-- In April, doctors at Washington, D.C.'s St. Elizabeths Hospital said Tomar Cooper Locker, 25, was no longer mentally ill and should be unconditionally released. Just two months earlier, Locker had been found not guilty by reason of insanity (post-traumatic stress) in the murder of boxer Reuben Bell, whom Locker had fatally shot because he thought Bell had killed Locker's girlfriend. Though Locker thus escaped penalty for murder and the wounding of five bystanders, he was sentenced to 20 to 60 months for gun-possession (but since he was jailed pre-trial for 26 months, a judge at press time was considering whether to release Locker immediately).

-- The hottest-selling item this spring for turkey hunters has been Delta Industries' male decoy that fits on top of its traditional hen decoy to give gobblers the illusion that a stranger is having his way with one of the gobbler's harem. According to a hunters' store manager in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (reported in the Cedar Rapids Gazette), the appeal to territorial jealousy is especially effective with older gobblers too wise to fall for hunters' simple mating-call lures.

Among this year's political candidates: For governor of West Virginia: Joseph Oliverio, who admitted in February that he's had 60 speeding tickets and been arrested 150 times. For Anderson County, Tenn., property assessor: Bobby E. Jones, who served time for 37 counts of making false statements to the federal government. For a seat in the Missouri General Assembly: Richard Tolbert, who recently filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy for the seventh time in three years. For Scottsdale, Ariz., City Council: Gary Tredway, on the lam for 30 years after a conviction for throwing a firecracker at firefighters during a student antiwar demonstration.

-- Dutch researchers, writing in a December issue of British Medical Journal, reported their findings on observing couples engaged in sexual intercourse while inside MRI machines (modified so the couple would fit inside), for example, that during missionary-position sex, the penis is not straight but actually takes the shape of a boomerang.

-- Recent Language/Brain Scramblings: Wendy Hasnip, 47, told BBC Television in December that a minor stroke had given her the rare Foreign Accent Syndrome (in her case, a French accent, though she knows no words in French). Also in December, the Moscow (Russia) Times featured Willi Melnikov, 37, brain-injured by a landmine in the Soviet-Afghanistan war, who emerged from the hospital with an activated (previously dormant) facility for languages and has since become fluent in dozens and conversant in 93.

-- Researchers from Boston University and Cornell, writing in a December journal article, said they have identified the behavior that the male bat uses to elicit mates for procreation (the equivalent, said a Science News writer, of a man's slapping on aftershave). At about the same time every afternoon for a half-hour, male bats transfer urine to sacs in their wings by alternately licking the penis and the sac. Later, the bat hovers in front of females and flutters his wings to spread what one researcher called the "very sweet and spicy" scent.

-- China's Xinhua News Agency reported in March that the 13-pound cyst removed from a 28-year-old farmer in the northern province of Shaanxi actually contained the ossified fetus of his identical twin brother. Physicians at Hanzhong Medical School and Xi'an University of Medical Science said the fetus had grown for a while after the farmer's birth, then stopped, with the result that it had hair, skin, and teeth similar to an adult's but other features that resembled a fetus'.

-- In March, Christie's Auction House of New York City unloaded all of the 60 paintings created by artists that happen also to be elephants, including Sao (a former log-hauler in Thailand's timber industry), whose work was likened by Yale art historian Mia Fineman to work of Paul Gauguin for its "broad, gentle, curvy brush strokes" and "a depth and maturity." Fineman said she is writing a book on the three distinct regional styles of Thai elephant art.

-- Garbage artist Tom Deininger's one-person show opened at the Newport (R.I.) Art Museum in January, consisting of his sculptures made of discarded trash, including packaging, toys, clothes and computer parts. Deininger says fans feed him tips on particularly cool Dumpsters to raid and told the Providence Journal that he was working on a self-portrait made of cardboard boxes, with cheeks made of wads of Pokemon wrappers, teeth of Styrofoam, and a toy soldier forming a nostril.

-- According to an April San Francisco Chronicle feature, a painting by local artist Catherine Anderson had been accepted for hanging, then rejected, by the fancy Lodge at Sonoma resort set to open later this year. Anderson specializes in paintings of cows, but the Lodge declined her first piece because the cows in the field included too many posteriors, and also declined a substitute because one cow was in what a Lodge representative allegedly said was a "provocative position."

