The law and the jungle

A panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reinstated the requirement that Hoosiers who want to buy wine by phone or over the Internet have to first make face-to-face contact with the winery, and isn't it wonderful we're saving the childfren?

Sigh. Fort Wayne is famous again. The complete text of the police report of our claw-hammer guy has found its way onto The Smoking Gun Web site. As the site advises:

Let's keep reminding ourselves that, no matter how much Chinese officials polish up the place during the Olympics, China is not really a citizen-friendly nation:

Living in Beijing? The government wants to know your shoe size, blood group, political affiliation and where you get your money from, according to police in at least one corner of the security-obsessed Olympic host city.

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Boy, this would have been a good night for some smart burglars to make a real haul:

An estimated 3,000 people converged at Brownsburg Town Hall Tuesday for the community's Night Out Against Crime.

Those Canadians really know how to handle scofflaws:

Jon Tennett loves to tinker in his garage. It's not an uncommon pastime for an 81-year-old man, but what is unusual is the city's response.

Because Tennett fixes his neighbours' lawn mowers and other small machines, the City of Pickering has charged him with operating an illegal business - even though he's never charged a penny for his work.

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A new one for the "cruel & unusual" file:

A death row inmate scheduled for execution in October says he's so fat that Ohio executioners would have trouble finding his veins and that his weight could diminish the effectiveness of one of the lethal injection drugs.

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This report might shock a few of you, but I lived just around Lake Michigan from Chicago for eight years, so it struck me as just belaboring the obvious:

It's getting tougher for the dishonest, the mentally unstable and the overweight to get hired as Cook County jail guards these days. As a result, fewer guards are getting hired.

You know the question they used to try to scare us with? "Are a few moments of pleasure worth a lifetime of regret?" This guy should have asked it of himself:

Just one day after a convicted murderer escaped from an Indiana prison an arrest has been made. But it wasn't the prisoner who was taken into custody, it was a correction officer.

I first decided to link to this because of the outrageousness of getting arrested for being nude in your own house. This guy was arrested because police "saw him standing naked in the window of his home."

Because of a crime wave, among other reasons, Indianapolis residents panicked and threw out the incumbent mayor and elected political novice Greg Ballard. Now there's been another month of violent crime, and Ballard  seems to be panicking. First, he announced a two-day employment fair for ex-offenders and named Colts Coach Tony Dungy to chair the city's ex-offender re-entry efforts. Now, this: