| December 11, 2008 | - Federal agents arrested hedge-fund manager Bernard Madoff and charged him with running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, possibly the largest in Wall Street history. Madoff faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines; he had hoped to distribute his last $200 million to friends, family, and favored employees before his arrest, but was turned in by his sons.
| Source 1:
SEC
Source 2:
NYT
Source 3:
Bloomberg
Source 4:
WSJ
Source 5:
NYT
|
| June 28, 2008 | - Farmers in Britain, under attack by fuel-poaching
gangs, were creating secure collective fuel-storage compounds for their red diesel, which is used to power tractors. In West Sussex a man named Jon Ward put dogs in his garden and razor wire on his fences to keep thieves away from his heating oil. “Let the bastards try it now,” he said. “Shotgun is also at the ready.”
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| August 15, 2007 | - A Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to intentionally eating glass in over a dozen restaurants to collect insurance compensation.
| Source:
AP via SFGate.com
|
| April 18, 2007 | -
Representative Louie Gohmert (R., Tex.) argued against a hate crime bill from the floor of the House. “If you are going to hurt someone,” he characterized the bill as saying, “if you are going to shoot them, brutalize them, please make it a random, senseless act of violence like Virginia. Don't hate them while you hurt them.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| March 23, 2007 | - After two black Labrador retrievers sniffed out a shipment of nearly a million black-market
DVDs in Johor, Malaysian disc pirates offered a bounty to anyone who kills the dogs, which were on loan from the Motion Picture Association of America. Lucky and Flo were subsequently moved to a safe house.
| Source:
AP via Canadian press
|
| July 19, 2006 | - The president of Vietnam told reporters to “stick to their principles” and to “do their utmost in the fight against wrong-doing and crime.”
| Source:
Vietnam News
|
| July 8, 2006 | - An Army reserve colonel offered to plead guilty to charges that he engaged in bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering while he was stationed in Iraq.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 17, 2006 | -
and bBanana
rustlers were on the loose in Australia.
| Source:
Times Online
|
| April 11, 2006 | - In Italy, Bernardo Provenzano, also called The Tractor, the alleged head of the Italian mafia, was arrested near Corleone in Sicily.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 18, 2006 | - A study found that unattractive people commit more crimes.
| Source:
The Washington Post via the San Francisco Chronicle
|
| July 26, 2005 | - In New York City, subway crime dropped 23 percent in the wake of random bag searches.
| Source:
WNBC.com
|
| May 1, 2005 | - Laura Bush told jokes at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. She accused her husband of attempting to milk a male horse and compared her mother-in-law to a Mafia don. “I am a desperate housewife,” she said.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 2, 2005 | - In Bangladesh, four infants were on trial for looting, with bail set at fifty dollars per infant.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 23, 2005 | - Israeli researchers found that ultra-Orthodox Jews are three times as likely to jaywalk as those in secular communities.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| January 6, 2005 | -
Tom DeLay was still not indicted.
| Source:
The Christian Science Monitor
|
| December 15, 2004 | - The United Nations reported that there had been widespread smuggling of oil out of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority,
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 23, 2004 | - several states were threatening to jail or fine medical personnel who give flu shots to healthy people, and
| Source:
British Medical Journal
|
| October 15, 2004 | - Karl Rove testified before a grand jury investigating the exposure of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA officer.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| October 13, 2004 | - Police in Burlington, Ontario, were searching for someone who glued shards of glass to playground equipment.
| Source:
CBC News
|
| October 10, 2004 | -
Martha Stewart began her five-month prison sentence for telling lies.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| October 7, 2004 | - A Washington, D.C., policeman arrested, cuffed, and jailed a woman for eating a candy bar in the subway.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| September 15, 2004 | -
Martha Stewart asked for permission to begin her five-month prison sentence early instead of waiting for her appeal. Stewart said she would be sad to miss the holiday season but that it was time to reclaim her "good life. I must return to my good works."
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| August 13, 2004 | - A Jelly Belly factory was robbed, and
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 8, 2004 | -
Iraq's new government reinstated capital punishment and issued an arrest warrant for Ahmad Chalabi on counterfeiting charges; Salem Chalabi, Ahmad's nephew and the head of the special tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein for war crimes, was accused of murder.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| July 23, 2004 | -
Russian police broke up a summer camp for young thieves.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 11, 2004 | - Samuel Berger, Bill Clinton's national security adviser, was in trouble for removing classified documents from the National Security Archive.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 9, 2004 | - The Pentagon revealed that pay records of George W. Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War, records that might be able to establish whether he met his military obligations, were accidentally destroyed.
