now with two guns) as he walked away. A shootout ensued and, before the police arrived, a third man joined the melee with his own gun. Along with the original gun thief two innocent bystanders were shot. The Wellston Food Market was the scene of a deadly shooting that left one police officer dead in 2019.
In other, non-shooting, news
A French man smashed through the world record for most bungee jumps in a 24- hour period completing 765 jumps from a bridge in Scotland.
A man disguised as an elderly woman lept up from his wheelchair and smeared cake on the bulletproof glass protecting the Mona Lisa. He then threw rose petals around the room while saying there are people trying to destroy the planet and we all need to think about it.
A woman in San Antonio, Texas had an ear “printed” for her by a company in New York City using cartilage from her own, misshapen right ear and a 3D scan of her normal left ear. The new ear was printed in 10 minutes and shipped overnight and attached by her surgeon back in Texas.
In order to protect a certain species of bumble bee under the law, a California court expanded the definition of fish to include the endangered bees.
Following a campaign led by eighth graders, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who was condemned but not executed for witchcraft over 300 years ago, became the last victim of the Salem witch hunt to be officially pardoned.
Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas (famous for catching COVID after refusing to wear a mask) was recorded in an interview complaining, “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you”
Facebook, which last week rewrote its famously lengthy privacy policy to meet a secondary-school reading level but, in the process, tripled its length to 12,000 words.
Self-driving company Cruise received a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for fully driverless rides in San Francisco between the hours of 10pm and 6am on “select streets” at speeds no faster than 30 miles per hour.
In a medical first, a paramedic used a jetpack to reach a climber suffering from a cardiac arrest in the UK’s Lake District. The 3-minute trip would have taken a non-jetpack paramedic 1 hour and 20 minutes on foot. Some may recall last year a drone was used to deliver a defibrillator to help a Swedish man in a remote area.
