Lead Story
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In January Britain’s General Dental Council found David Quelch, a dentist in Bexhill, England, guilty of serious misconduct and barred him from further practice. According to testimony, after hearing that an 87-year-old patient had told her doctor she’d found Quelch’s previous conduct unprofessional, Quelch pulled out two of the woman’s teeth over her objections and without anesthetic, shouting afterward, “That’ll teach you not to complain to the doctor.” Also in January, a Romanian court suspended the license of surgeon Naum Ciomu and ordered him to pay a patient about $200,000 for an incident at Panduri Hospital in Bucharest: after making an incision error during testicular surgery, Ciomu lost his temper, cut off the patient’s penis, sliced it into three pieces, and stormed out of the operating room.
Recurring Themes
One afternoon in January, according to authorities in Hartselle, Alabama, 22-year-old Daniel Brown put on a ski mask, armed himself with a jack handle, and walked the ten feet from his house to his grandfather’s, where he announced: “This is a robbery. I need your money, and I mean it, Pa-Paw.” Brown allegedly found his grandfather’s wallet in a pair of pants hanging on a chair; the grandfather tackled him, but he broke free after a scuffle and returned to his own home. Police said that when they arrived they found the pants, the wallet, the jack handle, and $5 on the ground between the two houses. Brown denied he was the robber.
The city of Philadelphia announced in January that it would pay $180,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed by Janet Lee, a 21-year-old student at Bryn Mawr. In December 2003 Lee–possibly unfamiliar with smuggling techniques notoriously used by drug mules–tried to board a flight to Los Angeles with a carry-on bag containing three condoms filled with flour, apparently joke items that she and her friends squeezed to relieve stress while studying for exams. Police at the airport didn’t believe her story, and Lee spent three weeks in jail before lab tests proved the condoms’ contents were perfectly legal.
