-- In August, Ukrainian Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko began a crackdown on tax delinquents to collect the $3.5 billion the government is owed. The centerpiece of the campaign is to call the top 1,500 tax scofflaws, mostly business executives, to a military base near Kiev to live for an undetermined time in tents, to listen to lectures on civil defense preparedness for natural disasters until apparently out of sheer boredom they decide to pay up.

-- The notorious Japanese TV game show "Super Jockey" (which features stunts such as contestants competing to eat repulsive-flavored ice cream) began selling commercial time on the show recently by inviting potential sponsors to present bikini-clad women who would endure dunkings in scalding-hot water and then be rewarded with commercial time equivalent to the number of seconds they endured the pain.

In July, the Tennessee Supreme Court reinstated patient Frances Blanchard's lawsuit against Memphis dentist Arlene Kellum for allegedly committing battery by attempting to pull out all 32 of her teeth in one sitting. (Blanchard, who has a gum disease, said she thought it would be done over several visits.) Kellum was half done when Blanchard fainted and had to be hospitalized for six days. And a jury in Oklahoma City awarded $1.3 million to Mark Macsenti in June for brain damage he suffered when dentist Jon D. Becker went to sleep during an appointment and left Macsenti hooked up to nitrous oxide for about 10 hours.

In July, Canada's Human Resources Development office announced it was creating a special legal category for strippers entering the country to address what a leading immigration lawyer called "a shortage of exotic dancers." And according to a Times of London report in April, a glut of British fashion models was crowding out British computer tech people in the fight for valuable work permits in California this summer, to the chagrin of Apple, Texas Instruments and other firms, since the law that authorizes work permits explicitly puts models on even footing with anyone who has a college degree.

Georgia state Sen. Ralph David Abernathy III, son of the late civil rights leader, announced his retirement from politics in July after his $400 re-election filing fee check bounced. His legislative career included an incident of following a female into a state Capitol ladies' room and of being caught with marijuana in his underwear at the Atlanta airport. He said he plans to enter the seminary.

(1) Chewing Gum Rage: A 5-foot, 380-pound man who accidentally sat on chewing gum in a Bellevue, Neb., movie theater in July took off his sticky pants, walked around, yelled and seethed, and punched out a glass case. (2) Spelling Rage: Bronx, N.Y., school board member Dennis Coleman disrupted a July meeting by haranguing the staff and refusing to be quieted by the chancellor when he discovered that the word "rescind" was misspelled on a resolution to be voted on. (3) Barber Rage: In July, Providence, R.I., barber Sam Johnson, 53, upset that a 21-month-old customer wouldn't be still, allegedly whacked the kid in the head with his electric clipper and then sprayed alcohol to make the cut sting.

-- Convicted killer Robert Hunt lost his appeal to the Nebraska Supreme Court in June. In his closing argument at trial, Hunt's lawyer, in an effort to gain the jury's sympathy for Hunt, had called him a "creepy, slimy, sexual degenerate," and Hunt complained that the strategy obviously backfired, in that he got a life sentence. The Supreme Court said Hunt would probably have been convicted anyway (but took no position on whether the lawyer's statement was accurate).

-- In July, Diane Parker accompanied her husband, Richard W. Parker, (who had been accused of drug trafficking) to federal court in Los Angeles. According to friends, Diane was so supportive that she had come prepared to put up her investment property and her mother's townhouse to make Richard's bail. However, the prosecutor began reciting to the judge facts about Richard's double life that included a mistress and a safe house, and Diane's expression changed dramatically. She removed her wedding ring with a flourish, walked out of court, immediately drove to an Orange County office where the mistress worked, and punched her several times before being restrained.

-- In March, students from Madrona Middle School, visiting Torrance (Calif.) Superior Court to learn about the legal system, were ushered by their teacher into a trial in session despite a warning to the teacher that the subject matter was "sensitive." Virtually the first thing the kids saw was, in a child molestation case, the prosecutor's propping up two 10-inch dildos on the railing of the witness stand so as to make her line of questioning more vivid for the jury.

-- Petty-theft defendant Ronnie Hawkins, acting as his own lawyer in a Long Beach, Calif., courtroom in July, thought incessantly talking back to Judge Joan Comparet-Cassani was a good strategy, but Hawkins had been fitted with a remote-controlled "stun belt" under his clothing, and the judge ordered a bailiff to send Hawkins a bone-rattling 50,000 volts of electricity, causing him to grimace and his body to turn as taut as a board for the 8-second blast. Five days later in Oakland, Calif., Brian Tracey Hill suffered the same fate during jury selection on an assault charge. However, Hill was behaving perfectly; a sheriff's deputy had leaned over in his chair and accidentally nudged the stun belt's trigger.

-- Murder-trial juror Gillian Guess, 43, was convicted in June of obstruction of justice when a court in Vancouver, British Columbia, found that she was having a torrid sexual affair with the defendant, who was eventually acquitted in large part through jury-room advocacy by Guess. Witnesses said Guess appeared to be attracted to defendant Peter Gill early in the 1995 trial and frequently sat facing him instead of the witness box, sometimes with her legs wantonly uncrossed.

-- Michael H. Egli was found in contempt of court in Daytona Beach, Fla., in August. He had tried to get out of jury duty by sending the court clerk two messages announcing that he "hate(s)" "(epithet for blacks), cops and judges." Egli has a kidney condition that requires regularly scheduled dialysis and was surprised when the judge told him he would automatically have been excluded from jury duty, anyway.

From time to time News of the Weird has reported on the fluctuating value of the late Italian artist Piero Manzoni's personal feces, which he canned in 1961 as art objects in 90 tins, 30 grams at a time. The Baltimore Sun reported in 1993 that one tin sold for $75,000 at the top of the market. The latest sale, in July 1998 at Sotheby's in London, was for about $28,800. However, even with the drop in price, as Forbes magazine pointed out, Manzoni's feces is still about $1,000 per gram, almost 100 times the price of gold ($9.50 per gram).

A 17-year-old boy was killed in Navarino, Wis., in July when shrapnel from a mailbox he was playfully blowing up with a firecracker severed his carotid artery. And a 28-year-old man drowned in Mount Clemens, Mich., in July in an apartment-house pool while winning a game with his friends as to who could hold his breath under water the longest.

(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 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.)