News of the Weird

-- The Future of War: Although India and Pakistan have backed off of their recent potentially nuclear confrontation over Kashmir, computer hackers from both countries have stepped up their wars against each other's government Web sites and networks, according to a July Washington Times dispatch. Retaliating against increased hacking that accompanied the attack on India's parliament in 2001, Indian hackers unleashed the annihilating Yaha virus, which has been answered by a massive flood of Pakistani attacks (at about seven times the Indian attack rate), which has provoked Indian hackers to consider an even-more-devastating Yaha virus.

-- As straphanger Joyce M. Judge, 42, stared out the window of the Boston subway car during morning rush hour on July 30, she started dripping profusely, and a minute or so later, a baby fell out from underneath her skirt and slid around on the car's floor. According to witnesses (some of whom vomited at the sight), Judge at first acted as if nothing had happened, then finally picked up her newborn, declined the help of passengers, nonchalantly continued the ride, and left the train at the next station (stopping only to pick up the placenta when it fell to the ground). She subsequently reported to Boston Medical Center, where the baby was in good condition (and where the mother was referred for a mental health evaluation).

-- According to Houston newsletter publisher and devout Catholic Hutton Gibson, there was no Holocaust; Pope John Paul II is an imposter and a "Koran kisser"; and the church is doomed because, among other things, masses are no longer conducted in Latin. According to a July Houston Press profile, Gibson, 84, believes there is a worldwide plot that began with the 1960s' changes in the church imposed by the Vatican Council, and he is using his 600-reader newsletter to get the word out, even though the Press compares him to the paranoid lead character in the movie "Conspiracy Theory," which starred Mel Gibson, who happens to be Hutton's son. Said Hutton, "I figure that as long as there's one (true) Catholic in the world, (the church) hasn't finished."

-- David Mitchell, 35, was arrested in June in Omaha, Neb., on charges of false imprisonment and making terroristic threats, accused of having locked up his wife, Polly, every time he left the house over a two-year (and maybe longer) period. He was always with her in public, and intimidated her from reporting him. David had always had only a cell phone so he could take it with him when he left the house, but he had recently gotten a home phone for Internet access, allowing Polly to call her sister one day when he was out.

-- The Latest Results From America's Pre-eminent Lawyer Enrichment Program (class-action lawsuits): (1) In a $350 million settlement between AT&T and customers overcharged on telephone leases, lawyers get $84 million, and customers get back $15 to $20 each (December). (2) In a recent settlement between Sears and customers with improperly done wheel balancing, lawyers get $2.45 million, and customers get $2.50 a tire. (3) In a $3.7 million settlement between televangelist Jim Bakker's Praise the Lord Ministries and 165,000 defrauded Christians, lawyers get $2.5 million, and each victim gets $6.54 (July). (4) In a settlement of price-fixing charges against cosmetics manufacturers and retailers, lawyers get $24 million, and each customer gets a free cosmetic (July).

-- ABC News reported in May that it is not illegal in Massachusetts for a man to take surreptitious photographs of his adult daughter in the family home, even though in "hundreds" of the photos, she is nude or partially nude. The Easthampton, Mass., woman was 19 when she moved back into her old bedroom, where her father had been keeping electronic equipment, but later got a tech-savvy friend to examine a camera and computer. The parents are now divorced, but since the father committed no crime, he got to keep the photos.

-- On July 31, a jury in Miami concluded almost simultaneously that a subsidiary of the Chevron Texaco corporation breached a contract with a local company, Apex Development Corp., yet caused Apex not a penny's worth of harm, and yet still had to pay Apex $33.8 million in "punitive" damages. (Apex had charged that Chevron Texaco backed out of a contract to build "express lube" sites after Apex had already built them.)

-- A Rough Summer for Weird India: (1) Doctors at Burdwan Medical College and Hospital reported that black ants were crawling out of the left eye of an 11-year-old boy (June). (2) Six members of a family hanged themselves on a hillside near Tirupati, but the bodies were not discovered until the odor wafted into a nearby village (July). (3) After doctors in Angara found 15 students unconscious following a lightning strike, they covered the bodies in cow dung as per a traditional remedy; 13 recovered within a few hours (but not even cow dung could save the other two). (4) Doctors at Burdwan originally diagnosed parasitic flies emerging from the penis of a 13-year-old boy while he urinated, but doctors at SSKM Hospital in Kolkata disputed that (June).

