xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In the course of a rare crackdown on Nigerian “419”/”advance-fee” scams, a Nigerian court in July sentenced a woman to 30 months in jail, plus fines, in a case in which the victim was not a gullible, e-mail-reading American, but a bank. Brazil’s Banco Noroeste S.A. was apparently suckered into advancing money for a nonexistent new airport in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, which ultimately cost it $242 million (much of which it later recovered).
The Massachusetts attorney general’s office said in June that it was investigating whether longshoremen’s unions (working the docks in Boston) have for years been putting some members’ kids (as young as age 3) on their membership rolls so that they will accumulate seniority and thus be eligible for higher starting pay if and when they worked as longshoremen.
In India, children as young as 5 are working for police departments, according to a June BBC dispatch, because among survivors’ benefits for the family of a police employee killed on duty is that a family member is given a department job, with the workload tailored to his or her abilities.)
British biochemist James Shippen and colleague Barbara May created the Indipod, supposedly the first portable toilet made for cars (4-wheel-drive vehicles) and tested it recently by traveling from Scotland to Italy without using any restrooms along the way. The Indipod, to be installed in the trunk, sells for the equivalent of $550.
(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
