-- At press time for this issue of News of the Weird, Broward County (Fla.) high school senior Adam (A.J.) Walker is still on the list of possible admittees to the Air Force Academy in the fall, despite his 1998 no-contest plea to attempting to blow up his high school. Walker told the Sun-Sentinel newspaper that the academy solicited him because he is a standout athlete (golf) and that he applied "out of curiosity." His 1998 plea covered charges of attempted murder, armed burglary, placing a destructive device and conspiracy.

Brenda Anne Sorochan, 41, convicted after assaulting a 79-year-old woman, Edmonton, Alberta, January (explanation: Sorochan is a manic-depressive who forgot her medication). Swiss airline passenger Thomas Dolder, 39, released from a facility in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after assaulting a flight crew in October (explanation: psychotic who forgot his medication in his checked baggage). Former Detroit police officer Paul Harrington, 53, charged in October with killing his wife and children (explanation: severe depressive who ran out of medication). Brian Drepaul, 25, shot by police trying to break into his estranged wife's home, Brampton, Ontario, October (explanation: schizophrenic who refused his medication).

-- From the confessions of Pakistan's notorious serial killer Javed Iqbal, whom police were unable to catch but who surrendered in December after having murdered 100 young men: "I could have killed 500. This was not a problem. Money was not a problem. But the pledge I had taken (when I started the spree) was of 100 children, and I never wanted to violate this."

-- Under pressure from the National Labor Relations Board and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a Holiday Inn in downtown Minneapolis agreed in January to pay $8,000 each to nine undocumented immigrants from Mexico whom it had fired for helping with a union organizing drive. One EEOC official compared the men to civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks for fighting their dismissals, even though they were unlawfully holding the jobs from which they were fired.

-- In January, a Teamsters union local in Chicago, having picketed Donnellan Funeral Home for several months, decided to step up the protests during a funeral and began to yell chants as a woman's body was taken from Donnellan to a church, where shouts of "Who are we? We are Teamsters!" greeted family members' solemn arrivals. Next time, vowed a union official, picketers would proceed on to the graveside ceremony with their chanting.

-- Tampa, Fla., prosecutors, and defendants Steven and Marlene Aisenberg (charged with lying to police in connection with the disappearance of their baby Sabrina in 1997, and suspected by some of causing the disappearance), announced in January 2000 that they had different interpretations of a conversation on a police audio tape from the Aisenbergs' home shortly after Sabrina disappeared. The prosecutors' version of Steven's words: "I wish I hadn't harmed her" and "That's the cocaine." The Aisenbergs' version of the very same moments: "You know, I'm just saying, honey, because (garbled) feel this way (garbled) people," followed by Marlene asking, "Do you want some more salad, honey?"

-- In December, members of a science class at Elizabethton (Tenn.) High School created a Nativity scene out of dissected cadavers of cats as part of a homeroom decorating contest. After many protests, a school official told reporters that the teacher was "shocked" that anyone had interpreted the scene as anti-Nativity and said she thought most reactions to the display were positive.

-- At an anti-drug ceremony under the protection of Mexican army personnel at a dig on a hillside in Ciudad Juarez, in December, Mexican and U.S. officials, including FBI Director Louis Freeh, unearthed the remains of murdered victims at a drug trafficker's farm. According to a New York Times report of the ceremony, the Mexican government had also provided a dozen local women in black miniskirts, low-cut blouses and high heels, wearing "Hostess" nametags, to line the routes to the graves.

-- In November a jury in San Francisco acquitted Albertinah Mkhize, 71, of all charges in the June 1999 traffic death of a 10-month-old boy in a crosswalk during a right turn by Mkhize. A few hours before the collision, Mkhize had flunked her state driver's test for making an unsafe left turn. According to a police investigation, Mkhize's brakes were fine, but she convinced a jury that they were, unknown to her, defective.

Adam Brooks Jr., 17, admitted to a judge in Columbus, Ohio, in March that he was the one who broke into a woman's home, tied her up, and stole the car out of her garage. According to the victim, a 76-year-old woman, after Brooks tied her up, he came back in from the garage three times before finally leaving, twice to get her to teach him how to use the garage-door opener and once to tell him how to operate a car with automatic transmission.

