-- The chief justice of oil-rich Brunei ruled in March that Prince Jefri, the 46-year-old brother of the Sultan of Brunei, was entitled to an allowance of about $300,000 a month while awaiting trial on the Sultan's lawsuit that Jefri misspent $15 billion while in charge of the country's investments. A preliminary audit showed that playboy Jefri had bought himself $2.7 billion worth of toys in 10 years, including 17 airplanes, 2,000 cars, and a huge yacht that he named "Tits," and whose two dinghies he named "Nipple 1" and "Nipple 2."

Two years ago, in a bogus Internet news story, a South African hospital with a high fatality rate had discovered that a cleaning lady had been plugging her floor polisher in each night by briefly unplugging an appliance that was, unknown to her, a life-support machine. In November 1999, Chicago's TV Channel 7 lost sound for 25 minutes on the final night of the crucial ratings "sweeps" week when cleaning-service personnel plugged a floor buffer into the station's master control outlet, overpowering an audio circuit and driving away 40 percent of the prime-time audience.

-- After Ivory Coast's soccer team was eliminated from the African Nations Cup in January, the country's military ruler, Gen. Robert Guei, had the team arrested and put in a military prison for two days. Addressing the players, Guei said, "I asked that you be taken there so you reflect awhile. Next time (if you play badly) you will stay there for military service ... until a sense of civic pride gets into your heads."

-- In January, a Philadelphia city-funded community organization published a pamphlet on health and safety tips for prostitutes, which recommended always getting on top, negotiating price before getting into a car, and getting the money in advance. Also in January, a member of the Canadian Parliament released a list of recent pamphlets directly funded by the government, including "How to Communicate With the Dead," "How to Stimulate the G-spot," and "How to Understand and Enjoy an Orgasm."

-- Despite many anti-smoking programs sponsored by the U.S. government, a Senate subcommittee found last year that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had spent $4.2 million since 1996 to help American Indians build discount cigarette stores as part of the federal community block-grant program. (In April 2000, legislation was introduced in the Senate to end the practice.)

-- In January, a New York state administrative law judge ruled after four hearings in three years that Krystyna Maliszewska, 51, of Brooklyn was not eligible for worker compensation because she had not provided the proper "medical evidence" that her leg had been amputated (even though voluminous hospital records were in her file). Maliszewska attended each hearing and could have shown her artificial leg and the stump that ends at her right knee but was never asked even to speak. (After a February New York Daily News story, the state quickly reopened the case.)

-- Wynema Faye Shumate, 65, was arrested in Ladson, S.C., in March on two charges of mishandling a dead body. The case came to light when a 27-year-old Englishman flew to America to marry Shumate after a hot Internet romance but discovered that Shumate was not the age-30ish woman she had portrayed online. According to police, when the man asked Shumate if she had other surprises, she told him about the carved-up body in the freezer, which was that of her male former housemate, who Shumate said had died the year before of natural causes. Shumate was cleared of causing the death, but, according to the Englishman, the wedding is off.

-- In a case unique among women who keep too many cats at home, a judge in Fairfax County, Va., told U.S. Navy program analyst Kristin Kierig in November that she could keep the 104 cats that share her Annandale, Va., townhouse because the house is apparently clean and the cats groomed and in good health. Kierig produced medical records on the cats, showed that she cleans the 101 litter boxes twice a day and keeps the 15 water bowls and 20 food bowls stocked, and said she can recognize each cat by name (but she did confess that her house might have an "odor").

-- In March, Benjamin Thomas Douglas, 34, was sentenced to 180 days in jail for the latest in what police call serial public masturbation incidents in the middle of department stores in Dallas and its suburbs of Plano and Mesquite. And the month before that, Philadelphia police were hunting a man in his early 20s for seven incidents of public masturbation at area fast-food outlets over a four-month period; in each case, according to the police reports, the man reached a climax quickly and then left without his order.

-- News of the Weird has regularly reported highway truck spills over the years, but a December spill in Providence, R.I., interwove another News of the Weird theme: the tacky, wayward public official. Rhode Island Department of Transportation maintenance supervisor Thomas E. Jackvony Jr. was charged with larceny because, according to police, when he was supervising the cleanup of grocery-store items from an 18-wheeler's spill, he also grabbed whatever items he could and put them into his car. Police recovered 15 packages of cookies, 15 home electronic scales and 20 cassette tapes.

-- More Divine Dentistry: A News of the Weird roundup in July 1999 listed several cities in which worshipers recently have claimed that, following prayer, gold teeth and fillings appeared in their mouths in place of the previous porcelain and silver. Later that year, similar divine outbreaks occurred, at a New Life Community Church revival in Weatherford, Texas, and with Pentecostals in Orangevale, Calif. As with the earlier instances, some of the faithful stuck to their claims even when their own dental records showed they had gold fillings all along.

A 57-year-old Halifax, England, man, distraught at his wife's death, decapitated himself with his homemade guillotine (December). A 30-year-old man attempting suicide in Rustenberg, South Africa, put a firecracker in his mouth and lit it; the explosion shook his house and mangled his face, but he survived (January). A 29-year-old man, driving to work at rush hour near Washington, D.C., and arguing with his fiancee on his cell phone, shot himself to death, with the resulting collision tying up traffic for hours (February).

A man in a wheelchair and wearing a beanie robbed a Wells Fargo Bank, instructing the tellers to fill the beanie with cash (Pleasant Hill, Calif.). A woman won $171,000 from a jury for slipping on a piece of broccoli in a Grand Union supermarket (Bennington, Vt.). A Washington, D.C., police officer was found guilty of sexual assault, becoming the 16th officer on the force in 15 months to be convicted of a crime. The Ohio liquor control agency banned as offensive the Belgian ale Manneken Pis because its label features a boy urinating. At least two viewers smashed their TV picture tubes trying to kill the high-definition cockroach crawling across the screen as part of a recent Orkin commercial.

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

-- 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/.)