xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx-17

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Amarillo, Texas, officials, welcomed home eighth-place national spelling bee finisher Caitlin Campbell in June with a billboard, but misspelled her name as “Cambell.”

ExxonMobil, the company that announced jaw-dropping profits of $18.7 billion for the first half of 2006, said in June that it would fight the U.S. Justice Department over $92 million that the government said the company owes in the still-uncompleted 1989 Exxon Valdez oil-spill cleanup.

* I See Dead People:
–A campaign worker for unsuccessful Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate Dennis Michaud was charged in July with falsifying election records, in that he allegedly made a sworn statement that 57 voters had signed Michaud’s nominating petition “in (his) presence,” including two people who had long been dead. Said the worker, “I did nothing wrong.”

–The signers this summer of a nominating petition for James T. Finnell for an office in Smithtown, N.Y., were all living, but the problem there was that Finnell himself had died in 2004, and according to a July report in Newsday, no one knows who circulated the petition.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD