Not-so-perfect gift: dissecting kit with real carcass
Christmas Madness: (1) In November, the upscale New York City menswear and accessories store Jack Spade removed from its holiday catalog a $40 frog-dissection kit (with a real carcass) after numerous queries from people wondering what in the world the store was thinking.
(2) A holiday party for inmates at Britain’s Peterborough Jail promised a fun time with Xbox and PlayStations, along with cash gifts of about $9 each, which is greater than the value of the candy boxes the jail will give its guards for Christmas.
I Know My Rights!
The North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned the cocaine-possession conviction of Timothy Stone in September, ruling that a search of his person was unconstitutional even though he had given police permission. The judges agreed with Stone that when he consented, he never expected the search would include the officers holding out the waistband of his sweatpants and shining a flashlight on his genitals, which is where he happened to be hiding a small container of cocaine.
Unintended Consequences
(1) Kimberly Baker, 22, sought child support in Warrensburg, Va., in October from the father of her daughter. However, when officials realized that the father, now 16, would have been 13 when the child was conceived, that made him a rape victim under state law, and thus, they arrested Baker.
(2) The “Berkeley Pit” in Butte, Mont., is the nation’s largest environmental-disaster site, with 40 billion gallons of highly toxic copper-mine waste that the federal government has long feared too expensive to clean up. However, Montana Tech researchers, writing in the Journal of Organic Chemistry in July, have found more than 160 types of “extremophiles” (organisms that thrive in toxicity) in the pit and have demonstrated that some are effective against lung and ovarian cancers.
Compelling Explanations
Ricardo Meana, 81, was charged with attempted murder in November in Sun City, Fla., when his 82-year-old wife, who has Alzheimer’s, was found inside a van in a store’s parking lot struggling with the plastic bag over her head. Police were called, but Meana seemed unconcerned and even nonchalantly resumed shopping, saying that he often put the bags on when his wife felt sick, so that she would not vomit on herself.
The Laws of Irony
Federal prosecutors have insisted so far that any ill-gotten money that former Enron executives had squirreled away in their spouses’ names still can be fully recovered by the government, except for one executive. Michael Kopper, once a director of Enron’s global finance unit, pleaded guilty in 2002 to illegally obtaining $16.5 million, but he is openly gay. And since his home state of Texas does not recognize his union with his longtime partner, prosecutors cannot treat the partner as a “spouse” and have lumped him with “third party” transferees, whose assets are much more difficult to obtain (according to a November report in Washington Blade).
? University of California, Irvine, professor Elizabeth Loftus, a prominent scholar on people’s overconfidence about memory, was turned down by the judge as an expert witness in November in the forthcoming trial of “Scooter” Libby (Vice President Cheney’s former assistant, who has been charged with lying to prosecutors about phone conversations, which Libby says weren’t lies but just forgetfulness).
At a hearing on Loftus’ credentials, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald not only exposed some problems with her research but elicited from Loftus the confident assertion that the two had never before met. However, Fitzgerald then immediately refreshed Loftus’ memory, reminding her that he had cross-examined her in court once before.
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