London's Daily Mail reported (after an investigation under Britain's freedom of information act) that more than half of the local government councils responding admitted that they were using anti-terror laws and surveillance equipment to monitor such mundane activities as whether residents put their garbage out at the proper times for pickup. Said one prominent critic, "We are no longer living in what most would recognize as a free society."
Justice Run Amok
Extreme Behavior
In October in Olympia, Wash., a developer who was denied a permit for a grocery store decided instead to expand his adult video store next door into an "emporium."
When Arien O'Connell posted the fastest time in October's Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco, she expected of course to be declared the winner, but the shoe company apparently had promised a group of elite runners (to attract them to enter the race) that one of them would be the "winner," and consequently, first place went to a woman who ran 11 minutes behind O'Connell. After a storm of complaints, Nike reluctantly settled on calling both women "winners" and said next year it would scrap the two-tier system.
In November, after two years of controversy, the school board in Jacksonville, Fla., voted 5-2 to retain the designation of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which is named for a Confederate general who was also an early Ku Klux Klan leader. Advocates for change described Forrest as one of America's biggest Civil War slave traders, but a local Confederacy historian said his research indicated that Forrest was "nice" to his slaves and that "(t)hey loved him."
London's Daily Mail profiled two 10-children British families in October to illustrate the inconsistencies of government benefit awards. Sean and Anne Tate and their children live on Sean's truck-driver salary of the equivalent of about $23,000 a year, plus the government's standard per-child benefit. Harry Crompton has been out of work for 15 years, and his wife, Tracey, has never held a paid job, yet they receive the equivalent of $48,000 in various government benefits, which The Daily Mail said would require a tax-paying family to earn the equivalent of $68,000 a year to draw. The Daily Mail reporter also noted that the Tate home is immaculate and the Cromptons' home, messy.
Lame: A woman being interviewed for jury duty on a murder case in Bronx (N.Y.) Supreme Court in October asked to be excused for the reason that she was once murdered, herself, by her husband (but had somehow been revived by a doctor). (She was dismissed from the jury, but on other grounds.)
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Operation Repo
The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest
Inside American Jail
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