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Least Competent Criminals

Claude White, 34, was arrested in April in Elizabethton, Tenn., and charged with stealing a forklift, which sheriff’s deputies later found overturned in the middle of a road, but with a pair of shoes and socks trapped underneath. Around the same time, a call came from Sycamore Shoals Hospital about a patient (White) telling an […]

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The Continuing Crisis

At least five convicted sex offenders in Florida’s Miami-Dade County have their official residence in a makeshift encampment underneath a bridge on the Julia Tuttle Causeway to Miami Beach, with the blessing of the state Department of Corrections, according to an April report by CNN. Officials say that the state’s tough zoning law for sex […]

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Try to Read This Without Wincing:

A cable broke on a leg extension machine at a YWCA facility in Akron, Ohio, in 2004, catapulting a steel bar forcefully at a 22-year-old football player working out for a shot at a college scholarship, hitting him squarely between his parted legs, whacking his left testicle. Three years later, he still walks gingerly and […]

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Fetishes on Parade

In January, Ronald Dotson, 39, pleaded no contest to attempting to break into a Ferndale, Mich., store in order to steal a mannequin outfitted in a French maid’s uniform, which authorities said was his seventh “statuephilia”-related offense in 13 years. “I thought I was getting my life together,” he told the judge, even though his […]

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Compelling Explanations

Local music producer Ricky Lackey, during questioning in March by a judge in Cincinnati to help her determine an appropriate sentence for Lackey for his crime of attempted theft, told her that he has no children but that he has “six on the way.” The judge sought clarification. “Are you marrying a woman with six […]

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The Litigious Society

In lawsuit-friendly Madison County, Ill. (termed “the promised land” by some trial lawyers), a judge awarded $311,700 to Amanda Verett for a long series of painful injuries that her courtroom-veteran chiropractor has been treating. Verett said she was holding a door open at a Pizza Hut when an employee yanked it open farther, and calamitous […]

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Ironies

So many U.S. executives want to visit India to make deals to outsource their companies’ jobs that in March, India’s Washington, D.C., embassy said it was forced to outsource the job of processing the executives’ visa applications. Yet another U.S. job was outsourced to India in May, that of “local government reporter” covering city hall […]

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Leading Economic Indicators

Updates: Zimbabwe’s almost comically sad hyperinflation, which News of the Weird reported had reached 1,593 percent in January (one could buy a house, pool and tennis court in 1990 for the same dollars as would buy a single brick today), was up to 3,731 percent in May, and is expected to get much worse. Star […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Least Competent Criminals

Claude White, 34, was arrested in April in Elizabethton, Tenn., and charged with stealing a forklift, which sheriff’s deputies later found overturned in the middle of a road, but with a pair of shoes and socks trapped underneath. Around the same time, a call came from Sycamore Shoals Hospital about a patient (White) telling an […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Update

In November, News of the Weird reported the arrest of Michael McPhail of Spanaway, Wash., who was charged with bestiality under the state’s brand-new law, having allegedly been caught by his wife having sex with the family dog. In May 2007, a jury in Tacoma, Wash., found McPhail not guilty.

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