IN THE NEWS.

Freshman congressman Albert Cardoon, responding to allegations that surfaced in news reports shortly before his swearing in, has admitted that some of the statements he made during his campaign were not strictly accurate. In particular, Cardoon did not invent penicillin; he was not the “mastermind” behind Doctors Without Borders; he did not write thirty-nine plays under the pseudonym “William Shakespeare”; he was not the first American to walk on Mars; he is not a full-blooded Appomattoc chief; he did not obtain doctorates at Oxford and Cambridge simultaneously; he did not win Super Bowl XLVII; he did not write the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation; his parents were not killed in the 9/11 attacks; his sister was not killed in the Johnstown Flood; his son Herbert was not killed in Pompeii in a.d. 79, but is still in the seventh grade at Blandville Junior High School; his Uncle Al is not the same Alexander who conquered Persia; and his wife is not Lillian Russell. Cardoon insists, however, that it is true that his family “in the direct ancestral line” was expelled from the Garden of Eden for what he terms a “very minor offense.”