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 2, 2004 | - More than 2,100 Florida residents were found to be wrongly included on a list of ineligible voters.
| Source:
Miami Herald
|
| June 30, 2004 | - two conservative groups were caught illegally promoting Ralph Nader's presidential candidacy in Oregon.
| Source:
CNN
|
| June 25, 2004 | - President George W. Bush was questioned by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as part of the investigation into who in the White House exposed the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, as part of a campaign to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who criticized the decision to conquer Iraq.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 19, 2004 | - White House council Alberto Gonzales testified before the grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame affair.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 16, 2004 | - The Senate agreed to expand the federal definition of hate crimes to include those committed because of "sexual orientation, gender or disability" but defeated a measure that would have eliminated funding for research into "bunker busting" mini-nukes.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 15, 2004 | - In Los Angeles, an intruder cut off the head of Robert Lees, a 92-year-old former screenwriter (of Abbot and Costello comedies), then ran next door, head in hand, and fatally stabbed a neighbor.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 5, 2004 | - Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by prosecutors investigating the illegal disclosure of a covert CIA agent's identity.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 12, 2004 | - In Kansas City a man went on a crime spree and shot two women for wearing blue.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| April 2, 2004 | - President Bush signed a law making it a crime to harm a fetus while committing another crime.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| March 25, 2004 | - The Senate passed a bill making it a crime to harm a fetus while committing a violent crime.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| March 12, 2004 | - Criminal investigations of Halliburton for its war profiteering in Iraq were ongoing; the company has acknowledged that mistakes were made.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| February 28, 2004 | - Treasury Department officials have declared that it is a criminal offense to edit writings from countries under a trade embargo, such as Cuba or Iran.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 26, 2004 | - The chairman of the board of Smith & Wesson resigned after it was discovered that he is a convicted bank robber.
| Source:
Arizona Republic
|
| February 12, 2004 | - An elderly Florida man robbed a bank to pay for his wife's medical bills.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| February 11, 2004 | - A former Texas National Guard officer charged that in 1997 he overheard a superior and a Bush adviser discussing ways to "cleanse" Bush's file to remove embarrassing information. The officer said he later saw papers with Bush's name on them in a garbage can.
| Source:
USA Today, New York Times
|
| February 11, 2004 | - In Finland, a sausage heir was fined $216,000 for speeding.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| January 22, 2004 | - Republican staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were still under investigation for improperly infiltrating
Democratic computers and reading strategy memos, which were then leaked to the press. Several computers, including a server from Senator Bill Frist's office, have been confiscated by the Senate's Sergeant-at-Arms.
| Source:
Boston Globe
|
| January 1, 2004 | - Six men were indicted for burning a cross in the yard of a Georgia woman who was dating a biracial man.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 30, 2003 | - Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the Justice Department investigation of the White House's
exposure of an undercover CIA agent, and a special counsel was named to oversee the inquiry.
| Source:
UPI
|
| December 16, 2003 | -
Santa Claus
robbed a bank in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| December 11, 2003 | - A bank in suburban Baghdad was robbed of about $800,000.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 6, 2003 | -
President Bush, surrounded by ten smiling white men in dark suits, signed a bill outlawing the rare abortion procedure known as "intact dilation and extraction." He said that America "owes its children a different and better welcome."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 31, 2003 | - A clown robbed a bank in Virginia.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| October 30, 2003 | - Shropshire lads were warned by British police to stop throwing eggs or face prosecution; parents were asked to keep a close watch on the household egg supply, and police cautioned shopkeepers to be suspicious of egg-buying children.
| Source:
BBC
|
| October 22, 2003 | - In Arizona, a firefighter pleaded guilty to starting a wildfire so that he could get paid for putting it out.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 12, 2003 | - A man in Pennsylvania charged with killing five people escaped from jail by climbing 60 feet down a rope made from bedsheets.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 11, 2003 | -
Rush Limbaugh, who was forced to resign from ESPN after he made unkind comments about a black football player, admitted to being a drug
addict.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 11, 2003 | - Federal prosecutors indicted Greenpeace, under an obscure 1872 law designed to prevent "sailor mongers" from preying on returning seamen, for authorizing a protest in which two activists boarded a cargo ship and unfurled a banner. "Never before," said the director of Greenpeace USA, "has our government criminally prosecuted an entire organization for the free speech activities of its supporters."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 10, 2003 | - The FBI doubled the number of agents assigned to investigate the White House.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 10, 2003 | - Four white Texans were arrested for beating a retarded
black man unconscious.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 10, 2003 | - A shoplifter in Amsterdam was kicked to death by supermarket employees.