-- Police, having knocked on a door in Woodlawn, Ky., in June, pursuant to a neighbor's noise complaint, inadvertently stumbled across an apparent family-run retail drug business when three teenagers eagerly answered questions about the marijuana plant viewable from the front door. According to police, the kids invited them in and proudly showed them the entire elaborate hydroponic operation. The mother, Bernadette Dusing, 42, was at home at the time, but according to police, remained silent.

-- In April, apparently dissatisfied with the many dictionaries on the market, the Republican-controlled Oregon House of Representatives passed House Bill 2416, whose sole purpose was to define "science" ("the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the universe and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories"). A commentator for The Oregonian newspaper speculated that the sponsor, Rep. Betsy Close, believes that the definition will somehow halt recent successes by the state's environmental activists.

(1) Most recent mother to fall asleep next to her infant child and accidentally roll over and smother it to death: a 20-year-old woman in Pontiac, Mich., in July. (2) Latest convicted slum landlord to be sentenced (90 days) to live in her own dilapidated, roach-and-rodent-haven apartments: Sandra O'Neale (Los Angeles, July). (3) Latest enrollment figures in Florida's statewide program allowing high school students to take physical education courses by computer: 614. (Administrators say they can detect any student cheating; critics don't think so.)

A July Associated Press dispatch from Jerusalem reported that a 32-year-old woman accidentally swallowed a cockroach and then, after trying to dig it out with a fork, swallowed the fork. Dr. Nikola Adid of the Poria Hospital in Tiberias, Israel, had to remove both items.

(1) The Baltimore Sun (May) and The Wall Street Journal (July) reported on the handful of schools (most prominent, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and University of Texas at Dallas) that vie for supremacy in intercollegiate chess and engage in annual recruiting battles to sign up established chess masters with cushy scholarship offers. (2) And in April, the Saxonia Globe Snippers of Germany beat a British team, the Black Dog Boozers, to win the World Marbles Cup in Tinsley Green, England; the winner of the match is the first team to knock 25 of a circle's 49 marbles out.

A van and an SUV, both transporting undocumented aliens, collided, injuring 28 (Blythe, Calif.). A woman saved her drowning daughter in a backyard pool by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which she said she couldn't have performed if she hadn't seen it on "Baywatch" (Brooklyn, N.Y.). A 37-year-old man, having reported to a hospital emergency room with a knife penetrating his brain, waited, conscious, for six hours while doctors planned the complicated surgery (which was successful) (Wellington, New Zealand).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- Largo, Fla., private school principal (and Disney fanatic) Dick Baker, 52, was under pressure in August to resign after revelations by the St. Petersburg Times that he took chosen middle-school-age girls (his "princesses") on dozens of overnighters to the Disney World resort, during which he supplied them with Disney-themed costumes and swimsuits (and wore his own Disney pajamas). One princess made 81 trips. Baker's friends and neighbors, and all the princesses, and most parents, support him, calling a recent police investigation (that was completed without charges) a witch hunt, but enough other people were puzzled by Baker's frequent hugging and tickling of the girls, plus his Disney obsession, to call for his resignation.

-- In June, Milwaukee police officer Robert Henry, 34, was awarded lifetime disability benefits because of work-related stress, which he said was caused by the department's decision to fire him for roughing up a misdemeanor suspect in a 2002 incident caught on videotape. (He was reinstated on appeal, but shortly after that filed for disability.) Henry, who had a total of four years' service, will receive $23,000 immediately, then $39,000 a year for 29 years, and then collect his standard pension.

