Fun_People Archive
10 Sep
Scary WEIRDNUZ

Date: Fri, 10 Sep 93 13:53:22 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: Scary WEIRDNUZ

 From: vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU!bostic (Keith Bostic)
 From: WEIRDNUZ.290 (News of the Weird, August 27, 1993)
 By: Chuck Shepherd

* The Associated Press reported in July that the prestigious Hughes, Hubbard
and Reed law firm pressured its lawyer Allan Gerson to leave the firm
prematurely in June so that it could take on as a client Libyan dictator
Moammar Gadhafi.  Gerson was a stumbling block because he was representing
the family of a victim of Pan Am Flight 103.  Because Libya is alleged to
have had a role in blowing up the flight, representation of both the family
and Gadhafi would have been viewed as a conflict of interest.  [AP wirecopy, 7-20-93]

* In July, the government of Thailand started a hospital program to treat
elephants addicted to amphetamines.  The elephants were given the drugs to
make them work harder and to withstand injury in hauling logs out of
jungles.  [New York Times-AP, 7-25-93]

* In a July article on Northern Ireland's aggressive tourist industry,
Newsweek reported that despite its long-running, bloody civil war the
country has a crime rate that is one-fourth that of Sweden and a murder rate
one-fifteenth that of Washington, D. C.  [Newsweek, 7-26-93]

* In the first seven months of the year in New Delhi, India, at least 58
people were killed in bus-related accidents.  Officials attribute the
problem to increased bus competition following government deregulation:
Bus drivers frequently ram buses through crowded intersections to beat
competitors to bus stops.  The government's only remedial program so far
has been a drivers' test that only a few of the several thousand drivers
showed up to take and which only one driver passed.  [St. Joseph
News-Press-AP, 6-26-93]

* Russian scientists investigating unusually high levels of radiation at a
children's camp in Siberia announced in July that they believe the source
is bats that feed from Lake Karachai (where a chemical plant dumps its
wastes) and then hang out at the camp.   [Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
(Ontario, Calif.), 7/19/93]

* A June Boston Globe story on the Soiree strip joint in South Boston
disclosed that dancer Taylor Monet, 33, believes she has the world's first
inflatable breasts, the result of a "valve and hose" implantation that
allows her to inject or extract a saline solution to vary the size of her
silicone breasts between a minimum 40-D and a maximum 96.  [Boston Globe,
Jun93]

© 1993 Peter Langston