Quick Takes

Thaw in Iceland

Finally, Spaniards from the Basque Country can feel free to visit Iceland without reprisal. On April 22, the West Fjords district commissioner Jonas Gudmundsson officially repealed a 400-year-old provision allowing Icelanders to kill anyone from the Basque Country on sight. The provision dates back to an incident with a Basque whaling vessel in 1615 that resulted in the murder of 32 Basque crewmen. After repealing the law, Gudmundsson joked, “It’s safe for Basques to come here now.”

Papal call

Imagining himself the mark in a prank call, Franco Rabuffi hung up the phone. In fact, the ailing Italian man had hung up on the pope. Pope Francis had to dial Rabuffi three times before the Italian man finally believed that the pontiff had actually made a get-well phone call to him. After the phone mishap, the pope wished Rabuffi well and invited the ailing man and his wife to visit him in St. Peter’s Square on April 29. There, Rabuffi received an audience with Pope Francis and a hug.

Special delivery

Neither a carjacking, a robbery, nor a stabbing will keep Josh Lewis from his appointed rounds. Lewis, a 19-year-old pizza delivery driver for a Spinelli’s Pizzeria in Louisville, Ky., was robbed and stabbed while having his vehicle stolen when he was attempting to deliver a pizza on May 3. He proceeded to the Norton Hospital emergency room—where he delivered the pizza. The order had come from the hospital’s ER. Lewis is reportedly recovering from a collapsed lung at the University of Louisville Hospital. “I can’t believe he just walked in there, said, ‘Hi, I’m from Spinelli’s. I have a pizza delivery,’ and then just collapsed,” Spinelli’s regional manager Willow Rouben told The Courier-Journal: “That’s dedication.”

By the book

It promotes literacy. It promotes community. Who could be against it? Dallas resident Stacy Holmes found out who when she received a city code violation on April 2 for erecting a Little Free Library in the front yard of her home. Begun by a pair of literacy advocates in Wisconsin in 2009, the Little Free Library initiative invites people to place small lending libraries in publicly accessible places on the “take a book, leave a book” principle. Holmes built her lending library with her 10-year-old daughter, and the library quickly became a neighborhood hit. “Neighbors I did not know were coming over,” Holmes told the Lake Highlands Advocate. “They would introduce themselves. We were getting to know each other, and might not have ever talked if not for the library.” Holmes said city officials are standing firm that her front-yard library constitutes a code violation, but she has hired a lawyer to fight the move.

Alarming behavior

Police officers storming into a bank in Mitchell, S.D., were expecting to find bank robbers. Instead, they found schoolchildren. While on an April 28 tour of the First Dakota National Bank, one of the students accidentally tripped the bank’s silent alarm. According to a police spokesman, the group of students found the police response amusing.

Culinary code

It was the moment scientists at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia were waiting for. The signals caught by the powerful radio telescope facility seemed faint, distant, and strange—perhaps even a sign of intelligent life in outer space. But the subsequent investigation revealed a more terrestrial source: the nearby workplace microwave. Apparently, any time a scientist, heating up lunch or warming coffee, opened the office microwave to stop the device rather than let it time out, strange signals were emitted and received by the large Parkes radio dish.

Parting shots

One Texas college professor dismayed by malaise and cheating decided to flunk his entire management class. Until recently, Irwin Horwitz taught a management course at Texas A&M-Galveston. But this year’s crop of more than 30 enrollees put the professor over the edge. In April, Horwitz sent an email to the class announcing they would all fail the course for cheating, incompetence, and ill-tempered behavior before also announcing he had quit his job. University officials say the school will review student grades and Horwitz’s mass flunking will not stand.

Facebook trail

Vanity got the best of Levi Charles Reardon when he liked the Cascade County, Mont., Facebook page—because it displayed a wanted poster of himself. A staffer at the Great Falls Tribune took a screenshot of Reardon’s Facebook activity and forwarded it to law enforcement authorities. By April 24, Reardon had been arrested. Police accuse the 23-year-old of felony forgery after stealing a wallet and passing forged checks.

Awash in controversy

The fight over what exactly constitutes a craft beer appears headed for a California courtroom. A San Diego law firm filed a class action suit on April 24 against alcohol giant MillerCoors for deceptive advertising for contending that the MillerCoors product Blue Moon is a craft beer. The lawsuit alleges that MillerCoors cannot possibly manufacture a craft beer because the company makes over 2.4 billion gallons of beer every year. A California Superior Court judge in San Diego will be tasked with discerning whether the macrobrewery is capable of producing craft beer.