-- In April, commenting on the breakthroughs in cloning, Ann Northrop, a columnist for a New York lesbian and gay publication, argued that cloning could give women total control over reproduction: "Men are now totally irrelevant," she wrote. "Men are going to have a very hard time justifying their existence on the planet." And a week later, two Rutgers University researchers reported confirming that an alternative nervous-system route to sexual arousal exists, from the cervix to the neck to the brain, thus accounting for why some spinal-cord-injured people can nevertheless have orgasms. One of the researchers said it might thus be possible to induce orgasm chemically by stimulating the specific neurotransmitter.

-- University of North Carolina law professor Barry Nakell, 53, a nationally known expert on death-penalty law, was fired in February after pleading guilty to shoplifting food and a book from a store in Chapel Hill. He had also been charged with shoplifting in 1991, but the charge was dismissed after he performed community service.

-- The Los Angeles Times reported in December that nearly 2,000 criminals, "hundreds" of them violent or repeat offenders, have escaped in the last two years from a lackadaisically run work-release program of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. In most cases, inmates were merely asked if they preferred work-release, with no examination of their criminal records.

-- In a September statement, Joseph Sniezek, an official of the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Injury Prevention, lamented the serious injuries suffered by rodeo bull riders and suggested a solution might be to require helmets.

-- In November, as part of a growing trend to micromanage school curricula, the New York legislature required that all public school students age 8 and above receive formal instruction in the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. That follows a requirement that students be given instruction weekly on how animals fit into "the economy of nature." (New Jersey already requires instruction on the potato famine, via amendment to its law requiring instruction on the Holocaust.)

-- In January in an experiment to exercise better crowd control over opposition-party demonstrations in Jakarta, Indonesia, the local police chief put seven cobras in a glass case in front of the main police station and said they would be used to intimidate protesters. He said police would wave the cobras at the crowd, but it was not clear whether officers relished handling the snakes in the first place or that such crowds would allow the officers to get close enough for the snakes to strike.

-- The National Wilderness Institute charged in January that the Department of the Interior has failed to remove several plant and wildlife species from the government's endangered list despite the common knowledge that they (such as the "Maguire daisy") do not exist. The government resists because it says it costs $37,000 to remove a name from the list but meanwhile has added hundreds of new ones in recent years.

-- The governing commercial body of Europe, the European Union, ruled in February that despite a six-century tradition, wooden shoes manufactured in the Netherlands would no longer be permitted in the workplace unless they could meet the same standards as steel-toed safety shoes. Shoe manufacturers warn that Dutch clogs might soon disappear altogether. As one shoe executive said, "It would be like Paris without the Eiffel Tower."

-- In December, the Canadian Defence Department issued a 17-page set of guidelines for manufacturers who wish to compete for new contracts to supply underwear to the military. Among the most challenging requirements are that one pair must be able to be worn for six-month stints in the field and that the garment must be invisible to night-vision goggles so that a skivvy-clad soldier does not offer a target to snipers.

-- The Sunday Times of London reported in December that 300 tons of humanitarian aid from Western countries was sitting in Bosnian warehouses because it is useless. Included were birth control pills with an expiration date of 1986, weight-reduction tablets from Britain, mouthwash from the United States, and chemical waste from Germany. According to the Times, some war-zone drivers have been killed transporting these supplies, and the German chemicals by law cannot be returned, thus creating a hazardous waste disposal problem for Bosnians.

-- The Associated Press reported in February on Ms. Myassar Abul-Hawa, 52, the first female taxicab driver in Jordan. Her business is brisk, in part because some devout Muslim men ask for her by name to chauffeur their wives and daughters so they won't be alone with male drivers. (As is sometimes the case in the United States, Abul-Hawa turned to taxi-driving when she could not put to use her degree in English literature.)

-- In the last six months, several reports have surfaced from the old Soviet Union countries that nearly bankrupt factories have been forced to pay their workers merchandise instead of cash. Included were eggs paid to farm workers in Klyuchi, Siberia; old train cars given to railroad workers in Ukraine; salaries of from 33 to 42 brassieres a month by an underwear factory in Volgograd, Russia; and, from another Volgograd factory, rubber dildos (which are in surplus, according to The Economist magazine, because the market has turned to electronic vibrators).

Carrying on a 40-year tradition, Filipinos in the village of San Pedro Cutud recently conducted their Easter audience-participation crucifixion ceremonies, with 12 volunteers nailed to crosses with sterilized 4-inch spikes in a show of absolution. As News of the Weird reported in 1990, for several years the Philippines Department of Tourism was an official sponsor of the event.