Police in Westerly, R.I., arrested Robert Brayman, 51, and his disciple Hobart Livingston in July and charged Brayman with commissioning Livingston to build a pipe bomb to kill a woman whom Brayman was stalking. According to police, Livingston believes Brayman has spiritual powers and submits himself nearly totally to Brayman, including having paid Brayman more than $13,000 over a three-year period for protection of actress Natalie Portman, whom Livingston believes is in danger from creature-implanted eggs that might otherwise hatch without Brayman's guardianship. Among the exercises Brayman uses to upgrade Livingston's avoidance of evil spirits: having Livingston try to dodge BB's fired by Brayman at a local cemetery.

According to an Associated Press dispatch, a bolt of lightning struck the steeple at the First Baptist Church in Forest, Ohio, on July 1 (damage: $20,000) just as a guest evangelist was beseeching God for a sign from above. And, though it's not quite the rocket ship of the urban legend, a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter is being configured with a 39,000-horsepower jet engine by a team of retired aircraft mechanics in Pierce County, Wash., to challenge the world land-speed record, according to a June story in the Tacoma (Wash.) News Tribune.

-- The family of the late Ben Martinez filed a lawsuit in June against the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe (N.M.) because a priest had castigated lapsed-Catholic Martinez during his funeral, telling guests that the Lord "vomited people like Ben out of his mouth to hell." (The priest, Scott Mansfield, has since moved to another parish.) And Cheryl Bartges has not yet filed a lawsuit but did tell WABC-TV in New York City in July that her late father suffered grievously in the last hours before his death because a priest sent from the Diocese of Rockville Centre (N.Y.) to administer the last rites refused to do it, following an argument about the Catholic Church's culpability in the child-molesting scandals.

-- Popular Lutheran pastor Thorkild Grosbold was suspended in June from his church in Tarbaek, Denmark, after he declined to retract his statements to a newspaper that he doesn't believe in a "physical God," or an afterlife, but believes instead that God is only a constant moral force; Denmark is a highly secular nation, but church leaders say that pastors still must believe in an actual God. And Tulsa, Okla., Christian evangelist Carlton Pearson recently expanded his "Gospel of Inclusion" (providing for universal salvation) to make clear that even Satan would be admitted to heaven if he apologized; the resurrection of Jesus, Pearson says, shows that hell is only a temporary condition, not a place.

-- Smited: Kim Russell, 35, collapsed and died in a hotel room in Yeovil, Somerset, England, in December (probably of "sudden death syndrome," an inquest decided in July). She was in the room for a first-time rendezvous with the man with whom she had been carrying on an Internet-based romance and had been so excited to meet him that she had walked out on her husband and two children two days before Christmas.

-- Darrell Krumnow, 29, pleaded guilty in Waco, Texas, in March to taking so-called "upskirt" photographs of a 19-year-old female clerk at Richland Mall. Krumnow was done in because, unlike other upskirt photographers who have figured out that they need to be discreet, Krumnow used a flash, which caught everyone's attention.

-- In July, a judge in Sacramento, Calif., overruled a defense by two California Highway Patrol officers and decided that the lawsuit against them could proceed (by relatives of a man who accidentally fell down a gorge adjacent to Interstate 5 and who died because no one called for help). The officers had contended that, though they knew the man had fallen, law enforcement officers are under no duty to help if they had nothing to do with the original fall.

-- The Florida Legislature, faced with a mounting traffic accident rate caused by its increasingly older population but habitually unable to address the problem because of resistance by senior voters and their lobbyists, finally passed a law in May to improve highway safety. From now on, seniors' eyesight will be tested at every license renewal, but only for drivers age 80 and older.

Recently arrested for murder: Michael Wayne Sears, 54, Charlottesville, Va. (May); Dale Wayne Eaton, 58, Denver (April); Ricky Wayne Brown, 39, Manassas, Va. (wanted in Florida) (May). Sentenced for murder: Michael Wayne Fisher, Chester County, Pa. (March). Executed for murder: Allen Wayne Jenecka, 53, Huntsville, Texas (July); Bobby Wayne Swisher, 27, Jarratt, Va. (July).

