Lead Stories
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In January the prime minister of Latvia, Einars Repse, complained that there was “too much foolishness” in the country’s government and announced the formation of an Anti-Absurdity Bureau to deal with it. The agency, intended to address the arbitrariness, disorganization, and laziness of the country’s civil servants, now receives about ten complaints a day, according to a newspaper in Riga, Latvia’s capital; though its office has only two employees, it has made 460 responses and referred seven cases to prosecutors.
In Tampa, Florida, bail proceedings for Sami Al-Arian, a University of South Florida professor accused of helping direct the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, were still ongoing at press time; prosecutors have urged a federal magistrate not to grant Al-Arian bail on the grounds that he’ll surely flee the country. In April, however, immigration authorities announced that they’d taken the first steps necessary, in the event Al-Arian is granted bail, to deport him.
In April surgeon Harry J. Metropol of Columbia, South Carolina, appearing before a state committee to argue in favor of caps on malpractice awards, minimized the suffering of a Wisconsin woman (not his patient) who’d had an unnecessary double mastectomy because of a mistaken cancer diagnosis. “She did not lose her life,” Metropol said, “and with plastic surgery, she’ll have breast reconstruction better than she had before. It won’t be National Geographic, hanging to her knees. It’ll be nice, firm breasts.”
In Houston, members of an international organization of gay men that holds high-fashion drag shows to raise money for charity came to the rescue of several local high school students: through a program called the Fairy Godmother Project, the men donated prom gowns to girls who couldn’t afford their own. And in Burt Township, Michigan, police determined that truck driver Brian Anderson, who’d rolled his log trailer on I-75, had lost control of his vehicle while making himself a bologna sandwich (no one was injured).
