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In December in Easton, Pennsylvania, 49-year-old Floyd Kinney Jr. pleaded guilty to molesting two girls; he blamed the attacks on his wife’s devotion to bingo, which he said kept her out of the house “three, four times a week.” (The judge pointed out that “some people, when their wives are not home, decide to do other things, like clean their living rooms.”) Also in December, 45-year-old Kevin Sutherland was arrested in Salt Lake City for allegedly downloading child porn on his office computer. His wife reportedly told investigators that though Sutherland would never do such a thing himself, he was being treated for a multiple-personality disorder and one of his other personalities was a teenage boy who wanted to look at images of girls his own age.
Michael Stone forced the evacuation of the Parliament Buildings in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during a crucial November meeting by trying to get inside with what he allegedly claimed was a bomb; the bag he carried was found to contain a gun, a knife, and several explosives. At a bail hearing the following month his lawyer argued that Stone–a notorious figure who served time for murder after he opened fire at an Irish Republican Army funeral in 1988–had not been attempting to carry out an actual terrorist attack but rather “a piece of performance art replicating a terrorist attack.”
Ouch
In January, according to the local Daily Telegraph, police in Sydney made 19 arrests after a disagreement between two neighboring families erupted into a street brawl in which more than 60 people reportedly went at each other wielding “knives, baseball bats, metal poles, planks, branches, cricket bats, pick handles, screwdrivers, golf clubs, curtain rods, and glass bottles.” And in October in Erie, Pennsylvania, 27-year-old Chytoria Graham was arrested for assault and reckless endangerment; police said that during a dispute with her boyfriend Graham tried to hit him using their month-old son, held by both legs, as a blunt instrument.
