Lead Story
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Colombian garbage collector Oscar Hernandez claimed in March that he had been kidnapped by security guards during Carnival in Barranquilla and taken to a lab at the Free University there, where a syndicate planned to kill him for his body parts. In the widely reported police investigation that followed, officials turned up 11 bodies, parts of 22 others, and a report that body bounty hunters received $200 per person. Police identified most of the victims as garbage collectors.
The International Amateur Athletics Federation recently changed its procedures for gender checks of female athletes. The federation, which had used a chromosome smear test for 25 years, decided late last year that it would merely make visual inspections from then on. The federation explained that the chromosome test was “ethically unacceptable.”
An 81-year-old woman died of severe burns in December in Columbia, Missouri, when her 15-mile ambulance ride to the hospital took too long. At the time the hospital’s emergency helicopter and crew were on a public-relations assignment, with one crew member dressed as Santa Claus.
Isbrain Marquez Pacheco, 53, was indicted in March in East Windsor, New Jersey, for the attempted murder of his wife of three weeks. According to police, Pacheco said he beat her with a baseball bat after he demanded that she stay home from a friend’s baby shower and she refused. Pacheco said, “If I had killed her, I would have no regret” because he was “offended by what she said to me.”