Australian biologist Mark Elgar, writing in Nature magazine, described the tiny male Zeus bug as having the idyllic, work-free life, with food, transportation (piggy-back) and unlimited sex being eagerly provided by the female Zeus (though Elgar said he is baffled at how the male got so lucky) (July). And Agence France-Presse reported from Seville, Spain, during a political forum just prior to the national elections, that a female campaign worker shouted to Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar that "you have really nice ones" and "You may be short, but you've got them firmly attached" (May).

A 23-year-old man who opened the passenger door of a pickup truck to urinate (even though the truck was zooming along Houston's Southwest Freeway at the time) fell out and was fatally run over (June). And Sonny Morris El, 32, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a collision that caused the death of a 25-year-old woman, who was sitting in his lap having sex with him while he drove (Monmouth, Ill., June). And driver Michael Lappin, 18, was set for trial after his arrest for fatally hitting another driver after losing control of his car because he was receiving oral sex from a woman as he drove (Green Bay, Wis., June).

A courthouse had to be closed for a week, as judges, lawyers and employees were attacked by an infestation of fleas (Henrietta, Texas). Two Harare, Zimbabwe, mortuary workers were charged with renting out corpses to motorists so they could go to the head of gas-station lines, since hearses get preferred treatment. A 30-year-old man was sentenced to probation for entering a funeral home's living nativity scene last Christmas and having sex with one of the sheep (Charleston, W.Va.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- Toning up one's body is apparently a need that unites diverse soldiers in America's so-called culture war. In July, USA Today profiled the Lord's Gym in the West Palm Beach suburb of Greenacres, catering to devout Christians (sales pitch: "Your body is a temple for Christ"), where mothers say they can bring their teenage daughters without men ogling them. But in April, Reuters profiled a "Slavercise" class in New York City, where dominatrix "Mistress Victoria" led her clients through punishing fitness and weight-loss routines while wielding an intimidating riding crop.

-- You Break It, You Bought It: Australia's High Court ruled 4-3 in July that because Dr. Stephen Cattanach's sterilization surgery on Ms. Kerry Melchior had failed, it was Cattanach's (and the Queensland Health Department's) responsibility to pay the cost of raising the Melchiors' unwanted child until age 18. The decision stunned the medical profession and insurers in Australia, especially because Cattanach had relied on Melchior's inaccurate statement that her right fallopian tube had been removed at age 15 (and so performed surgery only on the left tube).

-- The Salon Mexico restaurant in New York City introduced a $45 burrito in July, with a filling of filet mignon and truffles. And the founder of Paul Mitchell salon products recently launched John Paul Pets (shampoos for dogs), joining Estee Lauder's Origins line in the so-far-uncrowded upscale pet hair-care field. And a June runway show at Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo featured eight dogs modeling fashions such as a yellow dog raincoat (US$72) and a wedding dress and matching hat for dogs.

-- At a New York legislative committee hearing in May, a Manhattan building owner revealed that he had hired as a lobbyist former U.S. Sen. Alfonse d'Amato to make a single telephone call to the chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority regarding a real-estate issue that eventually was decided in the owner's favor and for which he paid d'Amato $500,000.

Until May, Darlene Heatherington, 40, was a well-regarded, high-achieving city councilwoman in Lethbridge, Alberta, but then she traveled to Great Falls, Mont., on city business, during which trip an incident occurred. In several shifting public statements since then, Heatherington said she was drugged, kidnapped to Las Vegas and raped. However, police in Las Vegas, Great Falls and Lethbridge have contradicted her accounts, and (in Great Falls and Lethbridge) have charged her with filing false reports. Still, she has stuck to her story (baffling most people in Lethbridge) and denies any emotional problems ("I'm a long way from nuts," she said). (A National Post columnist wrote in June that, most likely, she had a consensual tryst and was then tormented by her own super-straight image.)

Brian Kline, 10, playing with his father's old handcuffs (Dad used to be a security agent) on Father's Day, lovingly cuffed himself to dad William Kline Jr., 33, but the key was lost, and William called police (in Des Moines, Iowa) to get the cuffs off. As is routine, police ran Kline through their database, found two arrest warrants outstanding, and re-cuffed Kline for real. And in Tulsa, Okla., in July, suspected shoplifter Jacob Wise, 18, had cleverly removed security tags from clothes he was allegedly walking out of a store with, but the alarm went off anyway because he had merely put the removed tags in his pocket.

