News of the Weird

-- The 60,000 delegates (from 182 countries) to the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, luxuriated not only in four- and five-star accommodations but an elegant food and drink layout, including tons of lobster, oysters, filet mignon, salmon, caviar, pate de foie gras, champagne, fine wines and mineral water. (An estimated 60 African children a day die from contaminated water.) The conference center (which cleared out hundreds of nearby trees to accommodate delegates' limousines) is only a few miles from the squalid neighborhood of Alexandra, one of Africa's poorest. (Poverty in Africa is up 35 percent since the last such summit, in 1992.)

-- In San Francisco, two adult dodgeball leagues have been formed recently (the San Francisco Bombardment Society and the S.F. Blood Warriors), with rules similar to the kids' playground game. According to one organizer, the game "is a nice way of pegging people in the face (with the soft rubber ball) and getting away with it." And, he said, "Certain things never change. Some people look like they're going to get hit, so you go after (them)."

Sophia Reitan fell and broke her arm when a Pentecostal Upper Room Tabernacle minister pushed the evil spirits from her forehead, and no one caught her when she swooned backward; she settled with the church for $80,000 (Dix Hills, N.Y., February). And even though Clarence Cromwell, 29, fully confessed to police that he had killed a man, a judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., set him free because officers forgot to read him his Miranda rights (May). And according to a police report in the Hesperia (Calif.) Star: "An elderly man who lived on the 10700 block of 'G' Avenue suffered a heart attack while engaged in sexual intercourse and died April 2."

-- Researchers at England's Cambridge University, and others in Tallahassee, Fla., and Cleveland, are training dogs to screen patients for prostate and lung cancers by detecting distinct smells of tumors in patients' breath. One researcher reported a success rate of 87 percent, which rivals that of some expensive technology. (The genesis of the research was a 1989 journal article reporting that a border collie attacked a woman's mole that turned out to be a malignant melanoma and ignored her after the mole was removed.)

-- Among Recent Animals in the News: the Asian paradise tree snake, which actually flies (by thrusting itself from high places, flattening out and undulating its body) (reported in Singapore in August), and a species of millipede from the West Indies, which, when zoo-dwelling capuchin and owl monkeys rubbed them on their fur, caused the monkeys to go into a delirious frenzy (an "ancient primate form of hallucinogen," according to one millipede expert), similar to the way cats react to catnip (August).

-- Supposedly Lower Orders of Animals: Recently, the journal Science reported that chimpanzees in West Africa have learned to smack certain nuts with specially chosen stones at precisely the correct strength that will break open the delicate shell without obliterating the food inside (June), and that crows have been observed bending discarded wires in just the right configuration for use in retrieving food from hard-ro-reach places (August).

-- In a three-month period this summer, three 5-foot-long sturgeons have jumped from Florida rivers directly onto anglers, sending them to hospitals with injuries (all together: a cracked sternum, five broken ribs, two collapsed lungs, several broken teeth and various lacerations). According to a wildlife expert, sturgeons are docile, have no predators, and apparently jump only "because they can."

An apparently harmless passenger (college student Maxim Segalov) forced an unscheduled landing of an American Airlines flight in Salt Lake City (and his subsequent ejection) when he alarmed the crew by trying to recharge a size-AA battery by heating it with his cigarette-lighter (August). And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in July that a passenger was detained at St. Louis' Lambert Field because for some reason he had packed in his checked luggage (which happened to be chosen for random inspection) his cute, personal alarm clock, which is an old-fashioned clock outfitted with six toy sticks of dynamite.

-- Loxley, Ala., street preacher Orlando Bethel, who was scheduled to sing at the June funeral of his wife's uncle, was beaten by parishioners and physically tossed from the Pine Grove Baptist Church after he screamed from the pulpit that the deceased was a "drunkard" and a "fornicator" and was now "burning in Hell" and that the parishioners would be right behind him. Bethel defended his outburst by claiming that the "Holy Ghost" had ordered him to tell the truth.

-- Among the problem motorists cited in a July Toronto Star roundup: (1) a 26-year-old man who gave the finger to an only-trying-to-help driver who had motioned for him to fasten his seat belt (but the Samaritan was a police officer in an unmarked car, and he took umbrage, stopped the man, and discovered his license has been under suspension since 1999), and (2) a middle-aged man who was let off with a warning for swerving across the road because his dog was licking his ear (and who, the officer discovered, was also shoeless, with banana peels wrapped around his feet, supposedly a remedy for bunions).

