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The latest from where the sun don’t shine: Fadhel al-Maliki, a 35-year-old Iraqi national living in New Jersey, was detained at LAX in March after security personnel found a small magnet (wrapped together with some gum in a napkin, then in coils of wire) and a smooth round stone in his rectum. According to the local Daily Breeze, he explained that the items helped him fight stress. And in the letters section of the February 3 issue of the Lancet, a doctor described the ordeal undergone by a 48-year-old male patient when U.S. immigration officials in New York discovered his seton. The patient suffered from an anorectal fistula–a channel, formed by an abscess, leading from the wall of the anal canal to a hole in the skin nearby–and had a seton, or loop of absorbent suture, threaded through his anus and back out through the fistula to prevent serious infection. Apparently suspecting it was attached to some kind of contraband, inspectors reportedly tugged hard on the seton during their examination and ultimately required the patient to let an airport doctor remove it before he could enter the country.
Schemes
A judge in Racine, Wisconsin, set bail at $50,000 for 21-year-old Mario Sims in March. According to court records, he cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet last year while awaiting trial on child molestation charges and missed a September court date. His lawyer at the time revealed that Sims had been seen getting into a limousine sent by The Jerry Springer Show; on an episode that aired subsequently, Sims announced he would marry his half sister, who was also the mother of his baby.
While shooting a story in January on the hazards of thin lake ice, a news team from Milwaukee’s WDJT TV watched as their driver mistakenly drove the remote truck onto the frozen surface of Big Muskego Lake, where it fell through. The driver escaped unharmed, but it took workers more than a day to haul the truck out of the water. Also in January, according to Pakistan’s Daily Times, six students at Dawood Engineering College in Karachi were injured in a furniture-throwing brawl that started when two rival campus groups argued over who would be first to put up posters urging students not to fight.
