-- Mr. Kamla Jaan, 50, was elected mayor of Katni in central India in December, and Mr. Shabnam Mausi was elected to the legislature in the state of Madhya Pradesh in February, in political breakthroughs for eunuchs, who have run for office in large numbers recently as a reaction to perceived widespread corruption among India's traditional politicians. Until now, the genitalless "hijras" have been relegated to being either prostitutes or professional pests who trespass and then demand fees to leave the premises.

In October, high school teacher Edward R. Kotwica committed suicide by walking in front of a train in Bergen County hours after he was charged with fondling a 17-year-old female student. Two weeks later, piano teacher Samuel S. Aster, 59, hanged himself in Teaneck; he had been charged with molesting seven of his young students. Less than a month later, Adam Victor Reed, 53, a former board of education member in Monmouth County, was arrested and charged with possession of 12 boxes of child pornography.

-- A 45-year-old man was identified by police in February as the one who had recently taped as many as 100 vials of water to trees in Milwaukee and suburbs (though at press time, he had not been charged with a crime). He told police that he was testing the frequencies of radio stations because one of them had been bombarding him with signals. Though he did not explain the role of the vials, he vowed to send the test results to the FCC. The man's son, 17, said he was a good father but that sometimes he neglects his medication.

-- Joseph Sherer, 41, was arraigned in Bozeman, Mont., in January on 11 felony charges, including aggravated assault and impersonating a physician, stemming from what police believe were from 40 to 200 phone calls he made from his Sunrise, Fla., home to women in Montana, advising them to perform harmful procedures on themselves (such as persuading one woman to cut off a nipple and flush it down the toilet). According to police, Sherer had episodes of similar, but not as dangerous, phone calls in other cities in the 1980s.

-- E.H. Dennis, 77, was convicted in Greensboro, N.C., in January of scaring attendees at a 1998 Guilford County Commission meeting by making an explicit bomb threat against commissioners if he didn't get his way in a land-use dispute. According to a videotape of the meeting, Dennis calmly described how commissioners' body parts would be strewn around the area after the bomb went off. During a break in testimony at his trial, Dennis left the courtroom and stepped over to the elections office, where he left a $147 cashier's check as filing fee to run for a seat on the commission.

-- New York City firefighter Albert Hohmann was arrested in February after being identified by police as the man who, naked, sneaked into a restaurant at night and snacked on expensive food and wine. Hohmann's lawyer denied the charge despite the fact that the restaurant's surveillance camera was running and that the intruder sported an easily identifiable tattoo of "Mr. Peanut" on his derriere.

-- Trauma therapist Karen Frogley complained in January to Reverse Bungy New Zealand about the company's installation of a 130-foot-high tower with a bungee-attached capsule in downtown Wellington, outside Frogley's office building. Frogley says the jumpers' blood-curdling screams make her rape and car-crash patients anxious during their sessions.

-- In December, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offered 350 homeless shelters in the U.S. and 34 more in Canada holiday "tofurkeys" -- tofu shaped to resemble turkey parts. Said the PETA coordinator, of the campaign to save hapless turkeys, "Homeless people especially can empathize with those who are oppressed."

-- In December, the Education Ministry in Turkey asked a math publisher not to use the letters "p" and "k" in algebra equations because they could form the acronym for the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party ("PKK"). The ministry suggested instead the letters e, f, g and h.

Because of an inexplicable rash in mid-1999 of newborn babies being abandoned on the street, Child Protective Services in Houston bought 75 billboard ads in December to beg reluctant mothers to take unwanted babies to hospitals or social services agencies. And at the Berea Baptist Church in Johannesburg, South Africa, at least four newborns have been deposited recently through its oversized mail drop for unwanted babies. South African authorities are equally baffled at the sudden upsurge in abandoned babies.

Barely six months after the murder conviction of San Diego surgeon John Ronald Brown (whose patient died while voluntarily having a healthy leg removed), a hospital in Scotland announced that it has been the site of two similar but successful surgeries in the last three years, on patients so dissatisfied with their bodies that they have a psychological need ("apotemnophilia") to have a healthy limb removed. Surgeon Robert Smith said he was troubled by his patients' (one British, one German) needs but ultimately performed the operations at no charge because the patients were so distraught, one having earlier shot himself in the leg to improve the chances a surgeon would agree to amputate.

A 37-year-old man who tried to get out while backing up his van fell to the ground and was run over (Silver Spring, Md., December). And a 22-year-old man who decided to push his asphalt-filled truck up an off-ramp as it was sputtering to a halt after running out of gas, slipped as the truck started to roll backward (Jacksonville, Ill., January). And a 30-year-old man who got underneath his truck at a service station to adjust the starter was crushed when the truck lurched forward on top of him (Sugar Land, Texas, December).

A 58-year-old man got 12 months in jail for forgery; it was his 151st criminal conviction since 1961 (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario). The publisher of the "For Dummies" book series donated $350 million to MIT for brain research. "Mountain man," the escaped murderer from Bulgaria who spent 12 years burglarizing houses in Washington state, received $412,500 from Snohomish County because a police dog bit off part of his foot during the arrest. A furniture store floor collapsed, injuring 161 shoppers (13 seriously) in a frenzy to buy one of 36 $229 armchairs marked down to $18 (Dos Hermanas, Spain). A 51-year-old man, out of work 14 weeks with broken ribs after being hit by a bus, was billed $850 for damage to the bus (London, England).

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

-- State-of-the-art veterinary care was described in a January New York magazine story on Manhattan's Animal Medical Center, including kidney dialysis (at $55,000 a year), cataract removals, hip replacements, anterior-cruciate ligament repairs, root canals and brain surgery. CPR on small animals (such as, witnessed by the reporter, a pet rat) consists of placing the animal's head inside a doctor's mouth. The New York Times reported in January that veterinary care flourishes in Canada because the private sector runs it, unlike human health care; one man, long wait-listed for an MRI at Ontario hospitals, quickly booked time at an animal hospital.

"Who wants old ugly Kevin Green, anyway?" (uttered by a 17-year-old Atlanta woman who was then shot to death by Kevin's other girlfriend, who was convicted in December). "Make me (stop humming Christmas carols)" (uttered in December by a 78-year-old Menlo Park, Calif., man who was then strangled by his roommate). "I killed your dog" (uttered tauntingly by a 37-year-old Whitelaw, Alberta, woman to her rifle-holding husband, who then shot her to death, according to his December confession; she had already admitted having an affair with an old boyfriend).

-- In December, after a four-year legal battle, the Texas Supreme Court invalidated the VitaPro soybean meat substitute contract with the state prison system because of evidence that prisoners had become demoralized with their VitaPro diets, which had "led to adverse health effects, including rampant flatulence."

-- Former pastor Eric Daniel Harris, 37, pled guilty in November to the 1996 arson that burned down the Kentucky Missionary Baptist Church in Saline County, Ark. According to a federal prosecutor, Harris said he did it because "there was a division among church members, and they needed a project to unify them."

-- In October, a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court accepted driver John Carlin's argument on appeal that it was impossible for him to comply with the police's Breathalyzer demand because he had to urinate so bad that he could not blow firmly into the device. Said Judge Rochelle Friedman, "The difficulty of such a task is obvious." Officers had denied Carlin a restroom break until he consented to make the standard two blows; the first registered 0.18 (over the legal limit), and he refused to take the second.

-- According to reports of an NCAA investigation published in the Knoxville News-Sentinel in February, an official in the University of Tennessee English department last year claimed that a star football player plagiarized a class paper, but the university concluded that an athletic department tutor had merely misinterpreted the federal Americans With Disabilities Act. The athletic tutor said she thought the act allowed a student with a learning disability to talk to her about a classroom topic and that the tutor could then draft a paper for the student.

-- Jack Ramsay, who is a member of the Canadian Parliament and who was convicted in November of the 1969 attempted rape of a 14-year-old girl while a member of the Mounted Police, said the crime "would never have happened" if she had not let him see her panties. Ramsay admitted recently that while questioning the girl as a crime victim in 1969, he needed to know whether she understood the concept of sexual intercourse and thus asked her to demonstrate it. Ramsay said it was when she unfastened her jeans that he caught the fateful glimpse of her panties. (Ramsay has been ousted from the Reform Party but has not resigned his seat.)

