-- Reuters News Service reported in April that, increasingly, Chinese families along the border with North Korea are refusing to bury their recently dead relatives until the bodies seriously decompose. The families fear that famine-plagued North Koreans who cross the border foraging for food will dig up fresh bodies and eat them.

-- Bennie Casson filed a $100,000 lawsuit in Belleville, Ill., in July against PT's Show Club in nearby Sauget for its negligence in allowing a stripper to "slam" her breasts into his "neck and head region" without consent as he watched her perform. Dancer Susan Sykes (a.k.a. "Busty Heart") claims show business's biggest chest (88 inches), which Casson said was responsible for his "bruised, contused, lacerated" neck.

-- Virgin Mary World Tour (apparitions): December 1996 (Clearwater, Fla., plate glass window of finance company; Lewis, Kan., wall of family home); April 1997 (Sunnyside, Wash., roadside sign); June 1997 (Gradina, Croatia, cluster of trees; Mexico City, floor of Hidalgo subway station).

-- In March, the First Baptist Church of Berryville, Ark., closed its day-care center, declaring its purpose inconsistent with the teachings of the Bible. (Working mothers wouldn't have to work, said the church, if they did without "big TVs, a microwave, new clothes, eating out, and nice vacations.") And in May, the chief of the Ekhupeleni area in northern Swaziland banned the use of condoms, citing the teachings of the Bible on the waste of reproductive fluids. (He said contraceptive pills are OK.)

-- In a March Amarillo (Tex.) Globe-News story, service technician Eddie Golden, 28, attributed his recovery from brain surgery to divine intervention. In October 1996, Golden had accidentally shot himself above the ear with a nail gun, embedding a 1 1/4-inch brad, avoiding death by about an eighth of an inch. After a doctor pulled it out, he suggested an MRI to assure there was no further damage. The MRI revealed a brain tumor, which has now been treated. Said Golden, "God's got a reason ... or he wouldn't have put that nail in there."

-- In February, the Houston Chronicle reported on the local Buddhist Temple of the Great Bodhisattva Washington, which founder Ong Dao Ton believes is the only temple in the world to jointly pray to Buddha and George Washington. Ton says he has about 40 members and formed the temple because he believes the United States saved him from oppression in Viet Nam twice, in 1954 and 1973.

-- Eddie Clyde Harris, 38, was sentenced to life in prison in March in Neosho, Mo., for the attempted rape of a 57-year-old woman. According to a psychiatrist who testified at the trial, Harris believes he has a special gift from God that enables him to look at a woman and determine whether she is promiscuous and that the victim in this case passed the test.

-- Rev. Joe Bullard resigned from the Copper Ridge Baptist Church in Halls, Tenn., in May, ending what had been a months-long feud with many of the parishioners over whether he was pocketing the offerings by pilgrims who had come from afar to see the so-called glowing-cross apparition in the church windows. Police had been called several times to break up fistfights among its largely elderly congregation. And in December during a feud over who did and did not have the authority to fire minister Marvin Hodge of the Mount Pisgah Baptist Church in Rembert, S.C., Hodge's opponents would regularly attend services and heckle and boo him while he preached.

-- Driver Anthony Lowe, 16, allegedly rammed a Winston-Salem, N.C., utility pole in February, cut it in half, and knocked out power to 7,000 customers, including an old-folks' home, just as a sleet storm began. News photos at the scene revealed a clearly pleased-with-himself Lowe, who suggested a headline for a reporter ("Anthony 1, Telephone Pole 0"). Lowe had had his driver's license for less than three weeks and told police he "wasn't really paying attention" as he drove. When informed of the power outages, Lowe and his passenger allegedly responded, in unison, "Cool!"

-- Latest Handcuffed-Behind-My-Back Escapes: David Thornton, 28, stopped for DUI in Spartanburg, S.C., in April, and Tommy Richards, 21, arrested for assault in Elmwood, Ill., in May, allegedly stole their arresting officers' cruisers and drove several miles, using various parts of their bodies to steer and shift gears, before being recaptured.

-- According to a May Advertising Age report, the rock group Motley Crue is promoting its latest album with a bright-blue-colored soft drink, Motley Brue, among whose characteristics is that it leaves both the drinker's mouth, and any contemporaneous excrement, blue. The independent soft-drink company Eat Me Now says the beverage is "for people who are done with the whole drugs and alcohol thing, but still want to have fun."

-- Recent Chain-Link Fence Impalings: Shayne Henry, 22, impaled by a section of pipe when he allegedly drove through a fence while horsing around a golf course at night in Edmonton, Alberta, in April; and Michael Brown, 29, impaled by a 10-foot-long section of galvanized pipe on a fence when his mother accidentally drove through it while taking him to a job interview in Ripon, Calif., in April.

-- Recent Flying Things: cars (going over embankments or ramps), landing on Rob Hasenwinkle's house in Kamloops, British Columbia, in February, J.C. Warner's motel room in Grants Pass, Ore., in March, and an Amtrak train in Portland, Ore., in July; a couch, tossed out a fourth-floor apartment in Edmonton, Alberta, in March, clipping a newspaper carrier and sending him to the hospital; a one-ton bull, falling from a cliff onto Elizabeth Hanks' car near Joseph, Ore., in July; and a 3,000-pound wrecking ball, rolling off a truck onto a car, near Shepherd, Mont., in July.

-- One day apart in June in Stafford County, Va., two husbands were charged with beating their wives during channel-changing disputes. Joseph W. During, 20, was charged with assault for punching his wife for changing radio stations in the car, and Edgar D. Colvin, 49, was charged with assault for roughing up his wife, who had commandeered the remote control and changed channels with two minutes left during Game 5 of the NBA championship series.

(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 1993 India Scott dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon Ventimeglia when she lived in Detroit and moved in with Fletcher in 1994 when she was about to give birth. Neither man knew about the other, and she told each he was the father. For two years, Scott managed to juggle the men's visitation rights, but in March 1997 when she announced she was marrying another man and leaving the area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of "his" son. Only then did Ventimeglia and Fletcher find out about each other. They took blood tests to determine which was the real father of the boy they had been caring for for more than two years, and in May the blood test revealed that neither was.

-- Connecticut Police Academy: Robert Jordan filed a lawsuit in May against the New London, Conn., police department for illegal discrimination, claiming he was rejected as an officer solely because he scored too high on an intelligence test, which the department claims is evidence that Jordan would get bored on the job and be a bad officer. And an Associated Press report from New Haven, 50 miles away, revealed that new-recruit police classes include training in the arts (watercolor drawing, ballet, etc.), which was the brainchild of former police chief Nicholas Pastore, who himself resigned in February after admitting that he had fathered a child with a prostitute.

-- More than 200 students at Molalla (Ore.) High School petitioned officials in May to overturn the school's mandatory-brassiere policy after two girls were sent home for not wearing them. Protesters complain that the dress code is not fairly enforced, in that more heavily endowed violators are more frequently punished than less-endowed violators.

-- The National Labor Relations Board ruled in December that Caterpillar Inc. workers who were on strike from June 1994 to December 1995 were entitled to be compensated for the popcorn, sodas, ice cream and other snacks that the company provided workers who remained on the job during that time.

-- In February, the student government at Oxford University in England appointed a person to patrol the grounds and stop couples' public displays of affection. In one place, petting was banned from the dining hall, and another facility was divided into heavy- and light-petting-allowed zones. The government also banned sexual intercourse in libraries between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m. (although no student leader claimed to have actual knowledge that it had ever occurred). The actions were taken because some students who did not have dates found the behaviors offensive.

-- Two inmates serving life sentences at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola filed a lawsuit in February claiming officials have denied them the chapel space and equipment necessary to observe their religion of Satanism. Even though they allegedly cannot practice faithfully, their credentials for the Satanic afterlife seem substantial: One plaintiff is in for first-degree murder and the other for rape, robbery and kidnapping.

