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In November Brazil’s heaviest woman, Joselina da Silva, who weighs 900 pounds, was admitted to a posh health spa in Sao Paulo. A specially adapted ambulance was required to transport her to the facility, and when she arrived fire fighters had to remove a window and part of a wall so she could be taken to her room.
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In court papers submitted in July federal prosecutors moved to revoke the parole of convicted Irvine, California, bank swindler Charles J. Bazarian, who was then on the lam. The prosecutors also accused Bazarian of a second swindle: in 1992 he’d convinced the man who prosecuted him three years earlier in the Irvine swindle to invest $6,000 of his own money in an Oklahoma company that turned out to be worthless.
In November a jury in Montrose, Pennsylvania, acquitted Samuel J. Cosmello Jr., who’d confessed to killing his brother and burning his house down. The jury accepted the testimony of a psychiatrist who said Cosmello suffered from an obsessive-compulsive disorder that made him need to confess falsely.
In September the Judicial Council of Manitoba reprimanded Judge Frank Allen for comments he made when hearing a domestic violence case. According to the council, Allen told the male defendant, who’d threatened to kill his girlfriend and himself, “There isn’t any woman worth the trouble you got yourself into.”
