Lead Stories
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
On June 28 in Orange County, California, sheriff’s deputy Owen Hall was standing next to a car he’d pulled over when he was struck in the leg with an arrow. Deputies combed the neighborhood and the next day arrested amateur archer Tri Thanh Lam, 44, who’d apparently been practicing in his backyard when one of his shots went awry. He was freed two days later, after authorities determined that the state law criminalizing negligent shooting does not apply to bows.
In June the Christian Broadcasting Network warned that it was no coincidence that the Bush administration’s pronouncements this spring in support of a Palestinian state were followed by “the worst month of tornadoes in American history” (including 375 in one eight-day stretch); God is punishing the country for condoning the division of Israel, which would contravene His covenant with the Jews. And in May in Brunswick, Georgia, 71-year-old Mary Burgess, who’d inherited a cockapoo and $10,000 to care for it, informed a probate court that God had told her she’d need $50,000 for the dog’s upkeep, despite the fact that the animal is only expected to live seven more years. (Burgess’s projected expenses–$225 a month for haircuts, for instance–actually added up to even more, but she said she’d accept the Lord’s number.)
Democracy in Action
In Neustrelitz, Germany, a 67-year-old woman, outraged that Guinness recognized 831 gallstones removed in a single surgery as the world record, promised to submit evidence that she’d had 3,110 stones removed in a 1981 operation (fortunately, she still has most of them). The city government in Tokyo, where space has long been at a premium, put 50 bed-size cemetery plots on sale (the first such public offer since 1960) for prices ranging from $35,000 to $80,000. And in Cambridge, England, 35-year-old Gary Cowan, a career criminal with 184 convictions, confessed to three more crimes just before his scheduled release from a six-year sentence–he hopes to stay in jail long enough to finish a catering course, so he can run his father’s restaurant when he gets out.
