Leg-reversal surgery keeps boy in the game

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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Man dies jumping off world’s tallest building

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.

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America’s Most Isolated Federal Prisoner Describes 10,220 Days in Extreme Solitary Confinement

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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Lawn sign advances feud between mosque, neighbor

A feud between two Transit Road neighbors — a homeowner and a mosque — turned ugly this weekend when the homeowner staked a sign on his front lawn insinuating that the new 11,600-square-foot Islamic worship site is home to a “bomb making” operation.

Michael Heick, who lives next door to the Jaffarya Islamic Center of Niagara Frontier, put a small sign that reads “Bomb Making Next Driveway” to northbound traffic on Transit Road. The next driveway on the same side of the road as Heick’s home heading north is the Jaffarya Center, at 10300 Transit.

Mosque members and other area Muslims objected to the sign and called upon Heick to take it down.

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