Here are a few items for you:
■ (1) In July, former peace activist Christiaan Briggs, 30 (who had gone to Iraq in 2003 to protest the impending US attack), was arrested in Islington, England, and charged with knocking a man out (leaving him in a coma) in a fight after he allegedly hit on the man’s girlfriend. (2) The British watchdog Environmental Agency, which prosecutes pollution violators, was fined the equivalent of nearly $14,000 in May for allowing toxic waste to flow from its monitoring station along the River Exe in Somerset. (3) In July, municipal officials in Provincetown, Mass., held a community meeting to air numerous complaints by heterosexuals that they are targets of hate speech by the town’s large gay and lesbian population.
■ What Goes Around, Comes Around: Colin Watson, 63, one of Britain’s most notorious illegal collectors of rare bird eggs (having been convicted six times and having had nearly his entire collection confiscated by the government), fell to his death in May from a tree he had climbed in south Yorkshire to check out a nest.
And this one's priceless:
■ In June, the Ministry of Higher Education of Saudi Arabia (home of 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers), along with the country’s civil aviation authority, jointly announced scholarships for Saudi men and women for bachelor’s and graduate-school study in the United States in such fields as “air traffic control,” “flight safety” and “other majors related to the airline transport industry.”
We'll never learn, will we?
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