In March, police at Bogota's El Dorado airport arrested a woman with about 4 pounds of cocaine sewn into her oversized, flesh-colored underwear; though the garments were designed to allay suspicion, they made her breasts and buttocks look large and unnaturally shaped. And a week earlier, Tirsa Ruiz, 43, attempted to smuggle a 7.65mm pistol in her rectum to a leftist-rebel inmate at Colombia's La Picota prison; inside the prison, she was unable to expel the gun and was rushed to a hospital with severe cramps.

Hospitals in developing countries continue to have cash-flow problems, as reported in News of the Weird in 1996 (Zaire) and 1999 (Iran), where strong-arm tactics have been used on patients who cannot pay their bills. In January 2000, friends brought mugging victim Wilson Owuor to a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, but were turned away when Owuor was unable to make a deposit. The men commandeered a stretcher, put Owuor on it, and took him to his branch of the Kenya Commercial Bank to withdraw money so that he could be admitted to the hospital.

The Humane Society removed from the adoption list a parrot whose previous owner had taught him to cuss and make a noise like a human passing gas (Charlotte, N.C.). In a case of mistaken identity, a dentist removed two teeth of an 8-year-old boy who was merely waiting for his sister in the reception area (Auburn, Calif.). Five teen-agers were charged with assaulting another, including holding him down and pricking an elaborate tattoo into his arm (Waldorf, Md.). Four miners dynamited the entrance to their mine to protest sagging ore prices, thus entombing themselves 900 feet underground (Tocopilla, Chile). A coroner changed a cause of death from traffic accident to murder after finding a bullet in the deceased's skull, but later learned the woman had been shot in 1978 and just never bothered to have the bullet removed (Houston).

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

-- In February, Union City, N.J., prosecutors began looking into the dental practice of Kevin P. Ward, 42, after a 5-year-old boy emerged from a routine office visit with a broken leg. The boy told his mother that Dr. Ward had reacted after the boy kicked him because of pain. Also, in January, Dr. Ward was sued by the parents of an 8-year-old girl who suffered a broken wrist while having a tooth pulled in 1996.

Ernesto Alvear, 74, told reporters in Valparaiso, Chile, in December he would never again try to vote after being ruled ineligible for the third time in 10 years because records indicated he was dead. And Islam Karimov was re-elected president of Uzbekistan in January; opponent Abdulkhafiz Dzhalalov got 4 percent, not including Dzhalalov himself, who voted for Karimov. And Mary Fung Koehler, 65, lost for mayor of Lake Forest Park, Wash., in November, despite a divination of victory from reading her pendulum. (Koehler admitted to short-term memory loss from an auto accident, but said, "You can't tell because my I.Q. is so much higher than the average person's.")

-- According to international police statistics, South Africa has the world's highest incidence of reported rape, and in draft legislation circulated in January, the South African Law Commission proposed to criminalize "any act which causes (any) penetration to any extent whatsoever." According to a researcher, that would cover "simulat(ing) sexual penetration by putting your finger in a guy's nose," which "some people have told us (is) a serious problem."

-- Malone College of Canton, Ohio, announced in October that it would offer an eight-week exercise-and-fitness class entirely online. Instructor Charles Grimes said he was confident that he could detect whether students were really doing the exercises (through online chats and by requiring students to keep journals).

-- In December in Eugene, Ore., Eric E. Wray, 35, was sentenced to 24 years in prison after being convicted of assaulting the teen-age boy who had been living with him. According to the prosecutor, Wray had sexually abused the boy for years and had grown jealous that he had acquired friends, including girls, and one day came after the boy with a pistol. Said Wray at sentencing (ignoring the abuse and focusing only on the incident with the pistol), "(The boy) makes it seem like I am a criminal. It was one day in my entire life."

-- Kind-hearted Lee Ming-chi, 31, was sentenced to five years in prison in Hong Kong in December for two taxicab robberies totaling about $220 (U.S.). Lee had taken pity on one victim and given him back about $12 of the loot, but wary of leaving fingerprints, he removed the money from the stash with his teeth and dropped it in the cabbie's hand. However, police matched the DNA from the saliva on the money with DNA from Lee's blood.

-- East Penn Township (Pa.) police officer Shawn Phillips was charged in December with conspiracy to commit assault after a Little League pitcher said that Phillips (the well-known "Officer Phil") had paid him $2 to hit a batter with a pitch in a game in May 1999. The pitcher complied and was paid, but so far, Phillips has been silent about a motive.

-- In Boston, chemical engineer Glenn Elion was sentenced to nearly four years in prison in February on a federal charge that he defrauded investors of $3.8 million by claiming to have duplicated the potentially incredibly lucrative genetic code of spider silk. According to the prosecutor, Elion needed the money because he himself had just been ripped off for at least $700,000 in a familiar Nigerian scam in which a man claims he found millions in U.S. currency that has been ruined by indelible ink applied by the Nigerian government, but that he knows an expensive process to remove the ink and will split the proceeds with whoever funds the cleaning.

-- Love Schemes: Police in New Albany, Ind., said that Charles E. Adams, 28, convinced buddy Clifton "Scooter" Foster in January to stab him, so that Adams could see if his ex-girlfriend would visit him in the hospital. (Adams survived.) And Frederick Alex Hunchak, 35, pled guilty in Wynyard, Saskatchewan, in January to puncturing the tires of three cars driven by women; he said he wanted to "rescue" them, hoping to find true love. And an Arizona State student let football player J.R. Redmond use her cell phone, then convinced him that that was an NCAA rules violation unless they got married. (They did, but annulment was scheduled for March.)

In February, a Mohave County, Ariz., judge sentenced Deborah Lynn Quinn, 39, to a year in prison for violating probation on a marijuana-sales charge; Quinn has no arms, no right leg, a partial left leg, and is almost totally dependent on others for care. Also in February, a federal judge in Atlanta sentenced quadriplegic Louis E. Covar Jr., 51, to seven years in prison for violating the probation he had received on a charge of possessing marijuana. (It is estimated to cost about five times as much to house them as to house able-bodied prisoners.)

More Evidence that Cigarettes Are Bad for You: In Cleveland, Charlene Smiley, 44, was charged in February with fatally stabbing a 40-year-old woman in a dispute over smoking in Smiley's boyfriend's house. And Michael Raines, 20, was charged with fatally shooting a 41-year-old man in Benton, Tenn., in October because the man would not return the cigarette lighter Raines had loaned him.

February Negative-Cash-Flow Robberies: In Albuquerque, an unidentified man asked for change of a $10 bill to get the Keva Juice shop clerk to open the register, then announced a robbery; the clerk locked the register instead, and the man fled, leaving his $10 behind. The same thing happened at Larry's Quick Stop, Spokane, Wash., but the robber was not as dumb, asking only for change of a quarter, which he also left behind when the clerk told a phone caller he was being robbed.

A new law requires Mongolia's many one-name people to adopt surnames to differentiate themselves, but more than half have chosen Borjigon, Genghis Khan's family name. A British Airways plane that made an emergency landing in Manchester because of smoke was carrying four women in the final act of a six-week course to overcome fear of flying. Charges were filed against a Norwalk, Conn., woman for giving her kids, ages 5 and 7, a hammer and a screwdriver in their school bags for use on bullies. A group of sexually frustrated women stormed a police station, demanding either that the taverns their husbands hang out in be shut down or that the cops themselves service the women (Kandara, Kenya). The Swaziland parliament's speaker of the house resigned under pressure, two months after he was caught stealing manure from ruling King Mswati III.

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

-- Mixed News for Women: Twenty wives petitioned for divorce in Cairo, Egypt, on March 1, the inaugural day in which wives were eligible to file without elaborate proof of abuse. (They must still wait three to six months for a ruling, whereas a husband who files gets his divorce instantly and with no reason required.) And in February, South Korea's national police announced it would begin placing unarmed female troops on the front lines in potentially violent street demonstrations, hoping to calm protesters. One rowdy labor union leader, acknowledging the wisdom of the decision, admitted, "How can we attack females?"

By government estimates, 6,500 religious cults operate in Japan, according to a December Boston Globe story. Included are the $600 million organization Honohana, whose leader was accused by the government in January of defrauding disciples of up to $100,000 to alter their negative fates as revealed by his examinations of their feet, and Life Space, whose founder died in August but whose body was discovered by police in a Tokyo airport hotel room four months later, being ministered to by followers as if he were still alive (and in fact, the followers insisted to the media that the dried mummy was responding nicely to their care and had recently enjoyed some tea).

-- According to a January Boston Globe report, 3 million residential customers still lease AT&T telephones (from Lucent Technologies) at rates of $53 to $252 a year, virtually all of whom have been doing so continuously since the breakup of AT&T in 1984. Most of the customers are elderly, and when a Globe reporter asked whether they were being exploited, the Lucent spokesperson said, "As long as there is demand for the service, we will continue to provide it."

