Showing posts with label weird news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weird news. Show all posts

Friday, April 25, 2008

Best. Headline. Ever.


The story's not bad either. From Rueters, via The Cunning Realist.

Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital

By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said...

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Apparently not a Photoshop Jobbie. Seriously.


From the Daily Mail.

At just 2ft 9in, Indian muscleman Aditya 'Romeo' Dev is the world's smallest bodybuilder.

Pint-sized Romeo is well-known in his hometown of Phagwara, India - for his ability to lift 1.5kg dumbbells - despite his overall 9kg body weight.

Every day, crowds flock to the local gym to the see the mini-muscleman in training. His trainer Ranjeet Pal spents hours helping his 19-year-old protege build his small muscles to perfection.

"Because of his small size, I don't assign him hard exercises. But Romeo trains more or less the same as anyone else and he's much more determined.
...

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Here at Morty and Moishe, We Love Weird News

Here is a look back at the best weird news of 2007. From Rueters. Follow the link for even more weird news.

By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN (Reuters) - From a Greek nunnery turned into a marijuana farm by two men posing as gardeners to a South African man with a gunshot wound told by a doctor to "walk the pain off," the world was full of weird news in 2007.

A Moscow woman set fire to her ex-husband's penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka. The couple divorced three years ago but continued to share a small flat.

"I was burning like a torch," the wounded ex-husband told Tvoi Den newspaper. "I don't know what I did to deserve this."

In another unusual living arrangement, a German man left his dead mother seated in her favorite armchair at their shared home for two years after her death of natural causes at age 92.

Yet not everything that smelled like a corpse was really dead in 2007. In the German town of Kaiserslautern, police broke into a darkened flat expecting to find a corpse after neighbors complained of a nasty smell seeping out into the hallway.

But instead they found a tenant with very smelly feet asleep in bed next to a pile of extremely foul-smelling laundry.

There were sadly many deaths in 2007 that were hardly noticed, such as in Zagreb, where a Croatian man who boarded a night tram and died in his seat rode through the city for more than six hours before the driver discovered he was dead...