News of the Weird
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Employees at Wal-Mart’s headquarters in China have set up a branch of the Communist Party, according to a December Associated Press dispatch, to go with five existing branches at individual stores (but the party said it would not interfere with Wal-Mart management).
Outsourcing of American jobs recently reached a new category of corporate employees: lawyers. An estimated 23,000 lawyers’ jobs were lost in the U.S. last year to India, where document review and legal research can be performed at about half the cost as in America, according to a story in the News Journal of Wilmington, Del.
In what one reporter termed “a culture clash of near-epic proportions,” Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist (the mostly free online advertising Web site), told a gathering of head-shaking, befuddled Wall Street analysts in December that his company had no intention of raising more money than necessary to cover expenses, much less of maximizing income (even though many analysts believe investors might pay $1 billion or more for the company).
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD