xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

In 2002, Germany legalized prostitution, primarily for tax revenue and to make sex workers eligible for health care benefits, and at the same time, it specifically declined to exempt brothels from those places of employment at which the jobless might be required to work in order to maintain their benefits. In December, there was a press report of a 25-year-old unemployed waitress complaining that she had been called for an interview at a brothel and feared that if she declined the job, her benefits would be cut. Germany’s Federal Labor Office said it would not do that, but a Hamburg lawyer said there have been cases of unemployed female call-center workers being offered telephone sex-line jobs via the government.

In a tourist park next to the zoo in Chiang Mai, Thailand, handlers have toilet-trained seven elephants. In photos published in Bangkok’s The Nation in January and now available on the Internet, a 5-year-old elephant is shown using a giant white, Western-style concrete toilet as if he were human, including using his trunk to pull a cord to flush.
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