-- The Blessed Family Unit: In December, a judge in Montgomery County, Md., awarded custody of a 2-year-old boy to his biological mother, Latrena D. Pixley, 23, despite the fact that she murdered an infant daughter in 1992 for crying too much. (She was given a suspended sentence for the murder and found a job, during which she engaged in credit-card fraud, to which she later pleaded guilty. The judge sent her to prison for that but changed his mind and let her out a few months later.) And the month before, Bertha Bromley, 34, was sentenced to probation in Edwardsville, Ill., for attempting to strangle her 9-month-old boy, and social workers say they are working toward eventually reuniting mother and son.

-- The Times of London reported in January that 10,000 current or former Irish soldiers have filed claims that they suffered hearing loss while in the military, either on firing ranges or playing in army bands, and judges have been rewarding them to the tune of about $33,000 per claim, on average. In addition, reported the Times, just recently the first claim was filed against the army for compensation for skin cancer, by an Irish soldier on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon who said he should have been issued sunscreen.

-- In December, Iowa Wesleyan College announced it would award an honorary degree in business to Cambodian tycoon Teng Bunma, who is a close adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen and who has long been suspected of cocaine trafficking. Teng Bunma recently made international headlines when he shot out a Royal Air Cambodge airliner's tires in retaliation for lost luggage and a short time later for pulling a gun on the crew of an Orient Thai Airlines flight so they wouldn't take off before his companions arrived. (In January, when it was pointed out that Teng Bunma had been denied a U.S. visa because of the drug allegations, the college withdrew the degree.)

-- On the heels of reports that Sweden forcibly sterilized 60,000 people with inferior genes between 1935 and 1976, Stockholm's second-largest newspaper Aftonbladet reported in September that government-supported dentists had force-fed candy to mentally handicapped people in 10-year experiments to help determine whether sugar facilitates tooth decay. (It does.)

-- Charles Keating Is a Lucky Man: In October, Mr. Cen Huanreng, mayor of a village in Guangdong province, China, was convicted of selling about $2.1 million worth of public property and then gambling away the money at a Macau casino. He was sentenced to death. (The report did not say when he would die, but execution usually comes swiftly after sentencing and is rarely announced in the press.)

-- Marijuana festivals were held in October in Spain (first time) and in November in Amsterdam (10th annual Cannabis Cup, sponsored by High Times magazine). In Madrid, 50 growers competed for plant quality awards by blind-sampling each other's work. In Amsterdam, 2,000 people taste-tested the products of many vendors. (Publicist Jody Miller, who said she had been high for three days solely on second-hand smoke, tried to explain how it is possible to taste-test so much dope: "You have to pace yourself.")

-- Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, who visited Scotland for the British Commonwealth summit in October, left without accepting the invitation of British gay rights leaders to be hooked up to an erotic arousal machine to determine whether his rabid anti-gay bias is really a shield for homosexual feelings. Mugabe has called gays "lower than dogs and pigs." Erection-measuring research by a University of Georgia professor indicates that as many as 80 percent of gay-hating men become aroused at gay erotic videos.

-- The New England Journal of Medicine reported in December that at least half the drugs donated to Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war (perhaps many of them from U.S. companies, though no company or country was identified in the article) were useless and even dangerous, apparently donated largely for the benefit of the company and not the recipients. Not only were 17,000 tons of drugs out of date (or spoiled, or with untranslated instructions), and not only did most or all of the companies get charitable tax deductions in their own countries, but disposal costs of about $2,000 a ton fell to the World Health Organization.

-- In August, two cities debated plans to reduce the amount of dog poop in municipal parks and on sidewalks. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was contemplating installing a series of anonymous "poopcams" around town to catch dog owners who neglect their scooping duty. And Tel Aviv, Israel, announced that squads of plainclothes police officers armed with cameras and night-vision equipment were on duty around the clock photographing violators of its ordinance.

-- In July, long-haired defensive end Brent Burnstein walked out of the Tennessee Oilers' training camp, thus putting his lucrative career in jeopardy, rather than submit to the traditional rookie haircut at the hands of veteran players. And in November, five football players from Leguna-Acona (N.M.) High School quit the team just before the first playoff game, in order to go deer hunting.

