xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In April, Luftee Abdul Waalee, 48, was sentenced to three years in prison for trying to pass a fake U.S. Treasury check for $25 million at a credit union in Pittsburgh. According to the prosecutor, Waalee is a member of the “Moors” black separatist group that supposedly believes that each American is endowed with a secret government account worth around $600,000, based on a theory that when the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1933, it began backing its currency not with a precious metal but with the prospective labor of its citizens. (Because the Moors are smarter than everyone else, only they know about these secret accounts and can thus buy and sell them.)
Recent news from the Washington, D.C., public school system, which by some measures is the poorest-performing in the country while simultaneously being the most expensive: D.C. schools were found to spend $234 per year per pupil on security (twice as much as Philadelphia, for instance, and five times as much as Baltimore, according to an April Washington Times report). Also, in one high school last year, 56 percent of students had streaks of at least 15 absences that were unexcused. And in an accounting-firm review of 944 student records in 16 high schools, in “hundreds” of cases the grade ultimately posted did not match the grade turned in, according to the report described in a December Washington Post story.
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Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD