Though a university study linked birth defects to the controversial mining industry practice of mountain top removal, lawyers for the National Mining Association offered a quick, industry-friendly rebuttal:
Since the area covered by the study was in West Virginia, any birth defects could well be explained merely as inbreeding.
A week later, the lawyers thought better and edited out that insinuation.
It’s a
compliment
back at
the home
Michael Jones, 50, told a magistrate in Westminster, England, that he did not “assault” a police officer when he urinated on him at a railway station a month earlier.
Jones claimed, instead, that he was “urinating in self-defense” in that the water supply had been “poisoned by the mafia.”
The magistrate explained that Jones’ argument “is not realistically going to be a viable defense.”
So, um, the
world did end
after all
An 18-year-old man, celebrating on the evening of May 21, after it had become clear that the world would not end as predicted by a radio evangelist, drowned after jumping playfully off a bridge into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa Fla. 33679 or go to www.newsoftheweird.com.)