Lead Stories
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Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues was staged in a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in March, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. Ensler and a troupe of local actresses, all wearing modest traditional clothing, performed for an invitation-only audience of 150 (in a country where women aren’t supposed to bare their arms in public, advertising was out of the question). “If [this show] can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” said Hibaaq Osman, a Somali Muslim activist in the audience, who in a fit of enthusiasm renamed the capital city “Vaginabad.” “Having these Pakistani women talking about vibrators–that’s what it’s all about.”
In March in Edinburgh, Scotland, police put out an alert after a man who said he was raising money for charity by performing bizarre stunts persuaded a young female shop assistant to let him cover her bare feet in baked beans and other canned goods and then take photos of them. (He’d asked her to close her eyes and guess what food he was using.) And in February on the campus of Missouri Western State College, a motorist described as white, balding, and 40ish pulled up next to a female student in a parking lot, grabbed her arm, licked her hand, and drove off.
Educators Out of Control
On March 27 in Columbus, Ohio, 40-year-old John Gladney was arrested about a block from the National City Bank he’d allegedly robbed just minutes before. According to police, Gladney was easy to spot because he was walking strangely, in obvious pain–he’d stuffed the bag of stolen money down his pants, and the dye pack the bank had hidden in it to mark the bills had exploded near his groin.
