Chinese crackdown of test cheats

- As many as 50 exam monitors were forced to take cover at a high school in Zhongxiang, China, in June, fending off outraged students (and some parents) who hurled insults and stones at them after the monitors blocked cheating schemes on the all-important national "gaokao" exams. (It was "siege warfare," and eventually "hundreds" of police responded, according to a dispatch in the Daily Telegraph of London.) Metal detectors had found secret transmitters and contraband cellphones used by groups beaming in exam answers from outside. Independent proctors had been assigned because of longstanding suspicions that the schools' own proctors routinely enabled cheating (with results such as the 99 identical papers submitted in one subject). Said one student (in the mob of about 2,000), noting how widespread cheating is nationally, "There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat (also)."

Things People Believe

- Sheriffs and government deed-recorders in several states have reported annoying attempts recently by "Moorish American nationals" to confiscate temporarily vacant houses (often mansions), moving in without inhibition, changing the locks, and partying joyously - based on made-up documents full of gobbledygook and stilted legalese granting them sovereignty beyond the reach of law-enforcement. There is a venerable Moorish Temple Science of America, but these trespassers in Florida, Maryland, Tennessee, and other states are from fanciful offshoots that demand reparations (usually in gold) for Christopher- Columbus-era Europeans having stolen "their" land. A North Carolina police investigator told the Washington Post in March that "every state" is experiencing the "Moorish American" invasion.

- Britain's Anomalous Mind Management Abductee Contactee Helpline is the nation's "weirdest" support group, wrote the Daily Mirror in June, providing a range of services to victims of kidnapping by extraterrestrials and other haunting incidents to about 1,500 people a year, according to co-founder Miles Johnston. AMMACH uses an ordinary wall-stud detector to locate bodily implants and employs magnetic field meters and mineral lamps to identify "signatures" left on a skin's atoms by visits to another dimensional reality, Johnston explained. "We are under the threat of termination as a species if we do not get this sorted out."

Cliches Comes to Life

- Sheriff's deputies arrested Shane Kersey, 35, in March as the one who made phone calls to four schools in New Orleans's Westbank neighborhood, threatening to burn them down. When taken into custody, Kersey had aluminum foil wrapped around his skull and secured by a baseball cap but explained to an officer that he needed it "to prevent microwave signals from entering his head."

- Among the character witnesses in May at the New York City sex-trafficking trial of alleged pimp Vincent George, Jr., 33, and his father were three of the younger man's ladies, who praised him unconditionally to the jury as a good father to the children they bore for him and as the person responsible for helping them kick their drug habits. Heather Keith, 28, and Danielle Geissler, 31, referred to each other as Vincent, Jr.'s "wife-in-law." Geissler admitted that George ("Daddy") slapped her around a bit, explaining that they both "slapped each other around sometimes but never over work or staying in the (prostitution) life." (Three weeks later, the Georges were acquitted of sex trafficking, although convicted of money- laundering.)

Oops!

- Tim Blackburn, 50, fell off a ladder in Stockton-on-Tees, England, in 2007, and shattered his arm so badly that doctors had to remove four inches of bone and attach a metal scaffold around his arm that took six years to heal completely (and then only because of help from a cutting-edge ultrasound procedure). In May 2013 - one day after he got a clean bill of health - Blackburn tripped over his dog and tumbled down the stairs in his home, and his arm "snapped like a twig," he said.

News of the Weird Classic

A 48-year-old immigrant from Malta regularly hangs out in various New York City bars, but always on the floor, so that he can enjoy his particular passion of being stepped on. "Georgio T." told the New York Times in June (2009) that he has delighted in being stepped on since he was a kid.