DNA was used to convict a man for bestiality after two dogs were found dressed in women's underwear in his garage (Winnipeg, Manitoba, July). A 34-year-old man was sentenced to a year in prison for three counts of approaching women in a supermarket, bending down and aggressively licking their feet (Woonsocket, R.I., July). A man accused a couple of restraining him at their home and forcing him to ejaculate while the couple looked on (Cape Town, South Africa, August).

A 25-year-old man was shot and killed by a friend as the two were acting out their favorite scenes from movies; the dead man was said to have been portraying Al Pacino (Melbourne, Australia, July). A 19-year-old worker at the Kargher candy factory suffocated when he accidentally fell into a 1,200-gallon vat of chocolate (Hatfield, Pa., July). A 47-year-old man stumbled as he was removing his trousers for bed and fell out a second-story window in his home, landing fatally on his head (Aptos, Calif., July).

A half-ton bull broke loose from his handler at a show and battered a portable toilet that a 51-year-old woman had just entered, but she was not seriously hurt (Dorset, England). Anglers off of Florida's east coast encountered a floating, severed human head and turned it in to authorities several hours later after they finished their outing (Fort Pierce, Fla.). Doctors examining rugby star Jamie Ainscough's lingering arm injury finally located the problem: Opponent Martin Gleeson's tooth was found embedded in Ainscough's arm, from a July match (London). Firefighters acknowledged a particularly pesky fire, which burned for more than 50 hours before being extinguished, at a Kingsford Charcoal plant (Pulaski County, Ky.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- During the last four months, an unidentified motorist in a maroon Volvo has been reported by construction workers in the California cities of Fremont, Hayward, Brentwood and Dublin to have approached them and requested that they fill his car with concrete or hot asphalt. An employee of Independent Construction (Concord, Calif.) honored the request in May in Dublin, with concrete up to steering-wheel level. The man allegedly said that he was trying to get back at his ex-wife. Police want to question him, according to an August Oakland Tribune report, although they admit he has not committed any crime.

-- LifeGem Memorials (Elk Grove Village, Ill.) announced in August that, using available technology, it can turn a loved one's cremated ashes into a diamond by pressing and heating the ashes to 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. A chemistry professor cited by The New York Times agreed that the plan was sound; carbon from the ashes converts to graphite, which can be pressurized into a diamond. LifeGem prices start at $4,000 for a quarter-carat.

Among recent District of Columbia government mishaps: Twice in June, firefighters had to battle house fires with garden hoses because pumper trucks were out of service. And apparently many police officers were not told about D.C.'s new vehicle registration program, resulting in their ticketing cars without the old (now invalid) stickers, even though owners had conscientiously affixed the new stickers. And D.C.'s Board of Elections ruled in August that Mayor Anthony Williams' name could not be printed on the primary ballot this month because his election workers forged too many signatures (e.g., "Kelsey Grammar," "Robin Hood") on his qualifying petition.

-- Order in the Court: Edmonton, Alberta, lawyer Maurice Prefontaine was arrested in March for skipping his contempt-of-court trial, which came about when he referred to Justice Gerald Verville as a "slithering mass (of) vipers." And a judge in Columbus, Ohio, declared a mistrial in July when lawyer Christopher T. Cicero rushed the phalanx of deputies surrounding his murder-defendant-client Michael Gordon and smacked Gordon in the head (in response to Gordon's threat, according to a bailiff, to "kick (Cicero's) fat ass."

-- In July, a federal judge ruled against lawyer Milo J. Altschuler (Seymour, Conn.), who claimed that his across-the-knee, bare-buttocks spanking of client Leslie Cerrato in his office was a legitimate trial-preparation tactic (and thus that when she recovered a $250,000 settlement against him for the assault, Altschuler's insurance company should pay it, as "malpractice"). Altschuler claimed that he thought the spanking would improve Cerrato's credibility as a witness.

-- The U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled in June that lawyer-plaintiff Richard Barrett of Mississippi was entitled to about $30,000 in government reimbursement of legal fees for challenging the protest-permit process in Morristown, N.J., for his small, white-supremacist organization. Barrett admits that court-ordered expenses (from 21 recent favorable decisions) are a major source of income. Barrett showed a few minor defects in the Morristown permit process, for which he originally asked reimbursement at $275 an hour, including 30 minutes' worth of "discussions with client" (presumably, $137.50 for talking to himself).

-- Football player Dennis Johnson, now an Arizona Cardinals rookie defensive end, began his high school football career at age 6 as a 5-foot-7, 170-pound second-grader playing for Harrodsburg (Ky.) High School, according to an April Los Angeles Times profile. (Nowadays, only ninth-graders and up can play, by national rule.) Johnson appeared in several games that year (after Harrodsburg had built up big leads), apparently holding his own against 18-year-olds.

