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Least Competent Florida Police: Sheriff’s deputies arrested Cynthia Hunter, 38, in Brandon, Fla., in October, and she remained in jail for 50 days until a lab finally concluded that the “methamphetamine” in her purse was really dried cat urine that she had legally purchased for her son’s science project. Deputies arrested Andrew Johnson, a white […]

It’s Good to Be a British Prisoner (continued): The Portland Young Offenders’ Institute in Dorset recently began holding classes, for up to 30 inmates, in pole-vaulting (but reassured critics that even the most athletic inmates would only get about 13 feet high, whereas the prison walls are 20 feet tall, topped by razor wire). Psychologist […]

In January, Jerome Felske was fired as a truck driver for the city of Chicago when investigators learned that he had 22 criminal convictions on his record. Felske appealed, and in September, the city’s Human Resources Board reinstated him, noting that Felske had actually disclosed six of them on his original application and, as to […]

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (85) The errant animal (often a squirrel) that wanders into an electrical line or substation, kills itself, and thereby plunges a wide neighborhood area into darkness, as in Ashland, Wis., and […]

A court in Preston, England, convicted Akinwale Arobieke, 46, of violating an earlier court order (reported in News of the Weird in 2006) by doing the same prohibited behavior: He accosted a man in public at a mall and fondled his bicep.  In October, the singer Donovan, 61, announced plans to open the Invincible Donovan […]

The existence of the 50-year-old, ultra-secure computer protocol required for a U.S. president to launch nuclear weapons is well-known, through newspapers, books and Hollywood films, but according to papers released by Britain’s National Archive in November, a similarly complex protocol has been in place in that country only since 1998. Before that, a person could […]

Mesa, Ariz., police arrested Sebastian Mancilla, 41, in November after a security camera at Mervyn’s department store caught him being not too subtle in looking up the skirt of a female shopper. According to an Arizona Republic reporter, citing a police source: “At one time Mancilla approached the woman from behind and laid down on […]

Not Ready for Prime Time: A man in a werewolf mask tried to rob a Subway sandwich shop in Pittsburgh in October, but came away empty as the two employees on duty refused to give up money even though he implied that he had a gun (covered with a paper bag). The employees said the […]

The Texas Board of Education announced in November that it had made its selections of approved math textbooks for the next school year, even though the group of chosen books contained a total of 109,263 errors. Books of the industry giant Houghton Mifflin accounted for about 86,000. All publishers have guaranteed to correct the errors […]

Mayor Ken Williams resigned in Centerton, Ark. (pop. 2,146), in November and revealed that he is actually Don LaRose, an Indiana preacher who abruptly abandoned his family in 1980 because, he said, satanists had abducted and threatened him, and brainwashed him to rub out details of a murder he supposedly knew about. He said his […]