Missing Illinois girl found years later, Prince Harry and Meghan grapple with car chase, and more of the week's news

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — McDonald's and a franchise holder are at fault after a hot Chicken McNugget from a Happy Meal fell on a little girl's leg and caused second-degree burns, a jury in South Florida found in a case reminiscent of the famous hot coffee lawsuit of the 1990s.

A second jury will determine how much McDonald's USA and its franchise owner, Upchurch Foods, will pay the child and her mother, the South Florida SunSentinel reported.

Thursday's decision was split, with jurors finding the franchise holder liable for negligence and failure to warn customers about the risk of hot food, and McDonald's USA liable for failing to provide instructions for safe handling of the food. McDonald's USA was not found to be negligent, and the jury dismissed the argument that the product was defective.

"Our sympathies go out to this family for what occurred in this unfortunate incident, as we hold customer safety as one of our highest priorities," McDonald's owner-operator Brent Upchurch said in a statement. "We are deeply disappointed with today's verdict because the facts show that our restaurant in Tamarac, Florida did indeed follow those protocols when cooking and serving this Happy Meal."

Jurors heard two days of testimony and arguments about the 2019 episode that left the 4-year-old girl with a burned upper thigh.

Philana Holmes testified that she bought Happy Meals for her son and then-4-year-old daughter at a drive-thru window at a McDonald's in Tamarac, near Fort Lauderdale, the SunSentinel reported. She handed the food to her children, who were in the back seat.

After she drove away, her daughter started screaming. The mother testified she didn't know what was wrong until she pulled over to help the girl, Olivia Caraballo, who is now 7, the newspaper reported. She saw the burn on the girl's leg and took photos on her iPhone, which included audio clips of the child's screams.

The sound of the girl's screams were played in court. The child, who is autistic, did not testify, the newspaper reported.

Lawyers for McDonald's noted that the food had to be hot to avoid salmonella poisoning, and that the nuggets were not meant to be pressed between a seat belt and human flesh for more than two minutes.

The girl's parents sued, saying that McDonald's and the franchise owner failed to adequately train employees, failed to warn customers about the "dangerous" temperature of the food, and for cooking the food to a much higher temperature than necessary.

While both sides agreed the nugget caused the burns, the family's lawyers argued the temperature was above 200 degrees (93 Celsius), while the defense said it was no more than 160 degrees (71 Celsius).

The case is likely to stoke memories of the McDonald's coffee lawsuit of the 1990s, which became an urban legend of sorts about seemingly frivolous lawsuits, even though a jury and judge had found it anything but.

A New Mexico jury awarded Stella Liebeck, 81, $2.7 million in punitive damages after she was scalded in 1992 by hot coffee from McDonald's that spilled onto her lap, burning her legs, groin and buttocks, as she tried to steady the cup with her legs while prying the lid off to add cream outside a drive-thru.

She suffered third-degree burns and spent more than a week in the hospital.

She had initially asked McDonald's for $20,000 to cover hospital expenses, but the company went to trial. A judge later reduced the $2.7 million award to $480,000, which he said was appropriate for the "willful, wanton, reckless" and "callous" behavior by McDonald's.

NEW YORK (AP) — The pioneering mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and on social media, has died at 47.

Armstrong died by suicide, her boyfriend Pete Ashdown told The Associated Press, saying he found her Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home.

Ashdown said Armstrong had been sober for over 18 months but had recently had a relapse. He did not provide further details.

Armstrong, who had two children with her former husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, began Dooce in 2001 and built it into a lucrative career. She was one of the first and most popular mommy bloggers, writing frankly about her children, relationships and other challenges.

She parlayed her successes with the blog, on Instagram and elsewhere into book deals, putting out a memoir in 2009, “It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita.”

Armstrong appeared on Oprah and was on the Forbes list of most influential women in media.

In 2012, the Armstrongs announced they were separating. They divorced later that year. She began dating Ashdown, a former U.S. senate candidate, nearly six years ago. They lived together with Armstrong's daughters, 19-year-old Leta and 13-year-old Marlo.

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If you or someone you know exhibits warning signs of suicide, call 1-800-273-TALK, text 741741 or visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

Photos: Notable Deaths in 2023

Jeff Beck

Bobby Caldwell

Robbie Knievel

Gina Lollobrigida

Lynette Hardaway ("Diamond")

Adam Rich

Charles White

Tatjana Patitz

Russell Banks

Cardinal George Pell

Ken Block

Walter Cunningham

KEY LARGO, Fla. — A university professor broke a record for the longest time living underwater without depressurization this weekend at a Florida Keys lodge for scuba divers.

