xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Convicted murderer Robert Ivey continued to tell a court in Montreal, Quebec, in December that (contrary to a jury’s finding) he is not guilty of killing the 42-year-old victim and that if only he had enough money to challenge the conclusive DNA tests (which showed that his blood was all over the victim’s apartment), he would be a free man. A few moments later during his recitation to the court, Ivey asked the judge for credit toward his sentencing because of his conscientiousness in having spent “seven hours” cleaning up the crime scene and the victim’s body.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who is widely believed by United Nations officials and Far East experts to be tolerating the starvation deaths of perhaps millions of his countrymen, launched a nationwide campaign in January to improve national health by eradicating smoking, whose practitioners, said Kim, are one of the “three main fools of the 21st century” (along with people ignorant about music and computers). Awesome!
In November, Jacky Bibby, 52, of Whiskey Flats, Texas (near Fort Worth), first sat in a bathtub with 81 live rattlesnakes and then extended his own Guinness Book record by stuffing the tails of nine of them into his mouth. Protocol required that he band the tails together at the rattles and hold them in his mouth for 10 seconds while leaning forward. (The Associated Press reported that Bibby’s day job is “marketing” for a drug treatment center.) (Also, in December, Brian Moffitt of Winnipeg, Manitoba, extended his Guinness Book record of 702 body piercings by inserting 900 surgical needles into his leg at the same time.)
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Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD