-- In June the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a 1998 decision upholding the privacy rights of child-porn suspect James Anderson of Duluth, Ga., who, as the object of a federal sting operation, allegedly took illegal videos into his workplace. Child porn photos uncovered at Anderson's home were later used against him in his trial, but the courts ruled that the workplace stash was illegally seized because Anderson had a legitimate "expectation of privacy." And three weeks later, British Columbia's highest court ruled that Canada's child-porn possession law was unconstitutional for also criminalizing erotic material written up from one's own imagination.

-- In April, police in Broomfield, Colo., issued a trespassing summons to Kristopher C. Ward, 36, who apparently had moved a female companion, all their furniture and two dogs into a vacant house belonging to Michael Deetz. When Deetz brought a police officer around to evict the squatters, Ward said he had been trying to get ahold of Deetz and decided that the best way to bump into him was just to move in and wait until he dropped by.

-- In April, a judge in Ottawa, Ontario, ruled against inmate Herbert Miller in his lawsuit against the Bowden correctional institution in Alberta. Miller had just lost his prison job, which was aimed at preparing him for work on the outside, and was demanding more than $3,000 (U.S.) in back pay, vacation pay and overtime.

-- Former Florida state Rep. Deborah Tamargo, visiting the House chamber in April for a reunion with ex-colleagues, sat next to her old seat while ex-seat neighbor Rep. Harry C. Goode went out for a smoke. While Goode was away, a bill was brought to the floor, and Tamargo apparently couldn't resist the temptation to vote on it. She pushed the "yes" button, to Goode's astonishment when he found out later. The bill, to ban trespassing on the grounds of a private school, passed.

-- The director of the worldwide charity Feed the Children, Steve Highfill, and several administrative employees were caught on tape in May by Nashville, Tenn., TV station WTVF taking home boxes of goods that had been donated for impoverished kids. Highfill saw nothing wrong with that: "If that's wrong, fine. I don't think so, and I don't think people are going to think so." Apparently, people did think so because the next day, Highfill resigned, and a week after, 14 employees were fired.

-- Three University of Sheffield (England) researchers reported in May that they had found a unique bird whose males not only experience orgasms during sex but also are equipped with a penis-like protrusion (though it does not contain a sperm duct). The male buffalo weaver bird uses the protrusion to stimulate the female so that when he expels sperm, the female will be better able to accommodate them.

-- Awesome Dogs: Casey, a golden retriever in Raytown, Mo., that made the news in April by recovering from three gunshot wounds to the head. And Suzzy, a German shepherd in Granite City, Ill., that in March was fine after surgery to remove $7.37 in coins she had swallowed. And the husky Whitey, which with local residents' help has eluded animal control officers in the town of Laconia, N.H. (population 15,000), for more than a year now, despite officers' frequent sightings.

-- According to police in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, the blood all over the furniture of the burglarized house in May was the thief's, courtesy of the homeowner's parrot, which attacked the perp and drove him out. Said a police spokesman, "The bird was fairly annoyed." And in an April Stroudsburg, Pa., trial of a man accused of burglary, prosecutors subpoenaed a parrot that was abducted in the crime, in the slight chance that it would identify the thief in court, but the bird was noncommittal.

York County (Pa.) reported in June that its Resource Recovery Center had found about $43,000 in carelessly discarded coins among the last year's trash. Also in June, the Miami-Dade County (Fla.) government announced the demotion of an administrator in charge of processing parking meter collections; the 21-year veteran had just not gotten around to bank-depositing about $150,000 in coins collected over a four-year period.

In February, Russian brain surgeon Svyatoslav Medvedev told reporters in St. Petersburg that he had achieved an 80 percent success rate curing alcohol addiction by removal of a part of the brain that he says facilitates such addiction. And in April, a University of Toronto researcher concluded that patients with brain damage to the right frontal lobe don't get the punchlines of jokes, even though they laugh easily at simpler kinds of humor, such as slapstick.

In May, according to officials at the Brookings (S.D.) County Jail, on the day before trusty inmate Jeffrey Kumm was to be released, he swiped three deputy's shirts and two prison uniforms and hid them outside on the grounds so he could retrieve them the next day after he got out. (He was caught and sentenced to six more months.)

