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Claiming to be concerned about identity theft, Ron Blankenship, the 63-year-old owner of a shoe-repair business, withheld all personal information from the public during his quiet campaign for sheriff of Jefferson County, Alabama. After he finished second in the Democratic primary earlier this month, earning a spot in a runoff, reports surfaced of a shady past: in the late 80s he was wanted by local authorities on a variety of charges including theft and forgery, and according to police Blankenship faked his own death in 1990 (allegedly in an attempted insurance scam) before serving time for assault. Confronted with this record by the Birmingham News, the candidate suggested it must be that of a different shoe repairperson named Ronald Wayne Blankenship who, like him, was married to a woman named Judy Ruth Green Stonecipher Blankenship.
The best policy: In April 20-year-old Jonifer Jackson reportedly told police in Clarksville, Tennessee, that the reason he’d been firing a pistol while preaching in the street was that it was the only way he could get people to pay attention. Also in April Philip Daniels, 42, was arrested on felony bomb-making charges after allegedly setting off a series of homemade explosives near his apartment in suburban Dallas; he reportedly explained, “I like to make loud noises sometimes.” And in March, according to police in Iwata, Japan, 25-year-old Yasuhisa Matsushita explained why he’d broken into a high school, taken a girl’s swimsuit out of a locker, put it on, and defecated in it: “I did it because it felt so good.”
The island of Tanna, part of the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, is home to some of the last remaining cargo cults, whose adherents believe that by imitating the behavior of American GIs stationed there during World War II–marching in homemade uniforms while carrying bamboo “rifles”–they will induce an ancestral spirit to come back from the West in human form bringing with him a great wealth of manufactured goods, or cargo. It’s been known for some time that ever since a visit to Tanna by Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, in the early 70s, residents of the village of Yaohnanen have regarded him as this messianic figure and awaited his return. Less known, according to a dispatch earlier this month in the UK’s Daily Mail, is that Prince Philip has over the years cooperated by sending his admirers three framed autographed pictures of himself, including a formal portrait of him holding a Yaohnanen war club.
