NEWS OF THE WEIRD
by Chuck Shepherd
People in Need of Adult Supervision

(1) Gary Galleberg, a former vice mayor of Naples, Fla., pleaded guilty to battery in February for spitting on the table of restaurant diners whose offense had been to ask Galleberg, twice, to convince his small daughter to stop banging on the window next to their table. (2) Serbian anesthesiologist Spasoje Radulovic and surgeon Dragan Vukanic had an "all-out" fight in a Belgrade hospital's operating room in February, and then outside, punching and slapping each other while an assistant surgeon was forced to finish the operation.

The nature of the dispute was not disclosed,

according to a Reuters report. n

LEAD STORY

The West Tennessee Detention Facility (Mason, Tenn.) made a video pitch for California inmates, hoping some would volunteer to be outsourced under that state's program to relieve overcrowding. The hard-timers should come east, the video urged, because of West Tennessee's "larger and cleaner jail cells, 79 TV channels, including ESPN, views of peaceful cow pastures, and ... the 'Dorm of the Week,' (with its inmates) staying up all night, watching a movie and eating cheeseburgers or pizza," according to a March description in Nashville's Tennessean. "You're not a number here," said one inmate. "You come here, it's personalized." (California's outsourcing program

is facing a lawsuit from the prison guards'

union, anxious about job loss.) n

Yikes!

A group of "extremist" rabbis (the Sanhedrin, about 70 in number) announced in February that they want Judaism to resume the centuries-ago practice of including animal sacrifices in services and that resumption should start, for historical reasons, in the Jerusalem compound of Temple Mount (but known primarily now as Islam's Al Aqsa Mosque). According to the rabbis, sacrifice (especially of sheep) was a centerpiece of services in the Old City, but they acknowledge that it is unrealistic to expect current Muslim officials to tolerate the practice.

-- U.S. Justice Department statistics released in January showed that nationally, inmates in state prisons (between ages 15 and 64) die at a rate of about 20 percent less than people of that age in the general population. Black inmates, especially, appear to suffer lower mortality behind

prison walls, where the death rate is less

than half what it is on the outside. n

The Continuing Crisis

Retired German farmer Karl Szmolinsky told reporters in January that he had agreed to visit North Korea in April to give tips on how he managed to breed huge rabbits (around 20 to 25 pounds), which he believes the Koreans view as one answer to their hunger crisis. He has already sent a sampler of 12 monster rabbits, which should produce 60 offspring a year, with one providing "a filling meal for eight people," he told Der Spiegel.

-- Walter C. Stevens, 81, thought he had buried his allegedly disreputable past, but an underground water problem at his former residence in Sierra Vista, Ariz., brought it back. When an area in the yard flooded, a plastic bag emerged, containing videotapes that the FBI now says Stevens had made in the 1970s and 1980s of

himself having sex with underage girls in

Japan, South Korea and Thailand. n

Update

The New York City children's services agency took away former "breatharian" David Jubb's 20-month-old son in February after Jubb refused to let physicians treat the boy's fractured ankle. As mentioned previously in News of the Weird, breatharians believe that humans can subsist primarily on air and sunlight. Jubb said he has evolved since those days and now eats, but extremely few calories' worth, and he drinks his own urine. He acknowledged that his child's diet is absent the generally recommended nutritional building blocks for infants, according to a New York Post report. n