Lead Stories
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A confidential report prepared for the Australian Foreign Ministry containing uninhibited appraisals of many South Pacific leaders was accidentally left on a table at a regional economic ministers meeting in Cairns, Australia, in July, and picked up by the press. The report described many of the leaders as inept or corrupt. And two weeks earlier, Austria’s foreign minister came under fire for name-calling at a breakfast meeting in the Netherlands. Minister Wolfgang Schuessel reportedly called one German official “a real pig,” the president of Belarus a “smelly Turk,” and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright “an aging Bette Davis.”
Police Blotter
A Chicago Tribune correspondent, writing from Caracas, Venezuela, in April reported on the recent carjacking of Rosa Clemente, who was en route with her grandmother to visit her ailing grandfather. The grandmother pleaded with the two robbers to at least swing by the hospital and drop the two women off, which they reluctantly did. The grandmother also got them to promise to return the car by Monday because the women needed it to get to the hospital. The men actually returned the car, but the women couldn’t use it for three months because police were holding it as evidence.
At a celebrity auction in May, Debbie Dacoba of Paw Paw, Michigan, bid $8,625 for a pair of Mr. Ed’s horseshoes and was so overcome with joy when she won that she had to retreat to the ladies’ room for 20 minutes until she stopped crying. Later she told a reporter that she would keep the horseshoes in plastic because specks of brown residue in the nail holes “could be manure, which I hope it is because then I have a piece of him.”
News of the Weird reported in 1996 on Oklahoma rapist Darron Bennalford Anderson, who had received a 2,200-year sentence in 1994, but appealed and won a new trial. Unfortunately for him, he was convicted again and given more than 9,000 additional years behind bars for a total of 11,250 years, including 4,000 years each for rape and sodomy, 1,750 years for kidnapping, 1,000 years for burglary and robbery, and 500 years for grand larceny. In July 1997, the state court of criminal appeals held that the grand larceny charge was double jeopardy on the robbery conviction and dismissed it, speeding Anderson’s release date up five centuries to the year 12,744 AD.