| Source:
Scotsman.com
|
| October 9, 2003 | - A Princeton graduate student was in trouble for pointing out on his website that the copy-protection software on a new music CD could be defeated simply by pressing the shift key when one inserts the disc. SunnComm Technologies Inc. claimed that the student had violated criminal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and threatened to sue him.
| Source:
Forbes
|
| October 8, 2003 | - Transparency International released its annual corruption survey; Bangladesh was rated most corrupt, just beating out Nigeria and Haiti. Finland, Iceland, and Denmark were the least corrupt.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| October 8, 2003 | - Senator Judd Gregg's wife, Cathy, was abducted by robbers at knifepoint from her home in McLean, Virginia, but was soon released.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 5, 2003 | - A pitbull named Murder attacked a young boy in Newark, New Jersey, and nearly chewed off his foot.
| Source:
New York Post
|
| September 30, 2003 | - The Bush Administration rejected calls for an independent counsel in the matter of Valerie Plame, whose identity as an undercover CIA operative was revealed by at least one senior White House official, possibly Karl Rove, in retribution for her husband's skeptical remarks about the president's case against Iraq.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 29, 2003 | -
Witchcraft
killings and mutilations were on the rise in South Africa.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 29, 2003 | - It was reported that the federal government is aggressively using antiterrorism laws to prosecute ordinary criminals.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 28, 2003 | - At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department began investigating charges that the White House leaked the name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press in retaliation for remarks by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, challenging President Bush's
claim that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Africa. An unnamed administration official told the Washington Post that two White House officials had revealed the agent's identity to at least six journalists. "Clearly," the official said, "it was meant purely and simply for revenge." The White House denied that Karl Rove was responsible for the leak, which was a violation of the Intelligence Protection Act and carries penalties of up to 10 years in prison and $50,000 in fines.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| September 25, 2003 | - in Minnesota, a high school freshman shot and killed one student and severely wounded another;
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 22, 2003 | - The International Monetary Fund accused Arafat of moving about $900 million into a bank account under his personal control.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 20, 2003 | - An American soldier who was drinking beer after hours at the Baghdad city zoo shot and killed a Bengal tiger that had bitten another soldier who was trying to feed it.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 18, 2003 | - Merrill Lynch avoided criminal charges in the Enron affair by agreeing to let the government monitor some parts of its affairs for the next 18 months; the firm promised not to engage in any more shady business deals.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 13, 2003 | - Two hundred chickens were beaten to death with a golf club near Brisbane, Australia.
| Source:
Courier-Mail
|
| September 11, 2003 | -
Chinese
police were told that they can no longer torture
crime suspects.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| September 11, 2003 | - Sweden's foreign minister was murdered.
| Source:
BBC
|
| September 3, 2003 | - Paul J.
Hill, a Christian who murdered an abortion doctor in Pensacola, Florida, was executed by lethal injection.
Hill said that he was looking forward to getting his reward in heaven.
| Source:
New York Times, New York Post
|
| September 2, 2003 | - The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced a settlement with energy companies that benefited from market manipulation in the California
energy crisis two years ago.
The companies agreed to pay about $1 million in fines, or about 3 cents for every Californian, though the energy scam cost the state $8.9 billion, or $250 per citizen.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 27, 2003 | - A Swedish man attacked two elderly women with a samurai sword and cut off one ear.
| Source:
Nettavisen
|
| August 26, 2003 | -
Kidnappings were on the rise in Baghdad.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 30, 2003 | - A former Nixon aide claimed to have overheard the president order the Watergate break-in personally.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| July 27, 2003 | - The NAACP called for an inquiry into the death of a black man who was found hanging from a tree with his hands tied behind his back; local police had concluded that the man, who had been dating the daughter of a white police officer, had committed suicide.
| Source:
AP
|
| July 18, 2003 | -
Japanese
police replaced their sirens with the recorded sound of church bells, in hopes of soothing agitated criminals.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| July 10, 2003 | - A new study found that marriage significantly undermines the careers of scientists and criminals.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| June 6, 2003 | -
John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon, was more blunt: "If Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked.
Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause.
It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.'"
| Source:
Findlaw.com
|
| January 14, 2003 | -
A new report found that the Vatican's crime rate is among the highest in the world, with 608 criminal offenses last year in a state with just over 500 residents.
| |
| October 1, 2002 | -
Texas executed a clown who murdered two young girls for playing loud music and talking back when he asked them to turn it down.
| |
| December 4, 2001 | - In Louisiana, a judge was suspended for 30 days for beating up another judge and leaving him bleeding on the floor.
| |
| November 27, 2001 | - Wild elephants rampaged through two villages in Bangladesh, killing four people.
| |
| November 20, 2001 | - Refugees reported that they were killing civilians as well.
| |
| November 20, 2001 | - Northern Alliance forces entering Kabul were photographed beating and summarily executing a wounded Taliban soldier as he begged for his life.
| |
| November 6, 2001 | - An appeals court in San Francisco overturned a 50-year prison sentence of a shoplifter as cruel and unusual punishment.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | - An Australian woman, a professional butcher, was convicted of killing her lover, boiling his head and body parts with some vegetables, and serving the stew to his children.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | - In Ohio, judges and prosecutors apologized to a man who spent 13 years in prison for rape after new DNA tests cleared him of the crime.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - A commuter plane crashed in Alaska, killing nine people.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - In Nigeria, a pregnant woman was sentenced to death by stoning for the crime of premarital sex.
| |
| October 9, 2001 | - Philippine military officials said they had found the decapitated remains of an American hostage who was abducted by the rebels in May.
| |
| October 9, 2001 | - Abdo Ali Ahmed, an American citizen, was murdered in East Reedley, California, for being an Arab.
| |
| October 9, 2001 | - Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, a tick-borne virus similar to Ebola, was killing
Afghan refugees and health workers.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | - Lawmakers were concerned that antiterrorism legislation proposed by the Bush Administration contained language that would define common criminals as terrorists.
| |
| September 18, 2001 | - In Turkey, the Revolutionary People's Liberation Army-Front carried out a suicide attack in Istanbul, killing two policemen.
| |
| September 18, 2001 | - Congressional leaders declared that spy agencies must be given more freedom to fight terrorism: the freedom to conduct unfettered electronic surveillance, the freedom to hire foreign criminals, the freedom to assassinate the enemy. Ordinary Americans, however, would probably have to give up some of their freedom.
| |
| September 11, 2001 | - It was revealed that the United States has been engaged in germ-warfare research that violates or comes close to violating the 1972 treaty outlawing biological weapons.
| |
| September 11, 2001 | - A federal appeals court found that prison inmates have a right to procreate that “survives incarceration.” A virus was killing thousands of salmon in eastern Maine.
| |
| September 11, 2001 | - Sudden oak death, a mysterious disease that causes its victims to weep sap, was killing trees in California.
| |
| September 4, 2001 | - American officials pointed out that such extrajudicial killings tend only to inspire suicide bombers.
| |
| August 28, 2001 | -
Scientists found that people who eat a lot of snacks are more prone to macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the U.S. The FBI uncovered a six-year scam in which eight people rigged McDonald's contests, embezzling $13 million in cash and prizes.
| |
| August 28, 2001 | - Tom Green, husband of Hannah, Cari, Linda, LeeAnn, and Shirley, was sentenced to five years in prison for the crime of polygamy.
| |
| August 28, 2001 | -
Iranian
police launched a crackdown on “flagrant manifestations of corruption,” including selling pet dogs, playing loud music, and displaying women's underwear in shop windows.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | - A single snake, which reportedly can be seen only by women and which disappears after striking, was being blamed for killing seven women in Kano, Nigeria.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | - North Carolina's governor said he would sign a bill outlawing the execution of retarded people.
| |
| July 24, 2001 | - A natural-gas well exploded near Waco, Texas, killing two Halliburton Company workers.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | - People in Congo were still killing suspected witches.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | - There were reports that Russian troops terrorized two Chechen villages, torturing and beating the men and looting the homes, after four soldiers were killed by mines.
| |
| July 10, 2001 | -
Police in Tampa, Florida, were using surveillance cameras and face-recognition software to scan for suspected criminals in the crowds of Ybor City, an historic downtown neighborhood.
