[font face="Verdana" size="2"]BE ALL YOU CAN BE
In a March change of regulations, the Pentagon began saving money by reducing
"combat-injury" benefits for all except those wounded while actually fighting,
explaining that combat-"related" injuries were simply not worthy of full compensation.
Thus, in examples offered by The Washington Post in November, Marine Cpl.
James Dixon and Army Sgt. Lori Meshell were not entitled to full combat-injury
coverage for their Iraq wounds (Dixon from a roadside bomb and a land mine,
and Meshell while diving for cover during a mortar attack) because neither was
actually fighting at the time. (Dixon, initially denied about $16,000 by the classification,
recently won a hard-fought reversal, but Meshell, drawing $1,200 less per month
because of the change, is still appealing.)
NEW DEFINITION OF WINNER: "LOSER"
When Arien O'Connell posted the fastest time in October's Nike Women's Marathon
in San Francisco, she expected of course to be declared the winner, but the shoe
company apparently had promised a group of elite runners (to attract them to
enter the race) that one of them would be the "winner," and consequently, first
place went to a woman who ran 11 minutes behind O'Connell. After a storm of
complaints, Nike reluctantly settled on calling both women "winners" and said next
year it would scrap the two-tier system.
HA HA, MADE ME LAUGH
In 1983, convicted South Carolina murderer Michael Godwin, then 22, succeeded
in getting an appeals court to reduce his death-by-electric-chair sentence to one
of life in prison at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C. Six years
later, in March 1989, while sitting naked on a metal toilet and attempting to fix
earphones that were connected to a television set, Godwin bit into a wire and
was electrocuted. [/font]
