Fun_People Archive
23 Oct
Weirdness [499] - 29Aug97

Content-Type: text/plain
Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2)
From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 97 00:47:28 -0700
To: Fun_People
Precedence: bulk
Subject: Weirdness [499] - 29Aug97

Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.499 (News of the Weird, August 29, 1997)
		by Chuck Shepherd

* In July, a judge in Doncaster, South York, England, released suspect
Martin Kamara, 43, a black man who had been accused of threatening a
financial advisor, because of police impropriety.  Cops wanted to put Kamara
in a lineup for identification, but because of recent racial incidents, no
black men could be found who were willing to stand alongside Kamara.  So
Doncaster police hired a makeup artist to put black faces on seven white
men for the lineup.  (However, the artist forgot to make up the men's
hands.)

* A confidential report, prepared for the Australian Foreign Ministry and
with uninhibited appraisals of many South Pacific leaders, was accidentally
left on a table at a regional economic ministers meeting in Cairns,
Australia, in July, and reported in the press.  While the Australian
delegation was outwardly friendly toward its smaller, island-nation
neighbors, the report described by name many of the nations' leaders as
inept or corrupt.  And two weeks earlier, Austria's foreign minister came
under fire for his name-calling at a breakfast meeting in the Netherlands.
Minister Wolfgang Schuessel reportedly called one German official "a real
pig," the Belarus president a "smelly Turk," and U. S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright "an aging Bette Davis."

* Four young men were arrested for trespassing and attempting to remove
tires from a vehicle at a car-auction lot in Des Moines, Iowa, in May.
Owner Dan Carney had seen the men enter the lot late at night on his
security camera and hopped on his forklift.  He picked up the men's getaway
car and hid it inside a building.  While the men were next door inquiring
whether anyone had seen their car, police arrived to arrest them.

* Dallas, Tex., police officer Raymond Dethloff, Jr., 34, was suspended for
15 days in March for eating a McDonald's chicken sandwich he took from a
crashed car at an accident scene he was working.  The 16-year-old girl to
whom it belonged had been taken away in an ambulance with minor injuries.

* At a celebrity auction in May, Debbie Dacoba of Paw Paw, Mich., bid $8,625
for a pair of Mr. Ed's horseshoes and was so overcome with joy when she won
that she had to retreat to the ladies' room for 20 minutes until she stopped
crying.  Later she told a reporter that she would keep the horseshoes in
plastic because specks of brown residue in the nail holes "could be manure,
which I hope it is because then I have a piece of him."

* News of the Weird reported in 1996 on hard-luck Oklahoma rapist Darron
Bennalford Anderson, who had received a 2,200-year sentence in 1994 but
appealed and won a new trial.  Unfortunately for him, he was convicted again
and this time given more than 90 additional centuries behind bars, a total
of 11,250 years, including 40 centuries each for rape and sodomy, 17-1/2
centuries for kidnaping, 10 centuries for burglary and robbery, and 5
centuries for grand larceny.  In July 1997, the state Court of Criminal
Appeals held that the grand larceny charge was double jeopardy on the
robbery conviction and dismissed it, speeding Anderson's release date up 5
centuries to the year 12,744 A.D.

	Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

© 1997 Peter Langston