xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
The FBI charged in November that the now-resigned head of the Washington, D.C., Teachers Union may have embezzled more than $2 million in union funds (while broken-down public schools lack books and supplies for students) to support an Imelda Marcos-like clothing, furnishings and artwork habit.
On another matter, the D.C. public school system admitted in December that it had continued to pay out $5 million in employee benefits during the year to ex-employees who had already left the government (and other parts of the District government were suspected of doing the same thing).
The Guardian (London) reported in December that multinational food giant Nestle continues relentlessly to demand about $6 million from dirt-poor Ethiopia as payment for that government’s having nationalized a Nestle subsidiary 27 years ago. (According to the Oxfam humanitarian group, $6 million would feed a million people for a month.)
Florida inmate Gary Alvord, 55, who escaped from a Michigan mental institution and killed two women in Tampa in 1973, this year begins his 30th year on death row.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD