Lead Stories
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In January the British government passed a law to define the crime of “sexual activity in a public place,” but its definition allows people to have sex in public lavatories as long as they cannot be seen by other patrons. And in February the California Patriot (a student publication at Berkeley) reported that a university-funded gay student group maintained a Web site on a university server where visitors posted comments about the most hospitable campus rest rooms for public sex (which is still illegal in California).
In December 45-year-old Robert John Cusack pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 57 days in jail for smuggling endangered wildlife on a June flight from Thailand to Los Angeles–he had four birds of paradise and 50 protected orchids in his luggage, which inspectors at LAX discovered after one bird burst out of his open suitcase and flew off down an airport corridor. At first Cusack denied he had anything more to claim, but after an agent ordered him to strip, he relented: “Yes,” he said, “I’ve got monkeys in my pants.” (The monkeys–actually two lesser slow lorises–are recovering in a zoo, but the birds and orchids did not survive.)
Unclear on the Concept
A Woman With Two Problems
A Maryland auditing office examining the cell-phone usage of state employees found that the government could’ve saved $130,000 last year if 74 high-volume callers had switched to plans with higher limits….In Dallas, Texas, Daniel Torres was convicted of killing a man after prosecutors showed that Torres’s DNA had been found in the beak of the victim’s pet cockatoo, which had come to its owner’s defense….And a sex-crime unit in Saint Albans, Vermont, unable to meet its budget in the face of government cuts, announced it would turn to raffle tickets and bake sales to raise money.
