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In Charlottesville, Va., in October, a judge found white-nationalist leader Kevin Strom not guilty of the sexual enticement of an 11-year-old girl, despite humiliating testimony from Strom’s wife. According to prosecutors, she (also a white-nationalist activist) had caught him at home naked, masturbating to photographs of nude women whose faces had been replaced by face […]

Hawaiian Airlines is suing Mesa Air Group on a business matter and believes Mesa’s chief financial officer, Peter Murnane, has, or had, documents relevant to the lawsuit on his office computer but that, recently, conveniently, the documents had been deleted. Mesa acknowledged in a September court filing that Murnane had indeed recently erased a huge […]

Update: The man noted in News of the Weird in 1996 for keeping an almost unbelievably detailed personal diary died in October at age 89. For 25 years, Rev. Robert Shields of Dayton, Wash., had chronicled his life in five-minute segments of banalities, leaving 37 million words on paper filling 91 boxes. His self-described “uninhibited,” […]

In interviews with reporters from McClatchy Newspapers in October, cemetery workers in Najaf, Iraq, lamented the recent downturn in violence in that city, as they admitted having grown accustomed to the income from the estimated 6,500 caskets a month that they serviced. (The number had fallen to less than 4,000 a month, and others dependent […]

About once a year, News of the Weird learns of an episode in which a motorist creeps up to a railroad crossing and then onto the tracks, but mysteriously at that point is unable to move the car forward or backward, and even more mysteriously, a train is coming at precisely that moment, and the […]

Police in Pittsburgh arrested a man in October for, they said, trying to get change at a Giant Eagle store for the bogus $1 million bill he was carrying (with a likeness of Grover Cleveland) and getting rowdy in the cashier’s office when he was turned down. Also, in October, six men went on trial […]

Trial lawyer Gary Baise is also the “lower taxes, limited government … less spending” candidate for chairman of the Fairfax County (Va.) Board of Supervisors, but an October Washington Post investigation revealed that he had collected nearly $300,000 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2005 on an already profitable farm he owns in Illinois. At […]

“Over my dead body was I going to give the state another dollar for the tolls,” said Thomas Jensen, 68, to the judge in Rochester, N.H., in September as he accepted the three-day jail sentence instead of a $150 fine. He had been convicted of cheating the state for insisting on using two discontinued 25-cent […]

Donald Turk, 48, and two associates were charged in Lake Elsinore, Calif., in September with kidnapping Turk’s girlfriend, whom Turk was trying to push out of his life because she annoyed him. His plan, allegedly, was to take her to Mexico, drop her off, and hope that she would not return home. However, she was […]

Australian performance artist Stelios Arcadious, 61, showed off the laboratory-grown ear that he had implanted in his arm in 2006 and which now fully resembles his other two ears, according to an October report in London’s Daily Mail, reviewing his latest show at Britain’s Newcastle Centre for Life. The next step, he said, is to […]