| |
| July 10, 2001 | - According to witnesses, a 14-year-old dehydrated boy was denied water, beaten, and forced to eat mud, whereupon he vomited and died at a wilderness bootcamp for troubled youths in Arizona.
| |
| July 3, 2001 | - American and British warplanes bombed Iraq again, killing three people.
| |
| June 26, 2001 | -
Cookie Monster was beaten up at a theme park in Pennsylvania after he refused to pose for a photograph with a three-year-old girl.
| |
| June 26, 2001 | - Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the ten-year-old English boys who kidnapped, tortured, and murdered two-year-old James Bulger eight years ago, were released on parole with new identities to protect them from the public.
| |
| June 26, 2001 | -
Killings continued in Israel and Palestine despite the cease-fire; among those murdered were two Israeli soldiers, who were lured into a trap by a suicide bomber, and a Palestinian man who was thought to be “moving suspiciously” and ran when challenged by soldiers, who shot him in the back.
| |
| June 19, 2001 | - A New York jury sentenced a terrorist to life in prison for killing 213 people in the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Kenya.
| |
| June 12, 2001 | - Tropical storm Allison flooded Houston, killing over a dozen people.
| |
| June 5, 2001 | -
Indonesia continued to disintegrate; parliament voted 365-4 to begin hearings to impeach President Abdurrahman Wadid a few days after the attorney general absolved him of corruption charges; great mobs of his supporters ran amok.
| |
| June 5, 2001 | - Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing, decided to ask for a stay of execution; his lawyer said that “the most important thing in his life is to help bring integrity to the criminal justice system.” In Israel, a Palestinian
suicide bomber blew himself up on a crowded sidewalk outside a beachside nightclub frequented by teenagers, killing at least 20 and wounding almost 100.
| |
| June 5, 2001 | -
New York
police, acting on a tip, entered an apartment and found a bathtub filled with bloody water and a severed head under the sink; two men were arrested for killing and cutting up the victim with a hacksaw so they could get his apartment. The suspects threw the victim's hands out the window when police knocked on the door.
| |
| May 29, 2001 | - Protesters in Brazil dropped their trousers in front of congress to protest rampant corruption.
| |
| May 29, 2001 | - Someone threw a haggis through the window of a Scottish woman living in England; police said they were treating the incident as a “racially-motivated hate crime.”
| |
| May 22, 2001 | - The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot observed that “only a revenge-seeking fool could believe that eliminations and missile fire, the demolition of neighborhoods, the killing of soldiers and civilians and the destruction of homes could restore personal calm and security.” A Palestinian
suicide bomber killed ten Israelis and wounded 100 others at a shopping mall; Israel responded with F-16 air strikes.
| |
| May 22, 2001 | - There were reports that an Iranian woman would be stoned to death for killing her husband, who was buried next to a cow's skull in a fruit garden.
| |
| May 15, 2001 | - Richard Baumhammers, an immigration lawyer who ran amok last year and murdered
a Jewish neighbor, two Asians, an Indian, and a black, was sentenced to death.
| |
| May 8, 2001 | -
Indonesia's
parliament voted to censure President Abdurrahman Wahid for corruption and incompetence.
| |
| May 8, 2001 | - The Pope visited Greece, the first such visit in about 1,300 years; Orthodox Christians protested, apparently still upset about the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, and held up insulting placards calling the Holy Father, among other things, a “two-horned monster of Rome.” President Macapagal Arroyo declared that a “state of rebellion” existed in Manila as thousands of supporters of former president Joseph Estrada (who was arrested recently on corruption charges, fingerprinted, and photographed like a common thief) stormed the presidential palace.
| |
| May 1, 2001 | - Missouri's House of Representatives passed a bill making it a crime for a politician to lie in a campaign advertisement.
| |
| May 1, 2001 | - The House of Representatives approved a bill criminalizing violence done to a fetus during the commission of a federal crime against a woman.
| |
| May 1, 2001 | - Brigitte Bardot was extremely upset that the mayor of Bucharest, Romania, was killing
stray dogs instead of putting them up for adoption as the aging actress had demanded; she accused the mayor of tyranny.
| |
| April 24, 2001 | - A man named Luther V. Casteel was told to leave JB's Pub in Elgin, Illinois, so he went and got his guns and shot up the bar, killing two and injuring 21.