-- In recent months, a New York woman and a Massachusetts woman received huge windfalls to their checking accounts due to data-processing errors, and now both are fighting to keep the money, in both instances citing their banks' incompetence. Susan Madakor, 40, has spent $230,000 of her $700,000 that should have gone to a United Nations environmental agency, and retired Centerville, Mass., schoolteacher Joan L. Phillips has spent most of the $800,000 accumulated since 1990 when her pension checks mysteriously increased from $800 a month to $8,000.

-- The family of 15-year-old Lance Landers said it would appeal a January Alabama court decision barring the diagnosed-"emotionally conflicted" student from public schools. His mother insists he be mainstreamed into the school system under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, even though he has allegedly assaulted his mother, threatened to kill students, punched the driver of a moving school bus, spit in cafeteria food, thrown batteries at students, ranted during classes, and regularly addressed the principal, "Hello, motherfucker!"

Joseph Motyka, 32, was arrested on Jan. 1 in Chicago and charged with child endangerment because he, not content with a firecracker celebration of the New Year, had brought home a quarter-stick of dynamite. Motyka's 3-year-old daughter discovered it and put it into a candle, and the resultant explosion took off her right hand and caused hearing and vision loss.

Matthew Harley, 27, sentenced to prison on weapons charges in 1995, surrendered at a courthouse in Portsmouth, Va., but was sent home, where he continued with his life until September 1999, when authorities finally came for him. And Doris Preston, 74, sentenced to five years' minimum for arson in 1991, went home to Columbus, Ohio, on bail but was not called back until September 1999. And in August, parole-violating rapist Gerald Bennett, 30, tried politely to surrender at the police station in Glenolden, Pa., but was turned away because of a records glitch and remained free for six more days, during which time, according to police, he killed one woman and raped another before being caught.

-- Miguel Avalos-Rivera, 28, was arrested in Fairfax, Va., in November after being found screaming in pain in a car; his hand had gotten stuck in the dashboard as he tried to steal the stereo, and he had broken three of his fingers. And Jimmy Cooksey, 36, also was discovered screaming in pain in October; sheriff's deputies in Dallas said he had tried to steal electricity by connecting powerline wires with a homemade pole, but took 36,000 volts, burning him so badly that he lost both legs and is still hospitalized (though no criminal charge was filed).

A couple parked in a Loudon County, Va., nighttime lovers' lane was so startled by an approaching sheriff's cruiser that the man abruptly drove off, accidentally right into the Potomac River before being rescued. A 7-year-old girl was stabbed 25 times (not life-threateningly) by a playmate emulating Chucky in "Child's Play 2," which he had seen three days earlier (Brasilia, Brazil). A rapist sentenced to two life terms plus 110 years asked the judge for a lethal injection, saying, "I can't do that much time" (Prince George's County, Md.). A drug-dealing couple were arrested for trying to collect a $40 debt by dangling a guy out a window while the woman bit his testicles (Evansville, Ind.). A math teacher was arrested for forcing a 13-year-old boy to take his restroom break in a classroom trashcan (Montgomery, Ala.).

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

-- According to a February Wall Street Journal report, the annual "Milk Bowl," featuring competition between college teams for the national championship of dairy sniffing, crawls with corporate recruiters seeking to sign the nation's top flavor-evaluation talent, at starter salaries of up to $40,000. Mississippi State's three-person squad won the 1999 contest in October, winning "ice cream" (by coming the closest in agreement with professional judges as to sensory quality), finishing second in "cheddar" and "yogurt," third in "cottage cheese" and "milk," and fifth in "butter."

On the heels of the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in September due to engineers' failure to standardize readings between metric and the English system, a U.S. government report in December revealed that a 1998 test of mock nuclear warheads failed because a contractor had accidentally installed dead batteries in them and was not able to detect the error. Nonetheless, at a speech in February in Albuquerque, the manager of the Cassini interplanetary cruiser now heading for Saturn dismissed his program's apprehensive critics, even though his spacecraft blasted off with 72 pounds of plutonium in 1997 and approached Earth again in August 1999.

-- Two undercover policewomen running a prostitution sting in Dothan, Ala., in October declined to arrest a pickup-truck-driving john, around age 70, despite his three attempts to procure their services. He first offered to give the women the three squirrels he had just shot, but they ignored him (too much trouble to store the evidence). A few minutes later, he added to the offer the used refrigerator in his truck, but the officers again declined (same reason). On the third trip, he finally offered cash: $6, but without the squirrels and refrigerator. The officers again declined but said they resolved to arrest him if he returned, but he did not.