In March in Lipovljani, Croatia, twin brothers Branko Uhiltil and Ivan Uhiltil, 57, committed suicide in separate incidents within hours of each other, apparently with utterly no knowledge of each other's plans. And in January, Jim Hare, 65, driving his identical twin brother, Tom, near Bellefontaine, Ohio, lost control of the car, and in the ensuing crash, both were killed instantly, at the same moment.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- Life Imitates Monty Python: The Salem (Mass.) Evening News reported in March on an incident in which Ms. Carmen LaBrecque, 51, had to outrun a rabid skunk, which was literally snapping at her heels, for 15 minutes before an animal control officer arrived to shoot it. Unable to slow down enough even to open her front door and get inside, LaBrecque circled her yard 12 times, a foot or two in front of the skunk. On one pass by her front door, LaBrecque's elderly mother handed her a cell phone, which LaBrecque pantingly used to call 911.

-- In March, at the height of the civil unrest in Albania, when the U.S. diplomatic mission was evacuating personnel for safety reasons, The Washington Post reported that the State Department had just sent a cable to the diplomats in Tirana reminding them of the department's "(evacuation) policy for safeguarding of sterling silver flatware (cutlery)."

-- The public-service goal of an advertising campaign by England's Children's Society was to enlighten people that child sex abuse could occur in anyone's town and not just in notorious sex-tourist spots in the Far East. However, its slogan, announced in billboards released in February, came out this way: "Why travel 6,000 miles to have sex with children when you can do it in (the English town of) Bournemouth?" When questioned by a reporter, a society spokesman expressed pride in the campaign and said it would be extended to Manchester and Leeds.

-- In January, motorist John Tanayo, 30, was stopped in New York City and a search of his car turned up 573 pounds of cocaine worth about $5 million. He only drew cops' attention when, in traffic in front of a police cruiser, he failed to signal a right turn.

-- A 38-year-old apartment building manager was arrested in Whitewater, Wis., in January and charged with surreptitiously videotaping a female tenant with a camera hidden in the ceiling of her shower. The 20-year-old tenant had become suspicious because of the fixture the manager had installed in order to disguise the lens: Why, she thought, was a smoke detector placed in the ceiling of a shower?

-- The Robles family placed an ad in a newspaper in the town of Leon, Guanajuato, north of Mexico City, in January, to the attention of robbers who had been breaking into their house and stealing things. In exasperation, but perhaps unwisely, the family begged robbers to stay away, announcing that they had been cleaned out except for the TV, the VCR and the refrigerator.

-- In November, Washington, D.C., inmates Antwan Hudson (drug charges) and Kingsley Ellis (a Texas credit card fraud suspect), in a holding cell, apparently thought they were each in less trouble than the other and thus agreed to a scheme to swap identities for an upcoming court appearance. Ellis was shocked to learn in court that Hudson was also wanted on several more drug charges and for threatening his wife. Hudson was even more shocked to find that Ellis was facing deportation to Jamaica and thus blew the whistle on the scheme.

-- In a Virginia case reported in the December Mental Health Law News, Susanna Van de Castle was awarded $350,000 against her psychiatrist-husband, Robert, for malpractice. According to the lawsuit, after having diagnosed her as suffering from multiple personality disorder, he then married her and continued the therapy but also sought deals for a book and a movie about her, in addition to staging public lectures (charging admission) in which she was showcased as his subject.

-- In November, Brownsville, Texas, insurance agency owner Raquel Cantu Garza was charged with impeding IRS agents who had come to seize her business on a tax matter. According to the prosecutor, Garza instructed the two employees on duty at the time to leave and lock the agents inside. When one agent pounded on the door to get out, a Garza employee allegedly said, "Call a locksmith," and walked away.

-- In Guthrie, Okla., in October, Jason Heck tried to kill a millipede with a shot from his .22-caliber rifle, but the bullet ricocheted off a rock near the insect's hole and hit pal Antonio Martinez in the head, fracturing his skull. And in Elyria, Ohio, in October, Martyn Eskins, attempting to clean out cobwebs in his basement, declined to use a broom in favor of a propane torch and caused a fire that burned the first and second floors of his house.

-- Early New Year's morning, a 16-year-old girl in Kalamazoo, Mich., was arrested for erratic driving in a car she allegedly stole from Patricia Conlon. The girl was unaware that the next day Conlon would begin a term as county juvenile court judge. Also in Kalamazoo on New Year's Eve, Derrick Demones Gunn was sentenced to one to five years in prison for attempting to escape from a halfway house one day before his original sentence was up.

-- In October, Heber C. Frias, 20, on the lam from a first-degree murder charge in Florida, saw his freedom come to an end in an Arlington, Va., 7-Eleven when he tauntingly stole a candy bar right in front of a clerk, provoking a call to the police, who apprehended Frias just outside the store.

North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge made News of the Weird in 1995 when he denounced state funding for abortions for rape victims as unnecessary in that a woman who is "truly raped" doesn't get pregnant because "the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work." In March 1996, North Carolina House Speaker Harold Brubaker appointed Aldridge co-chair of the Committee on Human Resources, which oversees abortion funding.