-- Craig J. Ziegler, 35, was sentenced to five years' probation in Pittsburgh in November for impersonating a law-enforcement officer and then forcing a woman (a self-described former prostitute) to perform a sexual act. The victim was outraged that Ziegler got no jail time for the assault and pointed out to reporters that the last time she was in court for prostitution, she went to jail for seven months.

-- Zhang Guoqiang, 27, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in February for swindling 50 people out of about $100,000, promising U.S. visas to people in the northern port city of Tianjin by showing them a photo of him with his bud Bill Clinton. An Associated Press reporter in Beijing said the photo shows Clinton in a green casual shirt with Zhang in a business suit pasted in next to him as if they posed together, with the two men's images "clearly out of proportion" to each other.

-- Terry Johnson, 36, received a fine and driver's license suspension in a Nova Scotia court in December over his refusal to take a Breathalyzer test at a DUI stop in 1999. Johnson's excuse was that he was belching too much at the time, as much as several times a minute for nearly two hours after being stopped, and that belches throw off the machine's readings. The police officer listed each burp, with the time, but finally just gave up and wrote the ticket. (In 1986, Johnson beat a similar charge by belching repeatedly.)

-- In December in Alberta, John Ebeling, 40, lost control of his pickup truck, crashed into a speeding freight train (onto which the truck hooked and was dragged along the tracks), freed himself from the truck onto the side of the train, held on for about 12 miles until he managed to uncouple the car he was on (causing the train to brake and his rail car to smash into it), and rode the out-of-control car into a ditch. Thirteen cars were derailed, and power lines were downed, but Ebeling walked away with only minor bruises.

-- Nathan King, 12, is recuperating in Helena, Mont., after early-March open-heart surgery to remove a pencil that he had fallen on lunging for a football. All told, before surgery began, King spent more than two hours with the pencil embedded in his heart, and if anyone had removed it, he would have died almost instantly. (King's welcome-home present from neighbors: a sweatshirt reading "Tougher Than Dracula.")

-- According to a December Agence France-Presse report from Budapest, Hungarian physicians are increasingly relying on tips from patients to supplement their falling wages in the country's free health-care system. The practice is so common that the phrase "one final checkup" is widely used to indicate a brief visit to the examination room for the discreet money exchange.

-- In February Bloomberg News reported that the $23 million Internet company NetJ.com, which went public in November, had seen its share price double in recent weeks, to nearly $4, despite the fact that the company plainly disclosed in Securities and Exchange Commission documents that it not only had no profits but no revenues, and in fact that it did no business of any kind. The company told the SEC that it might begin doing business soon, but maybe not, but if it did, it had no specific idea about what kind of work it would do.

In 1998, News of the Weird touted the increasing popularity of therapeutic self-trepanation (drilling a hole in one's head to improve blood flow around the brain) for stress relief. In February 2000, after unsuccessfully soliciting doctors to drill in her native England, Heather Perry, 29 and suffering from what she believed was a physiologically induced exhaustion, flew to Philadelphia to seek guidance from prominent trepanist Peter Halvorson. After boning up on the technique, Perry performed the 20-minute procedure that was witnessed by a camera crew from ABC News. Said Perry afterward, "(T)here's definitely more mental clarity. I feel wonderful."

In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in October, a policeman shot a tipsy motorist to death at a traffic stop to prevent him from exposing himself to the officer, which according to local culture is a grave insult. And a 30-year-old repo man and a 19-year-old man behind in car payments killed each other in a gun battle in Miami, Fla., in February; the car that cost the two lives was a 1987 Chevrolet Caprice.

A 62-year-old woman thought a stranger punched her in the neck, but it was a stabbing, and the 4-inch knife remained in her neck for 40 minutes while she grocery-shopped before a passerby pointed it out to her (Darby Township, Pa.). A Maryland state senator introduced a bill to make it illegal for one woman to breastfeed another's baby. Las Vegas police burst into an apartment and arrested a Florida murder suspect while he was watching "America's Most Wanted" on TV, believing that his crime would be featured that night. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals targeted an anti-milk campaign to college students, urging them to drink beer instead. At a routine traffic stop, police found 22 pounds of cocaine hidden in a car's center console, with a lock controlled by a magnet inside a passenger's bra (Enon, Ohio).

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