Police and prosecutors in Dallas, appropriately sensitive at having been the site of the 1963 killing of President Kennedy, have apparently taken out their shame on assassination buff Robert Groden. As the Dallas Observer reported in September, Groden has been ticketed by police dozens of times for operating book sales booths near the "grassy knoll" (site of the alleged "second shooter" of the president) -- and yet he prevails in court every single time (82 straight, and counting). (Tip for visitors from the Observer: Never publicly utter "grassy knoll" in Dallas, as it seems particularly to offend the police.) [Dallas Observer, 9-8-2016]

-- Stephen Mader, 25, native of Weirton, West Virginia, and former Weirton police officer, is fighting to get his job back after being fired for not being quick enough on the trigger. When Ronald Williams Jr., in May, made a ham-handed attempt at "suicide by cop," it was Mader who, rather than shooting, tried to talk Williams down (based on his Marine Corps and police academy training), but when Williams pointed his unloaded gun at two of Mader's colleagues, and one of them quickly shot the man to death, police officials fired Mader for having been insufficiently aggressive. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9-11-2016]

-- Can't Possibly Be True: Few U.S. forces in Afghanistan speak the native Pashto or Dari, and the war prospects would be dim were it not for courageous Afghan civilians who aid the U.S. as interpreters under promise of protection and future emigration to the U.S. However, the congressional battle over immigration policy has delayed entry for about 10,000 interpreters, who (along with their families) face imminent death if they remain in Afghanistan. Some in Congress also regard Afghans as riskier immigrants (despite the interpreters' demonstrated loyalty). [New York Times, 8-18-2016]

Master baker Stefan Fischer filed a lawsuit recently against Bakery of New York for wrongful firing -- because he refused to use "bug-infested" flour to make batches of bread. According to Fischer, when he informed management of the bugs in the facility's 3,000-pound flour silo, he was told simply to make "multigrain" bread, which Fischer took to mean that fewer diners would complain if they heard "crunching" while eating multigrain. [New York Daily News, 9-15-2016]

-- News Corporation Australia reported in September the enviable success of a 16-year-old British entrepreneur, Ms. Beau Jessup, who has so far earned about $84,000 with a simple online app to help rich Chinese parents select prosperous-sounding English names for their babies. Users choose among 12 personality traits they hope their baby to have, then receive three suggestions (including a list of famous people with those names). Jessup got the idea when living in China and noticing that some babies of the rich were given lame names, such as "Gandalf" and "Cinderella." [News.com.au (Sydney), 9-9-2016]

-- Chinese Management Techniques: (1) About 200 employees at a travel service in Shandong Province were fined the equivalent of $6.50 each recently for failing to comply with orders to "comment" (favorably, one supposes) on the general manager's daily posts to the Twitter-like Internet site Sina Weibo. (2) In June, a motivational trainer working with employees of the Changzhi Zhangze Rural Commercial Bank reportedly told the poor-performing bank personnel (among the 200 at the session) to "prepare to be beaten." He then walked among the workers, whacking some with a stick, shaving the heads of the males and cutting the hair of the females. [Beijing Youth Daily via China Daily, 8-19-2016] [Reuters via The Guardian (London), 6-21-2016]

Trees talk to each other and recognize their offspring, according to Australian ecology researcher Suzanne Simard (most recently lecturing on the influential video series TED Talks). Trees are not independent organisms but belong to arboreal "families" with characteristics identifying them to other family members. According to Dr. Simard, "mother" trees that ordinarily expand their roots wildly may hold back to give nearby "kinfolk" tree roots a chance to spread. Using "isotope tracing," she learned of trees passing healthful carbon, via fungi, to neighboring family seedlings, which she said renders the seedlings more resistant to future stress. [Treehugger, 7-29-2016] [Daily Telegraph (London), 9-11-2016]

(1) The lifelong pickpocket known as "Auntie Sato," 83, who has spent nearly 30 years of her life behind bars, was sentenced again (two years, six months) in August for a purse-snatching from a traveler in Tokyo's Ueno Station. "Why," asked the judge, does Auntie Sato keep at it, especially since she also owns property and has rental income. Said she, "I thought about (stopping)," but "gave up." "It's hopeless." (2) Faisal Shaikh, awaiting his cellphone theft case to be called at the Thane sessions court in Mumbai, India, in August (one of several theft charges pending), wandered up to the court stenographer's desk and swiped her cellphone. He was apprehended shortly afterward near the courthouse. [Japan Today, 8-7-2016] [Mumbai Mirror, 9-1-2016]