In March, Shulamit Dezhin, 82, passed her driver's test in Ashdod, Israel, after 35 failures. She said she originally wanted to learn to drive so she could get to Tel Aviv to visit her parents, but it took so long to get her license that now they're dead. And in February, Sue Evans-Jones, 45, of Yate, England, passed her driver's test after only three failures. However, she had taken 1,800 lessons over 27 years with 10 instructors, most of whom had told her she was such a bad driver that she should not even attempt the exam. (Her policeman-husband explained her problem to a reporter: The first thought crossing her mind about crashing, no matter what the circumstances, causes her to flail wildly at the brakes and steering wheel.)

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- In Milwaukee, the family of Robert Senz demanded shortly after his burial last July that Borgwardt Funeral Home dig up the body because his wallet was missing. Sure enough, the wallet containing $64 and credit cards was still in Senz's pocket. In February 1997, Borgwardt sent the family a reburial bill for $2,149, but then decided the whole thing was the county medical examiner's fault and sent the bill there, but that office has denied responsibility.

-- In March, four strippers at the Scene Karaoke and Coconut Karaoke bars in Pattaya, Thailand, were fined a total of about $80 for indecency for an act in which live ducklings were placed inside plastic "eggs" (with air holes) and inserted into the women's bodies so that in the course of their routines, they would "lay" the eggs, which would then "hatch."

-- In February in Redwood City, Calif., Rachel Landa, 48, got out of her van to pump gas, but when she realized the hose wouldn't reach, she instructed her 14-year-old daughter to get behind the wheel and back it up. By the time the girl wrestled the van to a stop, the mother had been run over three times (broken ankle, foot and finger), and the van had crashed into a traffic signal box adjacent to the station.

-- Latest Highway Truck Spills: Several hundred thousand apples near Brighton, Mich., in November; a tractor-trailer full of Hills Bros. ground coffee in downtown Louisville in December; a truck hauling spaghetti sauce and ranch dressing (colliding with a truckful of computers) on I-35 in Austin, Texas, in January; and during a November ice storm, a tractor-trailer full of nuclear weapons near Brownlee, Neb. (an accident kept secret for a month by the federal government).

-- John O'Neill, 73, had to be rescued by firefighters in Huntington, N.Y., in February after he wandered out of a bar late at night and somehow got wedged between two buildings overnight. He was stuck so tight that he had to be pulled out from above.

-- A breathalyzer company executive testifying in a Knoxville, Tenn., DUI trial in September, disputing the defendant's contention that an untimely belch yielded a falsely positive reading: "Belching? I frankly have never seen a belch that brought alcohol up into the oral cavity."

-- Honduran Congressman Julio Villatoro, reacting in February to the bigamy charge filed by his wife: "(I) have problems with my wife, even though she knows a handsome man is not for one woman but for several. God gave me a physique attractive to women, and I take advantage of it."

-- Employees who have become ill in asbestos-laden workplaces have their own class-action lawsuit, so lawyer Michael V. Kelley filed one in January in Cleveland on behalf of employees in those workplaces who are perfectly healthy (in case they someday become ill). Said Kelley, "It's very proactive."

-- King Letsie III, 33, king of Lesotho, imploring other southern African monarchs and dignitaries in December to help him find a wife: "The pressure on me to find a wife soon is heavy, especially (from) my mother. (I) sometimes feel jealous when I see other leaders getting partners with such remarkable ease."

-- Kevin Carter, 21, and Michael Harrison, 26, were charged with murder and armed robbery in Boynton Beach, Fla., in December. Motive: to raise money to attend the police academy.

-- Darrel Voeks, 38, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Appleton, Wis., in December for stealing $100,000 worth of pigs from his farmer-employer. Motive: to pay for breast implants for a stripper at a club he patronized.

-- Michael Pollina, 26, pleaded guilty in Chicago in February to three bank robberies. Motive: to pay for a lavish reception that he and his fiancee had planned for their upcoming wedding.

-- Jack Swint, 42, pleaded guilty to passing bad checks in Roanoke, Va., in November (while he was awaiting trial on other bad-check charges). Motive: needed to pay for counseling sessions to help him kick his bad-check habit.

The famously dysfunctional Sexton family, headed by Eddie and Estella, of Canton, Ohio, and Tampa, Fla., made News of the Weird in 1994 and 1996 based on almost unimaginable charges of incest, child molestation and murder. In March 1997, son Willie, 26, was found to be "competent" after two years in the Florida state mental hospital, and now will stand trial for killing his sister's husband (as allegedly ordered by Eddie, who feared the husband would turn Eddie in for killing the man's baby, whose crying annoyed Eddie). Ostensibly, the dead baby was Eddie's own grandson, but according to trial testimony in a case against Estella, the baby was actually Eddie's own son, the result of a father-daughter coupling.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)