Lead Stories
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The Agence France-Presse news service reported that Al Thawra, the government newspaper of Baghdad, played an April Fools’ Day joke on its readers, announcing: “Good news: from today, bananas (two pounds), Pepsi (a case), and chocolate (50 pieces) to be included in rations.” Elsewhere in the newspaper the editors revealed that the story was a hoax and the monthly government food ration continued to be small amounts of tinned cheese, flour, rice, sugar, tea, cooking oil, powdered milk, and salt.
Science Fair
A police detective reading the confession of Lyle Clinton May in Asheville, North Carolina, in March told a jury that after May had killed a 21-year-old woman he also stabbed her four-year-old son to death. “It didn’t seem right leaving him alive,” May wrote. “I felt sorry for him. I did not want to see the kid crying or having the memory of his mom being killed.” May was sentenced to death.
Two 15-year-old boys, sentenced to community service in a Winston-Salem courthouse for vandalizing a telephone booth, were captured on surveillance videotape in March urinating in a coffeepot used by lawyers, according to an Associated Press report. The coffeepot was left plugged in all night, creating a pungent cooked-urine smell. Said one lawyer who often uses the coffee room, “[The boys] are going to have to get [someone] from out of state to defend them on this one.”
Send your weird news to Chuck Shepherd, Chicago Reader, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611.
