Lead Stories
Latest adventures of defendants who elected to be their own lawyers: Joe Pietrangelo, 54, on trial in September for assaulting the mayor of Niagara Falls, Ontario, refused to register a plea because the “corrupt” judge would not allow him to complain about issues concerning his father’s will. (He was convicted.) Lawrence Brown, 30, on trial at press time for murder in Toronto, decided he didn’t need a lawyer even though he had told a guard, “You guys are always picking on me because I killed some white bitch.” And Norman Laurence, 37, awaiting trial for murder in Warwick, Rhode Island, and acting as his own counsel, told the judge: “I did kill the woman. But that confession isn’t right.”
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A May Wall Street Journal dispatch from Beijing profiled the first successful franchised restaurant in China, Shen Qing’s Baked Pig Face, which features a whole pig’s head cooked with herbs for 12 hours. Connoisseurs eat all of it, said Shen, including the brain, which “can make you smarter.” Among the restaurant’s side dishes: roast ox penis.
Break Into Jail, Go to Jail
Jesus T. Rodriguez, 34, was arrested in September on drug trafficking charges; he had aroused suspicion when he walked into a bank in Strongsville, Ohio, with two grocery bags full of cash totaling $300,000 yet listed himself on a form as unemployed. And Drtangyn Sinclair, 33, was arrested in Franklinton, Ohio, in October and charged with robbing a pharmacy; he had yanked the cash register off the counter and carried it away, unaware that the cash drawer was a separate unit under the counter.