| |
| April 17, 2001 | - There was speculation in the press that crime rates may have dropped in recent years as a result of legalized abortion.
| |
| April 3, 2001 | - Ivan Boroughs, a Jamaican man who spent twenty-nine years in prison for breaking a window, was finally released; Jamaican officials said that Boroughs, who had been deemed mentally unfit to stand trial but was nevertheless kept in prison, had not been forgotten: “We were monitoring his progress yearly, but we had to wait on communication from the court and that did not come until Tuesday.” A man in New Jersey was on trial, facing ten years in prison, for allegedly stealing 58 cents from a parked car.
| |
| April 3, 2001 | - Yugoslavian commandos arrested former president Slobodan Milosevic on corruption charges.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | - After a heavy lobbying campaign by the electric industry, President George W. Bush broke a campaign promise and decided not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, humiliating Christie Whitman, his EPA administrator, and effectively killing the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. The President said that he was worried about an energy crisis and that he wasn't entirely convinced that global warming was real.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | - An American navy fighter jet dropped a 500-pound bomb on American troops in Kuwait, killing six.
| |
| March 13, 2001 | - Georgia's supreme court agreed to decide whether killing people with an electric chair was cruel.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | - In Indonesia, Dayak headhunters were killing hundreds of Madurese migrants on the island of Borneo, where Madurese have settled recently as part of a program to reduce overcrowding.
| |
| February 20, 2001 | - A Palestinian
bus driver ran down a crowd of Israelis at a bus stop, killing eight.
| |
| February 20, 2001 | -
Islamic rebels in Algeria murdered three men, twelve women, and twelve children in their homes; a new book published in France claims that similar attacks have been carried out by soldiers disguised as rebels.
| |
| February 13, 2001 | - Joseph Estrada, the former president of the Philippines, asked for more time to answer corruption charges but was refused; Estrada is said to be having a hard time finding a lawyer willing to defend him.
| |
| February 6, 2001 | - An innocent man who spent thirty-three years, two months, and five days in prison was released after documents were presented that proved not only that he was innocent but that he had been framed by Federal Bureau of Investigation informants, who themselves committed the murder in question. F.B.I. agents knew that their informants were guilty of the crime but remained silent to protect their sources.
| |
| February 6, 2001 | -
Mexico's new customs chief fired forty-three out of forty-seven customs supervisors in an attempt to reduce corruption.
| |
| January 30, 2001 | -
Thailand's
election commission ordered revotes in 62 districts because of widespread cheating, though it confirmed the overall victory of the Thai Love Thai party, whose leader, the new prime minister, is under investigation for corruption.
| |
| January 30, 2001 | - O. J. Simpson lost an appeal of the $33.5 million civil judgment that was entered against him for killing his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.
| |
| January 23, 2001 | -
President Clinton pardoned 140 criminals, including Patty Hearst, a revolutionary; his brother Roger, who had a fondness for cocaine; and former CIA director John Deutch, who found it difficult to leave classified information in the George Bush Center for Intelligence.
| |
| January 16, 2001 | -
Afghanistan's chief mullah decreed that encouraging a Muslim to convert to Christianity was a capital crime; Mullah Muhammad Omar also let it be known that selling any kind of anti-Islamic literature would be punished by five years in prison.
| |
| January 16, 2001 | - A husband and wife who ran a travel agency in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, were arrested for killing their clients and selling their organs to the Russians; six bodies and 100 passports were found in their apartment.
| |
| January 9, 2001 | - Two Louisiana death-row inmates were released from prison; both men were convicted of murdering an elderly couple in 1986; both men were released after a judge found “a total lack of credible evidence” linking them to the crime; both men were convicted on the testimony of a mentally incompetent jailhouse informer nicknamed Lyin' Wayne.
| |
| January 9, 2001 | -
Colombia was spraying Roundup on crops near villages in the Putomayo province as part of the U.S.-backed Plan Colombia antidrug campaign; villagers complained that the pesticide was killing their food crops and livestock and that it was making them sick.
| |
| January 9, 2001 | - Spanish cattlemen were trying to prevent their government from killing whole herds when one cow comes down with mad cow disease.
| |
| January 2, 2001 | - A mob ran through Jerusalem chanting “Death to the Arabs!” and beating any Palestinians they happened upon.
| |
| January 2, 2001 | -
Israeli soldiers assassinated Dr. Thabet Thabet, a senior Palestinian health official, near his home in the West Bank: Last week, an Israeli general admitted on the radio that the extra-judicial killing of suspected terrorists was an official policy of the Israeli government.
