-- In Bridgeport, Conn., in July, a 37-year-old man was put on probation and ordered to counseling for breaking into a Fairfield, Conn., home on April 17. According to police, the man's motive was that he knew white people lived there because the house was painted white and that he wanted to kill some white people because he was tired of what he called "honkies" not respecting him. The man is white, too, but according to police, he believes he is black.

-- Least Competent Magician: According to an Australian Broadcasting Commission report in June, Luke Dow was recuperating in a hospital in Mount Isa, Australia, and was considering a lawsuit against an unnamed magician as a result of a recent performance. Dow said he had volunteered from the audience to assist in two stunts. First, the magician was to snatch a piece of paper out of Dow's hand with a whip, but he missed, snapping Dow hard in the head. Dow nonetheless decided to do the second stunt, in which he would hold a balloon in his hand while the magician shot at it with his back turned, looking at a mirror. The first shot hit Dow in the hand.

In Colonial Beach, Va., in May, Michael L. Long, 46, was charged with DUI as he pulled up in a limo at Colonial Beach High School to pick up his passengers: students who had procured his services for the evening as a graduation night designated driver. Two weeks later, in Minneapolis, Curtiss Clarin, 56, was charged with DUI and failure to take a breathalyzer test; for the last 15 years, Clarin has been employed by the Minneapolis Police Department to testify in jury trials about how Breathalyzers work.

In May, Professor John H. Lammers was fired by the University of Central Arkansas for making a snorting noise as he passed school administrators with whom he had been feuding. And in April, Li Sanhua was sentenced to 20 years in prison in China's Hubei province for shooting a hole in the flag of China on a sports field. And in February, Jermaine Brown and his cousin Jonas Brown, both 21, were sentenced in Durham, N.C., to six months in jail for riddling a man's car with bullets because, said the prosecutor, he "looked at them funny."

In March 1997, Algie Toomer won a $100,000 settlement against the state of North Carolina for harassment during a power struggle in his office at the Department of Motor Vehicles. A legislative committee investigating the power struggle called him once as a witness, and in June 1998 Toomer announced that the hearing was so stressful that he had been advised by doctors to take the next year off. And two employees of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs have not been to work since April because, they maintain, harassment by their supervisors would cause them to lapse into clinical depression.

A study released in July by a London Institute of Psychiatry researcher concluded that, in the 13 years of once-a-year, no-smoke workdays in England, the accident rate on those days always goes up. On the other hand, preliminary findings in July of a Boston University medical school study revealed that smoking could reduce the size of a man's erection in the same way that it shrinks the heart.

-- France's Employment and Solidarity Ministry reported in June that already it had logged "several thousand" violations against companies for working too hard. (The legal maximum is now 39 hours a week and drops to 35 in the year 2000.) Among the Ministry's recent busts were a crucial early-evening labor-management bargaining session at the communications firm Alcatel and one at the defense contractor Thomson-CSF, after which the company agreed to lock its buildings at 7 p.m.

-- Puerto Rican legislator Augusto Sanchez Fuentes proposed in April that the government sponsor "fairs" to which mothers could bring their newborns and put them on sale (for instant adoption) to people from the mainland. He said such fairs would at once reduce abortions, improve tourism, streamline the adoption process, and ease poverty in Puerto Rico as mothers begin to look on the fairs as a way to make procreation profitable.

-- Purdy, Mo., banker Glen Garrett, 66, said in March that he has spent about $1 million in legal fees in six years to fight federal regulators who fined him $25,000 for doing business as his father had taught him, by handshake, rather than by required paperwork. In one paperless deal, Garrett hired himself to construct a bank building, but that upset the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. because there were no competitive bids, even though an independent appraiser later said Garrett charged about $300,000 less than market price.

-- In June, as international sanctions sank in for Pakistanis as a result of the nuclear face-off with India, Pakistan's prime minister Nawaz Sharif said it is the patriotic duty of his countrymen to "eat grass" so that money continues to be available for defense spending. (The Washington Post reported the Sharif paid $58 in income tax in the last year for which figures are available, despite the fact that his family's business, the Ittefaq Group, is the country's fourth largest industrial company, worth $217 million.)

-- In June, Ontario Health Minister Elizabeth Witmer ordered a stop to her office's requiring photographs of the breasts of women who want reduction surgery (though apparently it was only a staff preference to demand the photos, not a department policy). She pointed out that photos of breasts are irrelevant in determining medical necessity and that few other surgeries require evidence beyond the physician's certification. (In 1992, a similar problem arose at the Alabama Medicaid office in Birmingham.)

Karl Ray Johnson, 23, was charged with disorderly conduct at Mervyn's department store on Sereno Drive in Vallejo, Calif., in June. He fell through a ceiling from a crawl-space ledge on which he was perched, just above four dressing rooms in which females were trying on swimsuits.

Among the most astonishing cases of paraphilia that News of the Weird gets to report are the outhouse peepers, who lurk in raincoats in the pits of outdoor toilets. The last widely reported sighting was of a 26-year-old man just outside Peterborough, Ontario, in 1995, but another alert went out in June 1998 in Horsetooth Mountain Park near Fort Collins, Colo., when a 28-year-old woman using an outhouse noticed a red light in the pit and looked down to find a man standing in hip-high waders videotaping her. He escaped.

Last week, News of the Weird reported that singer Stevie Nicks had obtained a court stayaway order against a man who had a ticket to her July 21 concert in Denver and who believed she was a witch who could "cure" his homosexuality. That man stayed away, but at a Concord, Calif., Stevie Nicks concert two weeks later, a 38-year-old man lost control of himself upon running into his estranged wife (who had a court stayaway order against him) in the parking lot. He climbed a utility pole and hanged himself with battery jumper cables as hundreds of people watched.

(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.)

-- Rosamaria Machado-Wilson, formerly a manager at BSG, a Panama City, Fla., audio lab doing product development for the gambling industry, filed a lawsuit against the company in July, claiming she was fired for not embracing the company's workplace Christianity. The lawsuit claims the company forced her to be baptized and to attend prayer meetings and that Machado-Wilson sometimes encountered prostrate employees in the office, praying in tongues. She claims the experience caused her to compulsively read the Bible and to refuse conjugal sex.

-- Tourists driving a pickup truck with California plates camped out in a Peruvian historical-landmark area in July and defaced the thin, 1,000-year-old Indian etchings (called the Nazca Lines) with their tire marks. The stretch of desert 250 miles south of Lima is not well-guarded but is ringed with concrete markers, and some observers believe that it will take decades for blowing sand to cover the tire tracks. The tourists also left garbage behind.

A 41-year-old man in a pickup truck was arrested in Conneaut, Ohio, in May and charged with shooting two volunteer firefighters. The victims were assisting an ambulance crew to tend to an elderly woman; apparently, the ambulance driver, with traffic stopped in both directions, was taking too much time backing out of a driveway and thus needed to be shot. And in April on the side of I-395 in Alexandria, Va., during rush hour, Army Maj. Odie Butler stood for 45 minutes protecting a critically wounded woman whose van had just overturned. During the wait, Butler said he had to endure many refusals to call for help, plus epithets and middle fingers, because the accident had blocked a lane of traffic.

In May, when New York City sixth-grade teacher Ms. Aishah Ahmad, 44, declined to switch the classroom TV set from educational programming to "The Jerry Springer Show," four girls aged 11 and 12 pounced on her and beat her up, sending her to the hospital. However, a month before that, Stratford (Conn.) High student Joseph Calore filed a lawsuit against the school because it kept the Springer show on in the classroom during an exam. According to Calore, a fight on the show provoked another student to punch Calore and break his jaw.

In July, while a religious organization was running a controversial national advertising campaign offering help to gays to "change" into heterosexuals, Ronald Anacelteo, 38, was ordered by a court in Los Angeles to stay away from singer Stevie Nicks, whom Anacelteo thought could change him from gay to straight. According to a law enforcement officer, Anacelteo (who is not affiliated with the ad campaign) "is a self-proclaimed homosexual" who believes that Nicks can "heal" his homosexuality and "find (him) a woman to marry."

-- In June, retired Missouri Highway Patrol investigator Jack Merritt told reporters he had since destroyed the 1994 photograph he admitted playfully taking of Christian County sheriff Steve Whitney touching a murder victim's breast during an autopsy. (The man charged with the murder is in court, questioning autopsy procedures.) And Mark Calebs, 31, was arrested in July in London, Ky., and charged with breaking into the House-Rawlings Funeral Home and stealing the underpants from the body of a 9-year-old girl who had died of cancer.

-- In July, a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., rejected a prosecutor's request to stop Latin Kings gang leader Antonio Fernandez from selling Amway products. Fernandez, out on bail on drug charges, is restricted to his home except under certain conditions, and the prosecutor believes a sales route would allow Fernandez a way to conduct Latin Kings business. Fernandez's lawyer, chiding the prosecutors, said the Amway business was a good thing and could lead Fernandez into Tupperware, Mary Kay and Avon.

-- The French company Neyret announced plans earlier this year to market "exciting" underwear, beginning with an aromatic bra that will go on sale sometime this year. While stretched taut, and even more so when it is caressed, the bra will give off scents of pink grapefruit, apple, watermelon, black currant or apricot.

-- In February, the Kloser brewery in Nuezelle, Germany, announced it would soon begin selling dark beer concentrate for foam baths and eczema treatment. The new product differs from beer only in that the yeast is left in, creating its skin-soothing quality. Said owner Helmut Fritsche, "You can bathe in it or drink it. Whoever wants to, can do both."

-- For People With Way Too Much Money: The New York Times reported in April that Burberrys had just introduced six new styles of trench coats for dogs at prices ranging from $65 to $575. A July New York Times feature pictured the Gucci Dog Bowl at $750, black or clear. In late 1997, Gucci introduced its nipple ring attached to the larger "G," at $790 for crystal and $6,300 for diamond.

-- San Diego businessman Denis Braun told the Union-Tribune newspaper in June of his proposal to finance a new downtown baseball stadium for the Padres by selling space inside the outfield wall for about 70,000 urns with ashes of baseball fans, at about $2,500 a slot. According to Braun, the boring alternative would be to "deep-six (the ashes) in a pine box in the back 40 of some anonymous cemetery."

Jailed drug-dealer suspect Dwayne Brown, 24, in Cambridge (Mass.) Jail in February, allegedly hatched an escape plot with two friends. Brown was to lower a rope-blanket out an 18th-floor jail window; the friends would tie a gun to it; Brown would hoist it up; and Brown could use it to threaten a judge at his next court date. Problems: (1) Despite casing the joint, the friends did not notice a ledge that prevented the rope-blanket from even reaching the street. (2) Jail and court searches still would have uncovered the gun. (3) Most important, guards overheard the whole plan when the friends visited Brown in jail to plot it out and thus had heavy surveillance on the street that night. (Apparently it failed to strike the friends as eerie that no other traffic was present on the sealed-off street.)

News of the Weird has reported several times on husbands who Super Glued their wives' genitals in retaliation for alleged extramarital affairs, most recently in a Newport, Tenn., case in 1997. In April 1998, Richard McDonald, 32, was arrested in Rock Island, Ill., for Super Gluing his girlfriend's genitals. And in Easthampton, Mass., in July, Ms. Kim M. Bonafilia, 34, was charged with assaulting her ex-boyfriend with a baseball bat and attempting to Super Glue his penis to his leg after he allegedly admitted he was interested in her only for sex.

Jerome Covington, 43, identified by a woman as the man who broke into her car in Chicago in June and stole her computer, collapsed and died of a heart attack in the police cruiser as he was being taken to the station. The following week, Terrence C. O'Neal, 48, who police say had just robbed a Kroger pharmacy in Westerville, Ohio, collapsed and died in his getaway car (driven by an accomplice) during a 10-minute police chase.

(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.)

-- The BBC reported in June that despite recent Pakistani government crackdowns, gangs operating around the shrine of Sha Dola in the city of Gujrat have been deliberately deforming infants handed over to the shrine for religious purposes so that they can be used by the gangs as high-sympathy, and unusually effective, beggars. The so-called "rat children" have distinctively smaller heads, which shrine personnel say is due to genetic defects, but which critics say are the result of clamping medieval iron rings on their heads to retard growth and brain function.

-- NASA revealed in May that it had inadvertently allowed an astronaut impostor to sit at the Mission Control console at Alabama's Marshall Space Center during a shuttle flight in which actual astronauts were preparing to rescue a satellite from space. Jerry Allen Whittredge was arrested in Houston and charged with lying to NASA officials, but his lawyer said he is mentally incompetent to stand trial. Asked how NASA could not correctly identify its real astronauts, an official said merely that Whittredge made a credible impression.

Sometime between March and May, thieves stole an 18-ton steel bridge that connected an isolated cottage to a main road near Bytow, Poland. And in May, in Liverpool, England, thieves stole about 250 feet worth of an entire street (5,000 cobblestones). And in May, thieves stole the entire left field fence of the Capitola-Soquel (Calif.) Little League field.

