Fun_People Archive
13 Dec
Weirdness [511] - 21Nov97

Content-Type: text/plain
Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2)
From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 97 02:33:54 -0800
To: Fun_People
Precedence: bulk
Subject: Weirdness [511] - 21Nov97

Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.511 (News of the Weird, November 21, 1997)
		by Chuck Shepherd

* The government of Italy revealed in September that it had recently asked
a court in Rome to take jurisdiction of a lawsuit it plans to file against
Youssef al-Magied al-Molqi, who was convicted of the 1985 Achille Lauro
hijacking and murder.  The government says that when Al-Molqi failed to
return to an Italian prison from a pass last year, he embarrassed the
country, and now it wants to sue him for the harm to its international image
and for betraying the trust of jail officials.  (Al-Molqi is still at
large.)

* At the Vatican's request, Brazil's leading religious artist, Claudio
Pastro, is at work giving the image of Jesus Christ a makeover designed to
update it for the third millennium.  According to an October Knight-Ridder
news service report, the new image will be of a serene and victorious Jesus
(rather than a suffering one) and will have traces of Asian, black, and
Indian features in his face.

* Edward Caudill, 32, filed a lawsuit in September in Greenup, Ky., against
Our Lady of Bellefonte Hospital, claiming its personnel hastened his
father's death from an auto accident in 1996 by not giving him blood,
allegedly because the man's wife said not to on religious grounds.  The wife
herself died from her injuries about four hours after the husband.  Because
Caudill's father died first, his estate was inherited by the wife (and on
her death, by her family) and not by Caudill.  Caudill pointed out that his
father had never signed any document declining life-saving procedures and
thus that the hospital was legally required to try to save him.

* Several newspapers in Stockholm, Sweden, reported in March that a
prostitute's $200 lawsuit against a client who failed to show for an
appointment was ordered to trial by an appeals court.  (The engagement would
have been legal under Swedish law, but a lower court had nonetheless
rejected her claim.)  In April, the parties settled out of court.

* At the annual national hobo convention, held this year in August in Britt,
Iowa, Minneapolis Jewel was elected queen of the hobos for the third time.
The king was a fellow from Helena, Mont., known as Frog.  Said Jewel, about
the changing demographics at the convention:  "The oldtimers are dying out,
the ones who rode the steam trains.  So it's nice to see these younger kids
coming in."

* According to a Times of London report in August, trains in Johannesburg,
South Africa, are being systematically equipped with fans to blow away the
increasingly common cannabis smoke.  Frequently, cannabis smokers take over
the front car of a train in order to blow smoke playfully through the
keyhole into the train engineer's cab.  Earlier in August, one driver had
to stop a train for almost an hour because he was rendered dizzy by the
smoke.

* According to a news report in the June issue of the magazine of the
Ontario College of Nurses, one of the College's members was suspended for
six months recently for "vulgar and offensive" behavior.  According to the
report, she perhaps accidentally broke wind while working in the presence
of a patient's wife, who took offense.  However, the discipline committee
found that the nurse compounded the problem by asking the wife if she
"wanted more" before passing gas directly into her face.

	Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

© 1997 Peter Langston