Lead Stories
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At the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, some of the estimated 65,000 delegates (from more than 170 countries) not only luxuriated in five-star accommodations but enjoyed an elegant spread of food and drink that included literally tons of lobster, oysters, filet mignon, salmon, caviar, and pate de foie gras, as well as champagne, fine wines, and mineral water. Organizers cleared out hundreds of trees to make sure delegates’ limousines would have easy access to the conference center, which is only a few miles from the squalid township of Alexandra, one of South Africa’s poorest. (Poverty in Africa is up over 35 percent since the last such summit, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.)
In Dix Hills, New York, 65-year-old Sophia Reitan fell and broke her arm when a Pentecostal minister at the Upper Room Tabernacle Church, believing her to be under the influence of the Holy Spirit, put his hand on her forehead and gently pushed her; she swooned backward and no one caught her. She settled with the church for $80,000 in January. And in May in Brooklyn, a judge released Clarence Cromwell, 29, even though he’d confessed to police that he’d killed a man–officers had forgotten to read Cromwell his Miranda rights.
In August college student Maxim Segalov inadvertently forced an American Airlines flight from Chicago to San Francisco to make an unscheduled landing in Salt Lake City when he alarmed the crew by trying to recharge the batteries to his portable CD player by heating them with a cigarette lighter; he was ejected from the plane and arrested. And in July the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reported that a passenger was detained at Lambert Field after a random inspection of one of his checked bags–he’d packed his old novelty alarm clock, which was outfitted with six toy sticks of dynamite.
In the Last Month
