Two longtime News of the Weird ongoing sagas came to an end this summer. In August, the annual Gotmar festival in India's Madhya Pradesh state was finally banned, after "centuries" of tradition. Residents of two neighboring villages would come together once a year to bombard each other all day long with rocks (resulting in dozens of bloody injuries and, most years, deaths), but at the sundown cease-fire, both sides would bandage their wounded and celebrate with each other (only to do it all over a year later).
And in July, H. Beatty Chadwick, 73, was finally released from a Pennsylvania jail after serving more than 14 years behind bars because a series of judges believed they could thereby force him to admit that he was hiding marital assets from his 1995 divorce (which he always denied). Chadwick was the longest-serving incarcerated American who had not been charged with a crime.
