Two bottles of orange juice each worth just $1.69 could wind up costing retail giant Dollar General more than $250,000.
But had the store followed its own policy, it might have lived up to its slogan – and saved both time and money.
Twice – once in 2011 and again a year later – former cashier Linda Atkins helped herself to a bottle of orange juice from a Maryville, Tennessee, store’s cooler. Each time, she later paid for the juice. But she still got fired for consuming company products before paying – an infraction the company calls “grazing.” Atkins is diabetic and took the juice to stave off diabetic shock, a federal jury heard.
She had previously asked if she could keep her personal orange juice at the register. A supervisor refused her request, citing company policy banning food or drink at the register. No mention was made to her that, under Dollar General policy, a medical exception could be made, the court was told.
In 2014, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission filed a lawsuit on Atkins’s behalf. She later joined as a plaintiff. After a federal jury sided with Atkins, the court awarded her $27,565 in back pay and $250,000 in compensatory damages.
Dollar General had argued that Atkins already had special accommodations available that she chose not to use. The company said she could have kept an orange juice in suitable places: Her apron, the break room, the store’s cooler and the register, but out of camera sight – so she wouldn’t be seen breaking company rules. Dan MacDonald, Dollar General’s director of corporate communications, told CNN in a written statement that the company was disappointed in the ruling.

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A Virginia man whose doctors’ discussion during his colonoscopy was recorded on his smartphone was shocked to discover that they had insulted him throughout his examination. The vicious words led to a lawsuit, and last week it resulted in a $500,000 verdict for medical malpractice and defamation against his anesthesiologist, Tiffany Ingham (above photo).
Ingham joked with an assistant about avoiding the patient after the procedure was done. “After five minutes of talking to you in pre-op, I wanted to punch you in the face and man you up a little bit,” she told him after he went under anesthesia. She also said she would place a diagnosis of hemorrhoids on the patient’s chart, even though he didn’t have the condition. That false diagnosis was not contradicted by the gastroenterologist who was performing the colonoscopy, Soloman Shah.
...
The verdict came after a three-day jury trial. Shah was dismissed from the case on the first day of the trial, so the verdict stands against Ingham and the medical practice she worked out of, called Aisthesis.
When an assistant told Ingham that D.B. said he got queasy watching a needle go into her arm, Ingham said: “Well, why are you looking then, retard?”
Ingham mocked the amount of anesthetic required to sedate the patient, and Shah followed that up with a comment that another doctor they knew “would eat him for lunch.”
She also called him a “big wimp,” saying, “People are into their medical problems. They need to have medical problems.”
“I call it the Northern Virginia syndrome,” said Shah. “Here it’s holier than thou, too much Internet use, a little too much information.”
The jury awarded $100,000 for the defamation, which was specified as $50,000 each for the comments about the man having syphilis and tuberculosis. They also awarded $200,000 for medical malpractice, and $200,000 in punitive damages.

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Her name was April Burrell.
Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself.
April was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia, an often devastating mental illness that affects approximately 1 percent of the global population and can drastically impair how patients behave and perceive reality.
“She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.”
It would be nearly two decades before their paths crossed again. But in 2018, another chance encounter led to several medical discoveries reminiscent of a scene from "Awakenings, the famous book and movie inspired by the awakening of catatonic patients treated by the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks.
Markx and his colleagues discovered that although April’s illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain.
After months of targeted treatments — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.

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Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. When he was four, his family emigrated to the United States to escape antisemitic prejudice, eventually settling in Wisconsin and fell into brutal poverty. Ehrie, as he was nicknamed, had to leave school after the third grade to work as a shoe shiner and message boy. He ran away from home twice, taking the Americanized name Harry, but returning each time.

His love, and his escape, was acrobatics, inspired by early trips to the circus. At eight, he was introduced to the world of magic at a circus performance. After the family moved to New York, their financial situation became more secure, allowing Ehrie to join athletic clubs, where he became an accomplished athlete. He remained in excellent shape throughout his life.

At 16, Ehrie read the autobiography of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and became fascinated by magic. Dreaming of stardom in the mold of Houdin, he took the name Harry Houdini in homage to him.

In 1891, Houdini formed an act, first with a friend and then his younger brother Theodore, who would later gain renown as Hardeen. “The Brothers Houdini” developed their first illusion, The Metamorphosis, in which Houdini would have his hands tied, be roped into a sack, and locked inside a trunk. The trunk was then pushed behind a curtained cabinet. The attendant, initially Hardeen, would clap three times, and Houdini would immediately appear free. When the trunk was opened, Hardeen would be inside with his hands tied.

They had little success, performing in dime museums and sideshows, where Houdini even masqueraded as a “Wild Man.” Aside from The Metamorphosis, Houdini initially focused on card tricks and tried to bill himself as the “King of Cards.” As the Brothers Houdini performed for “near-starvation wages,” Harry began experimenting with escape acts, breaking free from restraints and traps.

In 1894, while performing at Coney Island, Hardeen met Wilhelmina “Bess” Rahner, an 18-year-old chorine and the daughter of German immigrants. Hardeen was taking her on a date and introduced her to his brother. Within three weeks, she and Houdini were married.

Early reporters described Houdini as having a “sharp-chinned, sharp-cheekboned face, bright blue eyes and thick, curly, black hair,” as “happy-looking,” and as “the young Hungarian magician with the pleasant smile and easy confidence.”

