Lead Stories
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Two professors recently resigned from West Virginia University to protest its Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health, an organization devoted to anxiety reduction and named after a welder whose epiphany “catapulted him from a routine life of stress and insecurity into a state of deep peace, hopefulness, security and clarity.” According to one professor, a speaker at a recent Banks conference in Seattle presented photographs of “ice crystals formed in the presence of positive thoughts and…in the presence of negative thoughts,” noting that the negative ones “weren’t as pretty” and remarking, “I’m not a scientist myself, but this looks like evidence to me.”
According to an attorney for several students at Benicia High School in California, when principal Robert Palous suspended the students for toilet-papering the school last month, he described their prank as the school’s own World Trade Center attack….That same month, after a judge in Frederick, Maryland, ordered the release of a prostitute’s address book to the Frederick News-Post, outgoing mayor Jim Grimes said, “I absolutely feel that the same thing that happened at the World Trade Center has hit me. I was terrorized [by the News-Post].”…And a month earlier the Associated Press reported that the Miami house where Elian Gonzalez stayed was treated as a shrine by some; one visitor said of Elian’s return to Cuba, “To us, it was almost equivalent to the Twin Towers day.”
People With Issues
Police in Fulton County, Georgia, say 36-year-old Derrick Van would have successfully completed his burglary of a private home last month if he hadn’t dropped some coins on the floor. When he reached down to collect them, he locked eyes with the home owner, who was hiding under a bed; feeling threatened, the home owner fired his .357 Magnum and badly wounded Van.
