Jury Gives Woman Left at Altar $150K

A jury this week ordered RoseMary Shell’s ex-fiance to pay her $150,000 after he broke off their engagement three days before the wedding by leaving her a note in their bathroom.

To top things off, a few months after the engagement was over, Shell told the jury that she learned that her fiance had been seeing another woman while they were engaged.

Shell had moved from Florida to Georgia to be with her fiance, Wayne Gibbs, according to court records. She found a new job, taking a pay cut. Her salary went from $81,000 a year, plus a 15 percent bonus, to $31,000 a year.

After the break-up, in June 2007 she went to court alleging that Gibbs was guilty of breach of contract. She said he acted in bad faith and caused her unnecessary trouble and expense. Thanks to him, she has no health insurance, no life insurance, no home, no car and limited creditworthiness to fix her life.

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Radioactive Countertops?

SHORTLY before Lynn Sugarman of Teaneck, N.J., bought her summer home in Lake George, N.Y., two years ago, a routine inspection revealed it had elevated levels of radon, a radioactive gas that can cause lung cancer. So she called a radon measurement and mitigation technician to find the source.

“He went from room to room,” said Dr. Sugarman, a pediatrician. But he stopped in his tracks in the kitchen, which had richly grained cream, brown and burgundy granite countertops. His Geiger counter indicated that the granite was emitting radiation at levels 10 times higher than those he had measured elsewhere in the house.

“My first thought was, my pregnant daughter was coming for the weekend,” Dr. Sugarman said. When the technician told her to keep her daughter several feet from the countertops just to be safe, she said, “I had them ripped out that very day,” and sent to the state Department of Health for analysis. The granite, it turned out, contained high levels of uranium, which is not only radioactive but releases radon gas as it decays. “The health risk to me and my family was probably small,” Dr. Sugarman said, “but I felt it was an unnecessary risk.”

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[Thanks, Chris!]

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Satan and the Methodists

Jesus stood up to him. Plenty of Christians talk about him. And some blame all sorts of evil on him. But likely you won’t hear his name tossed around much in a United Methodist Church.

Could it be… Satan?

“For the most part, you don’t hear mainline Protestants talking about Satan, the devil or the demonic,” said Jaime Clark-Soles, associate professor of New Testament at Perkins School of Theology. “I think we’ve handed that kind of language over to the fundamentalists.”

Though Methodism founder John Wesley talked about Satan in his sermons, the United Methodist Church has no official doctrine on the devil or the demonic. Few Methodist ministers in the U.S., it seems, preach about Satan as a personal being active in the world today.

While Satan turns up frequently in Scripture, the notion of Satan and demons “certainly plays a larger part in the biblical context than we give it in our context,” said Douglas Wingeier, a retired United Methodist pastor and author of What About the Devil? A Study of Satan in the Bible and Christian Tradition (Abingdon Press, 2006).

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Boy exits child care, goes to Hooters

A 5-year-old boy slipped out of the Imagination Station child care center unnoticed Tuesday afternoon, crossed two busy streets and wandered to a restaurant on the Interstate 35E service road in 100-degree heat.

Employees of Hooters found the child safe about 5:20 p.m. He left the child care center in the 2300 block of San Jacinto Boulevard, crossed the Interstate 35E northbound service road and Dallas Drive, bought a soft drink at a service station and walked to Hooters, where an employee found him in the parking lot and called police.

Deborah Pugh, who owns the child care business, said Wednesday that the boy asked to go to the bathroom and then slipped out a fire exit door, which must, by law, remain unlocked.

“It was just really fast,” Pugh said. “When the parent came for him we said he was in the bathroom. But we looked and realized he wasn’t, and we called police.”

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