In March, the Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) StarPhoenix, citing several witnesses inside the Pine Grove Correctional Centre, reported that some formerly heroin-addicted female inmates so desperately crave methadone that they routinely consume the fresh vomit of inmates currently on methadone treatment because enough is still present in the regurgitation. The newspaper uncovered the practice while investigating the death of an inmate in February. Said a source, “The whole building knows (that the inmate choked on vomit). That’s how she died.”

The litigious society

Kaziah Hancock and Cindy Stewart won almost $300,000 in damages in January from a breakaway Mormon sect in Manti, Utah, based on their lawsuit for fraud claiming that self-proclaimed prophet Jim Harmston failed on several promises, including one to produce Jesus Christ himself in the flesh. Hancock said Harmston persuaded her to give 67 acres of land to the church and that the church would give her back a place to live but that after the church made one payment on the new place, Harmston said God told him to stop paying.

 In March, a Canadian federal judge refused to quash convicted murderer David Wild’s $2 million (U.S.) lawsuit against the Mission Medium Security Institution in British Columbia. Wild claims the guards aren’t quiet enough when they do nighttime bed checks and thus make getting a good night’s sleep impossible, causing headaches, loss of balance, blurred vision, irritability and depression, and leave him too weary to play in the prison’s soccer tournament.

Not my fault

Fugitive Harvey Taylor, 48, told reporters in February from his hospital bed in Bangor, Maine, that he would soon sue the sheriff’s deputy who failed to arrest him fast enough, a delay that resulted in Taylor’s spending three nights in the woods and losing two toes to frostbite. Taylor said that after fleeing the pursuing squad car, he got lost in the woods in hip-deep snow and that “(n)obody looked for me, not even the detective that I’m going to sue as soon as I can find me an attorney that will take the case.” Taylor is a convicted sex offender wanted for probation violations in Brevard County, Fla.

Our civilization in decline

Earlier this month police in Jaipur, India, arrested 81 bookmakers who had been offering bets as to whether the Hindu-Muslim riots would escalate to adjacent states (as well as offering over-under bets on the number of casualties). And Reuters reported in March that veterinarians in Jerusalem are finding that more dogs suffer panic attacks due to increased gunfire and are generally prescribing Valium for them.

Unclear on the concept

In a joint federal-state child-protection announcement in December, the German government proposed that pornography Web sites could transmit only between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (which, for example, is 5 p.m. to midnight in New York and 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. in California). And a vacancy announcement for the Auburn University football team’s defensive coordinator (a job filled in February by Mr. Gene Chizik) listed minimum qualifications as “seven years experience as NCAA Division I defensive secondary coach,” but then noted that “women are encouraged to apply.”

And, in the last month …

The Archbishop of Canterbury said that financially faltering parishes should rent out their buildings part-time as “disco” clubs (London). A man and woman, both 24, were arrested after they had urgently pulled off a highway, into a private driveway, at 7 a.m., to have ostentatious sex, even though there was $11,000 worth of marijuana in their car (West Rockhill Township, Pa.). On International Women’s Day (March 8), a female judge dismissed all domestic violence charges against a firefighter on the grounds that the man was a career hero but would be forced to retire if convicted (Hamilton City, New Zealand). The California Supreme Court ruled that police could arrest and search a person whose only offense was riding his bicycle against traffic, if the cyclist was not carrying identification.