xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Ireland’s justice ministry proposed rule changes for its prison system in June, banning such “inhumane” treatments as restricted diets and corporal punishment. On the other hand, among the current practices that would soon be prohibited are inmates’ bringing in their own furniture, hiring maids, and ordering food and alcoholic beverages, according to a dispatch from Dublin published in The Australian.
Officials in Montgomery County, Md., regard the feathery green plant called the mugwort as a weed, an “alien invasive plant,” and periodically lament its presence in the county’s parks, according to a June Washington Post report. However, local Koreans, who call the plant “souk,” consider it a delicacy in seafood soup and rice cakes, and have eagerly been digging it out of the parks for free, except that it is illegal to remove anything, even weeds, from the parks. Consequently, according to the Post, county officials have simultaneously undertaken (a) a pilot program to see if goats could be trained to root out unwanted flora and (b) a stepped-up program to convince the Koreans to obey the law against removing mugwort.
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