NAPLES, Fla. (AP) — A man in southwest Florida has been charged with flooding a hospital’s emergency rooms after attacking a nurse and stripping off his clothes. The 53-year-old became agitated while in a waiting room at the North Collier Hospital in Naples. The Collier County Sheriff’s Office says he barged into the emergency room, pushed a patient and then pushed a nurse in the head. After the hospital staff got him into a room in an effort to keep him from disturbing other patients, he took off his clothes and pulled a high-pressure water pipe from the wall. The hospital’s emergency rooms flooded, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage. Responding deputies subdued the man using a Taser after he threatened them, and he was taken into custody.
UNDATED (AP) — Shootings and other attacks are increasing at hospitals across the U.S., contributing to health care becoming one of the nation’s most violent fields. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show American health care workers are now far more likely to suffer nonfatal injuries by violence than workers in any other profession, including law enforcement. They racked up 73% of all such injuries in 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available. Hospitals have armed security officers with handguns, stun guns or batons. Some states allow hospitals to create their own police forces, including Indiana, Ohio and Georgia.
UNDATED (AP) — Thousands of muddy plastic bottles and other waterlogged pieces of rubbish are piled onto a flatbed trailer on the banks of the Tisza River in Hungary — a metric ton of waste that was removed by hand from the waterway and its floodplain in a single day. It’s the haul of volunteers participating in a 10-day competition that draws over 150 people. Life-jacketed rivergoers of all ages pile into dozens of canoes to scour Hungary’s second-largest river for trash that has flowed downstream. The annual Plastic Cup competition has gathered around 330 tons of waste from the Tisza since 2013. Their aim is to preserve Hungary’s natural environment, but also to head off a mounting global plastic waste crisis by cutting it off early in the cycle.
CHICAGO (AP) — An 8-year-old Chicago girl riding a scooter was fatally shot in the head. The Chicago Sun-Times reports witnesses say the gunman was upset over noise. The shooting happened Saturday night in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood. A neighbor says the gunman complained about noise before shooting the girl. Police say the gunman was tackled by the girl’s father after the shooting and shot during a struggle. He was taken to a hospital.
