Weird

Florida’s nation-leading epidemic of mortgage fraud was facilitated by state regulators who permitted 2,200 people with finance-crime records to become professional “loan originators,” part of the total of 10,000 with rap sheets allowed to work in the industry over an eight-year period, according to a July investigation by The Miami Herald. At least 20 registered […]

Registered sex offender Jason Lee, 28, was arrested in Cincinnati in February and charged with several counts of deception for his seemingly benevolent acts of posting bond for two female strangers who had been arrested. Later, according to police, he had demanded sex and drugs from the women as payback, and a prosecutor said Lee […]

Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird (.995) WEEK OF MARCH 4, 2007 Muslims Find School Kosher About half the students who attend the Jewish primary school King David, in Birmingham, England, are Muslims, and in fact, their parents work hard to get them in because they so respect the school’s ethos and its halal-like diet. […]

In March, a jury in Los Angeles listened to nine psychiatrists testify, along with other witnesses who openly described their sex lives, before finally deciding that neither party in the shrink-vs.-shrink contest was all that emotionally healthy. Dr. David Martorano had sued the UCLA psychiatry department, blaming a loss of promotion on a failed affair […]

A Tennessee prison tries to poach California inmates (The West Tennessee Detention Facility (Mason, Tenn.) made a video pitch for California inmates, hoping some would volunteer to be outsourced under that state’s program to relieve overcrowding. The hard-timers should come east, the video urged, because of West Tennessee’s “larger and cleaner jail cells, 79 TV […]

A political appeal to the Finnish Klingon community A political appeal to the Finnish Klingon community … Plus, insurance against paper cuts, preferring babies with abnormalities, Egyptian Muslim women’s re-virginization, and more in this week’s News of the Weird. -Democracy in Finland: The Intopii computer firm of Helsinki announced in February that it has installed […]

Touring the World’s Greatest Slums The Kibera neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Dahravi section of Mumbai, India, are two of the planet’s most appalling slums, but residents have recently discovered well-off international visitors roaming their toxic, fetid urban hells as voyeurs on travel agency-arranged tours. “(T)hey want to come and take pictures … tell […]

A California School’s Racial Pep Rallies  Mount Diablo High School (Concord, Calif.) students met in racial groups in February to prepare for upcoming statewide tests, to motivate them to improve their race’s “team” score from the year before. Principal Bev Hansen defended the strategy of dividing whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians, pointing out both its […]

Muslims Find School Kosher About half the students who attend the Jewish primary school King David, in Birmingham, England, are Muslims, and in fact, their parents work hard to get them in because they so respect the school’s ethos and its halal-like diet. All students learn Hebrew, recite Jewish prayers, and celebrate Israeli independence, but […]