Lead Story
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In October the borough council in the London suburb of Romford, England, issued a massive report–300 pages, according to the Romford Recorder–on its 12-month, $19,000 investigation to determine which councillor had interrupted a September 2005 meeting by repeatedly making “baa” noises. The probe narrowed down the field to four suspects, to be questioned this month. And in September the Guardian reported on criticism of an antipigeon program instituted in 2003 by London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, in which two hawks were hired to patrol the area around Trafalgar Square; animal activists called it cruel, while other politicians objected to the cost–about $430,000, they said, or roughly $170 for each of the 2,500 pigeons scared away or eaten so far.
On the Campaign Trail
While training at the Dukovany nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic in September, a U.S. official wandered off from his International Atomic Energy Agency group, in violation of procedure, and fell into a water tank. (The water wasn’t radioactive.) Also in September, in Spokane, Washington, a 70-year-old man was doing yard work when he fell headfirst into the small shaft in the ground that housed his water meter and got his head stuck; he spent four hours upside down before firefighters rescued him. And after Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan fainted in Ankara in October, bodyguards drove him to the hospital but after getting out of the armored car accidentally activated its security system, locking the unconscious Erdogan inside; they had to smash a window with a sledgehammer to open the door and lift him out.
Thinning the Herd
