xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Administrators of the 162-year-old North Carolina state capitol authorized an inspection by the Ghost Research Foundation following years of disquieting complaints by security officers about middle-of-the-night “choral singing” and “door-slamming” (October).

In Dallas, Ruben Garces Moreno, 39, was convicted of killing his wife, motivated, he said, by the fact that a fortune-teller had informed him that the wife had been unfaithful (November).

A spokesman for the Internet site offering “Kaboom: The Suicide Bomber Game” (the more bystander-victims, the more points) told The New York Times in December that the game had been played by computer users about 875,000 times since its introduction in April and is but one of several of the site’s questionable-taste games based on contemporary events, including “Extreme WTC (World Trade Center) Jumper,” “Sniper’s Revenge” and “Pico’s School” (modeled after the Columbine, Colo., tragedy). Said the site’s Web master, “People … need to lighten up and realize there are far worse problems in the world than what games people are playing.”

Singapore neurosurgeon Keith Goh and his colleagues said they would decide by the first of the year whether to attempt the unprecedented head-separating surgery requested by 28-year-old Siamese twins in Iran. Laleh and Ladan Bijani are law school graduates who claim to need the separation because they have grown apart psychologically. “We have different lifestyles,” said Ladan (the more extroverted). “We think very differently about issues.”
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