Insanity

Google+ users were quietly given the ability to invite friends into the new social network Wednesday night, but that option lasted only a few hours because of overwhelming demand. Vic Gundotra, who is overseeing Google's social networking efforts, said in a Google+ post: "We've shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you all for your interest!" Google didn't formally announce that it was providing the invite feature; instead, a small red envelope with Google's "G+" logo and the words "invite people to join Google+" popped up, and it seems it didn't take long before users found it and started bringing people in. Gundotra didn't say when invites might return, but it is Google's style to go with invites before fully opening new products to the public, as has been the practice with the hugely popular Gmail service and the search giant's recently launched Google Music Beta.

Jon Ronson is fascinated by people who are bonkers. And insane people who appear to be normal, and ostensibly sane people doing crazy things. The British journalist's book "The Men Who Stare at Goats" — about a secret U.S. military wing that hoped to use mind power to walk through walls, become invisible and perform psychic executions — was the basis for the 2009 film of the same title. Now, Ronson's paddling around the swampy parts of sanity again in "The Psychopath Test," a book that manages to be as cheerily kooky as it is well-researched.

An attorney for a 10-year-old boy charged with murder in the fatal shooting of his father, a local neo-Nazi activist, told a Riverside County Juvenile Court judge Wednesday that the boy may pursue a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity. The sandy-haired boy appeared in Juvenile Court shackled and wearing a bright orange shirt and khaki pants, with his stepmother, mother and grandmother sitting on a courtroom bench behind him. Judge Charles J. Koosed postponed the boy's detention hearing for two weeks and ordered that he continue to be held at Juvenile Hall.

A judge has issued a temporary restraining order stripping "Two and a Half Men" star Charlie Sheen of contact with his two youngest children and barring him from coming within 100 yards of his estranged wife. The action by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Hank Goldberg on Tuesday came after Sheen's estranged wife, Brooke Mueller, filed a declaration chock full of accusations against the actor that might have made jaws drop a month ago but now seemed merely a confirmation of the bizarre and menacing behavior on display in his nonstop media appearances.

I am now officially terrified. Groupon, a coupon-hawking website out of Chicago with less than two years of history to offer, is heading toward an initial public offering that may value it as high as $15 billion. Facebook, the popular social networking and privacy-wrecking website, is valued at somewhere between $50 billion and $80 billion by private-market reckonings. So it looks like Arianna Huffington sold herself cheap ? she got only $315 million from AOL for her Huffington Post.

It hasn't taken Boston Red Sox and Liverpool owner John W. Henry long to get the hang of this soccer thing. Not long at all. In fact, if English clubs aren't careful, it won't be long before Henry and his fellow American owners ? Stan Kroenke at Arsenal, Randy Lerner at Aston Villa and Malcolm Glazer at Manchester United ? start calling the shots in the Premier League. Given soccer's sorry state of affairs ? highlighted by the ineptitude of the English Football Assn. and a spend-and-be-damned attitude by certain Premier League clubs already floundering in debt ?

The judicial process for Jared Lee Loughner, accused in the Tucson shooting rampage, promises to be a long and potentially convoluted one involving both federal and state prosecutions. Loughner's federal defense team, led by high-profile capital-defense lawyer Judy Clarke, will probably examine whether he has any defense other than insanity, and whether an insanity defense alone could keep him off death row, legal experts said. Clarke, a former head of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers, is based in San Diego, and has represented Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who pleaded guilty by reason of insanity, and Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph.

A federal jury in Salt Lake City, Utah on Friday morning convicted a self-proclaimed prophet and street preacher of kidnapping and repeatedly raping then-14-year-old Elizabeth Smart, rejecting arguments by the defense that Brian David Mitchell was insane at the time of the crimes. Mitchell, 57, could face up to life in prison. He and his then-lover, Wanda Barzee, took Smart from her bedroom in her Salt Lake City home one night in 2002 and brought her to a remote mountain camp, where she was shackled and repeatedly raped by Mitchell.

Stephanie Lazarus, the Los Angeles police detective charged in the 1986 murder of an ex-boyfriend's wife, admitted to investigators the morning of her arrest that she had confronted the victim on multiple occasions, but denied having a role in the killing, according to the transcript of her interrogation. The interview transcript, which became public during a hearing in Los Angeles County Superior Court, offers a detailed account of how LAPD homicide detectives duped their unsuspecting colleague into talking about the case, and of Lazarus' disbelief and panic as she realized she was the target of the investigation.