No habla English?
The city commission of the border town of El Cenizo, Tex., voted in August to establish Spanish as the town's official language and to prohibit municipal employees, under penalty of firing, from cooperating with the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service on undocumented aliens. Mayor Rafael Rodriguez has acknowledged that he entered the United States illegally many years ago (though he is now a citizen).
Premature release
Scottish psychopathic murderer Noel Ruddle, who has been in the Carstairs mental hospital in Glasgow for eight years, was released in August because no treatment is currently available for his paranoid schizophrenia, and British law prevents a prisoner's hospitalization if it does not result in the improvement, however slight, of his condition. Various officials and psychiatrists quoted in the British press were aghast at the decision, for nearly 2,000 seriously disturbed prisoners are in situations similar to Ruddle's.
Male and female
The San Francisco Examiner reported in June that one-third of outdoor rodents at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge have both male and female reproductive organs, a finding attributed to a nearby reservoir of selenium, which is a byproduct of agricultural runoff. The lead investigator said the rodents are male on the outside and female on the inside.
Questionable
judgments
In July, police in Tijuana, Mexico, investigating a roadside sniper attack, jailed suspect Dennis A. Macchione, 33, before they had released the victim's two companions, whom they were holding temporarily. The companions chatted and shared food with Macchione but only because they didn't know who he was; they said if they had known, they'd have killed him.
And in December, Las Vegas police inadvertently locked up a witness to a contract killing in the same holding cell with one of the two men accused of arranging the hit.
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