-- Texas Bomb Squad Follies: In November, a patrol officer in San Antonio confiscated two live bombs and nonchalantly took them across town in his squad car to the drug property room, having mistakenly identified them as elaborate marijuana bongs. Two weeks later, police in Cedar Park (near Austin), responding to a check-cashing store's report of a "pipe bomb," sent only an animal control officer to the scene because the 911 operator had instead understood "python."

-- Joshua Marete Mutuma, 32, was arrested in Modesto, Calif., in November on suspicion of impersonating his wife. Mutuma's wife had a restraining order against him, and Mutuma arrived at the courthouse dressed as a woman with a long black wig and 5 o'clock shadow, attempting to have the order dismissed, and responding to the clerk's questions in falsetto.

-- Little Rock, Ark., police officer Carlton Dickerson's 57-day suspension for sleeping on the job was upheld by a city commission in October despite his claim of the disability of sleep apnea. In his four years on the force, he has been caught asleep six times and has wrecked five patrol cars. (Dickerson once denied to internal affairs investigators that he was asleep even after two fellow officers said they needed to rap on his desk for 15 minutes to wake him.)

-- Campaign to Help Police Recruiting: In August a judge in Halifax, Nova Scotia, ruled that undercover police could legally touch prostitutes' private parts if it were necessary to effect the crime. And in November, the Arizona Republic newspaper revealed that police guidelines in Mesa, Ariz. (contrary to virtually all departments' guidelines in the United States), permit undercover officers to receive massages while nude if in the course of a prostitute sting operation.

-- In its November findings after a yearlong study of correctional institutions around the world, Canadian prison officials recommended that nearly all of its facilities be made to resemble its most lenient, including eventually removing razor wire, bulletproof glass and guards' guns, and giving all but a handful of the most heinous inmates control over the keys to their cells so as to establish "a culture of respect."

-- In a long-classified report on the World War II era, released in October, Britain's Special Operations Executive office warned that spies should know themselves better psychosexually in order not to compromise their missions. For example, careless destruction of code materials shows a castration complex; getting captured reveals masochistic tendencies; parachuting is a sexual stimulant; failure to bury the discarded parachute shows exhibitionistic tendencies; and fear of parachuting responds to "the unconscious reproduction of the trauma of birth."

In January, Bobby G. Olson, 34, pled guilty to vehicular homicide for an incident in rural Breckenridge, Minn., in 1998. Olson and another man were arguing in a bar over who had the more powerful pickup truck, and the two left to settle things by chaining their trucks together and having a tug of war. Olson won by default when the other man's truck slid into a ditch, rolled, and, when the man was ejected, came down on top of him.

News of the Weird reported in 1997 on how Palm Springs, Calif., airport authorities felt the need to issue hygiene regulations for taxi drivers serving arriving passengers, including requiring regular toothbrushing and daily showers with soap. In January 2000, the chief executive of Dublin (Ireland) Tourism told the city's taxi drivers to bathe daily and change clothes regularly in order to quell recent tourist complaints, although many drivers maintained the odors in their cabs came from previous passengers.

A 58-year-old man was killed when his small construction truck accidentally fell into a 25-foot-deep hog-manure lagoon near Laverne, Okla., in December (though divers could not find the body in the muck for 18 days). The same fate befell a 23-year-old man in December when his out-of-control pickup truck smashed through a fence in Orono, Maine, and landed in a 400,000-gallon tank of raw sewage. And a 57-year-old man accidentally asphyxiated in Duluth, Minn., in December; his body was found stuck head-first in a sump drain in his basement.

After two white police officers shot a black colleague, Providence (R.I.) mayor Vincent Cianci called on the city's poet laureate to help the community heal. An imprisoned Minnesota arsonist legally changed his name (at taxpayer expense) to G.Q. Fires. Courthouse employees in Rome, Italy, found papers on 700,000 open criminal cases accidentally stored in a basement since 1989. Spain dropped the minimum-IQ requirement for its military from 90 to 70. A federal tax official in Moscow, Russia, announced that confiscated vodka would henceforth be turned over to a government contractor to reprocess into antifreeze.

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