By August, Raymond Mazzarella was fed up with the tree in his neighbor's yard in Pittston Township, Pennsylvania, as it was continuously dripping sap onto his car -- and so grabbed a chainsaw, cut through the 36-inch-wide trunk, and (he thought) fixed the problem. However, the tree fell directly onto Mazzarella's small apartment house, dispossessing five tenants and, ultimately, forcing inspectors to condemn the entire building. [WNEP-TV (Scranton), 8-22-2016]

Popular Fetishes: (1) A middle-aged man was reported in three incidents in the Aberdeen, Scotland, area in August and September to be approaching women and asking for piggyback rides. He was still at large. (2) In September, England's Derby Crown Court sentenced Sanjeev Sandhu, 29, to six months in jail because of the "extreme" pornography on his phone. One image was of children having sex, but the judge also noted images featuring humans having sex with dogs, a donkey, a bull and in another case, a fish. [Evening Express (Aberdeen), 9-5-2016] [Derby Telegraph, 9-3-2016]

Dave Little, 27, vacationing on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, Spain -- and partying hard, apparently -- was at press time still haggling with eBay, trying to get out of his "successful" auction bid (blamed on a fingering misadventure on his phone) of 28,500 British pounds (about $37,000) for a Scania Irizar Century bus. eBay, of course, warns that bids are legally binding. Little believes that his dad had earlier searched bus information on the phone and that alcohol then affected his own navigation between screens. [Metro News (London) 8-25-2016]

(1) A water line in Hood County, Texas, broke in August, 5 feet below ground on Andrea Adams's property, but Acton Municipal District worker Jimmie Cox, 23, came to the rescue -- which involved Cox briefly submerging himself in the mud, face down to his waist, to clamp the line. He said later, "In this line of work, (we) do it a lot." (photo: http://bit.ly/2bPCt0s) (2) On Sept. 9, a man (who said later he somehow could not stop his car) drove off of a nine-story downtown parking garage in Austin, Texas. The SUV hung upside down (caught only by the garage guide wire that wrapped around one wheel) until passers-by pulled him to safety. (photo: http://bit.ly/2bYnTCc) [WFAA-TV (Dallas-Fort Worth), 8-25-2016] [KXAN-TV (Austin), 9-9-2011]

No Do-Overs: By 2009, James Washington believed he had gotten away with a 1995 murder, but then he had a heart attack, and on his deathbed, in a fit of remorse, told a guard in the jailhouse where he was being detained on an unrelated offense, "I have to get (this) off my conscience." However, Washington miraculously recovered from the heart attack and tried to take back his confession, but prosecutors in Nashville, Tennessee, used it to augment sparse evidence from 1995, and in October 2012 the now-healthier Washington was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 51 years in prison. [WSMV-TV (Nashville, Tenn.), 10-31-2012]

One of the Islamic State's first reforms in captured territory has been to require adult women to dress devoutly -- including the face-covering burka robe, which, in Western democracies famously presents security dilemmas because it hinders identification. Now, after two years of Islamic State occupation in Mosul, Iraq, the security problem has come full circle on ISIS itself. Dispatches from the town reported in September that ISIS has likely banned the burka because it hinders identification of anti-ISIS insurgents who (female and male) wear burkas to sneak up on Islamic State officers. [Jerusalem Post, 9-6-2016]

-- Barbara Murphy, 64, of Roy, Utah, is the most recent "dead" person battling the federal government to prove she is still alive (but seemingly getting nowhere). She said Social Security Administration bureaucrats, citing protocols, have been tight-lipped about her problem and remedies even though her bank account was frozen; Social Security was dunning her for two years worth of Medicare premiums (since her 2014 "death"); and warning letters had been sent to banks and credit agencies. Nonetheless, Murphy told the Deseret News in August that, all in all, she feels pretty good despite being dead. [Deseret News, 8-25-2016]

-- Political connections in some Latin American countries have allowed convicted drug dealers and crime bosses to serve their sentences comfortably, and the most recent instance to make the news, from Agence France-Presse, was the presidential-suite-type "cell" occupied by Brazilian drug lord Jarvis Chimenes Pavao in Paraguay. When police (apparently not "politically connected") raided the cell in July, they found a well-appointed apartment with semi-luxurious furniture settings (including a conference table for Pavao to conduct "business"), embellished wallpaper designs with built-in bookcases, a huge TV among the latest electronics -- and even a handsome shoe rack holding Pavao's footwear selection. Pavao also rented out part of the suite to other inmates for the equivalent of $5,000 plus $600 weekly rent. [Agence France-Presse via BBC News, 7-30-2016]

