• Dark Day for Competitive Eating: A 42-year-old man choked to death on April 2 at a Voodoo Doughnut shop in Denver as he accepted the store's "Tex-Ass Challenge" to eat a half-pounder (equivalent of six regular donuts) in 80 seconds. Later the same day, in Fairfield, Connecticut, a 21-year-old college student died, three days after collapsing, choking, at a pancake-eating contest at the Sacred Heart University student center. [KUSA-TV. 4-3-2017] [Connecticut Post, 4-4-2017]
• The state-of-the-art Berlin Brandenburg Airport, originally scheduled to open in 2012, has largely been "completed," but ubiquitous malfunctions have moved the opening back to at least 2020. Among the problems: cabling wrongly laid out; escalators too short; 4,000 doors incorrectly numbered; a chief planner who turned out to be an impostor; complete failure of the "futuristic" fire safety system, e.g., no smoke exhaust and no working alarms (provoking a suggested alternative to just hire 800 low-paid staff to walk around the airport and watch for fires). The initial $2.2 billion price tag is now $6.5 billion (and counting). [News.com.au (Sydney), 3-27-2017]
Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author