Lead Story *In separate incidents over a three-day period in July, three cousins in Shasta County in northern California lay down on or dove onto Highway 89 directly in front of approaching cars, apparently on purpose, resulting in the death of one and serious injuries to the other two. There…

Lead Stories *A man whose name was not released checked in to a motel in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on July 15 for two days and left behind twelve jars’ worth of Vaseline smeared on the carpet, furniture, curtains, walls, bedspreads, sheets, and towels, necessitating a $1300 cleanup. No motive was apparent,…

Lead Stories *Six women filed a lawsuit in July in Birmingham, Alabama, in protest of the state’s new ban on the sale of sex toys (“any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs”). According to an Associated Press report, four of the women…

Lead Stories *In July in Columbus, Ohio, the prison sentence of convicted child-pornography importer Timothy Rowles, age 29, was bumped from one year to two after he wrote the judge a letter showing a lack of remorse. Rowles asked the judge matter-of-factly if his explicit child-sex magazines could be returned…

Lead Story *NASA revealed in May that it had inadvertently allowed an astronaut impostor to sit at the mission control console at Alabama’s Marshall Space Center during a shuttle flight in which actual astronauts were preparing to rescue a satellite from space. Jerry Allen Whittredge was arrested in Houston and…

Lead Stories *According to Pat Rusin and her team of researchers at the University of Arizona, the toilet seat is actually one of the least bacteria-laden surfaces in the home. Study results were published in a June issue of New Scientist magazine; three times as many bacteria were found on…

Lead Stories *On July 1 in South River, New Jersey, Yugoslavian Americans Boris Angelevski and his wife and 31-year-old son, after fighting among themselves about the son’s having become too Americanized, threatened police and barricaded themselves inside their apartment for eleven hours before giving up. Police knew the apartment well…

Lead Stories *Distrust of modern medicine has led to the increasing popularity of therapeutic self-trepanning (drilling a hole in the skull), according to a June Chicago Tribune story. Trepanning activist Peter Halvorson said that drilling into his own skull 25 years ago brought him “a heightened, childlike sense of awareness”…

Lead Stories *The New York Times reported in June that NASA recently successfully field-tested an oil-spill catcher that could have cleaned up the disastrous 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. A Huntsville, Alabama, hairdresser named Phillip McCrory came up with the idea to put hair clippings into mesh pillows; 1.4 million pounds…

Lead Stories *Michael Anthony Horne filed a lawsuit against the City of San Antonio in May for a wrongful arrest last year that cost him the ashes of his grandmother. When he pulled off the road to nap, a suspicious patrolman searched Horne’s car and found the ashes. He did…

Lead Story *In April the CIA debuted its Website for children, featuring games and gimmicks such as allowing kids to put disguises on models’ bodies and to maneuver virtual guards to look for explosives. Back in the real world a month later, the agency failed to discover that India was…

Lead Stories *In May a Plainfield, Connecticut, religious sect called God’s House filed a $200,000 lawsuit against the state’s Department of Children and Families for sending the young daughter of sect leader Sister Rachael to foster care. The little girl is very important to the sect: She is considered to…

Lead Stories *In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in May, housepainter David Maas, age 31, was arrested and charged with the theft of eleven statues and figurines from several churches and is suspected of having taken eighteen others. According to police, he said he wanted to furnish a new version of Noah’s ark…

Lead Stories *While Joe Camel-type ads lose favor in cigarette promotions in the United States, ads in other countries are stepping up their use of distasteful sales images, according to an April San Francisco Examiner report. A Marlboro ad in Cambodia features girls around eight years old; in Poland, the…

Lead Stories *In May Walter Scott Knieriemen, who admitted breaking into a woman’s home in Wheeling, West Virginia, was acquitted of burglary charges after a jury apparently found that he lacked criminal intent. A psychiatrist testified that Knieriemen suffered from a childhood-based sexual dysfunction that compelled him to grab a…

Lead Stories *In April a federal judge in Hartford, Connecticut, threw out the defamation lawsuit against Princeton University filed by disgruntled would-be medical student Rommel Nobay, who claimed that Princeton’s having bad-mouthed him for lying on his application discouraged other schools from accepting him. Nobay admitted to having fudged certain…

Lead Stories *Doug and Veronica Wright celebrated their first wedding anniversary on the U.S.-Canadian bridge at Niagara Falls because it’s the only place they can meet. Doug, an American, is barred from Canada because of a criminal record that includes illegal entry into the country; Veronica is barred from the…

Lead Stories *Tape recordings played in March at the Detroit trial of an organized crime gang exposed two alleged soldiers as somewhat less than “wise” guys. FBI bugs planted in their cars and homes revealed, among other comical exchanges, that they got lost trying to find an expressway after shooting…

Lead Stories *When farmers leave for the day, pigs start to party, say agricultural researchers in Reading, England, who were interviewed by the London Daily Telegraph in April. The pigs eat, drink, and roughhouse until about midnight before retiring for the evening, at least in buildings that are well-lit. Farmers…

Lead Stories *Former Maryland accountant Scott Lewis Rendelman, age 42, was convicted of emblezzling clients’ money in 1986 and sentenced to four months in prison. Lewis has managed to compound that sentence into more than eleven years and counting because he will not stop sending threatening and sexually offensive letters…

Lead Stories *In March two Missouri legislators proposed a law to have the state give $1000 to any married couples over age 21 who do not have sexually transmitted diseases, who had no children before marriage, who have not aborted a fetus, and who were not previously married. The law…

Lead Story *In March testimony began in Lesli Szabo’s $1.7 million lawsuit against a Hamilton, Ontario, hospital for not making her 1993 childbirth painless. Physicians said that painless childbirth cannot be achieved without the child being endangered by anesthesia, but Szabo said she expected enough comfort to be able to…