News of the Weird
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Two unnamed Egyptian men in their 20s, in Russia on tourist visas, illegally crossed the border to Belarus and then headed to Poland, which, as a European Union country, is harder to enter. According to an August report from BBC News’ Moscow bureau, the pair dug a hole under the border (using shoehorns), and once in Poland, intended to enter Germany the same way, but they had gotten turned around during the dig and instead of Germany, they mistakenly tunneled back into Belarus, where they were captured. They were sent back to Moscow but later were trying to leave the country again when Russian guards at the Ukraine border took them into custody.
H. Beatty Chadwick, jailed for contempt of court in 1995 for failure to hand over assets to his ex-wife after their divorce (because he claims not to have control of them), has now passed Day 4,100 in a county lock-up outside Philadelphia, according to an ABC News report.
Massachusetts inmate Michelle Kosilek, who was Robert Kosilek when he went to prison, is now awaiting a federal court decision on whether the prison system must fund the final-step surgery in his gender switch. Kosilek says being trapped in a man’s body is agonizing: “The greatest loss is the dying I do inside a little bit every day.” (Kosilek’s wife, though, did all her dying at once, when Robert murdered her in 1990.)
(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