Lead Stories
After Ivory Coast’s soccer team was eliminated from the African Nations Cup in January, the country’s military ruler, General Robert Guei, had the team arrested and put in a military prison for two days. Addressing the players, Guei said, “I asked that you be taken there so you reflect awhile. Next time [if you play badly] you will stay there for military service . . . until a sense of civic pride gets into your heads.”
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Wynema Faye Shumate, 65, was arrested in Ladson, South Carolina, in March on two charges of mishandling a dead body. The case came to light after a 27-year-old Englishman flew to America to marry Shumate after a hot Internet romance but discovered that Shumate was not the thirtyish woman she had claimed to be. According to police, when the man asked Shumate if she had any other surprises, she told him about the carved-up body in the freezer, that of her male former housemate, who Shumate said had died the year before of natural causes. Shumate was cleared of causing the death, but the Englishman says the wedding is off.
More divine dentistry: A News of the Weird roundup last July listed several cities in which worshipers had claimed that gold teeth and fillings appeared in their mouths in place of the previous porcelain and silver after prayer. Later that year, similar divine outbreaks occurred at a church in Weatherford, Texas, and in Orangevale, California. As in earlier instances, some of the faithful stuck to their claims even when their dental records showed they’d had gold fillings all along.
Send your weird news to Chuck Shepherd, Chicago Reader, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611.
