Baby born 19
weeks early defies long odds and astonishes doctors
Michelle Butler was 21 weeks pregnant with twins — a boy and a girl — when she felt contractions. On July 5, 2020, C’Asya Zy-Nell and Curtis Zy-Keith Means were born. Butler, 35, was told the infants, each under 1 pound, had less than a 1% chance of survival. C’Asya died less than a day later. Curtis hung on. He was trying to breathe on his own, and his heart rate was improving, showing a resilience that shocked staffers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Curtis was released in April. On Wednesday, Guinness World Records named Curtis, born 132 days early, the world’s most premature infant to have a first birthday.
Ecuador battle between prison gangs leaves
at least 68 dead
A prolonged gun battle between rival gangs inside Ecuador’s largest prison early Saturday left at least 68 inmates dead in the latest violence to hit the Litoral Penitentiary, which recently saw the country’s worst prison bloodbath. The fighting lasted for almost eight hours in the lockup in the coastal city of Guayaquil and authorities attributed the fighting to prison gangs linked to international drug cartels. Videos circulating on social media showed bodies, some burned, lying on the ground inside the prison.
Flooding and nuclear waste eat away
at a tribe’s
ancestral home
For decades, chronic flooding and nuclear waste have encroached on the ancestral lands in southeastern Minnesota that the Prairie Island Indian Community calls home. With no room to develop more housing on the reservation, more than 150 tribal members who are eager to live in their ancestral home are on a waiting list. With no remedy in sight, the tribal community is asking Congress to put into trust about 1,200 acres of nearby land that it purchased near Pine Island, Minnesota, about 35 miles away that would allow the tribe to preserve its future.
Chris Christie wants the post-Trump GOP to move past 2020
Chris Christie wants to be very clear about something: The 2020 election was not stolen. “An election for president was held on November 3, 2020. Joe Biden won. Donald Trump did not,” Christie writes in his new book, “Republican Rescue: Saving the Party From Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden.” “That is the truth. Any claim to the contrary is untrue,” Christie says. It is not a popular view in the Republican Party right now, as Trump has promoted his baseless claims of widespread election fraud for more than a year and as many Republicans have either echoed those claims or averted their gaze.
Doctor charged
with false report
to summon helicopter on Denali
A doctor is facing federal charges after falsely reporting in May that a pair of climbers he had joined in a makeshift expedition on Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, had fallen ill and needed a high-risk helicopter rescue, prosecutors said. They said in a complaint that Dr. Jason Lance, a radiology specialist from Mountain Green, Utah, was actually seeking an evacuation for himself after another climber, Adam Rawski of British Columbia, was evacuated after a 1,000-foot fall down the Alaska mountain. Lance would not comment. “Thanks for reaching out,” he wrote in an email. “As much as I’d like to discuss the complaint, I’ve been advised not to.”
Father and son help crack unsolved 1969 bank robbery
“When am I going to get Ted Conrad?” John Elliott, a U.S. marshal in Cleveland, asked his son, Peter Elliott, a year after Theodore Conrad had walked off with $215,000 in cash — one of the biggest bank robberies in the city’s history. On Friday, more than 50 years after the heist, Peter Elliott, now a U.S. marshal himself, had an answer. The U.S. Marshals Service announced it had found Conrad after investigators pursued a lead and discovered that he had been living under the fictitious name Thomas Randele in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, about 16 miles north of Boston, until his death from lung cancer in May.
By wire sources
© 2021 The New York Times Company
