Xxxnews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In court papers filed in 1994 but which only recently drew public attention, lawyers for the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., challenged a child-support claim against a priest by pointing out the culpability of the mother herself for failing to use birth control (which the church regards a grave sin). The 1994 document came to light when the woman went back to court in July 2005 for an increase in child support, but the court turned her down in deference to Father Arturo Uribe’s vow of poverty, although Uribe’s ordaining order subsequently volunteered more support. (The man who was archbishop of Portland during the 1994 case recently assumed Pope Benedict’s previous job as the Vatican’s chief doctrinist.)
In July, a team of South Korean scientists made history by cloning an Afghan hound, but many experts view the team’s revelation two months earlier as even more important, when they derived 11 stem cell lines from clones of patients with specific diseases. The leader of the team, Hwang Woo-suk, told the journal Nature Medicine then that Koreans have an advantage over westerners in delicate laboratory work because of “Oriental hands. We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with the steel chopsticks.”
Ronald Schueller, convicted of attempting to hire someone to knock his estranged wife unconscious and kidnap her, said (according to prosecutors) that he was just trying to reconcile with her, based on an idea from a “Dr. Phil” TV segment in which the host said that sometimes people need a good scare to realize their delusions (Port Washington, Wis., August).
(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
