Lead Stories
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In December in Portland, Oregon, after the police chief defied a local judge and insisted that officers could legally seize and search curbside garbage without a warrant (arguing that it becomes public property when discarded), reporters from Willamette Week dug through garbage and recycling put out by the chief, the district attorney, and the mayor (technically the chief’s superior) and published an inventory of each official’s trash. They found evidence that the DA enjoys pekoe tea and that the mayor enjoys watching dog shows and figure skating, but didn’t uncover a whiff of scandal. Nonetheless, when told that reporters had searched their garbage under cover of night, the chief got hostile and the mayor “went nuclear,” threatening legal action.
The erstwhile Bob Craft, a power lineman in Montana, filed a lawsuit in November against Viacom, which owns MTV, claiming that the program (and movie) Jackass has defamed him–in that five years ago, after Craft’s brother was killed in a single-vehicle alcohol-related crash, he began a national campaign against drunk driving, legally changing his name to “Jack Ass” to draw attention to his efforts. Ass claims that the TV show and movie have damaged his reputation to the tune of at least $10 million.
Creme de la Weird
In October in Hong Kong, 39-year-old Ng Lai Ping complained because an official at the city’s central library demanded she stop breast-feeding her 22-month-old son in public, handing her a leaflet explaining the library’s ban on food and drink.
