Apartment buyers in ridiculously expensive Hong Kong are now eagerly paying up to the equivalent of $500,000 (U.S.) for units not much bigger than a U.S. parking space (and typically physically self-measured by the applicant’s wing-span). An agent told The Wall Street Journal in June that, for example, standard furniture does not fit the units and that having guests over requires sitting on the window sill. The Journal pointed out that a typical so-called “mosquito” apartment unit in Hong Kong is 180 square feet. A government lottery for subsidized units rewards barely one of every 100 applicants.
The entrepreneurial spirit
In May, Texas health officials shut down the flea market sales of sonogram DVDs at Leticia Trujillo’s stall at San Antonio’s Traders Village. Though the nature of the equipment was not described in news reports, sonograms can be produced only under a doctor’s prescription and by licensed personnel, but pregnant flea market customers underwent a procedure (“just like a doctor’s office,” said Trujillo) that yielded a 12-minute DVD image, along with photos, for $35 — that Trujillo subsequently defended as for “entertainment” purposes only and for those without health insurance.
Ironies
According to Nathan Hoffman’s lawsuit, on the day he was prepped for eye surgery that day in May 2014, a clinic employee handed him a small-lettered liability-limitation form to sign. He was told that the surgery at the LASIK Vision Institute in Lake Oswego, Oregon, could not proceed without a signature, and despite hazy vision, he reluctantly relented, but things went badly. The form limits lawsuit damages to a money-back $2,500, but Hoffman demands at least $7,500 to cover the so-far two additional surgeries elsewhere to correct LVI’s alleged errors.
War is hell
Some jihadists who have traveled to Syria to join ISIS have complained recently, according to a Radio Free Europe dispatch, that they cannot secure work as “martyrs” because of discrimination by incumbent fighters. One “pro-ISIS” cleric, speaking for Chechens, said they “are so fed up with the long waiting lists in Syria” that they head to Iraq, where the lists are shorter. Said one, Saudis controlling suicide rosters in the Syrian theater “won’t let anyone in.” Their “relatives go to the front of the line using (their connections).”
Sexual assaulters’ defense league
• In April, Judge Marc Kelly in Orange County, California, defied a 25-year-minimum statutory sentence for punishing the sexual abuse of a 3-year-old girl by Kevin Rojano — cutting the term to 10 years because the man did not “intend to harm” the girl (except that he became “inexplicably” “aroused” when she walked into his garage). “There was no violence or callous disregard for (her) well-being,” the judge said.
• The child-abuse sentence of a sports club official in Buenos Aires was reduced in 2014 to little more than three years, it was recently revealed, because, said the judges, the 6-year-old boy had earlier been sexually molested by his father and had already made a “precocious (sexual) choice,” which is “apparently a reference to homosexuality,” according to a May Associated Press dispatch.
The continuing crisis
• America — sometimes called a land of second chances — gave stockbroker Jerry Cicolani Jr., 69, many such chances before he pleaded guilty in May to selling unregistered securities — setting up his first overt punishment despite a history of 60-some client complaints made to his then-employer, Merrill Lynch, between 1991 and 2010. The stockbrokers’ self-regulating arm, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, finally revoked his license and issued a statement acknowledging that it needed to improve its monitoring.
• Awkward: Corey Huddleston, 52, ap
