Lead Stories *Ms. Courtney Mann, head of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, was rebuffed in an attempt to join a Ku Klux Klan-sponsored march in Pittsburgh in April, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Though she has been in the NAAWP for at…

Lead Stories *In May in Santa Fe, New Mexico, schoolteacher Roger Katz, age 50, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for having sex with a fourteen-year-old student. He was convicted despite his compelling explanation that he had fallen in love with her after she saved his neck in a…

Lead Stories *The New York Times, describing several civil disturbances now raging in Zaire as President Mobutu’s 30-year reign ends, reported in April about the “quixotic on-and-off conflict waged by Mai-Mai guerrillas, who hide in the jungle and smoke large quantities of marijuana.” People fear the Mai-Mai because it is…

Lead Stories *In February Michael Knowles, awaiting trial in Virginia for killing his wife, filed a $100 million lawsuit against advice columnist Ann Landers, charging that she had defamed him by publishing his letter on how tough the Internet can be on marriages. Wrote Knowles: “Today is my wife’s 44th…

Lead Stories *In April the town council of Cambre, Spain, conferred legal, marriagelike status on nontraditional unions, but controversy still raged over a couple that was not even of the same sex. The precipitating event was the recent nuptials of Daniel Pena and his sister Rosa Moya Pena, who have…

Lead Stories *The Times of London reported in March that when an employee of the James Beauchamp law firm in Edgbaston, England, recently killed himself, the firm billed his mother about $20,000 for their expenses. Included was a bill for about $2300 for another employee to go to his home…

Lead Stories *Family values: In March the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that a local woman, age 66, and her husband are searching for a surrogate mother for their deceased son’s sperm so that they can fulfill their longing to be grandparents. And three days earlier, a Milan, Italy, newspaper reported…

Lead Stories *The Nashville Tennessean reported in February about state government engineer Ken Robichaux’s lonely, ten-year crusade to wipe out both the U.S. system of measurement and the metric system, in favor of one that combines weight, length, and volume into a single set of measures denominated as (not surprisingly)…

Lead Stories *Saddam Hussein filed a libel suit in February in Paris against the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur for its September 1996 story in which he was referred to by other Arab leaders as, among other things, an “executioner,” a “monster,” a “murderer,” “a perfect cretin,” and a “noodle.” *In…

Lead Stories *Kurt Irons, age 28, was arrested in December in Wausau, Wisconsin, and charged with vehicular homicide. Reportedly, Irons was driving a stolen truck after drinking heavily and crashed into another truck, killing a 37-year-old woman. According to the Marathon County sheriff’s report, Irons was surprised that he was…

Lead Stories *Former Gotti crime-family hit man Sammy “The Bull” Gravano cooperated on author Peter Maas’s Gravano biography Underboss, to be published in April. Despite the fact that his testimony helped send Gotti to prison for life without parole, and 36 others to the slammer, and despite the fact that…

Lead Stories *Veterinary breakthroughs: In February surgeons in Washington, D.C., removed a cataract from the eye of the National Zoo’s six-foot-long Komodo dragon Muffin in hopes that she could better see how studly the male was and thus would mate with him. And in January doctors in Johannesburg, South Africa,…

Lead Stories *In 1978 the Oakland Raiders’ Jack Tatum made a clothesline hit on New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley’s neck, causing permanent paralysis. At the time Tatum arrogantly defended the play as legal and warned other opponents they could expect the same. In January 1997 Tatum applied for disability…

Lead Stories *In January the owners of KZZC-FM in Tipton, California, ended eighteen consecutive months of being an all-“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” station, playing various versions of that song all day, seven days a week (except once, when it played the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” for a…

Lead Stories *The Associated Press reported in January on the three-year-old anti-smoking policy of Kimball Physics in Wilton, New Hampshire, which not only forbids lighting up at work but subjects each employee and visitor to a sniff test of his breath and clothing by receptionist Jennifer Walsh. Those whose odor…

Lead Stories *Still more Italian justice: In November a judge in Rome ruled that a 24-year-old man is entitled to live with his mother even though she doesn’t want him to. Said the woman: “If he comes home, I’m [leaving].” In a 1996 case reported by the Associated Press in…

Lead Stories *An ancient fear of penis-shrinking sorcery periodically surfaces in Ghana, the latest instance in December. Mobs beat seven men to death in Accra and injured others in Tema, all because of rumors that the men had the power to make others’ disappear by a mere touch. Police said…

Lead Story *Texas A&M student Jonathan Culpepper and his fraternity, Kappa Alpha, were indicted in College Station, Texas, in December on a criminal hazing charge — inflicting a severe wedgie. The grand jury found that fraternity members lifted a candidate off his feet by the waistband of his underwear, resulting…

Lead Stories *The Brooklyn, New York, organization Shalom Bayis (“Household Peace” in Hebrew) closed down its 24-hour mistress hotline in January after an unfavorable New York Daily News story. A Shalom Bayis spokesman said the hotline’s purpose was to place its 40 volunteer mistresses with unsatisfied husbands in order to…

Lead Stories *The New York Police Department announced in December that it has been stepping up enforcement of a little-known ordinance that makes it illegal for a subway passenger to occupy more than one seat (such as by putting a package or one’s feet on an adjacent seat), even if…

Lead Stories *Can’t hold it in: The school board in Durham, North Carolina, suspended a substitute teacher at Hillside High School in November after she urinated into a trash can during class, allegedly because of a medical condition. And fifth-grade teacher Dow Ooten, age 36, was suspended in Charleston, West…

Lead Stories *Township supervisors in East Marlborough, Pennsylvania, proposed an ordinance in November to ban offensive smells within the town, requiring that a panel of people with “ordinary and reasonable sensibility” be convened to determine which odors are unacceptable. The issue arose when one supervisor complained about the smell from…