-- Vanity Fair magazine reported in its January issue that when the warden at the Huntsville, Texas, prison was trying to accommodate the last requests of death-row inmate Larry Wayne White (who appeared in News of the Weird before, for an obvious reason) last May, he got his preferred last meal but not a last cigarette. The prison is a nonsmoking facility.

-- In August, after an investigation, police in Compton, Calif., announced that they no longer believed that high school English teacher Shannan Barron, who is black, was the victim of a racist feces-dumping attack, as she had claimed. Their most helpful evidence was the crime lab's finding that the feces on her pants came from the inside and thus that it was probable that Barron had, as the police chief put it, a "personal accident."

-- An August letter to the New England Journal of Medicine from Dr. Rachel L. Chin described a U.S. woman's infection from botfly larvae that she picked up in Peru. The patient was looking at spots on her legs when she saw things start to wiggle out. Eventually, seven maturing bugs, which had been gestating in the infection, emerged before she got medical help.

-- In 1988, Iranian Merhan Nasseri, then 46, landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris after being denied entry into England because his passport, and United Nations refugee certificate, had been stolen. French authorities would not let him leave the airport, and there he has been ever since, in Terminal One, luggage at his side, reading, writing in his diary, studying economics, receiving food and newspapers from airport employees. News of the Weird (which gave status reports on Nasseri in 1991 and 1995) has also been around since 1988, and with this column begins its 11th year. Charles de Gaulle spokeswoman Danielle Yzerman said, of Nasseri, "An airport is kind of a place between heaven and earth; he has found a home here." So is a newspaper, and so has "News of the Weird."

(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.)

-- Through what a company spokesman later called "human error," the front door of the CoreStates Bank in Robesonia, Pa. (10 miles from Reading), remained unlocked through the Veterans Day weekend, and no one knew until a customer, who had forgotten it was a holiday, innocently walked in at 9 a.m. Monday, setting off a silent alarm that alerted the police. The customer said his first thought on seeing the bank empty was that robbers had locked the tellers and customers in the vault.

-- The Wise Judiciary: In December, a Bloomfield, Iowa, judge sentenced two men, who had clubbed 23 cats with baseball bats (killing 16), to one day in jail per cat, but then he suspended even that sentence. Also in December, a judge in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, sentenced the men who beat a man to death on the eve of his wedding to 16 months each in prison. (In reaction, a Dutch inmate serving eight years in a stomping death asked Queen Beatrix for a pardon, claiming his own sentence was thus way too severe.) And in January, a judge in Mexico City freed confessed killer-bandit Alonso Gonzalez, calling him "a modern Robin Hood, who not only shares what he earns from robberies, but gives his companions more money (than he keeps)."

-- In September, a federal judge in West Palm Beach, Fla., dismissed the disability lawsuit filed by police Lt. Ed Wagner against the department, ruling that Wagner was not really penalized for having the disability in that he was merely denied a special assignment. Wagner was removed from the SWAT team for having a sensitive neck, a condition which came to light when he complained that an old neck injury flared up after a colleague got him in a headlock and gave him "noogies."

-- Hours before the Dec. 5 inaugural address of Mexico City's new mayor, who was expected to announce stern measures to deal with rampant crime and police corruption, the mayor's top assistant was mugged in a taxicab, giving up his wallet and briefcase, which contained the mayor's speech. And in June, an armed robber took the purse of the executive director of Crimestoppers of New Orleans outside her office.

-- Recent Dangerous Weapons: roast beef sandwich (pedestrian, angry at a motorist, Matteson, Ill., November); burrito (motorist, angry at another, Longview, Ore., September); carrot (reaction to spouse's demand for divorce, East Hanover, N.J., August); Etch-A-Sketch toy (two teen-age boys, overpowering a jailer and escaping, Clinton, Tenn., November); cordless drill (mother hit stepdaughter because her dog was barking too loud, and the daughter struck back with a "fish whacker" tool, Wasilla, Alaska, August).

-- In October, a man robbed the Capital Bank of North County in San Diego, Calif., and escaped in a pickup truck. According to a teller, the man never claimed to have a gun, but demonstrated his impatience at the teller's dawdling by showing her a photograph of another man holding a gun.