(1) Chris Atkins in Denver is among the most recent judicially ruled "fathers" to owe child support even though DNA tests have proven that another man's semen produced the child. Atkins is in the middle of a contentious divorce/child custody battle in which his estranged wife wants both custody and support payments, and since Atkins did not contest his fatherhood until the child reached age 11, he has lost legal standing. (2) A high school girl and her parents told the Tallahassee (Florida) Democrat in July that they were on the verge of filing a lawsuit demanding that the school district order the Leon High School cheerleader squad to select her (even though she had fallen twice during tryouts). [KDVR-TV (Denver), 7-27-2016] [Tallahassee Democrat, 7-18- 2016]

-- Boyd Wiley, 47, was arrested in August when he walked into the Putnam County (Florida) Sheriff's Office and, apparently in all seriousness, demanded that deputies return the 91 marijuana plants they had unearthed from a vacant lot in the town of Interlachen several days earlier. (Until that moment, deputies did not know whose plants they were.) Wiley was told that growing marijuana is illegal in Florida and was arrested. [Patch.com, 8-14-2016]

-- Not a Techie: The most recent perp to realize that cops use Facebook is Mack Yearwood, 42, who ignored a relative's advice and uploaded his Citrus County, Florida, wanted poster for his Facebook profile picture, thus energizing deputies who, until then, had no leads on his whereabouts. He was caught a day later and faces a battery complaint and several open arrest warrants. [WFLX- TV (West Palm Beach, Fla.) via Fox News, 9-2-2016]

Texan Monica Riley, age 27 and weighing 700 pounds, is the most recent "super-sized" woman to claim happiness in exhibiting herself semi-nude for "fans" (she claims 20,000) who watch online as morbidly obese people eat. She told the celebrity news site Barcroft Media in September that her 8,000 calories a day puts her on track to weigh 1,000 pounds soon, and that her loving boyfriend, Sid, 25 and a "feeder," is turned on by helping her. Sid, for instance, feeds Monica her special 3,500-calorie "shake" -- through a funnel -- and supposedly will eagerly become her caretaker when she eats herself into total immobility. ("Safe For Work" website: SSBBW Magazine) [Barcroft Media via Daily Mail (London), 9-6-2016]

-- Another DIY Overkill: Police in Centralia, Washington, arrested a man (not identified in news reports) for reckless burning in August when, trying to rid his apartment of roaches, he declined ordinary aerosol bug spray in favor of making a homemade flamethrower (the aerosol spray fired up by a lighter). He fled the apartment when he realized he might have taken things too far. (Firefighters were called, but the damage was minimal.) [The Oregonian, 8-8-2016] http://www.oregonlive.com/trending/2016/08/washington_man_arre sted_for_go.html

-- Population grows; goods must be hauled; traffic congestion is worse; and thus trucks keep spilling their loads on the highways. The really weird ones have set the bar perhaps unattainably high for this genre of news (e.g., the truck spilling pornographic magazines; the truck hauling ham colliding with the truck hauling eggs). In September, a tractor-trailer overturned on Interstate 295 in New Castle, Delaware, spilling a particularly low-value load. The truck, headed for the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, was filled with 22 tons worth of increasingly shunned U.S. pennies, but these were even less useful (though perhaps, by metal content, more valuable!) because they were not-yet-engraved "blanks." [WPVI-TV (Philadelphia), 9-8-2016]

-- Roy Pearson, a former District of Columbia administrative law judge, may be the only person in America who believes that his 2005 $54 million unsuccessful lawsuit against his dry cleaners was not frivolous -- and he has still not come to the end of his legal odyssey. In June 2016, a D.C. Bar disciplinary committee recommended that Pearson be placed on probation for two years because of ethics violations, including having made statements "unsupported" by facts when defending his contention that the cleaners' "satisfaction guaranteed" warranty made it liable for various negative occurrences in Pearson's life following the loss of a pair of pants at the store. Not surprisingly, Pearson, now 65, announced that he would challenge the committee recommendation. [Washington Post, 6-8-2016]

