xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

According to police in Red Bluff, Calif., Andrew McCrae killed one of their officers in November and fled to Concord, N.H., where he was arrested a few days later. According to his Web site postings, McCrae (a former “human shield” in Israel) thought the alleged murder would create sympathy for his views on war, police brutality, globalization and corporate social irresponsibility. He allegedly told friends that he was immune from prosecution because he had had the foresight to incorporate himself beforehand in a state other than California (corporate name: Proud and Insolent Youth).

In November, Blair MacKay, 32, was fined about $600 for invasion of privacy by a court in Dingwall, England, after testimony that he had barged into a neighbor’s apartment and asserted, “I don’t listen to phone conversations,” after the woman had just minutes earlier told her companion over the phone that Blair MacKay was probably listening to them.

In other wiretapping news, the Agence France-Presse news service reported in October that a German police surveillance campaign had been compromised when a software mix-up by the O2 mobile phone company mistakenly notified criminal suspects that their phones were being tapped from a voice-mail phone whose number was printed on their September bill.

Ng Lai Ping, 39, complained in October that an official at Hong Kong’s Central Library had demanded that she stop breastfeeding her child in public and gave as the reason signs posted at various places in the building, “No Food or Drinks.”
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