Lead Story
Inmates at a prison in New South Wales, Australia, taking advantage of a wardens’ strike in May, broke into an office and telephoned an order for 18 tons of concrete to be delivered as a prank. While they were at it, they called out for 312 pizzas. (The concrete was sent back, but the prison had to pay for the pizzas.)
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A Camden County (New Jersey) grand jury declined in May to indict a 102-year-old woman for having shot her granddaughter last December in a dispute over a radio. In July in New York City, Oliver Barre, 95, was indicted in the death of an 88-year-old neighbor. He had accused the woman of poisoning people in the building and of putting a voodoo hex on his roommate. (Barre died three weeks after being indicted.)
A ninth-grade boy went into intensive care in May after a pole-vaulting accident at a track meet in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He had cleared the bar when a gust of wind blew him past the landing pit onto the concrete.
A rumor in England in December that the McDonald’s Corporation was supporting the Irish Republican Army, the Economist later reported, emanated from some Britons’ picking up on their satellite dishes Cable News Network reports that McDonald’s was lobbying heavily in the United States for tax-free individual retirement accounts.
