Navy vet wins a Paralympic gold, and more

Navy vet wins a Paralympic gold

A U.S. Navy officer blinded by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan won a gold medal this week in his first ever Paralympic Games. Lt. Brad Snyder beat the best blind swimmers in the world in the 100-meter freestyle final. The former Naval Academy swimmer lost both his eyes in September 2011 while serving as a bomb disposal expert. “It was my first final, it was my first medal,” he said. “It’s an immense amount of relief.” Snyder will compete in six other medal events during the London Games.

Message in a bottle dates to 1914

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A fisherman from Scotland has broken a world record by retrieving a message in a bottle that was set adrift almost 98 years ago. Andrew Leaper found the bottle, one of 1,890 released by the British government in 1914 to map the seas off Scotland’s northern coast, earlier this year. Last week Guinness World Records confirmed it as the oldest such message yet discovered. A note inside the bottle asks the finder to report the discovery, and promises the reward of a sixpence. Unfortunately for Leaper, that coin was last minted in 1970.

Korean War vets with dementia reunite

When former Army medic Augie Angerame started paying regular visits to fellow resident Frank Dibella in their nursing home in Northport, N.Y., his son John was mystified. Angerame and Dibella both suffer from advanced dementia and can’t communicate, but their silent connection encouraged the staff to move them into the same room. Only then did John piece together the mystery. Looking through his father’s old papers, he discovered that the men had served in the same unit in the Korean War—and that his father had cared for the wounded Dibella. “Sixty years later,” said John, his dad is “still checking on his guys.”