-- According to police in Mesa, Ariz., Jean K. Dooley opened fire with a handgun in Valley Lutheran Hospital in 1995, intending to kill her husband, who was a patient there. (She missed but managed accidentally to hit a nurse and a paramedic.) In January 1997, she filed a lawsuit against the hospital for negligently failing to stop her from bringing the gun inside.

-- In March, the New York Appellate Division of the Supreme Court unanimously took away the $15 million award that a jury had made to Jose Barretto, who is paralyzed from the waist down. Barretto sued Richmond Hill High School in New York City for not stopping him from horsing around before volleyball practice in 1988, when, with the coach momentarily out of the gym and allegedly to show off for his friends, he ran toward the net from 30 feet away, dived over it, and landed on his head. Said Barretto, "I accept part of the blame, but what about the responsibility of the teacher and the school?"

-- Federico Perales, 52, was arrested in Fort Worth, Texas, in April and charged with stabbing his wife to death in front of their two teen-age kids because he was angry that the three of them started dinner before he arrived at the table. According to the Peraleses' son, Perales' last words to his wife were, "You pushed me to the limits. You did this to yourself."

-- In April, Mary Durante, the inheritor of a house in Newark, N.J., found 133 neatly stacked boxes upon her first visit to the attic, each with the remains of a cat wrapped in newspapers that dated back to 1945. She was startled by the discovery but said she knew the house once belonged to the late Newark Star-Ledger pet columnist, William H. Hendrix.

-- Sandra L. Archer, 35, was sentenced to two years in jail in April in Omaha, Neb., for disorderly conduct and cruelty to animals after videotapes surfaced of her having sex with her boyfriend (Mark W. Williams, 36, who is awaiting trial) atop groups of dogs, including sick ones, that had been obtained from local shelters.

-- The Mainichi Daily News (Tokyo) reported in April that a 24-year-old local man from Adachi-ku was arrested and charged with assaulting a 17-year-old schoolgirl on her way home. According to police, the man rubbed saliva in the girl's hair as an expression of anger because her socks were too loose around her ankles. Police quoted him as saying, "When I saw those socks, I just went crazy."

-- According to a recent Canadian documentary film, Troy Hurtubise, a scrap-metal dealer from North Bay, Ontario, was so disappointed at his 1984 first encounter with a grizzly bear that he embarked on a 10-year, $100,000 project to build a safety suit that would enable him to wrestle and defeat a grizzly. He has not yet found a bear to wrestle, but he has spent money so obsessively on the suit that he recently had to file for bankruptcy.

Michael Forgue, a Jackman, Maine, restaurateur, expressing doubt in May that his neighbor James Darrow was guilty of the murder for which he had been arrested and which he had allegedly claimed credit for: "They don't call (him) 'Big Jim the Liar' for nothing. You name it, he lied about it."

(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 March, armed with evidence that a drug dealer had been killed with a single gunshot during a robbery by two men, Torrance, Calif., district attorney Todd D. Rubenstein obtained separate jury convictions for both men for firing the fatal shot. Both robbers' guns had fired, but one missed, and a conclusion as to which one could not be drawn from ballistics tests. Rubenstein asserted confidently to one jury that Stephen Edmond Davis, 19, shot the man, and just as confidently to the other jury that it wasn't Davis, but rather John Patrick Winkleman, 19.

-- Correen Zahnzinger, 24, filed a lawsuit in Santa Ana, Calif., in May against her boyfriend of three years (and husband of one year), Ms. Valerie Inga, 29, who pretended the whole time to be a man. ("They did have a sexual relationship," said Zahnzinger's attorney, "but I'm not allowed to say how it was perpetrated.") And two weeks earlier in Arlington, Va., Margaret Hunter, 24, was awarded $264,000 in her lawsuit for fraud against her ex-husband, Ms. Holly Anne Groves, 26, who had posed as a man in their four-month marriage in 1996.

-- According to the 1997 platform of the Natural Law Party (based on teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) in Canada, released in May, people should stop using the south and west entrances to their homes because they are inharmonious and should instead use north and east entrances. Furthermore, Canadians entering the United States should do so from Niagara Falls, whose entrance (from the east) is the only nonsouthward entrance in the country. The party proposes to eliminate the federal deficit by "eliminating problems" and to create an "invincible" national defense through yogic flying (which resembles hopping like a frog). The party got 84,000 votes in 1993.