Joseph Dituri's 74th day residing in Jules' Undersea Lodge, situated at the bottom of a 30-foot-deep lagoon in Key Largo, wasn't much different than his previous days there since he submerged March 1.

Dituri, who also goes by the moniker "Dr. Deep Sea," ate a protein-heavy meal of eggs and salmon prepared using a microwave, exercised with resistance bands, did his daily pushups and took an hour-long nap. Unlike a submarine, the lodge does not use technology to adjust for the increased underwater pressure.

The previous record of 73 days, two hours and 34 minutes was set by two Tennessee professors — Bruce Cantrell and Jessica Fain — at the same location in 2014.

But Dituri isn't just settling for the record and resurfacing: He plans to stay at the lodge until June 9, when he reaches 100 days and completes an underwater mission dubbed Project Neptune 100.

The mission combines medical and ocean research along with educational outreach and was organized by the Marine Resources Development Foundation, owner of the habitat.

"The record is a small bump and I really appreciate it," said Dituri, a University of South Florida educator who holds a doctorate in biomedical engineering and is a retired U.S. Naval officer. "I'm honored to have it, but we still have more science to do."

His research includes daily experiments in physiology to monitor how the human body responds to long-term exposure to extreme pressure.

"The idea here is to populate the world's oceans, to take care of them by living in them and really treating them well," Dituri said.

The outreach portion of Dituri's mission includes conducting online classes and broadcast interviews from his digital studio beneath the sea. During the past 74 days, he has reached over 2,500 students through online classes in marine science and more with his regular biomedical engineering courses at the University of South Florida.

While he says he loves living under the ocean, there is one thing he really misses.

"The thing that I miss the most about being on the surface is literally the sun," Dituri said. "The sun has been a major factor in my life – I usually go to the gym at five and then I come back out and watch the sunrise."

The planet’s top underwater — yes, underwater — hotels

1. Conrad Rangali Island in the Maldives

2. Atlantis The Palm Dubai, United Arab Emirates

3. Resort World, Sentosa, Singapore

4. Anantara Kihavah Villas, Maldives

5. Intercontinental Shanghai Wonderland, China

6. Reefsuites, Whitsunday Islands, Australia 

7. Niyama Private Islands, Maldives

8. Manta Resort Zanzibar, Tanzania

9. Jules’ Undersea Lodge, Florida, USA

10. Utter Inn, Vasteras, Sweden

FARMINGTON, N.M. (AP) — The gunman who killed three people and wounded six others while roaming through his northwestern New Mexico neighborhood and apparently firing at random targets was an 18-year-old high school student named Beau Wilson, authorities said Tuesday.

The attack occurred Monday morning in Farmington, a city of about 50,000 people near the Four Corners, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet.

Witnesses and police say the gunman walked through a neighborhood a short drive from downtown Farmington spraying bullets at cars, homes and passersby until police arrived at the scene and shot and killed him.

San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari said at a news conference Tuesday that four officers fired a total of 16 rounds at the gunman, including one of two officers who were wounded.

Mayor Nate Duckett said Tuesday both wounded law enforcement officers — a local Farmington officer and a state police officer — were treated and released from a hospital.

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VATICAN CITY (AP) — Scaffolding in a niche of the Vatican Museums’ Round Hall conceal from view the work of restorers who are removing centuries of grime from the largest known bronze statue of the ancient world: the gilded Hercules Mastai Righetti.

For more than 150 years, the four-meter-tall (13-foot-tall) figure of the half-human Roman god of strength has stood in that niche, barely garnering notice among other antiquities because of the dark coating it had acquired.

But it was only after removing a layer of wax and other material from a 19th-century restoration that Vatican experts understood the statue's true splendor as one of the most significant gilded statues of its time. Museum-goers will be able to see its grandeur for themselves once the restoration is finished, which is expected in December.

“The original gilding is exceptionally well-preserved, especially for the consistency and homogeneity,” Vatican Museum restorer Alice Baltera said.

The discovery of the colossal bronze statue in 1864 during work on a banker’s villa near Rome's Campo dei Fiori square made global headlines.

Visitors drawn to the ancient wonder at the time included Pope Pius IX, who later added the work to the papal collection. The statue depicting Hercules after he finished his labors had the last names of the pope — Mastai — and of the banker, Pietro Righetti, added to its title.

