A routine audit of a mental hospital led to a surprise when officials discovered a sane patient who had been living there rent-free for over 80 years.
Ilie Ciurcov, 87, was admitted to the unit in Romania as a child and had become part of the furniture at the mental health hospital having lived there for such a long period of time.
The pensioner was only discovered after the cash-strapped hospital ordered an audit of the books in a bid to cut costs.
Mr Ciurcov joked: ‘I always meant to leave but it was so comfortable here I just kept quiet.’
He spent his whole life in the ward having been abandoned by his mother as a child.
‘The staff at the time took pity on him when his mother said she could no longer afford to feed him and no-one ever reviewed the decision,’ explained a health authority spokesman.
It is not yet known if he will be allowed to stay at the hospital.
A 14-year-old boy from Utah was killed while playing with a toy 1800s era replica cannon.
At about 7:30 a.m. on Monday, Tremonton police say the cannon fired some sort of projectile into the Robbie Ostberg’s face, killing him.
The incident was being investigated as an accident, although police weren’t sure what kind of propellant was used in the six inch-long replica that was meant for display only.
A relative of the victim says the mini-cannon was sitting on the shelf in the home.
“He was playing with it,” says Shauna Spencer. “He was looking at it. He’s 14 years old. It went off, it just went off.” Police say his older brother and father were in the home at the time. But Spencer says no one saw it go off. “His brother may have been in there and witnessed it,” says Spencer. “But he does not know how it actually happened.”
Police say the toy cannon is considered a weapon. Most load it with gun powder. But in this instance police say it was a show piece not a weapon. “It’s not intended to be used to fire anything,” says Dave Nance, Tremonton police chief. “It’s about six inches long or so. It’s just intended to be looked at.” For now, a family is grieving with so many questions unanswered.
A 12-year-old English boy was subjected to an obscene tirade by a new iPhone when he tested out its new voice technology in a supermarket.
Charlie Le Quesne was trying out the iPhone 4S at a Tesco store in Coventry when it told him: “Shut the f*** up, you ugly t***.” The boy had been using the phone’s Siri system – which answers spoken questions – and had asked it: “How many people are there in the world?”
His mother Kim, 39, a nursery worker, said: “The phone was a demo version and was low enough on the shelf for Charlie to have a go with it. He asked it a simple question and we couldn’t believe the filth it came out with. I thought I must be hearing things. So we asked again and the same four-letter stuff blared out.
“I asked for the manager and after staff heard it they agreed to unplug it. I couldn’t see the funny side.” Staff told her that someone had tampered with the phone’s set-up instructions. The Siri system addresses the phone’s user by name – using information entered in its contact system.
But someone had entered the obscene seven-word phrase as the user’s name, so the phone blurted it out when it answered a question. Tesco said: “We have launched an investigation. The handset will be going back to Apple for diagnostic tests.”
It may have been slightly scorched over the years but a letter to Santa written 100 years ago, which was later discovered in a Dublin fireplace, has the magic of Christmas written all over it.
On Christmas Eve 1911, a brother and sister, who signed their names, “A or H Howard”, penned their personally designed letter to Santa with their requests for gifts and a good luck message at their home in Oaklands Terrace, Terenure (or Terurnure, as the children spelled it) in Dublin.
They placed it in the chimney of the fireplace in the front bedroom so that Santa would see it as he made his way into the Howard household in the early hours of the morning.
The letter was discovered by the house’s current occupant, John Byrne, when he was installing central heating in 1992. Since then, he has retained it as a souvenir of another time and place but with the stamp of childhood innocence which still exists today. The message to Santa was warm but explicit.
“I want a baby doll and a waterproof with a hood and a pair of gloves and a toffee apple and a gold penny and a silver sixpence and a long toffee.”
Ownership of the house changed over the decades, with the Byrne family moving there in 1961, but the letter survived.
“At that time, the fireplaces were made of brick with a shelf on either side,” said John Byrne who works in the building industry. “The letter was found on one of the shelves.”
The letter remained remarkably intact given the passage of time and was only slightly burned from fires set in the house over the years.
As well as the requests for gifts from Santa the letter also contains drawings and a message of “Good Luck” to Santa from the children.
According to the 1911 census there were three children living at the address in the year in which the letter was written. The youngest of them, Hannah, who was 10 at the time, and Fred (presumably short for Alfred) who was seven, fit in with the initials on the letter. A third child, a 13-year-old called Lily, is also listed.
Here is a story which should not be a story.
School officials have punished a Tampa-area teacher accused of using a water hose to clean up a pre-kindergarten student who soiled himself at school.
Stephanie Wilson, 52, was suspended for 10 days without pay after the Pinellas County school board said she went around to the side of the school building, donned a pair of gloves and used a low-pressure hose to wash the student Oct. 28.
When she finished, she put the student’s pants on and went to the classroom, where she put a clean diaper on.
According to district records, Wilson told the child’s parent she hosed the child, apologized repeatedly and said she used poor judgment.
Wilson is a 30-year veteran teacher at Dunedin Elementary School, northwest of Tampa.
If the kid had made a bad mess of himself, then I do not see any problem with using a low-pressure hose to help clean him up! I suspect that it was due to the repeated apologies of the teacher that forced this to become an issue!
Safeway has declined to press charges against the Honolulu couple whose arrests over stolen sandwiches led state workers to take their 2-year-old daughter and sparked worldwide outrage.
Safeway told Honolulu police on Tuesday that they won’t press charges against Marcin and Nicole Leszczynski, company spokeswoman Susan Houghton told reporters.
The couple were arrested last week when Nicole, who is 30 weeks pregnant, ate a sandwich while shopping and walked out without paying.
Their daughter Zofia was taken away by state Child Welfare Services officials. She was returned to her parents 18 hours later.
Karl Schroeder, a Safeway division president, called Nicole Leszczynski on Tuesday, and, “He apologized for what she’s been through,” Houghton said.
Houghton said management followed routine shoplifting procedure by contacting police, but Safeway regrets not foreseeing that doing so would cause a child to be separated from her parents.
“We want to do the right thing here,” Houghton said. “Families are important to us.”
The incident at the store near downtown Honolulu is prompting Safeway to examine how managers and employees are trained. “In this case, it was not handled in the appropriate manner and we wanted to correct that,” Houghton said.
Nicole, 28, and Marcin, 33, forgot to pay for two sandwiches that together cost $5. They were handcuffed and searched, and later released on $50 bail each.
The family had moved to an apartment near downtown Honolulu from Monterey, Calif., two weeks ago. Still settling in, they ventured out Wednesday to stock up on groceries, took the bus, got lost, and ended up at a Safeway supermarket, Nicole said. Continue reading »