-- In October, Jay Urdahl, an incumbent running for county supervisor in Mason City, Iowa, was charged with criminal trespass while out campaigning. According to homeowner Debbie Opheim, Urdahl just walked right into her house to meet her without the benefit of an invitation or a knock on the door. Said Opheim, who heard a "hello," "I ran down the stairs, and he was standing in my living room." After Opheim ordered him out, she said, "He looked at me like I was insane."

-- In March, arguing for the legalization of holiday fireworks in Arizona, state Rep. Richard Kyle denounced opponents who said sparklers were dangerous: "I put them in my hair. I have stuck them in my clothes. They do not burn." (He lost.)

-- In April, North Providence, R.I., council member Charles A. Lombardi was charged with misdemeanor vandalism -- according to police, the drive-by egging of a car owned by a relative of his political opponent, Mayor Ralph Mollis. Said Lombardi, "This is politics in North Providence."

-- In a March New York Times story on vote-buying in Dodge County, Ga., a spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state tried to describe the depth of the problem: "We literally had people who said they had no idea that selling your vote was illegal. One guy said, 'It's my vote; I can do what I want with it.'"

-- In January, the U.S. Postal Service in Miami issued bulletins announcing a $25,000 reward for the return of something stolen from a mail carrier, but refused to say what it was, referring to it only as a "device." Said a postal inspector to a reporter, "I can't tell you what it is. I can't tell you what it's used for."

-- Former Prestonburg, Ky., school board member Wood R. Keesee, 59, filed a lawsuit in May against a female court clerk to whom he had allegedly loaned money in 1996. Under the terms of the $1,800 loan, according to Keesee, she was to have 18 sexual encounters with him, but when she stopped after three, he filed the lawsuit.

-- One week apart in March, in Ardmore, Okla., and San Francisco, Calif., schools disciplined female students who reported that they were raped on campus. A 15-year-old girl had been briefly suspended from Ardmore High for having sex at school despite the fact that her clothes were soaked in blood, as was the locker room area where she said the rape occurred. An 18-year-old woman was threatened with eviction from San Francisco State University housing because she had kept a hunting knife in her room, illegally, which she used to chase off the alleged rapist.

-- Among the recipients of the American Lung Association's "Thumb's Up" motion-picture awards, presented at the time of the Oscars in March to honor those films and characters who present a no-smoking image, was Woody Harrelson for his role in discouraging his movie wife from smoking in "The People Vs. Larry Flynt." However, in the movie, both Flynts are heavily addicted to illegal drugs and seem to be indifferent to sharing needles for injecting them.

-- A leading TV news program in Bogota, Colombia, reported in January that Jimmy Pacheco had been kidnapped for a month in the city of Cucuta in a scheme to pry undisclosed concessions from either friends or co-workers, but that to keep things low-key, Pacheco was permitted to return home every night so as not to alarm his family. The kidnappers would watch Pacheco's house at night and snatch him again in the morning as he left for work.

In February, Avi Kostner, 52, pleaded guilty in Newark, N.J., to the murders of his kids, aged 10 and 12, which he said he committed because he feared his ex-wife would not raise them as Jews. (In arguing successfully against the death penalty, Kostner's lawyer continually referred to Kostner in front of the jury as merely "less than perfect.") And in May, Harry Charles Moore was executed in Oregon for the 1992 murders of his in-laws because he was afraid they would persuade his ex-wife and infant daughter to move to Las Vegas and possibly get involved in prostitution and drugs.

Smoking: In April, authorities on North Carolina's Figure Eight island said they suspected the cause of the fire that destroyed the vacation home of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. president Andrew J. Schindler was a lighted cigarette butt. And after a New Year's Day domestic argument in Campinas, 60 miles north of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Silas Leite da Silva was Bobbittized by his wife because, among several reasons, according to police, he would not stop smoking at home.

(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.)