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London

Oct 2005Days after the London attacks that Bush said the U.S. was at war abroad “so we do not have to face them here at home”: 4
Source:

The White House (Washington)

Sep 2005Rank of “time to buy” in the futures markets, among the first thoughts Brit Hume said he had after the London bombings : 1
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Fox News Channel (N.Y.C.)

Oct 2003Chance that a Londoner believes that epilepsy is caused by "evil spirits" : 1 in 20
Source:

National Society for Epilepsy (Chalfont St. Peter, England)

Jun 2003Percentage change in central London's average rush-hour car speed since a £5 toll was imposed there in February: +111
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Transport for London

Dec 2002Organizers' estimated attendance at this fall's largest peace rallies in London and New York, respectively: 400,000, 25,000
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Stop the War Coalition (London)/Not in Our Name (N.Y.C.)

August 11, 2:00 AM , 2020A drum maker in London died after inhaling anthrax from an African animal skin he was using to make a drum.
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BBC

September 21, 2009One-time child music prodigy Helen Goddard, now a music teacher in London and known as “jazz lady,” was sent to jail for having sex with a 15-year-old female student who she claimed had pressured her into the relationship.
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BBC News

September 7, 2009A developer in London was found guilty of murdering his tenant so he could move ahead with plans to flip the property.
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BBC

May 15, 2009A man in London was given a suspended sentence after he was arrested for soliciting a prostitute to take his 14-year-old son's virginity.
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Reuters

February 26, 2009The principal of a London school, charged with downloading child pornography, skipped bail after undergoing treatment for a thyroid condition. “Please warn officers that when he is arrested he might be radioactive,” said a judge. “This is not a joke.”
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Daily Mail

November 5, 2008A council in London banned the placing of foster children in households with smokers.
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Reuters

October 22, 2008 British atheists, furious about ads for Christianity that appear on London buses, were raising money in order to buy their own ads featuring the slogan “There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
Source:

New York Times

October 14, 2008General Colin Powell endorsed Obama for president. “I'd have difficulty,” said Powell, “with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.” He also attended an African culture festival in London, appearing onstage to do the finger-pointing dance to “Yahoozee,” a Nigerian rap song about Internet fraud.
Source 1:

Yahoo

Source 2:

BBC

July 24, 2008Actor Christian Bale was arrested in London for allegedly assaulting his mother and sister.
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Telegraph

June 29, 2008Gardeners across Britain were reporting a harvest of deformed, dangerous vegetables, traced back to the Dow AgroSciences herbicide aminopyralid, which can wind up in manure. It was “scandalous,” said a woman with a patch near Bushy Park in London, “that a weedkiller sprayed more than one year ago, that has passed through an animal's gut, was kicked around on a stable floor, stored in a muck heap in a field, then on an allotment site and was finally dug into or mulched on to beds last winter is still killing 'sensitive' crops and will continue to do so for the next year.”
Source:

The Guardian

June 15, 2008 British and American special forces were operating in Pakistan in an attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden before George W. Bush leaves office. “If he can say he has killed Saddam Hussein and captured Bin Laden,” a U.S. intelligence source told the “Times” of London, “he can claim to have left the world a safer place.”
Source:

Times

June 15, 2008Two Anglican priests married in London,.
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Telegraph

February 27, 2008A man who calls himself “Osama bin London” was convicted of running terrorist training camps in England.
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Washington Post

January 27, 2008Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, the 36-year-old son of Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was linked to attacks that killed 38 Iraqis, wounded 225, and destroyed 50 buildings in a Mosul slum. The London School of Economics graduate, known in Libya as “the Engineer” for his reputation as a reformer and an advocate of human rights, allegedly funds the Seifaddin Regiment, which is allied with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Source:

AP

December 2, 2007A 3.3 pound truffle sold for $330,000 at an auction held simultaneously in Macau, London, and Florence. The winning bidder, Macau casino owner Stanley Ho, outbid the British artist Damien Hirst and Sheikh Bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi.
Source:

Giant truffle sets record price

November 8, 2007A London woman, who says she only called herself the “Lyrical Terrorist” because “it sounded cool,” was convicted under the UK Terrorism Act for posting poems on the Internet praising Osama bin Laden and for owning terrorist manuals. “You have been in many respects,” said the judge, “a complete enigma to me.”
Source:

BBCnews.com

October 3, 2007A Thai restaurant in London was cordoned off by police after passersby mistook the smell of its extra-spicy homemade chili sauce for a chemical outbreak.
Source 1:

Cape Times

Source 2:

Sky News

July 2, 2007Police found a pair of Mercedes-Benz sedans filled with gasoline and nails parked in the center of London, and two men crashed a Jeep Cherokee into the glass doors of Terminal One at Glasgow Airport. The vehicle failed to penetrate the doors, but the driver poured gasoline over himself and the Jeep, and the Jeep blazed. The throng of travelers in the terminal stampeded away from the inferno, and the flaming driver staggered out of the Jeep, threw punches, and shouted, “Allah, Allah.” The crowd of travelers in the terminal stampeded away from the fireball. Stephen Clarkson, a bystander, pounced on the burning man. “I managed to knock the fellow to the ground,” said Clarkson. “His clothes had partially burned from his body. His hair was on fire. His whole body was on fire.” Police arrested the charred driver and the unscathed passenger. The discovery of a suspicious device on the driver’s person resulted in the evacuation of the hospital where his burns were being treated, and authorities blew up a suspicious car in the hospital parking lot. Detectives blamed an eight-person Al Qaeda cell controlled by someone they called “Mr. Big” and commenced raids. Three suspected collaborators of the would-be suicide bombers, including a 27-year-old woman, were apprehended.
Source:

