The police force in Beaumont, Texas, suspended officer Keith Breiner for crossing the line during an undercover prostitution sting, in that he actually had sex with a prostitute. During an August hearing, Breiner defended his actions by saying, “It was a job, sir. I didn’t have pleasure doing this.” It was, he added, "something...

Police arrested Jose Diaz Jr., 35, and charged him with shoplifting from a Wal-Mart in Madison Township, Ohio, in October after Diaz attempted to run from the store with a digital camera. He first crashed into the glass front door—which looked like it was open, but was actually closed...

Recent research in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy may shed light on why females continue to earn less money than males, even in similar jobs. Competing hypotheses range from gender discrimination to the possibility that women place more emphasis on families while men more aggressively...

In July, a parachutist taking part in an Army ceremony at Fort Riley, Kan., was blown 50 yards off course and crashed into the band, injuring three musicians and destroying two tubas. And in August, as Duke University’s football team was preparing for the kickoff against James Madison University in Durham...

Legendary banjo player Eddie Adcock, 70, had been suffering from hand tremors that failed to respond to medication, so he volunteered for a revolutionary neurosurgery in August. Adcock finger-picked tunes while his brain was exposed so that Vanderbilt University Medical Center surgeons could try to locate the defective area. In “deep brain...

In October, Pentecostal preacher Thomas Weeks told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he was in talks to create a “Survivor”-type reality TV show in which the twice-divorced Weeks would navigate a field of single women and select a winner. Weeks assured the newspaper that “The Holy Hook Up: Who Will Be...

David Norris never knew his father, who left home when Norris was 5 months old. Now 22, Norris is serving a minimum-12-year sentence for killing a man after an earlier rape conviction and is housed in Peterhead Prison, which is the primary lockup for Scotland’s sex criminals. Soon after his arrival, according to a...

Bernard LeCorn, running against two others for the school board in Ocala, Fla., declared himself the best qualified of the three candidates because of his “doctorate,” but the Ocala Star-Banner discovered that his degree came from a well-known diploma mill and only cost $249. (In a diploma-mill fraud indictment...

Angela Pusateri, 79, maybe unconventional, but according to her 13-year-old granddaughter, Jenna, “She really is a cool grandmother.” Pusateri, who lives in Hallandale Beach, Fla., is a rapper—and even has a new CD, Who’s Your Granny? When performing live, she wears a hockey jersey, jewelry, sunglasses and baseball cap.

The two states whose disputed electoral votes called into question the results of the presidential races in 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio) are provoking anxiety in 2008 as well. In Palm Beach County, Fla. (home of the “butterfly ballot” in 2000), 3,478 optical-scan votes disappeared between the election-night counting...