-- In September, workers delivering crates to the Museon museum in The Hague, Netherlands, accidentally dropped one containing a 75 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton made from bones recovered in Montana, breaking it into 188 pieces. And in January during a break-in at the Yammonoki Museum in Ito, Japan, a thief being chased by a guard dropped a 600-year-old Ming Dynasty platter worth about $400,000, shattering it.

-- In November, an adviser to Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu conceded that, due to a bureaucratic oversight, the Western Wall in Jerusalem is not owned by the government but by an organization called the Islamic Trust, which administers various Muslim holy sites. After capturing Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, Israel apparently formally appropriated the land beside the Wall, but not the Wall itself.

-- The Nov. 7 edition of the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano contained statements declaring that homosexuals "do have the right" to adopt children and to live together as couples, attributed to staunch moralist Father Gino Concetti. After several days of panic at the Vatican, editor Gianfranco Grieco located the problem: a computer glitch that removed only the word "not" several times from the story.

-- In October, Harwinton, Conn., local official Marie Knudsen told the Waterbury Republican-American that the first person snared in a radar trap she intervened with the state police to have set up was the husband of the constituent who complained the loudest to her about speeders ruining her neighborhood.

-- In August, British mountain climber Alan Hinkes, who had already conquered nine of the world's 14 highest peaks, had to postpone his ambitious quest to climb the other five in one year when number 10 failed. He was at the base camp of the 26,600-foot-high Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, ready to eat a piece of local bread when the wind blew the flour topping in his face, causing him to sneeze, which resulted in a slipped disc.

-- The Sacramento Bee reported in November that a group of young people from the East Valley Foursquare Church in Orangevale, Calif., were recently observed playing what they called "Bambi Baseball," supervised by youth minister Robin Gattis. The name came from what was used as a bat: the frozen leg of a deer. (A frozen cow tongue was the ball.) It was also reported that an earlier version of the game was played by swinging a frozen trout to hit a frozen squid.

-- In 1987 a leaky tank car containing the volatile chemical butadiene exploded in a New Orleans rail yard. No one was hurt, but 8,000 nearby residents were evacuated and later filed lawsuits for their injuries, which consisted of 36 hours of displacement and a general fear of future illnesses, which have so far not materialized. About 20 so far have won an average of $100,000 each in compensatory damages. In addition, in September 1997, the entire class of potential plaintiffs won a jury trial for punitive damages against the CSX railroad and four other companies for a total of $3.4 billion. CSX was ordered to kick in three-fourths of the total even though the National Transportation Safety Board had ruled it blameless in the explosion.

-- Peter Sansom began work on Jan. 19 at his new, two-day-a-week job with the big Marks & Spencer department store in London. For the next six months under a government grant program run by the Poetry Society, he will work for about $1,500 per month as the store's poet in residence. He said he hopes generally to raise employees' and customers' level of awareness of poetry. A lesser-known poet in residence, at London's Botanical Gardens, said she has already had an impact on that organization, as witnessed by her telephone message recording: "Sarah Maguire can't get to the phone/So please leave a message after the tone."

(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.)

-- What Goes Around, Comes Around: Since taking control of most of Afghanistan in September 1996, the religious Taliban army has enforced strict, conservative Islamic rule, especially regarding the work, recreation and dress of women. Now, according to a report in the London Daily Telegraph in November, a splinter Muslim group about 200 miles north of Kabul has begun to train a women-only battalion to fight the Taliban. Females from the Hazaras, a Turkic Mongol ethnic group, have been training at a secret location and will soon begin a major recruiting campaign.

-- Tough Guys: In Paris in December, just before being convicted of the murders of two counterespionage agents, international terrorist Carlos the Jackal was sentenced to 10 days' solitary confinement for calling a prison guard a "gnu." Two weeks later, Montreal Canadiens' defenseman Dave Manson underwent surgery to remove a Christmas tree needle that had gotten stuck in his ear.

-- David S. Marion, 36, and Michael C. Ahorn, 35, were found naked in a car in a public parking lot in East St. Louis, Ill., in November, having sex, and were charged with public indecency. According to the arresting officer, Marion said, "I know it was wrong, but I just couldn't wait."

