Lead Stories
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Los Angeles surgeon Brigitte Boisselier announced in November that her company, Clonaid, might soon accept orders from clients who want to clone themselves. She hopes human cloning techniques will be refined within two years. In her spare time, Boisselier is a bishop in the Raelian religion, founded in 1970 by a former sports reporter in France, which states that earth was populated 25,000 years ago with alien DNA. Said Boisselier, “I’m a scientist and very pragmatic even if I do believe in little green men.”
A Perfect Life for Teenagers
In November the state of Punjab, India, announced that it was calling off an 18-month search for the state’s most honest government officer (which carried an award of more than $2,000) because it couldn’t find anyone worthy. However, as part of the same program, the government revealed that it had found 300 corrupt officers worthy of prosecution. India was recently named the world’s eighth most corrupt country by an international watchdog organization.
Kenneth Starr’s Kind of Country
In May, after another guest at New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel disturbed her sleep for two hours and urinated outside her door, Elizabeth Jaffe received a complimentary bottle of wine and a fruit and cheese basket from the management to make amends. According to Jaffe’s $6.5 million lawsuit against the hotel, filed in August, the fruit and cheese caused severe vomiting, requiring her to be hospitalized with intestinal bleeding and dehydration. “Obviously,” said Jaffe’s lawyer, “it was the fruit.”
Thinning the Herd