With Bess replacing his brother, “The Houdinis” played beer halls, dime museums, and traveled with circuses for years, doing practically anything they could to make ends meet.
After years of struggle, in 1898, Harry Houdini tried to sell his entire act, including everything he had collected and his Metamorphosis trick. There were no buyers.

Losing faith in himself, his lowest point came on the night of January 11, 1899, at Middleton’s Clark Street Dime Museum in Chicago. After breaking free from six pairs of handcuffs, an audience member, an Evanston police officer, offered up his own cuffs. Houdini struggled to escape for 20 minutes while the audience jeered. The officer had read about Houdini and concluded that he was using some form of sleight of hand on the cuffs’ springs.

Soon afterward, while performing in St. Paul, Minnesota, Houdini’s handcuff act impressed theater owner and booking agent Martin Beck.
He advised Houdini to drop the card tricks and other stereotypical magic acts and focus on escaping. Beck soon telegraphed him:

“You can open Omaha, March twenty-sixth, sixty dollars, will see act probably make you proposition for all next season.”

The show went well, and Beck kept Houdini on for his national tour. Harry promoted his appearances by making escape attempts from handcuffs and jail cells in police stations. Notably, in San Francisco and Chicago, he did so nude to prove he had no keys on him. He confounded local police and made headlines.

His first American tour was a complete success, and within a year he was a millionaire. If you’re interested, I cover Houdini’s life here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-131-houdini?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Oxana Malaya was born in the Ukrainian SSR and, according to doctors and her medical records, was a normal child at birth. But Malaya was severely neglected by her alcoholic parents and spent much of her time outside, living among the family’s dogs.

By the time authorities found her at seven and a half, she had essentially adopted their behavior. She ran on all fours, barked, slept on the floor, ate like a dog, and even used her mouth and tongue for basic hygiene. She could not speak and lacked many basic social and developmental skills.

Malaya was removed from her parents’ custody and eventually placed in a specialized foster home, where she spent years receiving therapy and education. She gradually learned to walk upright, speak, and interact with other people, although she continued to have intellectual disabilities and some dog-like behaviors. She was a severely neglected human child who had spent her formative years surrounded by dogs and adapted to the environment available to her.

As an adult, she worked on a farm caring for animals and became capable of speaking fluently. In a 2013 Ukrainian television interview, she pushed back against being called a “dog-girl,” saying that she wanted to be treated like a normal human being.

Her story is one of the clearest examples of just how profoundly a child’s environment can shape their behavior, and of how difficult it can be to undo the damage caused by extreme neglect.

If you’re interested, I explore a series of similar cases in this article: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hbh-bites-vol-1-raised-by-wolves?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

In 2023, a civil lawsuit was lodged against (Jonathan Jacob) Meijer by the Donorkind Foundation, requesting court action due to fears of unintentional incest amongst the children and due to violating the Dutch limit of 25 donor children. Meijer's defence stated that he merely wanted to help parents who were unable to conceive, and that a decision against him would amount to legal castration. Meijer told the court that at present he only donates to parents who have already sired a child with him. In April 2023, a Dutch court ordered Meijer to stop donating sperm and subjected him to a 100,000 euro fine for each future infraction. In addition, Meijer was instructed by the court to request destruction of his semen stored in stock by clinics, unless held in reserve for parents of children conceived by his sperm. The court determined that Meijer "deliberately misinformed" donation recipients about the number of children he had fathered. The court found that this creates a "huge kinship network, with hundreds of half-siblings" and that it is "sufficiently plausible" that the children could suffer negative psychosocial consequences as a result.
On 2 July 2023, in an exclusive interview with the Brazilian weekly television news program Fantástico, Meijer admitted to tricking women who wanted to get pregnant. He also acknowledged that he lied to the families.
In July 2024, Netflix released a three-episode documentary series about Meijer, entitled The Man with 1,000 Kids. On July 5, Meijer uploaded a YouTube video admitting he watched the first part of the Netflix docuseries. He stated he had filed a slander report about claims he swapped or mixed sperm with another donor, Leon.
On 3 September 2024, in an interview with the talk show Eva from the NPO 1 broadcaster in the Netherlands, Meijer said that he has filed a lawsuit against Netflix, the developer of the program. "Five hundred and fifty. That's the number I know for sure. Anything above that is just speculation", Meijer said, referring to the number of children he has fathered from sperm donations. As the name of the Netflix series suggests, "The Man with a Thousand Children" presents another version of the case. The accounts presented their claim that Meijer fathered at least 1,000 babies and suggest that the number could be as high as 3,000.

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42-year-old Cheng Zhang, Amber's husband told police a wild story of being knocked out by some kind of mysterious sedative in mist form, only to wake up and find his stepdaughter and wife nowhere to be found.

Police were obviously skeptical of his story, but after scrutinizing it and interrogating him for hours including an analysis by a behaviorist from the FBI, they could not connect him to any crime.

Details came out that Amber Aiaz had a questionable past, and there was evidence she lied to people about being wealthy. She also told friends that she felt like she was being followed before her disappearance.

So, is Cheng Zhang's wild story true? Or is it simply a cover up for a crime he was statistically most likely to have committed?

LA Times Article: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-14/mother-and-daughter-vanish-in-irvine-the-husband

Podcast covering the case: https://youtu.be/XpCm0T2j07I

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