• Mats Jarlstrom is a folk hero in Oregon for his extensive research critical of the short yellow light timed to the state's red-light cameras, having taken his campaign to TV's "60 Minutes" and been invited to a transportation engineers' convention. In January, Oregon's agency that regulates engineers imposed a $500 fine on Jarlstrom for "practicing engineering" without a state license. (The agency, in fact, wrote that simply using the phrase "I am an engineer" is illegal without a license, even though Jarlstrom has a degree in engineering and worked as an airplane camera mechanic.) He is suing to overturn the fine.
• Last year, surgeons at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), for only the second time in history, removed a tumor "sitting" on the peanut-sized heart of a fetus while the heart was still inside the mother's womb-in essence successfully operating on two patients simultaneously. The Uruguayan mother said her initial reaction upon referral to CHOP's surgeons was to "start laughing, like what, they do that?" (The baby's December birth revealed that the tumor had grown back and had to be removed again, except this time, through "ordinary" heart surgery.)
• The word "Isis" arrived in Western dialogue only after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as an acronym for the Islamic State, and the Swahili word "Harambe" was known to almost no one until May 2016 when the gorilla "Harambe" (named via a local contest) was put down by a Cincinnati zoo worker after it had dragged an adventurous 3-year-old boy away. In April, a Twitter user and the website Daily Dot happened upon a 19-year-old California restaurant hostess named Isis Harambe Spjut and verified with state offices that a driver's license (likely backed by a birth certificate) had been issued to her. ("Spjut" is a Scandinavian name.)
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