xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Officials in Saudi Arabia recently began to campaign against the culture of intrafamily marriage, which is practiced by almost half the country, according to a May New York Times dispatch. “Saudi Arabia is a living genetics laboratory,” said an American researcher stationed there. Several genetic disorders have festered, but in many tribes, such disorders (attributed to God’s will) have not in any way diminished the ideal of first-cousin marriages.
From a religious advice column in Arab News (an English-language daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia), 5-9-03:
“(Question:) A person feels very uncomfortable during prayers because he gets recurrent thoughts that he might have discharged wind (during the prayers, and thus) invalidated the ablution…and it is all without sound or smell.”
“(Answer:) (A) wind discharge is ascertained by sound or smell. If neither is present, then no wind discharge has taken place (and therefore the ablution has not been invalidated).”
In May, a priest of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Parma, Ohio, Monsignor Robert V. Yarnovitz, pleaded no contest to indecency charges for an incident at a conference in nearby Huron Township. According to police, Yarnovitz was wandering, drunk and pantsless, through the Sawmill Creek resort and when confronted by police, he repeatedly and aggressively answered their every question by uttering “Michael” and a slang phrase commanding someone to perform oral sex on him. (A spokesman at Yarnovitz’s church said the incident “was not characteristic of Monsignor.”)
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
