Lead Stories
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Future of War: Although for now India and Pakistan have backed off from the brink of nuclear war over Kashmir, computer-hacking clubs in both countries have escalated their assaults on each other’s national computer networks, according to a July Washington Times dispatch. Retaliating for Pakistani hacking that accompanied the suicide attack on India’s parliament in 2001, Indian hackers infected Pakistani networks with the destructive Yaha virus, provoking a renewed barrage of counterattacks. Indian hackers are now threatening to retaliate with a more damaging variant of the Yaha virus.
Houston pamphleteer Hutton Gibson, who considers himself a devout Catholic, maintains that there was no Holocaust and that Pope John Paul II is an imposter plotting to destroy Catholicism from within. A July profile in the Houston Press likened the 84-year-old Gibson to the paranoid character in the movie Conspiracy Theory played by Mel Gibson–who happens to be his son. “Whenever you say ‘plot,’ people automatically think ‘nutcase,’” grumbled Gibson pere.
In June police responding to an early-morning noise complaint in Woodlawn, Kentucky, inadvertently stumbled upon what appeared to be a marijuana nursery operated by a mother and her two teenage children. The cops said the kids responded eagerly to their questions about a pot plant plainly visible from the front door, then proudly invited them in for a guided tour of the household’s elaborate hydroponic system. The mother, 42-year-old Bernadette Dusing, was at home at the time but did not participate in the tour.
A woman who found her daughter unconscious in a backyard pool revived her using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which she said she couldn’t have performed if she hadn’t seen it done on Baywatch (Brooklyn, New York)….A 37-year-old man who reported to a hospital emergency room with a knife sticking out of his temple and embedded deep in his brain waited, fully conscious, for six hours while doctors planned the complicated–and ultimately successful–surgery to remove it (Wellington, New Zealand).
