BLOWING SMOKE
The cure for emphysema is cigarette smoke piped directly into the lungs, according to chemist Gretha Zahar, whose clinic has treated 60,000 people in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the past decade. Zahar (with a Ph.D. from Padjadjaran University in West Java) modifies the tobacco smoke with “nanotechnology” to remove “free radicals” and adjust the mercury levels–and touts her “divine cigarettes” as cures for “all” diseases, including cancer, with only a wink of the eye from the government (which opposition leaders say is in the pocket of Indonesia’s tobacco industry). Though 400,000 Indonesians die yearly from smoking-related causes, nicotine “addiction” was only reluctantly and subtly mentioned in recent regulations. One pharmacology professor said he had never heard of anyone dying of smoking, which he called a “good, cheap alternative” to expensive drugs.
PEDOPHILES CAN’T CATCH A BREAK
Thomas Cavender, 60, of Bessemer City, North Carolina, pleaded unsuccessfully with a judge in March to remove him from the National Sex Offender Registry, to which he had been assigned as part of his sentence in 2000 for molesting a third-grade girl. Cavender told the judge that he had become a preacher and evangelist and that it “hurts my ministry when you’re in the pulpit, and someone goes to the computer, and there you are.”
DOO WRONG
In April, two police constables in North London, England, threatened Louise Willows with arrest for criminal damage and forced her to clean her artwork from a city sidewalk. Willows had cleared off 25 deposits of droppings that dog-walkers had failed to remove and in their place drawn pink cupcakes in chalk with a nearby message, “Dog owners, Please clear up your dog’s mess. Children walk here.”
WHAT THE SMELL?
Nursery school teacher Elizabeth Davies, 48, was fired in February from Hafod Primary School in Swansea, Wales, after accusations that she had sprayed pine-scented room-freshener on kids who passed gas and on Bangladeshis who had come to class reeking of curry and onions. Of the latter, she reportedly said, “There is a waft coming in from paradise.”
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