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In September 23-year-old flamenco star Juan Manuel Fernandez Montoya–aka Farruquito–married a teenage girl in a televised ceremony in Seville, Spain, that included the Gypsy custom called the “test of the handkerchief,” in which the bride’s friends demonstrate her virginity by collecting three drops of blood from her hymen. The new Mrs. Farruquito passed the test: footage of the stained handkerchief was aired on all of Spain’s major TV networks.
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At 7 AM on November 2, about 45 demonstrators gathered outside the headquarters of Alliant Techsystems in Edina, Minnesota, for the 512th consecutive Wednesday to protest the company’s manufacture of military weapons that indiscriminately kill civilians: land mines, cluster bombs, etc. Alliant told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that it had stopped making those munitions before the protests began in 1996 (though it’s still the country’s leading maker of bullets), but protesters said that that wasn’t the point: “The fact that they have not manufactured them recently doesn’t matter. The company did years ago.”
In a September incident in Salt Lake City, a woman (described as being in her early 20s) tried to pass a 25-year-old male motorist on an I-15 on-ramp, plowing into a row of traffic cones in the process, then rolled down her window and screamed at him. The man, according to a report in the Deseret Morning News, responded by making an “obscene hand gesture.” The woman pulled out a .357-caliber revolver and fired four times, shooting off the tip of the man’s right middle finger, and sped away. (She then made a U-turn on the highway, crashed into a concrete barrier, and abandoned the car, which turned out to have been stolen, in the middle of traffic.)