In July, at an isolated hospital in Peru's Andes mountains, Dr. Cesar Venero realized that patient Centeno Quispe could not be airlifted to a full-service hospital in time to save his life from a brain injury incurred during a street fight. Luckily, the hardware store in the town of Andahuaylas was open, and with a drill and pliers, Venero (who earns the equivalent of about US$5,000 a year) saved Quispe's life by making the necessary holes in the skull to remove the clots that were putting pressure on the brain.

-- According to Norway's Newspaper VG (which is currently running a series on odd summer jobs), teenager Svein Tore Hauge's job may take the prize: Armed with a shovel and a container, he works at Saerheim Plant Research, following cattle around and catching their excreta before it can hit the ground. Because the work-product is used for scientific study, it must be "pristine," free of grass, dirt, foreign bacteria, etc. Sometimes, it's easy, he said, but, "Sometimes it just sprays in all directions."

-- A labor tribunal in Denmark concluded in May that the rule about not drinking alcoholic beverages on the job, issued by management of MJ Mason Co. (Broenderslev, Denmark), was illegal and could not be enforced. The Mason owner had issued a no-drinking rule, but since he did not follow the procedure in the union contract, it was declared void, at least as to employees' break times.

-- In the latest news from Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center, a researcher said in June that his study had found that men's underarm odor has a stress-reducing effect on women. The week before that, The Wall Street Journal, profiling the Gillette Co.'s research lab, reported that lab director Ahmet Baydar is working not just on ordinary antibacterial-plus-fragrance products but on a substance that actually blocks odor receptors in other people's noses. (Gillette's tests use a synthetic malodor compound so strong that more than a few molecules can make a room uninhabitable, and involve five odor judges who sniff actual armpits and rate them 1 to 10, with 10 meaning "your head snaps back.")

-- The 50th Vienna Biennale opened in Austria in June with its usual array of avant-garde art, including another chapter in Canadian videomaker Jana Sterbak's series on reactions to pain. This time, she strapped a camera to a Jack Russell terrier, Stanley. Among his experiences was an innocent but intrusive exploration of a porcupine, which eventually provoked a quill attack, at which point the video goes haywire as Stanley jumps and writhes in pain. (Stanley appeared with Sterbak at the exhibit and, by his demeanor, apparently has no hard feelings.)

-- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit recently ruled that just because convicted marijuana dealer Frederick R. James had sent the judge invoices for $500,000 each time the judge uttered his name during the trial (which his threats to do were reported in News of the Weird in 2002), that was not proof that James was legally insane. The court thus rejected James's appeal of his 22-year sentence, which makes it further unlikely James will ever collect on the $151 million he says District Judge Michael R. Reagan owes him for the "copyright" violations.

Syracuse, N.Y., dungeonmaster John Jamelske, 68, sentenced to 18 years to life in July for holding a series of girls and women as sex slaves underneath his house (though all were eventually released), told the judge that he thought of the slaves as his "buddies," that he would get together with them in the "party room," and that he did not "kidnap" them because no ransom was requested. And in Doylestown Borough, Pa., in May, ex-pediatrician Alva Hartwright, sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison for sexually abusing homeless teenage boys in his care, continued in May to insist that the many enemas he gave them were "medically necessary" and that the reason he had a huge cache of child pornography was because he found the pictures "aesthetically pleasing," in the same way as his other photos of landscapes and wildlife.

A man allegedly seeking a street-corner prostitute was arrested and, per local law, had his vehicle confiscated, even though his vehicle that night was a municipal transit bus, which he was returning after a shift (Cicero, Ill.). A 45-year-old man fleeing police in a high-speed chase between Oak Ridge, Texas, and Lebanon, Okla., kept calling 911 on his cell phone, asking the operators to tell police to stop chasing him. The Cranbrook (British Columbia) Daily Townsman profiled Irene Weller's cat, Patches, which nurses not only her kittens but also two mice that Weller had recently ejected from the home.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)