In January, the town of Herouxville, Quebec (pop. 1,300), famously enacted a "code" of expectations for immigrants, seemingly aimed at Islamic laws and rituals (for example, requiring gender equality, permitting alcohol, rejecting special diets for prisoners and reaffirming laws against stoning and female genital mutilation). In October, a town spokesman complained that the code had caused Herouxville residents to be called "(m)orons, liars, xenophobes, fascists ... dictators, Nazis, racists ... idiots ... mentally deficient, intolerant, stupid, retarded." Nonetheless, the town said it would campaign to have the code adopted nationally.
Justice Run Amok
Extreme Behavior
Weird Campaign Strategies: Mathew Lajoie, 21, running for an at-large school board seat in Brunswick, Maine, in November, spent the campaign trying to convince voters that he is a changed man from the one who had amassed 18 criminal convictions in the previous two years. (He lost but received 10.5 percent of the votes.)
[Times Record (Brunswick, Maine), 10-23-07; Portland Press-Herald, 11-7-07]
Simple Explanations: (1) Alex Noel, 16, a finalist in Rhode Island's Great Pumpkin Weigh-Off in October, said his success raising his (1,224-lb.) pumpkin was because "You spend all your time with it. No sports. You just come home and be with the pumpkin." (2) Darren Mack, 46, pleading guilty in Las Vegas, Nev., in November to murdering his wife, and also accepting a judgment for attempting to kill the judge handling his divorce (after first insisting on his innocence): "I do understand . . . in my
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 motorist must either bail out or be killed. In the latest incident, Betsy DeVall wound up on the tracks in Greer, S.C., in October and later said she mumbled to herself, "Oh, my gosh, I'm on the track. I've got to get off." She was unable to move her car, for some reason, but fortunately police Sgt. Marcus O'Shields saw the whole thing and pulled her to safety just before an oncoming train crashed into the car.
Armin Meiwes, the German gourmet-cannibal who was convicted in 2004 of killing, filleting and eating an apparently willing victim whom he had met via the Internet, gave his first extensive interview from prison in October to German TV and mentioned in passing that his sauteed morsels "tasted like pork, a little ... bitter, stronger." And in November, a Green Party activist who visits Meiwes' prison told a reporter that Meiwes had been elected by fellow inmates as a discussion leader on environmental, tax and legal issues and was demonstrating his commitment to Green Party principles by eating mostly vegetarian meals.
[Spiegel Online, 10-16-07; Daily Mail (London), 11-20-07]
In October a police officer in Scranton, Pa., charged Dawn Herb with disorderly conduct after he passed her home and heard her, through an open window, cussing her toilet, which at the time was overflowing and leaking into the kitchen. Herb, and the American Civil Liberties Union, were incredulous.
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Operation Repo
The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest
Inside American Jail
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