Lead Stories
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Rudolph Hicks Jr., 30, was arrested in Brooksville, Florida, in early December for trespassing. Before deputies could cuff him he shrugged off five Taser shots, a bite in the leg from a police dog, and a faceful of pepper spray. A few days later police in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, were considering whether to file animal-cruelty charges against Robin Bush, who fatally strangled a 130-pound rottweiler after it attacked her Yorkshire terrier. And the following week in Miami, a man in his 20s suffered only minor injuries from an apparent suicide attempt in which he drove off the fifth floor of a parking garage at 60 miles per hour, breaking through a steel-reinforced concrete wall, flying 50 feet across an alley and a parking lot, and crashing into the second floor of a neighboring pharmacy.
Ironies
In a November radio interview Jens Orback, Sweden’s minister for integration and gender equality, responded to criticism from gay groups who have called him “neoconservative” and “fundamentalist.” Denying that he was intolerant of sexual minorities, he said, “I had a wonderful aunt who lived in Canada with a horse. I thought it was wonderful. Let people live as they wish.” Later, attempting to explain himself, Orback insisted that his aunt’s relationship with the horse had been platonic.
A 39-year-old man in Chillicothe, Ohio, was hospitalized in December after an unsuccessful suicide attempt that accidentally blew his own house to pieces and did heavy damage to houses nearby. He told police that as he let his home fill with natural gas it occurred to him that a spark might set off an explosion and harm others, but just as he dashed to the basement to turn off the electricity, the gas ignited. According to police reports the man had tried to kill himself a month earlier by attaching a garden hose to his car’s tailpipe and running the other end through the passenger window, but his car ran out of gas before he could die; he then hooked up a propane tank for the same purpose but once again outlived his fuel supply.