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| January 2, 2001 | - Vandals broke into the Civil Rights Museum in Selma, Alabama, and ripped up about 30 photographs of state troopers beating marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1965; a Ku Klux Klan hood was stolen from the museum two weeks ago.
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| December 26, 2000 | -
Canadian Inuit were killing themselves in alarming numbers.
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| December 19, 2000 | - Timothy McVeigh, who was sentenced to die in 1997 for blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killing 168 people in Oklahoma City, asked to be put to death within the next four months.
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| December 19, 2000 | - Two days after a white farmer was ambushed and murdered, Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe urged blacks “to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy.”
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| December 12, 2000 | -
Pentagon investigators acknowledged that American troops had massacred unarmed Korean civilians near No Gun Ri at the beginning of the Korean War, but claimed there was no evidence of direct orders from superiors to kill the Koreans, which would constitute a war crime.
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| December 12, 2000 | - Ivoirian Muslims and Christians were killing one another again in the aftermath of a disputed election.
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| December 12, 2000 | - A man named Abbas Abbas shot up a mosque in the Sudan, killing twenty people, three days before general elections, which were being boycotted by opposition parties.
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| December 12, 2000 | - The president was considering pardons for a number of criminals, including Michael Milken (the former junk-bond king), Webster Hubbell, and Susan McDougal.
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| December 5, 2000 | - The terms of the amnesty he negotiated upon his abdication included murder but not kidnapping, and the bodies of nineteen people who were abducted by the “Caravan of death,” a helicopter-borne death squad led by one of Pinochet's close aides, were never found, world-historical ruthlessness giving rise to world-historical irony—which then devolved into farce when an appeals court suspended the arrest order.
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| December 5, 2000 | - Holland legalized the killing of terminally ill patients by doctors; a provision that would have allowed children to choose death was withdrawn.
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| November 28, 2000 | - Peru's dictator Alberto Fujimori stopped in Japan on his way to an economic summit, decided he liked it there, and quit his job, via fax; Peruvians were generally pleased with the development, and within days Fujimori was named in a corruption investigation.
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| November 28, 2000 | -
Israeli
defense forces responded to terrorist
attacks with bombs of their own, killing several adults and dismembering at least one child.
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| November 28, 2000 | - A car bomb went off in the Israeli coastal city of Hadera, killing two; Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel would “get even.” There were more killings.
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| November 28, 2000 | - After a court rejected plans to build a new cemetery in the French town of Le Lavandou (the old one was full), Mayor Gil Bernadi made it a crime to die.
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| November 14, 2000 | -
Zimbabwe's supreme court declared that the recent seizures of white-owned farms were illegal and ordered the government to evict black squatters occupying the farms; the government, which has ignored two previous court orders on the subject, said there was “no going back.” Indonesian troops in Aceh, on the island of Sumatra, were killing civilians suspected of collaborating with rebels; bodies of men arrested by security forces routinely turn up dead, mutilated, dismembered.
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| November 14, 2000 | -
Police shot protesters in Mozambique, killing ten, after an election the opposition said was rigged.
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| November 7, 2000 | - A man who killed his family in 1975 was found guilty of killing his second family last year; he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in his previous trial.
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| November 7, 2000 | - Protestant paramilitaries were killing one another in Belfast.
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| November 7, 2000 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed to open Soviet archives to researchers for data about the millions murdered by Joseph Stalin.
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| November 7, 2000 | - Garry Kasparov lost the world championship of chess to his former assistant Vladimir Kramnik; Kasparov was previously beaten by Deep Blue, an IBM computer.
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| October 31, 2000 | - A mob in Sri Lanka stormed a detention center and murdered twenty-four inmates, most of whom were Tamil Tiger rebels who had surrendered under a government-sponsored rehabilitation program.
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| October 31, 2000 | -
Congress passed an official secrets act that criminalized the disclosure of any “properly classified” government secrets, including revelations of illegal acts by criminals who happen to be government officials.
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| October 31, 2000 | - A new insecticide called the Green Muscle appeared to be effective in killing locusts.
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| October 17, 2000 | - Three young Bronx men were charged with a hate crime after they threw a bottle of vodka at a synagogue.
