Wierd news from MSN
LEAD STORIES
Accomplished toy inventor Brian Walker, 44, told the Newhouse News Service in June that he would, by next summer, launch himself on the world's first homemade space shot (blasting off at 4,000 mph, to a height of 30 miles, using 10 tanks containing 7,000 pounds of hydrogen peroxide as fuel, at an overall expense of $250,000). The spacecraft he built is 9 feet tall, will be propelled from a 30-foot-long trailer, and has a capsule that will return him to earth via parachutes. A jet-propulsion engineer at Cal Tech said Walker's plan was actually pretty sound, in theory.
Lean Times for La Cosa Nostra: Despite a massive federal, state and local law-enforcement operation against organized-crime gambling and loan-sharking in south Florida, capped by a six-count federal indictment in June, the evidence actually revealed rather dismal business prospects for the Colombo crime family in the area. According to the indictment, Colombo muscleman "Joey Flowers" Rotunno and his crew earned gambling income of less than $2,000 a day.
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O.R. Surprises
Orthopedic surgeon Nicholas Cappello had his license lifted in April by the Arkansas Medical Board for as many as 20 botched surgeries featuring such errors as metal plates screwed to the wrong bones or screws missing the bone altogether. And patient Robert Banks sued the Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge, La., in March, complaining that he went in for a heart bypass in 1995 but came out merely circumcised (which doctors said was a necessary antecedent to the surgery because he required kidney-monitoring equipment). (For unrelated reasons, the surgeons decided, after setting Banks up, not to do the bypass.)
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Compelling Explanations
In February, Nova Scotia provincial judge John MacDougall ruled that a doctor who had masturbated two teen-age boys numerous times in his office had not violated the law because he had thought his unorthodox procedure was a valid medical treatment for the patients (one of whom had complained merely of blurred vision after a fall). (Two weeks later, a prosecutor exercised a rare constitutional procedure and indicted the doctor directly before the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia.)
Calvin Jerold Burdine's 1983 Texas death sentence was overturned by a federal judge in September 1999 based on his lawyer's having slept during key parts of his trial. Because the judge ruled on the sleep issue, he was not required to decide a second issue that also might have contributed to the original death sentence: The prosecutor had been allowed to tell the jury that Burdine should not get a mere life sentence because "Sending (Burdine, an openly gay man) to the penitentiary (considering prisons' homosexual activity) isn't a very bad punishment." (In June 2000, a federal appeals court heard oral arguments on Burdine's sleeping-lawyer issue.)
In March, in the heat of a battle in the Mexican legislature over adopting daylight savings time, opponent Sen. Felix Salgado put forth his strongest argument: Advancing the clocks an hour will reduce daylight time in the morning, curtailing many "mananeros," or couples' morning sex. "(N)ow when you wake up," said Salgado, "your partner is no longer there because she had to take the kids to school."
In Boston in June, federal judge Mark L. Wolf ruled that convicted wife-murderer Robert "Michelle" Kosilek is entitled to go to trial on his demand that the state prison system provide him free "sexual reassignment" surgery so that he can serve his life-without-possibility-of-parole sentence as a woman. A court-appointed psychologist recommended that Kosilek get not only sex-organ substitution but the feminization of his face, removal of body hair, and access to makeup, hair care and nail polish because to ignore his needs would further Kosilek's "sadness and sense of loss" at having been born of the incorrect gender.
In a Norfolk County, Mass., court in March, Andrew Clary, 36, pled not guilty to murdering his girlfriend, a death that occurred when his car rammed hers twice after an argument and forced her into the path of an oncoming car. However, Clary told the judge that he really only "tapped" the woman's car in order to get her to turn around and head to a hospital so she could be treated for having ingested illegal drugs.
In 1999, James Weber of Calgary, Alberta, paid his tax bill (equivalent to about $75,000 U.S.) dollar-for-dollar with Colombian pesos (worth about $50 U.S.), arguing that the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency failed to print its dollar signs with two bars through the "S." A dollar sign with only one bar through the S, he said, is used only by several South American currencies, and thus he is now paid in full. (In March 2000, an appeals court ruled against him, despite his having produced several favorable historical banking documents from as far back as 1910.)
In April, after her arrest for robbing a Springfield, Mo., Bank of America, Joyce Lingle told police that she had not read the note that she had handed a teller (and for which she received a bag in exchange) and only began to suspect there had been a bank robbery after she walked out the door and saw employees lock it behind her. Lingle is married to a jailed murder suspect, was in the company of a second man during her bank transaction, and implied to police that the two men were just using her.
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So Much for the Revolution in Corsica
The guerilla separatist movement in Corsica was dealt a severe blow in June when its leader for the last 20 years, Marcel Lorenzoni, 50, and his son, Pierre, 21, stabbed each other to death during an argument in their hometown of Bastelica.
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Update
News of the Weird reported in 1994 that then-recent government figures showed the death toll of young women in India killed by their mothers-in-law for insufficient dowries had risen to 4,700 per year. In May 2000, Canada's Southam news service reported that a jail in Delhi, India, is seriously overcrowded with such mothers-in-law (including also those who merely have threatened, assaulted or imprisoned their sons' wives) and that the death toll is now 6,300 per year.
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Least Competent Criminals
Bad Decisions: Ernest Michaelson, 45, was arrested in Bridgeport, Conn., in January, just after allegedly robbing a United Bank; he was discovered around back, where he had interrupted his getaway in order to count the money ($857). And two women were arrested near Carlsbad, N.M., in January, where their car had run out of gas; acting on a hunch, a patrolman found that the gas tank held surprisingly little gasoline because the inside of the tank was taken up with packages containing about 80 pounds of marijuana. |