-- According to a BBC News dispatch from Harar, Ethiopia, in June, Mulugeta Wolde Mariam ("the hyena man of Harar") has trained about 80 local wild hyenas to congregate around him at night and be fed by grabbing pieces of meat out of Mulugeta's mouth with their teeth. Said he, "There is no danger unless you are scared, as the hyenas sense fear."

The Japanese enterprise of paying strangers to come to private homes, pretend they are the occupants' relatives, and exchange family gossip was reported by News of the Weird in 1995, and apparently business is still booming. According to an August Miami Herald dispatch from Tokyo, Kazushi Ookynitani's "convenience agency" supplies "friends" for weddings and funerals and even to sit in at college lectures (to keep a professor's spirits up). Recent wedding-party "friends" of one bride (who were paid about $500 each) were given detailed biographies of who they were to pretend to be, so as to mingle more interestingly with the bride's actual relatives.

-- A homeowner in Amarillo, Texas, found one of cross-country spree-bomber Luke Helder's active explosives in May but for some reason brought it into his house before calling police. And a woman found a bomb along the Columbia River near Woodland, Wash., in July but for some reason carried it directly to the police station to show the officers. And a member of the cabin crew on the December 2001 American Airlines plane carrying accused shoe-bomber Robert Reid confiscated Reid's shoes and put them in the cockpit for safekeeping.

-- Twice in a two-week period, what authorities believe to be the same yearling bear was roughed up by tourists in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee because each time he had a fawn in his grasp and was about to have dinner. Floridian Michael Shaw, 38, was charged by park rangers with interfering with wildlife for kicking and roughing up the bear (even though he insisted that saving the deer was the right thing to do), and in the second attack on July 7, a group of visitors drove the bear away by pelting him with rocks (until an animal researcher in the group explained to them the way nature works).

A pregnant woman told a New Zealand TV audience on July 12 that she had agreed to let adult filmmaker Stephen Crow film her childbirth for a sequence in an upcoming pornographic movie (Auckland). Idaho's Medicaid manager told reporters (who were questioning him about new restrictions that denied many clients dentures) that the elderly "can (just) gum their food" (Boise, May). At least 23 eighth-graders in the Rockford (Ill.) School District failed every single class last year but nevertheless were promoted (July).

A judge set a 19-year-old man for trial in a revenge-shooting, allegedly in retaliation for the victim's having given him a "wedgie" at a concert (Southampton, Pa.). A 37-year-old woman received probation-only after being charged with attempting to kill her husband by placing poisonous spiders on him while he slept (Rutherford County, Tenn.). A pregnant woman in the middle of a Caesarian delivery at the Waitakere Hospital had her legs catch on fire (from the alcohol-swabbing solution), but mother and eventual baby received only minor injuries (Waitemata, New Zealand). Police, citing federal forfeiture law, demanded that McIntosh College give up ownership of one of its dormitories to the city because so much drug activity was taking place inside (Dover, N.H.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- A Fortune magazine-commissioned study reported in August that officers and directors of the 1,035 companies that have fallen the most from their recent bull-market peaks cashed in $66 billion worth of stock before the crash, at a time when those companies' non-insiders (and in many cases, employees) were suffering devastating investment losses. Among the "shrewdest" executives were those from AOL-Time Warner ($1.79 billion), Enron ($994 million) and Charles Schwab ($951 million).

-- One proposed remedy for the sexual frustration of Iranian men who avoid marriage because of financial cost is to permit temporary, Islam-endorsed "marriages" with prostitutes inside designated brothels. About 300,000 prostitutes are active in Iran, and the number is rising, as is the typical cost of marriage and the "corrupt" influence of Western society on Muslim youth. Those circumstances have caused at least one prominent cleric to back the idea, according to an August Reuters dispatch.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (55) The robber who carefully, purposefully smashes a store's security camera (while looking directly at it), oblivious to the fact that destroying the camera does not affect the remote video recorder that it's hooked up to, capturing his face on tape, as with the 5-foot-9 man whose picture has been circulating in Edmonton, Alberta, since July. (56) And the hard-luck checkbook thief whose victim, by chance, is an employee of the very store or bank in which the thief later tries to cash one of the checks, as happened at the Farmers State Bank, Stockbridge, Mich., in June, resulting in the arrest of a 20-year-old man.

-- Responding to his latest call-up for jury duty, habitual San Antonio jury-slacker David Williamson sent the federal judge a serious bill for $16,800 because the court had advised Williamson to be ready to serve at any time during August (21 business days, 8 hours a day, at Williamson's consultant's rate of $100 an hour). Williamson also wrote that if the judge did not pay by Aug. 31, interest would accrue at 2 percent a month, and that if the judge would like to discuss the matter, he should call Williamson for an appointment. (A few days later, Judge John H. Wood Jr. ordered Williamson to his courtroom for a contempt hearing, the result of which was pending at press time.)

-- Child-sex-assaulter Kevin R. Hill, 36, filed a lawsuit from prison against St. Clair County, Ill., in July, demanding $100,000 because county officials caused him and his family "grave personal and professional financial devastation" when they charged him with the crime (even though he ultimately pleaded guilty). And in June, inmate Kenneth Bianchi (the "Hillside Strangler" serial-killer in California and Washington in the 1970s), filed a lawsuit against Whatcom County, Wash., demanding up to $100 a day for the 23 years he has been imprisoned (for lost wages and emotional distress); Bianchi said prosecutors caused him to misjudge the strength of the case against him at trial, and that's why he pleaded guilty to the murders of seven women.

-- Matthew E. Hooker, 30, filed a $200 million defamation lawsuit in May in Los Angeles against actor Nicole Kidman because she (and many other persons and media outlets named in the lawsuit) refer to Hooker as Kidman's "stalker" (even though a judge has entered a three-year stay-away order against Hooker because of numerous past harassments of Kidman). Hooker told reporters that the "stalker" label was likely to hurt his 2004 presidential campaign.

-- In Winnipeg, Manitoba, in July, David Dauphinee, 52, and his brother Daniel, 51, both retired senior members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, were convicted of bombarding local police officers with oranges and onions while standing on a 19th-floor balcony, while the local officers were investigating a break-in on a ground floor nearby. The brothers have had other recent confrontations with law-enforcement officers, and David's ex-wife Debbie described the men as "dumb and dumber."

-- Ex-lawyer Mitchell Rothken, 44, is serving a three-to-nine-year prison sentence in New York in connection with an embezzlement scheme, which he told a judge in February he concocted to win the favor of stripper Kimberly Barbieri, with whom he was utterly obsessed. In an August interview in New York magazine, Rothken said that although his secret, four-year bond with the dancer ultimately cost him his 21-year marriage, his three sons, his real-estate law practice, and more than $1 million in gifts, Barbieri and he never actually consummated the relationship.

In May in Brisbane, Australia, suspended police officer James Arthur Mariner, 42, was set for trial on charges that over a seven-year period, under the guise of helping people qualify for the police force, he solicited pubic hair, blood and urine samples and mouth swabs from people for his own gratification. Other victims claimed that Mariner got them to make a sex video (allegedly for police training), and another said Mariner put a wrestler's "headlock" on her.

Unfamiliar With the System: Andrew Cameron was arrested in August and charged with stealing Jacqueline Boanson's debit card in Cheltenham, England. Cameron had used the card to place a horse-racing bet, and the horse won, but since he could not collect without a photo ID that matched the debit card name, the winnings (about $495) were automatically transferred to Boanson's account.

A 40-year-old man, finishing off the last of his champagne on an apartment-house rooftop, climbed down a ledge as a shortcut to go get another bottle but fell and was fatally impaled on a fence (Chicago, June). And an 18-year-old high school student, attempting to prove that heroin is not addictive, overdosed and died on his first-ever experience (his impressions of which he had just begun to chronicle on his computer before he passed out) (Fort Worth, Texas, May).

In 1999, police in Tulia, Texas (pop. 5,100), arrested 40 blacks (more than 10 percent of the black population) for alleged drug trafficking and somehow obtained convictions, with no physical evidence and no corroboration, based on the testimony of one N-word-using officer, Tom Coleman, who kept almost no records (except that he sometimes wrote notes on his leg) and who swore that he had bought drugs from several people who later proved they weren't even in town. The "ringleader" (now serving 90 years) was an impoverished farmer who lived in a dilapidated shack; a few local whites with connections to the black community were convicted as well, with one receiving a 300-year sentence. The latest coverage of the convictions (now being appealed) was by a New York Times columnist who visited the town in July.

A female suspect being questioned by police managed to fatally shoot an officer who had permitted her a bathroom break, using a gun the woman had probably concealed between her buttocks (Minneapolis). An orthopedic surgeon's license was suspended after he, in mid-operation, allegedly left the OR for 35 minutes to run to his bank and deposit a check before returning to finish up (successfully) (Cambridge, Mass.). An ex-cop awaiting trial for molesting one stepdaughter dropped dead of an aneurysm in an X-rated peep-show booth while in a compromising position with his other stepdaughter (El Paso, Texas). A woman who two years earlier had a house built on the edge of a golf course fairway filed a lawsuit against the course because balls keep landing in her yard (Ossipee, N.H.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)