xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Doctors at Chimkent (Kazakhstan) Children’s Hospital told the BBC in April that they had removed a fetus from a 7-year-old boy; it was thought at first to be a cyst but when removed, actually had hair and bones and is now believed to have been the boy’s Siamese twin that grew in the wrong place.

In May, Groote Schnuur Hospital (Cape Town, South Africa) reported only the 15th documented case of a fetus developing in the mother’s liver (and the fourth to survive).

Curator Mark Norman of Australia’s Melbourne Museum revealed in January that he had captured and photographed the male of the world’s most sexually unequal species. When the blanket octopus male (2 cm long) mates with the female (6 feet long), it uses a special extension arm to transfer sperm from its penis (after which the male dies). Females, which may weigh 10,000 times as much as the males, are typically found with several such extension arms lodged inside them.

The world did not end on May 15, contrary to warnings by Japan’s 1,200-member Pana Wave Laboratory cult, whose public activities (covering themselves and their property in white sheets for protection against electromagnetic waves beamed by “communists”) had drawn media attention just before “doomsday.” The Pana Wavers are believed not to be dangerous, although one member said that if the group’s guru, Ms. Yuko Chino, soon succumbs to her (supposedly) microwave-induced cancer, the cult will, in revenge, exterminate “all humankind.”
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd

NEWS OF THE WEIRD