-- William Garland, the father of the late rap singer Tupac Shakur, fighting for part of Shakur's multimillion-dollar estate in Los Angeles in August, despite his having had no contact with his son after age 5, pointed out at a hearing how he was a good father. For example, he said he would often tuck in little Tupac, a bed-wetter, with another Garland son, also a bed-wetter: "They could pee with each other."

-- In July, Toronto courier Alan Wayne Scott, 47, lost a three-year battle when the Ontario Tax Court ruled that he took improper business deductions. Scott, who makes deliveries on foot and by bicycle, had claimed that his body is a professional vehicle and that operating expenses (shoes, knapsack, the $13 a day in extra high-caloric food he must consume to do his grueling work) should be tax-deductible just like an automobile's expenses are. (And, as Scott pointed out, his machine is environmentally friendly: On the day of the court's decision, a NAFTA report named Ontario the third biggest polluting jurisdiction in North America.)

-- In November in Wasilla, Alaska, Duane Carr was sentenced to 28 months in prison for sexually molesting his 15-year-old baby sitter. Carr maintained that he did not know the girl was under the legal age of 16 because he and the girl are Jehovah's Witnesses, whose members do not celebrate birthdays.

-- Crisis at Nike: The winner of September's annual Angeles Crest ultramarathon, which started at the Wrightwood Resort in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles and finished in Pasadena, was Mexican Tarahumara Indian Cirildo Chacarito, 52, in a time of 19 hours and 34 minutes. Incredibly (if one believes shoe ads), Chacarito beat all the guys in $200 running shoes; he ran the race in sandals made from old automobile tires.

-- Robert Kong, 13, was arrested and charged with manufacturing a destructive device, namely a 5 1/2-inch pipe bomb that he had made, gift-wrapped, and presented to a female classmate in Corvallis, Ore., for her birthday. He said he followed the instructions he had seen on an Internet site.

-- In September, officials at the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration changed their minds and decided it was OK for employee �Mr. Dale Robb, hired as a counselor in 1996 after 20 years in the military, to report for work every day dressed as a woman named Sabrina. And in an August story, The Washington Post featured a recent tourist, the very masculine Larry Goodwin, 51, of Douglas, Wyo., who took in the sites around town clothed as he usually is, in a dress. Said Goodwin, "I really love the feel of women's clothing."

-- According to a police report in Colerain Township, Ohio, in June, a restaurant manager trying to rid his property of drug paraphernalia turned over a homemade bong pipe that he found in a rear corridor of his building. The bong was actually a hollowed-out potato rigged with masking tape and aluminum foil, with marijuana residue inside, and had to be destroyed by the police, rather than kept as evidence, in that it was perishable food.

-- City Council member Ed Walker of Brier, Wash., was charged in September with spitting on a neighbor who had put up a yard sign touting Walker's opponent in the upcoming election. Said the neighbor to a reporter, "We've got him dead to rights. All we need is a sample of his spit (for DNA testing)."

-- In September, a basketball player for Southeastern Oklahoma State University was killed near Paris, Texas, when a flying cow hit the car in which he was riding, causing the driver to lose control and crash. The cow had been sent airborne when it was hit by another car.

-- In October, a court in Darwin, Australia, sentenced Christopher Sean Payne, 34, to 54 months in prison for causing the drowning of a 25-year-old woman at a local beach. Justice Sir William Kearney found that, though the intoxicated woman (0.287 blood-alcohol reading) had voluntarily gone underwater to perform fellatio on Payne, he deliberately held the victim's head too long in a "selfish" desire to "gratify yourself, to prolong your pleasure" and showed a lack of remorse in the aftermath.

Latest Attempts by Women to Use the Law to Enforce Prostitution Contracts: In November, three teen-age girls were arrested after they called police in Oneida, N.Y., to ask for help because a man who had just had sex with them and paid them with a check for $1,500 wrote it on an out-of-state bank that the girls couldn't get cashed. And in June, a judge in Salt Lake City dismissed Kathleen Ferguson's lawsuit against Zions First National Bank for repossessing her truck. She had sued, believing she could keep the truck because she worked out a deal by having sex with the repo man.

(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.)