xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In February, the lawyer for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke (who is to be sentenced in March for defrauding financial contributors in order to feed his gambling habit) appealed to the judge to send Duke to an upscale prison because otherwise black inmates would tear him up.
Kenneth Hawthorn, a Jehovah’s Witness proselytizer, filed a lawsuit in Adelaide, Australia, against a couple whose ram attacked him, battering him to the ground, as he approached the couple’s door. (The parties settled the lawsuit in January.) (Bonus detail: The ram, since deceased, was named Shit for Brains.)
In Holmes County, Miss., in October, Mr. Chocwe Lumumba, Esq., earned an acquittal for his client, former policeman Eddie Myers, having convinced the jury that it was self-defense when Myers killed his sister-in-law (who was the assistant police chief). Myers told the jury that, yes, he grabbed two .40-caliber handguns and fired 36 shots, hitting the woman 14 times, and yes, the victim’s own handgun was found by emergency workers still strapped inside its holster, but it was still self-defense.
In November, the Pentagon rejected a Freedom of Information Act request by a reporter to see an internal training video, claiming that the law allowed it to be withheld. The video is the 22-minute “Freedom of Information Act / The People’s Right to Know,” which is utilized to teach Pentagon employees how to carry out the maximum-disclosure purpose of the act.
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