Lead Stories
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According to a July report in the British newspaper the Guardian, Great Britain is upgrading courthouse facilities on tiny Pitcairn Island (about 3,000 miles from New Zealand in the South Pacific) in response to the claims of investigators who suspect as many as 20 past and current residents of engaging in sex with children. (Only four dozen people presently live on the island–many of them descendants of the original settlers, the famous Bounty mutineers–but it has roughly 400 citizens.) The island has no airport and no harbor, so if charges are filed, trials may be held in Britain or New Zealand using a satellite video hookup from Pitcairn.
In June in Pietersburg, South Africa, a 34-year-old woman from Texas was attacked by three young lions in a game-park enclosure after she started petting one of them. And in July in Orange Beach, Alabama, a 40-year-old Georgia man locked himself out of a 10th-floor condo and, frustrated by the slow response of the building’s security guards, decided to shimmy down to his balcony from the roof; he fell 200 feet into shallow water in the swimming pool, breaking three ribs and puncturing a lung.
More creative smugglers: In July in Falfurria, Texas, border patrol officers arrested two men who’d driven back from Mexico with 11 pounds of marijuana, which they’d apparently hoped to hide in the embalmed body of a dead relative: the corpse’s chest cavity had been cut open, and the wound had a plastic grocery bag taped over it. In July in Brindisi, Italy, a 23-year-old Belgian woman arriving on a ferry from Greece was detained for trying to smuggle her 26-year-old Kurdish boyfriend in a large suitcase. And also in July in Manchester, England, a 17-year-old girl fresh off a plane from Dubai was questioned in the airport when agents realized that the lizard design on her head scarf was an actual endangered chameleon.
in Greece continue to enforce a ban
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Shawn Belschwender.