In February, Don Giuseppe Avarna, 83 (the Duke of Gualtieri), died in Messina, Sicily. The duke achieved celebrity in the 1980s when he abandoned his family and took up with a young American female flight attendant and then proceeded to irritate his wife for years by ringing a chapel bell in their village every time he and the young woman made love.

An arson suspect had to be hospitalized after he fell off the roof of a building while admiring the fire he allegedly started (St. Louis). Bangkok police, trying to end traffic-stop bribes, started offering free rice to ticketed motorists who come to the station to pay their citations. The city of Graz, Austria, said it would start paying beggars about $260 per month to stay out of sight. A fire extinguisher exploded from the heat of a fire in the home of a 70-year-old woman and spewed foam wildly, which doused the fire (Rochester, Minn.). About 1,000 Pakistani cricket fans angrily surrounded the home of a player on the national team and threw rocks at his windows two days after the team lost the world title to Australia.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- The animal-food company Ralston Purina introduced earlier this year, from its subsidiary Purina Philippines, power chicken feed designed to build muscles in roosters for the popular "sport" of cockfighting. According to a June Wall Street Journal report, the market for Rooster Booster chow is huge: The Philippines has 5 million "gaming" roosters.

Labor activist Dan Craig, 25, accepted a plea bargain in January in Toronto that will keep him out of jail, despite his having protested layoffs at an aerospace plant by suspending himself from a factory ceiling and playing "Amazing Grace" on his bagpipes for four solid hours. And in West Union, Ohio, last winter, Berry Baker, 54, protested the school district's placing Ten Commandments statues on school lawns by demanding equal space for statues promoting his "Center for Phallic Worship," which he said copies a religion practiced in some countries. (In February, Baker filed a lawsuit against the district; in June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill authorizing the Ten Commandments, but not stone phalluses, to be displayed on public property.)

On May 10, the diversity-seeking Oregon Senate permitted Wiccan high priestess Cleda Johnson to provide the traditional session-opening blessing. And in June, a coalition of Christian organizations, along with U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, demanded that Fort Hood (near Austin, Texas), the Army's largest installation, stop its 2-year-old sanctioning of a Wiccan Open Circle group, whose several dozen members dance through the night at full moons. (Wiccan groups have also been sanctioned for U.S. military bases in Louisiana, Alaska, Florida, Okinawa and Germany.)

-- Sean Barry, 23, was arrested in Chandler, Ariz., in May after summoning police for help when he couldn't unlock the handcuffs he had playfully put on his wrists. When officers arrived, they ran a routine check on Barry and discovered he had an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court on a traffic charge. They decided to leave the cuffs on him until they got him to the station.

-- John Michael Haydt, 34, was arrested in Mountain View, Calif., in April and charged with burglary after he called 911 to rescue him from the Danish Concepts furniture store at 2 a.m. According to police, Haydt had broken in through a window but had cut himself so badly that he didn't think he could climb back out.

-- Easy Collars: Philip Racicot was arrested in Norwich, Conn., in April for carrying an unlicensed gun; he had called attention to himself when, trying to hide the gun in his car, he shot himself in the buttocks. And in May, a 17-year-old boy identified as Lukasz S., was captured by police in Bydgoszcz, Poland, after an assault; Lukasz slowed down considerably after he shot himself in the foot during the chase. And an unidentified 17-year-old boy, fleeing police in San Francisco in February after vandalizing a construction site, accidentally shot himself to death with a sawed-off shotgun he was trying to hide in his car.

-- Gary Patton and two 17-year-olds were arrested in Grand Junction, Colo., in January and charged with robbing a Norwest Bank branch. They were exposed when one of the teen-agers sent a pair of pants to the laundry without checking the pockets, one of which, according to police, contained the trio's holdup note ("Put the money in the bag and don't say a word or I will kill you").

-- Travis Black, 29, went on the lam on June 1 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., just as his trial for aggravated assault was getting started. The trial went on without him, and the next day, despite the empty chair at the defense table, the jury found him not guilty. (He turned himself in on June 4 and at press time was in jail facing a contempt of court charge.)

