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Great Art!

University of Western Australia artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr blend art with science, extracting living cells from animals and growing them on top of biodegradable scaffolds so that when the scaffolds disappear, a living entity remains, in the shape of the scaffold. At the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon, Israel, in April, […]

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Democracy!

In May, a jury in Weld County, Colo., declined to hold Kathleen Ensz accountable for leaving a flier containing her dog’s droppings on the doorstep of U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, apparently agreeing with Ensz that she was merely exercising free speech. Jenny Bailey was elected mayor in Cambridge, England, in May, and her companion-partner Jennifer […]

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Government in Action!

Servicemembers Legal Defense Network activists told reporters in June that at least 59 U.S.-trained Arabic speakers have been ejected from the military because they’re gay (and in each case despite being a native English-speaker who completed intense, expensive military language school). But a month before that, as symbolic of the government’s shortage of Arabic speakers, […]

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Undignified Deaths

(The most recent instance of someone killed by a flying cow occurred on a road near Carnarvon, Australia, in May, when a 26-year-old man in an SUV accidentally crashed into a cow and knocked it into the air; it landed on the vehicle’s roof, collapsing it and crushing the driver. In April, a prominent cat […]

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Recurring Themes

In early May, “scores” of Taiwan lawmakers brawled on the floor of parliament, wrestling, throwing punches and spraying water at each other over an election reform bill, according to a Reuters dispatch. However, a week later, one legislator, and also a U.S. political scientist who follows the Taiwan legislature, told a Reuters reporter that most […]

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Cultural Diversity

In Congo, which has lost an estimated 4 million people in the civil wars of the last decade and where many must get by on about 30 cents a day, “gangs” of designer-clothes-wearing men periodically square off against each other in preening contests in the streets of Kinshasa to prove that Versace and Gucci look […]

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People With Issues

In April, FBI officials warned of a disturbing series of threats dating from 2004 to college athletic officials and news organizations from someone apparently upset that television coverage of cheerleaders emphasizes those showing the least amount of skin (such as Ohio State’s, who often wear long-sleeved, jacketed outfits). According to an FBI agent interviewed by […]

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Least Competent Criminals

Can’t Stop Ourselves: Sheriff’s deputies in Hilmar, Calif., arrested Tasha Silva, 30, in April and charged her with stealing a deputy’s pickup truck, but her boyfriend and co-suspect, Marcus Schulze, fled. According to the sheriff’s office, the couple drove away, thought they were in the clear, and stopped to have sex in the truck, but […]

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Nature Calling

About 100 people were able to escape the perhaps-fatal effects of a sinkhole that collapsed under their one-story apartment house in eastern Sarawak, Borneo, in April, only because Renjis Empati, 57, had arisen in the middle of the night to go to the communal toilet. He noticed the ground moving and awakened all the residents. […]

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The Continuing Crisis

On one fateful day in 2003 in Sikeston, Mo., according to Holly Adams, she had sex at different times with Raymon and Richard Miller, who are identical twins and who did not know about each other’s encounter. Adams became pregnant, but both Millers deny paternity despite, of course, an identical DNA match for each brother […]

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