Lead Stories
In the September 19 primary in New Ashford, Massachusetts, none of the town’s 202 registered voters cast a ballot, including the town clerk, who manned the polls for 14 hours. A Green Party candidate for the Maine legislature failed to vote for himself in the June primary, leaving him with zero votes and forcing him to return his public financing. And the money flowed so freely at the GOP convention in August that Philadelphia Inquirer reporters discovered a lobbyist’s check for $5,000 stuck to the bottom of a utility cart outside the hall.
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A U.S. Forest Service researcher announced in August that her team had discovered the largest living thing ever found, a 2,400-year-old fungus covering 2,200 acres in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. DNA testing confirmed that the structure was indeed a single organism. Three weeks later near Lake Okeechobee, a University of Florida biologist found what he called an “evolutionary relic”: a previously unknown carnivorous flowering plant that somehow grows entirely underground using photosynthesis.
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The U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn a Californian’s drug possession conviction even though one juror admitted he made his decision by flipping a coin. (The juror defended himself by noting that he made it best two out of three.) An Atlantic City casino introduced a row of stationary bicycles rigged with 25-cent slot machines. And doctors in San Diego revealed that transplanting portions of a woman’s ovaries into her arm allowed her to grow new eggs for in vitro fertilization.
