xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
To fight two speeding tickets emanating from the same police camera in a 60km/hour zone, Carlos DeMarco, 39, went to the trouble of commandeering a 70km/hour sign and affixing it to the pole underneath that very speed camera, then photographing it to show that he was not speeding. In November, the judge in Parramatta, Australia, detected the clumsy nature of DeMarco’s work and fined him another A$1,000 on top of the A$246 in tickets (about US$880).
Toronto police arrested Walter Nowakowski, 35, in November on several pornography counts as well as theft of services after an officer spotted him driving the wrong way on a one-way street at 5 a.m. According to police, Nowakowski was pantsless, with a laptop computer running in the front seat, as he drove slowly down streets in search of wireless Internet signals that he could use to download pornography.
In October, in the ongoing trial of 22 members of the South African white separatist movement Boeremag, a police informant testified that the group’s plans included enlisting 8,000 rebels to stage a coup, seize military bases, assassinate ex-president Nelson Mandela, and, somehow, force all the country’s blacks to march out the N1 freeway across the border to Zimbabwe. (There are 35 million blacks in South Africa.)
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