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In separate incidents in the same week in September, Debra Rodriguez, 41, of Ames, Iowa, and Kristin R. Smebak, 34, of Superior, Wisconsin, both of whom had been drinking, forced their young children to drive them home. Rodriguez’s 11-year-old daughter caused a rollover, injuring both herself and her mother, but Smebak’s 8-year-old son made it safely over the bridge connecting Duluth, Minnesota, to Superior before being spotted by a patrolman, who arrested Smebak.
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West German criminologist Christian Pfeiffer, writing in the weekly Die Zeit in July, blamed East Germans’ proclivities for joining neo-Nazi groups (they are four times more likely to do so than West Germans) on the way they were potty trained. After World War II, the East German government issued manuals on toilet training, with rigid steps that Pfeiffer says stripped the kids of their individuality and reinforced government control.
According to a Cox News Service report in August, 21 people, most of them very intoxicated men, were fatally run over last year in North Carolina while lying in the middle of the road. A few days later, the British Health Education Authority announced that 43 people, most of them drunk, died last year in house fires after they tried to fry chips late at night.
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