Telegraph

May 23, 2007A South London artist planned to protest the royal family's treatment of animals by eating a corgi.
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Ananova

May 21, 2007The 138-year-old tea clipper Cutty Sark burned in London.
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BBC News

April 28, 2007Sony apologized and admitted that it might have been “inappropriate” to promote a new videogame based on Greek mythology by holding a launch party in London featuring topless serving girls and guests eating offal from the stomach of a decapitated goat.
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thisislondon.co.uk

April 24, 2007A man dining at the London restaurant “Zizzi” amputated his penis with a kitchen knife.
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BBC

January 26, 2007 North Korea demanded 44 million euros from the insurance company Lloyd's of London as compensation for damages in an alleged catastrophic helicopter accident in April 2005. According to their filed claim, a helicopter owned by the state airline was flying from Pyongyang to a remote island to save a woman who was in labor with triplets when it crashed into a warehouse full of humanitarian-relief supplies, causing a fire. “All this business about spending their money on their nuclear program,” said a source close to the North Koreans, “is complete tosh.”
Source:

London Times

January 15, 2007 Scientists in London were working on a gum that suppresses appetite and fights obesity. “Obese people like chewing,” explained a researcher.
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BBCnews.com

November 25, 2006In London, Col. Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB agent, died several weeks after being poisoned with polonium 210, a rare isotope that is used in nuclear bombs and moon buggies. Investigators fear that Litvinenko, who accused Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination, may have spread radiation to his wife and son as they hugged and kissed him on his deathbed.
Source 1:

Sky News

Source 2:

Sun (U.K.)

Source 3:

Daily Mail

October 26, 2006A pelican attacked and ate a pigeon in London's St. James's park.
Source:

BBC News

August 2, 2006The London School of Economics determined that good-looking couples are 36 percent more likely than their ugly counterparts to have female offspring.
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Washington Post

June 20, 2006Four men suspected of aiding a Canadian terrorist cell were arrested in London,.
Source 1:

The New York Times

Source 2:

BBC

June 19, 2006 London's mayor cracked down on a “radical” pigeon-feeding “splinter group” in Trafalgar Square.
Source:

The New York Times

April 18, 2006The New York Stock Exchange was considering a merger with the London Stock Exchange.
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Reuters UK

April 14, 2006In London, a woman's skeletal remains were found two years after her death, propped in front of a still-on TV. “I did notice a kind of rotten smell,” said a neighbor, “but the bins downstairs are strong and the stairwells smell with junkies.”
Source:

BBC News

April 4, 2006Doctors in London reported that a man who has taken 40,000 doses of Ecstasy was having trouble with his short-term memory.
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The Guardian

March 16, 2006 UNESCO met to discuss how to preserve world heritage sites, like the Tower of London and the Great Barrier Reef, from the effects of global warming; the United States said that the organization had no brief to discuss an unproven theory.
Source:

BBC News

February 24, 2006The mayor of London was suspended for four weeks with full pay for saying to a Jewish journalist: "You are just like a concentration-camp guard."
Source:

BBC News

February 19, 2006Riots over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad continued around the world. In Nigeria 16 people were killed in rioting and 11 churches were burned; in Libya at least 10 people were killed; and in Pakistan at least 5 people were killed. In Volgograd, Russia, officials closed the city newspaper after it published a cartoon that showed Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, and Buddha watching TV together. Fifteen thousand people protested the cartoons in London. “We have to speak up,” said a Muslim demonstrator, “to prevent something like the Holocaust from happening.”
Source 1:

CNN.com

Source 2:

The New York Times

February 10, 2006Riots over blasphemous cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad broke out in India, Indonesia, Kashmir, Palestine, Thailand, the autonomous Somali region of Puntland, and Afghanistan—where 11 demonstrators were killed, at least 4 of them by NATO troops. A Taliban commander offered 100 kilograms of gold to anyone who killed those responsible for the cartoons. Other anti-Muhammad-cartoon protests were held in London and Philadelphia. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called on newspapers to stop re-publishing the drawings, and U.S. President George W. Bush condemned the riots but also criticized publishers. "With freedom," said the President, "comes the responsibility to be thoughtful about others." An Iranian newspaper announced that it would publish cartoons mocking the Holocaust. Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor who published the original caricatures of Muhammad, said that he'd like to re-publish the Holocaust cartoons and was subsequently put on leave by his boss. Danes were increasingly concerned that their country would be singled out for terrorist attacks. "We make fun of everything here," said a carpenter in Copenhagen. "One shouldn't take it so seriously."
Source 1:

Arab News

Source 2:

