Lead Stories
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In November federal judge Robert H. Hodges Jr. ruled that the U.S. Department of Justice must pay its attorneys overtime–which for close to two decades it has openly denied them, in violation of federal law. (The department estimates that its lawyers currently work overtime hours worth $40 million a year.) The attorneys who brought the suit claim that a tacit “standing order” required them to put in more than 40 hours a week, but the department disputes this, saying its employees work overtime out of “dedication and professionalism”–though it admits it maintains two sets of time sheets, one to determine pay and one to track actual work done on cases.
In December in Oak Park, Michigan, unemployed engineer and Taiwanese national Shuo-Shan Wang, 29, pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license–specifically, to performing a kitchen-table castration on a 48-year-old man who’d found Wang’s “service” on the Internet. Wang told police he’d pulled off 50 such surgeries without complications, but that this patient began to bleed uncontrollably after bursting into laughter while eating a postoperative piece of pie at Wang’s house. Officers found the man sitting on the curb outside in bloody blue jeans, and a subsequent search turned up two testicles in a Tupperware container in Wang’s refrigerator.
At the International Professional Rodeo Association show held in October at South Carolina’s Hardeeville Motor Speedway, the performers included Tim “Wild Thang” Lepard and his three sheepherding border collies. This is not so novel in and of itself, in that border collies are often bred to herd sheep, but each of Lepard’s dogs was ridden by a small, screaming capuchin monkey. Said Lepard, “I [wanted] to put an act together that people [would] always remember.”
In the Last Month
