November 2010 Archives

The local press is calling it a morality tale. We here at Legal Grounds are calling it business as usual. 

Shortly before the season of giving and getting began, a man in Galveston, Texas, stole a car. This is indeed business as usual. The twist is he brought it back about five minutes after taking it. Why? There was a child in the back seat.

An unnamed woman and her boyfriend decided to go fishing the week before Thanksgiving down in Galveston, reports The Daily News. Deciding that the weather was too cold for her two-year-old, the woman returned the boy to the car, strapped him into the seat and left the heater (and thus, the car) running while she went to do the more important job of helping her boyfriend with the fishing tackle.

Google, you have really done it this time. As noted in a prior post, a mistake on Google Maps in delineating the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica resulted in a skirmish and rising tensions between the two countries which may escalate into a regional conflict. The chest thumping between the neighboring nations continues even after, or possibly because of, an attempt by the Organization of American States to intervene.

The OAS passed a resolution last Friday encouraging the countries to stop all "deployments of the armed forces or security forces in the area where their presence could generate tensions," reports the Associated Press. Generate tensions? The tensions have already begun in this stranger-than-fiction international dispute. Both nations are digging their heels in here. While Costa Rica trumpets the OAS resolution as a diplomatic victory, Nicaragua dismissed the vote as "invalid" and based on a "distorted process lacking order."

You can't blame a new father for getting a little overly excited about the birth of his child. But you can blame him for lighting up a joint at the hospital to celebrate.

Police in Uniontown, Penn. say the unidentified father was smoking pot in a designated smoking shed of Uniontown Hospital, located in western Pennsylvania. According to The Associated Press, a nurse smelled marijuana while taking a cigarette break in the smoking shed, which led to the marijuana arrest.

Uniontown Police Sgt. Jonathan Grabiak told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that a nurse smelled marijuana when she took a cigarette break in the same area. She observed two men in the smoking shed but did not see anyone smoking marijuana. After the nurse's report, a hospital security guard called police about 3:20 a.m.

Did Google accidently start a war? If they did, imagine the liability attached to that little mistake. It may not have actually been a war, but the Nicaraguan army relied on an erroneous Google Map and made a small incursion onto Costa Rican soil. The international boundary flare-up resulted in angry sniping from both governments and some finger-pointing at the Mountain View, California tech company.

There is evidently a long-disputed border between the two Latin American countries. Thanks to Google Maps, it bloomed into a flag-planting, gun-toting skirmish. According to Wired, Nicaraguan troops entered a town on the border with Costa Rica, lowered the Costa Rican flag and raised their own. In a statement that is surely a first in the long annuals of human warfare, the troop commander, Eden Pastora, said the invasion was not his fault. He blamed the troop moment on the Google Maps error which showed the area as being on the Nicaraguan side of the boarder. That's embarrassing.