The statue has been variously dated from the end of the first to the beginning of the third centuries. Even in its day, the towering Hercules was treated with reverence.

The inscription FCS accompanying the statue on a slab of travertine marble indicates it was struck by lightning, according to Claudia Valeri, curator of the Vatican Museums department of Greek and Roman antiquities. As a result, it was buried in a marble shrine according to Roman rites that saw lightning as an expression of divine forces.

FCS stands for "fulgur conditum summanium, a Latin phrase meaning “Here is buried a Summanian thunderbolt.” Summanus was the ancient Roman god of nocturnal thunder. The ancient Romans believed that not only was any object stricken imbued with divinity, but also the spot where it was hit and buried.

"It is said that sometimes being struck by lightning generates love but also eternity,’’ Vatican Museums archaeologist Giandomenico Spinola said. The Hercules Mastai Righetti “got his eternity … because having been struck by lightning, it was considered a sacred object, which preserved it until about 150 years ago.”

The burial protected the gilding, but also caused dirt to build up on the statue, which Baltera said is very delicate and painstaking to remove. “The only way is to work precisely with special magnifying glasses, removing all the small encrustations one by one,” she said.

The work to remove the wax and other materials that were applied during the 19th-century restoration is complete. Going forward, restorers plan to make fresh casts out of resin to replace the plaster patches that covered missing pieces, including on part of the nape of the neck and the pubis.

The most astonishing finding to emerge during the preliminary phase of the restoration was the skill with which the smelters fused mercury to gold, making the gilded surface more enduring.

“The history of this work is told by its gilding. … It is one of the most compact and solid gildings found to date,’’ said Ulderico Santamaria, a University of Tuscia professor who is head of the Vatican Museums' scientific research laboratory.

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. — The student speaker at Grand Island Senior High's graduation ceremony used the platform to call for an improvement to the school's culture.

Kenny Morales, who graduated from GISH on Sunday, called his speech “Opening Pandora’s Box.” After a generic opening, the box opened in paragraph two, to shouts of support from some in the audience.

“I don’t know about y'all, but I hated school,” Morales told the crowd, per a transcript of the speech provided by Morales.

He touched upon the number of physical altercations at GISH, saying “… while each fight has its own story, they all stem from the same problem: And that is the culture at our school.”

In his speech, Morales contended: “We lie, we pretend and we hide the truth with selective facts on positive things occurring around the school, instead of being honest and addressing the issues head on. We attempt to fix the issue by pulling them like weeds instead of fixing the underlying issue.”

District decisions are made by administrators who “sit in a room … everyone is guarded from the truth,” Morales told the Independent.

The district declined to comment on Morales’s speech. Grand Island Public Schools Board of Education President Hank McFarland declined to comment before discussing the situation with other administrators.

Morales said he felt his speech consisted of constructive criticism.

“I really don’t think I was too critical," he said.

He told the graduates and guests the solution is raising expectations.

“Sure, at first there will be resistance, but in the long term there will be leaders within the class that will emerge and set the standard we so desperately need," Morales said in the speech.

Morales said the speech was not necessarily about shaming the school.

“It was more about that message (of raising expectations),” he told The Independent. “I just wanted to start a conversation.”

Morales said his calculus classmates encouraged him to submit a speech — in his own words. Knowing the speech he wanted to write wouldn’t pass prior review, Morales enlisted ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, to compose a decoy. ChatGPT uses data and computing techniques to mimic human conversation.

Grand Island Public Schools Communications Director Mitch Roush described the graduation speech submission process:

“Students who are interested in speaking at graduation can submit their names and draft of the speech that they would like to give,” Roush said. “Then a group of GISH staff review them and score them blindly.”

From there, GISH Executive Principal Jeff Gilbertson assesses the scores and “makes the final call from there,” Roush explained. “Once that’s done, (the student selected) works with Mr. Gilbertson to refine their message and make sure they feel confident in what they’re doing.”

At that point, Gilbertson gives the speech a final review, Roush said.

Morales didn’t say how long it took to manufacture the submitted speech, but did note the delivered speech was written in about a half hour, the day before commencement.

“It’s just holding people accountable,” Morales said.

According to Nebraska Department of Education data, 553 GISH students graduated from the school in 2021-2022 — 83.41% of the four-year cohort for that class. State data is not yet available for the class of 2022-2023.