Lead Stories
In April, just as North Carolina representative Frank Mitchell was introducing his bill to revise a state law so that schoolteachers who have sex with their students would be punished, the chief inspector of schools in Great Britain was still dealing with fallout from his February remarks that teacher-student sex could sometimes be “experiential and educative.”
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In December Suphatra Chumphusri explained why she killed her drug-dealing son in Chiang Rai, Thailand: “No matter how much I loved him, I had to do it for the sake of the general society.” And the court-appointed psychiatrist examining Russell Eugene Weston Jr., the man who went on a shooting rampage in the Capitol Building, killing two, said Weston believed he had to get the “ruby satellite” in a Senate office to stop cannibalism that had produced rotting corpses. The corpses would infect everyone with “Black Heva,” which Weston called “the most deadliest disease known to mankind.”
Sounds like an urban legend, but it’s not: In April in Fayetteville, Arkansas, exploding beans and rice tore a hole in the roof of Steve Tate’s home. Tate had packed the food in frozen carbon dioxide in six-foot-long pipes to store at a cabin, but the gas expanded. Bomb technicians exploded the rest of the pipes Tate had prepared.
An April Associated Press feature reported on people with a fondness for (or addiction to) eating kaolin, the smooth clay used in chalk, paint products, and ceramics. Small bags of kaolin (labeled “not for human consumption”) are sold at convenience stores in central Georgia, where half the world’s kaolin is produced, and at farmers’ markets in Atlanta. Some kaolin eaters say it settles the stomach, but medical authorities say it leads to constipation and serious liver and kidney damage.
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