Lead Stories
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In April the supreme court of Connecticut heard arguments in a case that raises a sticky point in Miranda law: whether the police can use a suspect’s vomit (or at least the eight bags of heroin that came up with it) against him. Though the officers arresting Vincent Betances hadn’t yet read him his rights, they were alarmed at his condition–he was pale and sweating and having difficulty breathing–and asked him if he’d just swallowed heroin. He said he had, and the police called an ambulance. Betances now claims the question was unlawful “custodial interrogation,” even though he could’ve died without immediate treatment.
In April a former pro wrestler (Masanori Murakawa, aka “the Great Sasuke”) won a seat in Japan’s Iwate prefectural assembly; last week, defying criticism, he reported for work wearing his trademark mask (“This is my face,” he said). On March 11, several members of India’s lower house of parliament, opposed to an attempt by the finance minister to raise the price of fertilizer, launched a filibuster–except instead of simply holding the floor, they shouted at the top of their lungs for four straight hours (the minister backed down). And also in March, Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee came under attack from members of the opposition Congress party, who accused him of eating beef (they carried banners reading “The cow is our mother, Atal eats her”).
Recent Alarming Headlines
A February Boston Globe dispatch from Guangzhou, China, reported that an increasingly common tactic among desperate employees who are owed back pay is to threaten public suicide; one construction foreman, whose whole crew had gone unpaid for six months, dangled over the edge of the roof of a ten-story building for two hours: “There was no other way to get what the company owed us.”