-- Russian performance artist Petr Pavlensky's most infamous moment was in 2013 when, to protest government oppression, he nailed his scrotum to the ground at Moscow's Red Square. (He had also once sewn his lips shut and, at another time, set fire to a door at Russia's FSB security headquarters.) In August, the Burger King company announced a series of four limited-edition sandwiches inspired by Pavlensky for the artist's hometown of St. Petersburg. The scrotum performance, for example, will be marked by an egg "nailed" to a burger by plastic spear. A company spokesperson said Pavlensky was chosen as the inspiration because he is popular with "the masses." [Moscow Times via The Guardian (London), 8-31-2016]

-- Once again, Iceland's "little people" have, when disrespected, roiled the country's public policy. In August, a road crew had inadvertently buried a supposedly enchanted elfin rock along a highway being cleared of debris from a landslide, and immediately, all misfortunes in the area were attributed to the elves' displeasure. According to an Agence France-Presse dispatch, crews were quickly ordered to re-set the rock. (The incident was one more in a long series in which public and private funds in Iceland are routinely diverted toward projects thought to appease the elves.) [Agence France-Presse via Daily Telegraph (London), 8-30-2016]

Former Arkansas state legislator Charlie Fuqua is running again (in 2012) after a 14-year absence from elective office. In the interim, reported the Arkansas Times, he wrote a book, "God's Law: The Only Political Solution," reminding Christians that they could put their rebellious children to death as long as proper procedure (from Deuteronomy 21:18-21) was followed. "Even though this (procedure) would rarely be used," Fuqua wrote, "if it were the law of the land ... it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents." (Fuqua failed to gain his party's nomination.) [Arkansas Times, 10-8-2012]

The upscale clothier Barneys New York recently introduced $585 "Distressed Superstar Sneakers" (from the high-end brand Golden Goose) that were purposely designed to look scuffed, well-worn and cobbled-together, as if they were shoes recovered from a Dumpster. The quintessential touch was the generous use of duct tape on the bottom trim. Critics were in abundance, accusing Barneys of mocking poverty. [USA Today, 8-30-2016] [Daily Mail (London), 8-29-2016]

(1) The British food artists Bompas & Parr are staging (through Oct. 30) a tribute to the late writer Roald Dahl by brewing batches of beer using yeast swabbed and cultured from a chair Dahl used and which has been on display at the Roald Dahl Museum in Great Missenden, England. (2) A 16-year-old boy made headlines in August for being one of the rare survivors of an amoeba -- a brain-eating amoeba -- which he acquired diving into a pond on private property in Florida's Broward County. (By popular legend, Floridians are believed to lack sufficient brain matter to satisfy amoebas!) [The Independent (London), 8-17-2016] [NBC News, 8-24-2016]

-- The Drug Enforcement Administration has schemed for several years to pay airline and Amtrak employees for tips on passengers who might be traveling with large sums of cash, so that the DEA can interview them -- with an eye toward seizing the cash under federal law if they merely "suspect" that the money is involved in illegal activity. A USA Today investigation, reported in August, revealed that the agency had seized $209 million in a decade, from 5,200 travelers who, even if no criminal charge results, almost never get all their money back (and, of 87 recent cash seizures, only two actually resulted in charges). One Amtrak employee was secretly paid $854,460 over a decade for snitching passenger information to the DEA. [USA Today, 8-11-2016, 1-7-2016]

-- Update: In August, the Defense Department's inspector general affirmed once again (following on 2013 disclosures) that the agency has little knowledge of where its money goes -- this time admitting that the Department of the Army had made $6.5 trillion in accounting "adjustments" that appeared simply to be made up out of thin air, just to get the books balanced for 2015. (In part, the problem was laid to 16,000 financial data files that simply disappeared with no trace.) "As a result," reported Fortune magazine, "there has been no way to know how the Defense Department -- far and away the biggest chunk of Congress's annual budget -- spends the public's money." [Fortune, 8-19-2016]

-- In August, the banking giant Citigroup and the communications giant AT&T agreed to end their two-month-long legal hostilities over AT&T's right to have a customer service program titled "Thanks." Citigroup had pointed out that it holds trademarks for customer service titles "thankyou," "citi thankyou," "thankyou from citi" and "thankyou your way," and had tried to block the program name "AT&T Thanks." [NASDAQ.com, 8-25-2016]

-- In July in the African nation of Malawi (on the western border of Mozambique), Eric Aniva was finally arrested -- but not before he had been employed by village families more than 100 times to have ritual sex to "cleanse" recent widows -- and girls immediately after their first menstruation. Aniva is one of several such sex workers known as "hyenas" (because they operate stealthily, at night), but Malawi president Peter Mutharika took action after reading devastating dispatches (reporting hyenas' underage victims and Aniva's HIV-positive status) in The New York Times and London's The Guardian, among other news services. [Washington Post, 7-27-2016]

