Lead Stories
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In Saint Petersburg, Florida, the Reverend Henry Lyons, head of the National Baptist Convention, was convicted in February of defrauding two firms that thought they were purchasing a mailing list of the convention’s purported 8.5 million members. Prosecutors insist the number was wildly inflated, and Lyons’s former assistant testified that Lyons instructed her to use a telephone-book software program to create a membership list. Among the people that wound up on the list was an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
First Things First
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in October that LuLu, a Vietnamese potbellied pig, saved the life of her owner, Jo Ann Altsman of Beaver Falls, by alerting a passing driver that Altsman was in trouble. Altsman had suffered a heart attack at home and said later that LuLu squeezed through a small doggy door, pushed open a gate that she had never opened before, ran to the road, and according to a witness, lay down in the middle as soon as a car approached. The driver stopped and then heard Altsman’s cries.
In January the Minnesota computer-component manufacturer Innovex Inc. agreed to pay former executive Mary E. Curtin $750,000 to settle her sex-discrimination lawsuit. During the time Curtin said she was being discriminated against, her husband, Thomas W. Haley, was Innovex’s chairman and CEO.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Shawn Belschwender.