-- In January, preparing for a joyous festival at the end of Ramadan, the Taliban government in Afghanistan decided to clean up the six trees in Kabul on which had been hanging the amputated left feet of recently convicted robbers, exhibited as crime deterrents.

-- According to a March report in the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Sentinel, cockroach expert David George Gordon (in town for a local exhibition) called the pests "intelligent, hardworking and fastidious groomers" that are responsible, especially in the tropics, for recycling dead animal matter. Gordon has authored a bug-recipe cookbook, which touts crickets for their calcium, termites for iron and grasshoppers for protein.

-- Fecal Ordnance: The director of the sewer system in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, told reporters in June that the city's pipes may burst by winter from the gases released by the backup caused by last year's Hurricane Mitch, thus potentially showering the city with waste. And neither local officials nor the FAA is certain yet who has been causing the dozen or so instances of fecal bombardment of homes in and around Salt Lake City, Utah, since April; owners of the houses hit by the gobs of thick, raw sewage initially blamed airliners but now suspect an airborne vandal in a smaller plane or someone on the ground using a catapult.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (33) The annual student cheating riots in Bangladesh, first reported in News of the Weird in 1988, in which students are so blatant about their right to receive outside help when taking national placement exams that hundreds are injured and thousands are arrested yearly (with 11,000 expelled in this year's riots in May). And (34) the ego-driven bad guy who goes on a national TV talk show while on the lam from criminal charges, thus making it easy for police or parole officers to find him, as Willie Johnson, 22, did in May, appearing as a drag queen on "The Jerry Springer Show" while wanted in Houston for stabbing his sister's husband.

An inmate was executed in the Philippines when the president's last-minute-reprieve phone call couldn't get through because of busy signals. An Israeli man filed for divorce from his wife of 51 years because she had abandoned the hard-liners and voted for moderate Ehud Barak. A Lockheed aeronautics executive said the company lost as much as $70 million because of a misplaced decimal point in a sales contract. A newly arrived British NATO peacekeeper mistakenly turned right instead of left in Salonika, Greece, and wound up in Athens (250 miles away) instead of at his Macedonian border post (50 miles away). A Home and Garden TV channel study revealed that more men would rather tend their lawns than have sex.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- Sister Mary Rinaldi, director of development for the Salesian Sisters Roman Catholic order in New Jersey, told television reporters in April that more than 2,500 benefactors have paid $100 and up for nuns to pray for them daily. Rinaldi said the sisters are not selling their prayers; rather, she said, they will pray for anyone, but those who contribute money get special attention from their own designated nun, with proceeds to fund their retirement home. A Pennsylvania order has a similar program, "One on One With a Nazareth Nun."

In April, just as North Carolina Rep. Frank Mitchell was introducing his bill to plug a loophole in state law that did not fully punish schoolteachers who have sex with their students, the chief inspector of schools in Great Britain was still dealing with fallout from his February remarks that teacher-student sex could sometimes be "experiential and educative" and should not necessarily result even in the teacher's firing.

Ms. Suphatra Chumphusri, explaining why she killed her drug-dealing son in December in Chiang Rai, Thailand: "No matter how much I loved him, I had to do it for the sake of the general society." And according to the court-appointed psychiatrist examining last summer's U.S. Capitol shooter Russell Eugene Weston Jr., the two deaths were unavoidable because Weston had to get the "ruby satellite" in a Senate office in order to stop the Capitol Hill cannibalism that had produced rotting corpses, which would otherwise infect everyone with "Black Heva," "the most deadliest disease known to mankind."

-- Latest Highway Truck Spills: Several tons of chocolate bars (Hershey's, Reese's, etc.) on Interstate 80 near Grinnell, Iowa, March (which caught fire and burned out of control because of the chocolate's oil); a truckload of rock salt in Pittsburgh, March (giving great protection against ice to a small patch of East Carson Street); a tanker truck of tequila near Opelousas, La., June; and 20 tons of explosive black powder just before rush hour in Springfield, Va., at the Capital Beltway's busiest interstate interchange.

