Lead Story
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In February a national nonprofit organization of yoga instructors and enthusiasts filed a lawsuit in San Francisco against celebrity yogi Bikram Choudhury (creator of the trendy Bikram style), challenging his right to trademark yoga positions and harass independent studios with threats of exorbitant fines. They claim yoga is a 5,000-year-old tradition and can’t be owned; he counters that he’s copyrighted only his special sequence of positions, not the positions themselves. “I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each,” Choudhury said in a 2002 interview for Business 2.0 magazine. “Nobody fucks with me.”
Finer Points of Privacy Law
In February social workers found a feral family of six living in a corrugated-metal shed on a large farm near Theunissen, South Africa, where they’d been left almost completely alone for more than 20 years. Only the father spoke a recognizable language; the four children (ages 14 to 26) communicated with gestures and grunts and had never met anyone outside the family–they simply ran into the hills whenever the rare visitor approached. One boy walked on all fours, like a monkey or frog; another had never slept indoors. The father insisted that the kids had been normal till age ten, and guessed that their present condition was his ancestors’ way of punishing him for his failure to perform the traditional sacrifice of a sheep to celebrate each child’s birth.
In February the attempted robbery of a liquor store in Greenville, South Carolina, was aborted when the thief told the clerk to empty the register and she simply ran out of the store; he’d been pointing his bare index finger at her, simulating a gun.
