as per Jeff: Wacky News

Names in the News

Arrested for public urination (Bowling Green, Ohio, September): Mr. Joshua Pees.

Escaped from the same prison for a third time (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, October): Mr. Richard Slippery.

Pleaded guilty after being caught at bank fraud (Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation, S.D., July): Manuel Fool Head and his wife, Sandra Fool Head

July, the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Andre Johnson on drug charges, calling the warrantless search of his apartment illegal; the police had broken in, citing an emergency exception to the warrant requirement solely on the basis that Johnson's street name, Earthquake, made it obvious that he is too violent to have to wait on a warrant.

Least Competent Criminals

Aug. 30 was a remarkable day at the Baltimore Police Department personnel office. Edwin V. Gaynor, 21, was filling out an application to join the force when he came to the standard question of whether he'd ever committed a crime. Gaynor decided to be candid: Well, yes, he had, and he went into detail about a carjacking and two robberies in Texas. The answer drew the notice of detectives down the hall, who questioned Gaynor, got intimate details of the crimes, called police in Texas, found out that the carjacking was unsolved, found that Gaynor's details matched the crime's details, got a search warrant for Gaynor's home, found lots of relevant evidence, and executed the Texas arrest warrant. Said Gaynor's mom, "He always wanted to be (a cop)." [Baltimore Sun, 8-31-01]

and finally...

Dr. Rogerio Lobo, chairman of the ob-gyn department at Columbia Medical School, told reporters in October that he almost withheld publishing his findings (in a current issue of the prestigious Journal of Reproductive Medicine) because they were so improbable. His team found that random groups of South Korean women had almost double the success rate with in-vitro fertilization if they had been prayed for by a group of Americans than if they hadn't been. Lobo said there was probably some variable he had not accounted for, but he could not imagine what it might be. [London Daily Telegraph, 10-4-01]

culled from News of the Weird