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| October 17, 2000 | - The director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press announced that media pundits are less influential than researchers had thought: “There is increasing evidence the American public has an ability to ignore what the pundits say.” Two hundred million gallons of coal sludge escaped from the Martin County Coal Corporation's coal preparation plant in Inez, Kentucky; the blob of sludge was spreading through the area at a rate of ten miles a day, killing
fish and wildlife as it oozed through woods and streams.
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| October 10, 2000 | - Hundreds of members of the Falun Gong, a banned Chinese meditation cult with mildly apocalyptic doctrines, were beaten and arrested in Tiananmen Square.
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| October 3, 2000 | - A Greek ferryboat crew was arrested and charged with manslaughter after the boat hit a marked and illuminated reef off Paros and sank, killing at least 90; the crew had put the boat on autopilot so they could watch a soccer match.
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| October 3, 2000 | - A man named Ronald Edward Gay shot up a gay bar, killing one man and injuring six others, because he was tired of being teased for having the name “Gay,” which two of his three sons had renounced.
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| September 26, 2000 | - A new book claimed that anthropologists working in Venezuela in the 1960s deliberately infected the Yanomami people with measles, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, in order to test theories about evolution and eugenics; the same anthropologists, who were working in association with the United States atomic energy commission, also injected Americans with radioactive plutonium without their knowledge or permission.
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| September 26, 2000 | - Robert W. Ray, Ken Starr's replacement as independent prosecutor in the Whitewater case, grudgingly admitted that he lacked evidence that the Clintons had committed a crime.
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| September 19, 2000 | - Unknown terrorists bombed the Jakarta, Indonesia, stock exchange, killing at least thirteen.
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| September 19, 2000 | - Former Indonesian president Suharto, whose son has been implicated in the recent bombings, called in sick again for his corruption trial; the court ordered medical tests to determine his true state of health.
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| September 19, 2000 | - A Southwest Airlines passenger was beaten to death by other passengers on a flight from Phoenix to Salt Lake City after he tried to attack the flight crew.
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| September 12, 2000 | - The leaders of Aryan Nations, a white supremacist
cult in Idaho, were ordered by a jury to pay $6.3 million in damages to a woman and her son who were beaten by Aryan Nations security guards; after the verdict, Richard Girnt Butler, the pastor of Aryan Nations, said: “This is nothing. We have planted seeds.”
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| September 12, 2000 | - Louisiana agreed to stop placing children in private prisons where they were routinely beaten and neglected.
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| September 12, 2000 | - Five teenagers were arrested for beating a pizza delivery man to death for a free meal; the boys left $600 in their victim's pocket.
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| September 12, 2000 | - Several UN workers were beaten to death in West Timor; the next day, Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid said “I think now the situation is very good there. That is according to the full report I got this morning.”
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| September 12, 2000 | - A homeless man was discovered camping out in the Cape Town home of South African president Thabo Mbeki; South Africa's ministry of corrections said it would release 11,000 petty criminals to ease prison overcrowding.
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| September 12, 2000 | - Carlos Castaño, the head of Colombia's rightist paramilitary death squads, released an open letter in which he said that “The crime of anti-subversion or of pro-capitalism cannot exist in a civilized universe.”
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| September 5, 2000 | -
Europe's tallest structure, a 1,772-foot television tower in Moscow, burned, killing at least three and disrupting television for 20 million Russians.
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| September 5, 2000 | - Eleven residents of Matoon, Illinois, were arrested in connection with an investment scam that took in some $12.5 million from over 10,000 suckers worldwide.
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| September 5, 2000 | - A new study found that postal workers are one third less likely to be murdered on the job than other workers.
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| August 29, 2000 | - Smoking among teenagers continued to decline, as did violent crime.
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| August 22, 2000 | - Kurds, who still suffer harassment, torture, and political killings in Turkey, were unable to respond officially in their own language.
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| August 22, 2000 | - Czar Nicholas II and his family were made saints for the “humbleness, patience, and meekness” they displayed when they were murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918.
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| August 1, 2000 | - Former Indonesian president Suharto's lawyers claimed that he was too brain damaged to be tried on corruption charges.
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| July 25, 2000 | - A large quantity of files from Helmut Kohl's government, which were thought to have been destroyed in an effort to protect the outgoing German regime from corruption charges, turned up in the archives of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
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