-- Police called to a Giant supermarket in Yardley, Pa., in January arrested Samuel Feldman, 37, and charged him with one count of criminal mischief but suspected he is the person responsible for a three-year spree of squeezing, smashing and poking packages of bread and cookies in various area supermarkets, ruining more than $8,000 worth of goods. After the squeezer had struck more than 100 times in the area, Giant installed a hidden camera and, according to police, when Feldman was seen squeezing bread on the third separate occasion, he was arrested.

In December, Graham Gund started a third version of his new multimillion-dollar house in Cambridge, Mass., tearing out the foundation for the second time after deciding that he really wanted the house to look like the first version, which he had bulldozed down eight months earlier after it was nearly completed. And in January, a Newfoundland company announced it was taking reservations, at $35,000 (U.S.) a seat, for a 12-hour sightseeing tour in three-person submarines, 2 1/2 miles down to the sunken Titanic.

-- Among the February reform recommendations submitted to the Home Office by the British gay rights organization OutRage (in its effort to end different treatment of heterosexuals and homosexuals) was a proposal urging that the government legalize sex in public restroom cubicles.

-- In March, the New Haven Register reported on Tufts University student Carl Sciortino Jr.'s recent campaign to persuade the school to allow gays and lesbians to have roommates of the opposite sex. According to Sciortino, forcing same-sex roommates on gays could lead them to develop romantic feelings toward their roommates, which would interfere with their schoolwork. Some local gay and lesbian leaders do not support Sciortino, fearing that his argument undermines the cause of gays' serving openly in the military.

-- According to a December Orange County Register story, Mark W. Dziga of Long Beach, Calif., had just filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against his former company, Boeing, for firing him because he chose to work in the nude at the office on Thanksgiving Day 1998 when he thought he was alone. A security guard turned him in for violating the company's dress code, and Dziga charged that his subsequent termination was illegal in that Boeing should have provided "reasonable accommodation" to his religion of shamanism.

-- The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in October that workers have the right to express themselves on public issues but that Sikorsky Aircraft was justified in firing employee Gonzalo Cotto, who had objected to Sikorsky's pro-Gulf War stance by stomping on a workplace U.S. flag and blowing his nose on it. And Liz Anderson filed a federal discrimination complaint against employer USF Logistics in Indianapolis in November after the company ordered her to stop telling co-workers to "have a blessed day."

-- Jealousy With a Flair: In December, the wife of a Cambodian undersecretary of state was accused of dumping five liters of acid on top of the 18-year-old girlfriend of her husband. And in October, a 43-year-old woman in Lake Ronkonkoma, N.Y., was charged with assault for allegedly taking a samurai sword and slashing off two fingertips of a woman she found in bed with her husband.

-- Latest Rages: Elevator-Etiquette Rage: Engineering student knocked a lecturer unconscious after she objected to his pushing elevator buttons with his feet (Sriracha, Thailand, January). Cigarette-Ash Rage: 100 people were arrested for stoning police during a religious protest started when one man's ash accidentally landed on another man (Raver, India, November). Anglophobe Rage: One Quebec man was fined about $700 (U.S.) for punching another because he addressed a postal clerk in English rather than French (Hull, Quebec, March).

-- In December, a 36-year-old, 280-pound man in Pontiac, Mich., originally questioned by police because his stereo was too loud but then arrested on an outstanding DUI warrant, snapped his handcuffs off, creating a jagged edge, which he used to cut a hole in his stomach so he could pull his organs out to throw at rescue workers. "Reaching in and then tugging on stuff, and I mean tugging," is how Sheriff's Sgt. Matt Norman described the man's attempts.

In February, prominent French chef Jean Bardet had his restaurant in the city of Tours eliminated from the prominent Michelin Guide 2000 based on charges that his superior regional vintages were just cheap supermarket wine and that he had vastly inflated the uniqueness of his sea bass, veal, cheese and asparagus. Also in February, Quebec inspectors shut down the Comme Chez Soi restaurant in Granby temporarily after it was caught re-serving customers' discarded tartar sauce, coleslaw, bread and fondue, and not just from its own restaurant but from take-out food left behind in a motel owned by the restaurateur.

British artist Tracey Emin, 37, first made News of the Weird in 1996 with a show in Minneapolis featuring a tent with the embroidered names of "Everybody I've Ever Slept With," which included not only lovers but relatives and pajama-party bedmates she had as a child. In December 1999, she nearly won the prestigious British Turner Prize with "My Bed," which was an actual unmade bed, stained with urine and littered with panties, condoms, pillboxes and empty vodka bottles, supposedly set during a suicidal period. (One fussy observer at London's Tate Gallery, apparently believing that a vandal had struck, tried to make the bed and tidy up.)

A 13-year-old boy was sentenced to 25 years in prison in December for killing his parents in retaliation for their not letting him go on a church field trip (Canton, Texas). And a 23-year-old man obsessed with the film "The Blair Witch Project" pled guilty in January to strangling his girlfriend because she insisted the movie was fiction (Grand Haven, Mich.).

A town council in Oslo, Norway, OK'd Muslim loudspeakered prayers on Fridays provided atheists had a separate chance to shout "God does not exist." Protesting women formed "Menstrual Avengers" to challenge a tax that covers feminine hygiene products but not condoms, sunscreen or incontinence pads (Sydney, Australia). A police officer who hurt himself punching a wall while arguing with his boss was ruled eligible for worker compensation (Hayward, Calif.). A baby was born with a bullet wound on her bottom hours after her mother was shot in the abdomen during a carjacking (Johannesburg, South Africa). A British woman with 6 pounds of heroin strapped to her chest was arrested at an airport after her body piercing (in an unidentified but "intimate" location) tripped a metal detector (Istanbul, Turkey).

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

-- 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/.)