Al Jazeera

Source 3:

BBC News

Source 4:

Channel 4

Source 5:

ReviewJournal.com

Source 6:

CBC News

Source 7:

Al Jazeera

Source 8:

ABC News Online

Source 9:

Bloomberg News

February 3, 2006Professor Philippe Sands of University College, London, said he had seen a secret memo that details a January 2003 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush. According to Sands' account of the memo, Blair offered Bush full British support for an invasion of Iraq regardless of whether U.N. inspectors found evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Bush also told Blair that he was thinking of having U-2 reconnaissance planes painted with U.N. colors and then flown over Iraq in order to provoke Saddam Hussein into firing upon the planes.
Source:

The Guardian

January 21, 2006In London a northern bottlenosed whale swam up the Thames, sparking a massive rescue effort before the whale died.
Source:

BBC News

January 18, 2006 Scientists in London found more evidence of a link between the parasite Toxoplasma gondii in cat feces and the development of schizophrenia in rats.
Source:

Imperial College London

December 24, 20054,000 London Tube workers voted to hold a 24-hour walkout on December 31.
Source:

BBC News

December 23, 2005A senior member of the International Olympic Committee revealed that London probably only won the right to host the Olympics in 2012 because of a voting error.
Source:

BBC News

December 18, 2005North of London, thieves used a crane to steal a two-ton Henry Moore sculpture, “Reclining Figure,” that was valued at more than $5 million; authorities fear the thieves may melt it down for scrap metal.
Source:

AP

November 30, 2005 Scientists in London were planning to insert nose cells into damaged human spines in the hope that the cells will stimulate the growth of nerve fibers.
Source:

The Guardian

November 24, 2005A London man was stabbed to death by someone in a Santa hat and beard.
Source:

BBC News

October 10, 2005 Londoners were concerned about crack-addicted squirrels.
Source:

The Register

August 16, 2005Secret documents revealed that Jean Charles De Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot and killed as a terrorist by police on a London train, was not carrying any bags, was not wearing a bulky winter coat, and did not jump any turnstiles. He was, however, still shot seven times in the head.
Source:

ITN

July 31, 2005 British police had arrested nineteen people believed to be connected to the London bombings.
Source:

BBC News

July 24, 2005A suspicious package in Little Wormwood Scrubs was detonated safely.
Source:

BBC News

July 22, 2005Around twenty London police officers chased a Brazilian electrician named Jean Charles de Menezes onto a train and shot him dead, thinking he was a terrorist.
Source:

BBC News

July 22, 2005A Muslim cleric in London said that bomb attacks would continue.
Source:

Washington Post

July 21, 2005More bombs went off in London's public-transport system, but only the detonators of the bombs exploded. There was one injury.
Source:

BBC News

July 11, 2005 Terrorists set off bombs on three trains and a bus in London, killing fifty-two people, despite the fact that in 2003 Dick Cheney said that “our military is confronting the terrorists, along with our allies, in Iraq and Afghanistan so that innocent civilians will not have to confront terrorist violence in Washington or London or anywhere else in the world.”
Source 1:

The Scotsman

Source 2:

The White House

July 8, 2005 London began to scan the bodies of tube passengers.
Source:

Times Online

July 8, 2005Several London hotels increased their rates in response to the bombings.
Source:

BBC News

July 8, 2005 British MP George Galloway said that “London has reaped the involvement of Mr. Blair's involvement in Iraq.”
Source:

Democracy Now!

June 17, 2005A report prepared for the London Metropolitan Police Service expressed concern that young African boys were being sacrificed in England.
Source:

The Guardian

June 10, 2005Two crows attacked a jogger in London, drawing blood.
Source:

This is London

May 28, 2005In London, Big Ben broke down for ninety minutes.
Source:

BBC News

April 15, 2005A London grandmother coldcocked a burglar with a garden gnome.
Source:

CNN.com

March 18, 2005A woman in Zimbabwe testified that she had paid an advisor $5,000 to fly four invisible mermaids, named Emma, Charmaine, Sharvine, and Bella, from London to Zimbabwe.
Source:

Boston.com

February 11, 2005 Anti-Semitism was on the rise in London; there were complaints of arson, beatings, and the mailing of a snuffbox filled with excrement.
Source:

The Independent

December 24, 2004A mentally ill man went on a stabbing rampage in London, killing one and injuring five.
Source:

Guardian

December 23, 2004 Tony Blair toured the Middle East, and called for a peace summit in London. The United States and Israel both told him to cut it out.
Source:

Scotsman.com

October 0, 2000A London taxi driver tied one end of a rope around a post and the other around his neck and drove into a pillar, launching his head from the car.
Source:

Mail Online


December 2009

THE GENERAL ELECTRIC SUPERFRAUD
Why the Hudson River Will Never Run Clean
By David Gargill

THE MASTER OF SPIN BOLDAK
Undercover with Afghanistan’s Drug-Trafficking Border Police
By Matthieu Aikins

MERMAID FEVER
A story by Steven Millhauser

UNDERSTANDING OBAMACARE
By Luke Mitchell

Also: Dave Hickey and Wendell Berry