-- The July 2012 Aurora, Colorado, theater shooter, James Holmes, is hardly wealthy enough to be sued, so 41 massacre victims and families instead filed against Cinemark Theater for having an unsafe premises, and by August 2016 Cinemark had offered $150,000 as a total settlement. Thirty-seven of the 41 accepted, but four held out since the scaled payout offered only a maximum of $30,000 for the worst-off victims. Following the settlement, the judge, finding that Cinemark could not have anticipated Holmes's attack, ruled for the theater -- making the four holdouts liable under Colorado law for Cinemark's expenses defending against the lawsuit ($699,000). [Los Angeles Times, 8-30-2016]

-- Misunderstandings: (1) "Mr. L," 31, a Chinese tourist visiting Dulmen, Germany, in July, went to a police station to report his stolen wallet, but signed the wrong form and was logged in as requesting asylum, setting off a bureaucratic nightmare that left him confined for 12 days at a migrant hostel before the error was rectified. (2) In August at a hospital in Shenyang, China, "Wang," 29, awaiting his wife's childbirth, was reported (by People's Daily via Shanghaiist.com) to have allowed a nurse to wave him into a room for anesthesia and hemorrhoid surgery -- a procedure that took 40 minutes. (The hospital quickly offered to pay a settlement -- but insisted that, no matter his purpose at the hospital, he in fact had hemorrhoids, and they were removed.) [The Guardian (London), 8-8-2016] [Shanghaiist.com, 8-17-2016]

-- Evidently, many Chinese wives who suspect their husbands of affairs have difficulty in confronting them, for a profession has risen recently of "mistress dispellers" whose job instead is to contact the mistress and persuade her, sometimes through an elaborate ruse, to break off the relationship. For a fee (a New York Times dispatch said it could be "tens of thousands of dollars"), the dispeller will "subtly infiltrate the mistress's life" and ultimately convince her to move on. A leading dispeller agency in Shanghai, translated as the "Weiqing International Marriage Hospital Emotion Clinic Group," served one wife by persuading the mistress to take a higher-paying job in another city. [New York Times, 7-29-2016]

-- Flooding from rains in August tore down a basement wall of the Connellsville (Pennsylvania) Church of God, wrecking and muddying parts of the building and threatening the first-floor foundation, but under the policy written by the Church Mutual Insurance company, flooding damage is not covered, as rain is an "act of God." (Church Mutual apparently uses a standard insurance industry definition and thus recognizes, contrary to some religious beliefs, that not everything is caused by God.) [WTAE-TV (Pittsburgh), 8-31-2016]

-- In 2005, India enacted a landmark anti-poverty program, obligating th government to furnish 100 days' minimum-wage work to unskilled laborers (potentially, 70 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people). Programs often fail in India because of rampant corruption, but a recent study by a Cambridge University researcher concluded that the 2005 law is failing for the opposite reason --anti-corruption measures in the program. Its requirement of extreme transparency has created an exponential increase in paperwork (to minimize opportunities for corruption), severely delaying the availability of jobs. [Phys.Org News, 7-21-2016]

(1) Vegetarian Deb Dusseau of Portland, Maine, celebrating her 10-year anniversary of "all vegetables, all the time," reported to a tattoo artist in August and now sports, on her right arm, wrist to shoulder, an eggplant, peppers, mushrooms, peas, greens, onions, a radish and multiple tomatoes -- drawn in an "old seed catalog" motif. (2) Pro baseball player Brandon Thomas (of the independent Frontier League's Gateway Grizzlies in St. Louis, Missouri) hit a bases-loaded home run on Aug. 21 -- over the fence, into the adjacent parking lot, where the ball smashed the windshield ... of his own car. [Bangor Daily News, 8-29-2016] [Sports Illustrated, 8-22-2016]

Horse showjumping is a long-time Olympics sport, but since 2002, equestrians have been performing in "horseless" showjumping, in which horse courses are run by "riders" on foot (who, by the way, do not straddle broomsticks!). According to an October (2012) Wall Street Journal report, an international association headed by retired pro equestrian Jessica Newman produces at least 15 shows a year, with from 40 to 130 competitors, galloping over jumps that vary from 2 to 4 feet high (5 feet in "Grand Prix" events), with the "riders" graded as if they were on horses (timed, with points off for contacting the rails). Explained Newman, about the shows' success, "It's just fun to be a horse." [Wall Street Journal, 10-8-2012]