The Sunday Times of London reported in April that former prominent London male fashion model Chris Reid had just officially been accepted in the South African town of Port St. Johns as the first-ever white witch doctor. Reid, currently known as Ntombhe Mhlophe and whose "fashion" now consists of animal skins, had just finished a four-month apprenticeship in the art, which is said to retain importance for nearly 90 percent of black South Africans.

In February, Timothy Devine, 37, thought he had merely been struck in the ear while in a Boston park trying to purchase marijuana and that he could walk off the pain, but he decided to go to Quincy Hospital, whose attendants confirmed his emerging suspicion that he might have been shot in the head. And in May in Sacramento, Calif., a 19-year-old man was convicted of four counts of attempted murder, based in part on the testimony of one victim who said he was not aware for several days afterward that he had been shot in the stomach and another who said he thought at first he had been hit in the nose by a rock until a doctor told him a bullet had entered through an ear and exited through a nostril.

On the witness stand in March in Albuquerque, N.M., car salesman Sean Gene Druktenis, 28, denied the charge that he had fondled the daughter of the woman he was dating. However, during cross-examination, prosecutor Robert Rambo challenged Druktenis' truthfulness by asking, "As a top car salesman, did you ever lie to a customer?" That question drew what an Albuquerque Journal reporter termed "a long pause," followed by the ambiguous, "I would have to say no to that." (Four days later, a mistrial was declared on an unrelated issue.)

-- In March, a 20-year-old man was charged with attempted murder in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, for stabbing a 29-year-old man, an acquaintance, in the head. The victim walked out of his apartment after the stabbing, fully conscious and speaking, despite the fact that the butcher knife was still embedded in his skull. He survived.

-- In May, according to Pasadena, Calif., Fire Department Chief Joe Nestor, about 1,000 swifts (a small migratory bird similar to a swallow) flew down the chimney of a couple's home and filled their house. There was no authoritative explanation for that, but the explanation in Augusta, Ga., for the thousands of bees that quickly covered Betty Robinson's 1984 Buick in April was the new brand of air freshener she was using in the car. And in May in Weymouth, England, about 20,000 bees covered Jane Clark's house, and furthermore, Clark, trapped inside, could not get the town council to help her because, said a spokesman, bees are a protected species. (After two days, the bees left.)

-- In New York City in March, Adonis Gomez, 2, playing on the sofa in a third-floor apartment, bounced out the window but landed safely in the lap of Barbara Jones, 31, who was sitting in a wheelchair on the sidewalk. And a month earlier, in Brooklyn, Bishme Owens, 2, was thrown out an eighth-floor window by his grandmother (who has a history of mental illness) but was slowed by tree branches and landed in a flower bed so that his only injury was a broken arm.

-- Golf Imitates Miniature Golf: In May at Beaver Brook Golf Course in Haydenville, Mass., Todd Obuchowski was credited with a hole-in-one on a par-3 hole after his tee shot went over the green and onto a highway, hit a passing Toyota driven by Nancy Bachand, ricocheted back to the green, and rolled into the cup. At least eight golfers witnessed the shot.

-- Just Like in the Movies: In Aalesund, Norway, in May, Kristin Nalvik Loendal, 9, riding her bike down a steep hill and failing to stop at an intersection at the bottom, swerved into the path of an oncoming car and was knocked into the air. The driver of the car stopped to help the girl but couldn't find her. As he discovered several hours later, she had landed in the bed of a truck going in the opposite direction and sustained only bumps and bruises.

Justin Clark, 19, was arrested and charged with burglary in Sioux Falls, S.D., in April after a homeowner surprised him. According to police, Clark fled, then led police on a high-speed chase before crashing his car into a tree. As Clark ran through a nearby neighborhood, in which several residents were out in their yards, he kept up a steady chatter, informing them that the reason he was running was that the police were after him and asking whether any of them could help him. Several people tackled Clark and held him for the police.

Another Item Stored in the Rectum: Marijuana pipe, which police in Boardman, Ohio, recovered during a drug bust in June but which seemed to disappear in the squad car as suspect William P. Miller, 35, was being driven to the station. Police finally deduced there was only one place in which they hadn't looked and convinced Miller to remove it. He was charged with tampering with evidence.

In April, a 47-year-old man in Peoria, Ill., finally died of a 1971 gunshot wound that had paralyzed him for 27 years. His assailant would thus have been charged with murder, but he died five years ago. But in Boston, Raul Casanova, who had shot a man in 1991 and left him paralyzed and who had served seven years for that assault, was charged in June with the murder after the man died. In fact, the charge was filed on the day Casanova was to be released from prison.

(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.)