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According to an April New York Times dispatch, at least a third of all brides in Kyrgyzstan are abducted by their husbands in accordance with a practice called ala kachuu (roughly, “grab and run”). The prospective groom, usually with the help of friends, kidnaps a woman and brings her home, where his family tries to convince her to accept him. If they can keep her there overnight (by force or otherwise), she must agree to the marriage or face being humiliated and ostracized, as her virginity will thereafter be suspect; in many cases the bride’s own parents advise her to submit. Though ala kachuu has been illegal for years, the law against it is rarely enforced.
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According to a July report by WCMH TV in Columbus, Ohio, the Living Word Tabernacle in nearby Waverly revoked the membership of Loretta Davis, 65, because she had stopped paying her tithe after being hospitalized with congestive heart failure. A church official said Davis could still attend as a nonmember. And a study released in July by researchers at Bangor University in Wales found that 3 percent of Church of England clergy (or about 300 clergy members) doubt the existence of God.
The bodies of Kentucky State Reformatory inmates Avery Roland, 26, and Michael Talbot Jr., 24, were found in a nearby landfill the day after they went missing in July; an investigator said they had probably stowed away inside a Dumpster, apparently unaware that the prison’s garbage is always compacted four times before it leaves the grounds and once just afterward. And in a four-day period in July, two 19-year-old men–one in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the other in Louisville, Kentucky–fell to their deaths while car surfing. According to a witness, the man in the Sheboygan incident was flung off the car shortly after he yelled to his driver, “Is that all you got?”
