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The Toyota Tundra plant in San Antonio, TX has been hit by parts shortages as a result of the March 11 earthquake. The plant will be shut down on Mondays and Fridays, and production will be at only 50 percent the other three days of the week.

Luckily for the facility’s 2,800 workers, Toyota plans to pay its employees even when the plant is down, but there’s a caveat. The workers will need to either sign up for training or build homes for Habitat for Humanity if they want to collect a full paycheck. If the workers don’t feel like taking Toyota up on either offer, the employee will be able to take an unpaid leave.

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However, Honda has their own plan:

The move runs counter to one made by Honda, which recently announced part-time plant schedules in North America between May 9 and July 1. Honda workers will have the choice of doing training if they wish, or they can stay home and get paid anyway.

Dugan Smith loves playing sports – baseball, basketball, football, you name it. So when the 13-year-old lost part of one leg to bone cancer, he was faced with the prospect of being sidelined as a spectator for the rest of his life.

Instead, Dugan opted for a rare and what to many would seem a radical operation that has allowed him to return to the field like almost any other kid.

Known as a rotationplasty, his surgery involved removing a large section of his right leg that surrounded the tumour – from below his knee to about mid-thigh – then reattaching the lower limb to the shortened upper thigh.

The twist, so to speak, is that Dugan’s lower leg was rotated 180 degrees and sewn on backwards.

His ankle now acts as his knee, his calf has replaced the lower part of his thigh and his backwards-facing foot slips into a prosthetic and powers the reversed muscles and joint with an up-and-down motion.

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A 30-year-old Indian died falling off Burj Khalifa today afternoon in an apparent suicide, Dubai Police have confirmed.

According to the eyewitnesses, the man jumped from the 147th floor of the building and fell on the 102nd floor, dying after a few minutes.

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A 45 floor death is bad enough, but can you imagine if he made it all the way down?  Here’s a chart for comparison sakes.

Thomas Silverstein, who has been described as America’s “most isolated man,” has been held in an extreme form of solitary confinement under a “no human contact” order for 28 years. Originally imprisoned for armed robbery at the age of 19, Silverstein is serving life without parole for killing two fellow inmates (whom he says were threatening his life) and a prison guard, and has been buried in the depths of the federal prison system since 1983.

In his current lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Silverstein contends that his decades of utter isolation in a small concrete cell violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as well as its guarantee of due process.

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