-- Sounds Like an Urban Legend, But It's Not: In April in Fayetteville, Ark., exploding beans and rice tore a hole in the roof of Steve Tate's home. Tate had packed the food in frozen carbon dioxide in 6-foot-long pipes for later storage at a cabin, but the gas needed some room to expand. Bomb technicians from nearby Springdale exploded the other pipefuls Tate had prepared.

-- Livermore, Calif., whose population includes many smart people who work for two nuclear research labs, organized digging crews in June to search for its time capsule, which was created with great fanfare in 1974 but now cannot be found because no one remembers where it was buried. It is about the size of a beer keg but was interred unceremoniously by a work crew so as not to encourage thieves.

-- In February, Japanese tourist Satoshi Kinoshida, 48, was hospitalized in Taipei, Taiwan, after he tripped at a hotel and fell onto a chopstick he was holding and had it penetrate about an inch into his right eye socket. (It missed his eyeball, and he was not seriously hurt.) And in March, a 20-year-old man in Thisted, Denmark, had to be taken from a bar to a machine shop late at night so a technician could disassemble a condom machine in which his finger had become stuck.

-- In April at the Westchester (N.Y.) Medical Center, surgeons were preparing a patient for a long-awaited kidney transplant when they realized that the kidney -- on ice in a plastic box in the operating room -- was missing. Ninety minutes later, after an all-out search, the box and kidney were found in a trash bin, having been mistakenly set out for recycling. According to Medical Center officials, the kidney was still viable when implanted, but later failed for other reasons.

-- An April Associated Press feature reported on people (mostly rural Southerners) with a fondness (or addiction) for eating kaolin, the smooth clay used in chalk, paint products and ceramics. Small snack bags of kaolin (even though labeled "not for human consumption") are sold at convenience stores in central Georgia, where half the world's kaolin is produced, and even at farmer's markets in Atlanta. Some kaolin eaters say it settles the stomach, but medical authorities say it leads to constipation and serious liver and kidney damage.

-- Among unusual museums recently in the news: Ed's Museum (publicized in a May USA Today story), bequeathed by Edwin Kruger to the town of Wykoff, Minn., in 1989, consisting of Ed's stuff, interesting only because Ed lived alone and saved everything he ever owned. And the renovated William P. Didusch Museum in Baltimore, also known as the museum on the history of urology (subject of a Baltimore Sun story in January), displaying historical kidney-stone-remedying implements, which are not to be viewed by squeamish men.

-- From a May New York Times profile of Max McCalman, the cheesemaster ("maitre fromager") at the upscale Picholine restaurant in Manhattan: "You must look at (the cheeses)," said McCalman, "smell them, touch them, taste them. Sometimes, I even listen to them and they talk to me." His "office" is his dank, one-of-a-kind "cheese cave" in which he tends to his inventory for hours. Recently, a doctor diagnosed the pain in McCalman's arm as "cheese elbow," which has limited his personal slicing to the soft cheeses.

Women With Too Many Cats (and very smelly houses): Alice Tyhurst, Watsonville, Calif. (43 cats, discovered by authorities in May); Dixie Bielenberg and husband John, Decatur, Ill. (211 cats, December); Linda Marie Reynolds, age 50, Wilmington, N.C. (12 cats and 28 dogs, February); a 56-year-old woman, Omaha, Neb. (104 cats, along with a bathtub half-filled with cat waste, May); Janice Van Meter, Dale City, Va. (68 cats, April); Julie Harris, age 37, head of the "Feral Cat Project," Portsmouth, N.H. (31 cats, April).

Two grown men robbed a 9-year-old boy of $6 at his curbside lemonade stand (Cincinnati). A Baptist pastor with 24 years in the pulpit was arrested at a mall doing underskirt videotaping (Atlanta). A high school science teacher was forced to resign after showing her class an execution video to demonstrate "electricity" (Savannah, Ga.). A woman who plays bagpipes for tourists' tips withdrew her lawsuit against Swissair for lost income due to last year's crash of Flight 111 (Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia). A sanitation plant computer-system test for Y2K problems was unsuccessful, resulting in a 4 million-gallon spill of untreated sewage into streets and a park (near Los Angeles).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)