Lead Stories
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In a December New York Times dispatch from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, the female marketing director of the Perdu lingerie shop (which is tightly regulated by religious law) estimated that 85 percent of Saudi women wear ill-fitting bras–perhaps because only men are permitted to work as salesmen in shops open to the public. According to the Times, “[W]hile women may be berated for showing a…leg or an arm [on the street], they must ask strange men for help in assessing their bra size.”
In December in Urbana, Ohio, police began investigating Teresa Milbrandt, 35, for allegedly defrauding local people and businesses out of more than $10,000 in donations by pretending her seven-year-old daughter had leukemia. The girl herself was never aware of the scam: Milbrandt had put her in counseling to prepare her to die, regularly bandaged an imaginary “port” on her back for cancer medication, and drugged her with sleeping pills before shaving her head. Alert school employees eventually noticed that the hair wasn’t falling out from chemotherapy but had merely been cut.
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London’s Daily Telegraph reported in December on a video that shows Peruvian army commandos hacking apart a live dog tied spread-eagled between two poles, then tearing out and eating its innards. (Such exercises are supposedly “bravery tests” to help turn soldiers into ruthless killers–often the dog is their camp pet.) A Peruvian official admitted that live dogs have been used in the past, but said the practice was banned in August.