Madera, Calif., magazine publisher Kathy Masera, to a journalist investigating reports in May that Masera's office building's ventilation system was hosting several types of noxious molds, striking 26 of her 30 employees ill: "There isn't anything more frightening than sitting in a meeting and three people suddenly have blood running from their noses."

A year ago, News of the Weird reported on Reading (England) University professor Kevin Warwick's forearm implant of a transponder to allow his whereabouts to be monitored remotely. Warwick's next implant, according to an April 2000 Cox News Service report, will give him the same "sonar" system that bats and porpoises use for navigation by sending signals from the air to a microchip, which will be "tapped into" a nerve bundle that runs from Warwick's arm to his brain. Warwick believes he can train himself to detect what's in front of him even if his eyes are closed.

Edward Hall, 50, was arrested in March and charged with thefts of trailers from a Home Depot in Albuquerque. According to police, Hall took a trailer from the store's lot early in the morning, hitched it to his truck, and drove it a few miles until it came loose and crashed. He returned to the store, hitched up another, and drove it on the same route, but it, too, came loose and crashed at the site of the first crash. He returned, hitched up a third trailer, and drove it on the same route. A police officer had stopped at the previous crash site to investigate, and as Hall drove by, he accidentally bumped the squad car, provoking the officer to chase Hall down, after which he discovered the thefts.

A lawsuit by a brother and sister, both schoolteachers, to defy the government and keep their mother's corpse permanently at home, in a glass-topped freezer, was rejected (Bordeaux, France). A 52-year-old nightclub stripper filed an employment discrimination complaint over her recent firing (Brantford, Ontario). Japanese toymaker Bandai Corp., to help grow the market for its products, announced it would pay employees to have children, at $10,000 per child after their second. A theater-goer filed a lawsuit against the comic actor Dame Edna after one of the gladioli she throws to the audience at the end of her show poked him in the eye (Melbourne, Australia). A NATO elite training force of 116 Italian infantrymen landed at Kristianstad, Sweden (not a NATO country), instead of the assigned Kristiansand, Norway.

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

-- Dutch researchers writing in an April British Medical Journal advocated that Viagra be dispensed for free in the Netherlands because, even though costly, Viagra enhances the quality of its users' lives even more, for example, than kidney transplants. In fact, according to the researchers' Quality-Adjusted Life Year measure, a dollar spent on Viagra brings twice as much benefit as a dollar spent on breast cancer screening.

(1) A live, 14-foot-long python (prayed to by residents of Kien Svay, Cambodia, according to a January Deutsche Presse-Agentur story); (2) jazz saxophonist John Coltrane (for 29 years the idol of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco, according to a February report in The Independent of London); and (3) dirt, either plain (worshipped by parishioners in Chimayo, N.M., according to a December USA Today report) or perfumed (the result of a New Delhi, India, company's cosmetic dumping, which has attracted huge crowds of pilgrims, according to a December Associated Press story).

-- In January, Boston police officials investigating corruption in taxi-driver licensing, released the test paper of applicant Pierre Edouard, who was granted a passing grade and a license even though he answered only seven of 60 questions correctly and in fact left 45 questions blank.

-- In February, Canada's Reform Party denounced $60 million (all figures U.S.) worth of art grants given by Canada Council, including $3,000 for a piece on the history and culture of chewing gum; $4,000 for a video on the rubber stamp "as a low-tech marking device"; and $900 to an aboriginal poet to write a pamphlet on one of his race's anatomical traits, entitled "Where Did My Ass Go?"

-- In December, three lawyers working cases as court-appointed counsel for indigent defendants in the District of Columbia Superior Court filed a federal lawsuit against the court for constantly missing deadlines for paying them, sometimes even by months. By federal court rules, the Superior Court was obligated to answer the lawsuit within 20 days but, true to form, according to the lawyers, the Superior Court missed that deadline, also, and the lawyers were declared winners by default.

-- In March, a judge in Dedham, Mass., sentenced Thomas Flanagan, 47, to nine years in prison for the longtime physical abuse of his wife and three kids. Included were three counts of attempted murder and 39 counts of assault and battery, but the kids also told investigators that Flanagan made them endure the daily ritual of "plucking," in which he lined them up and yanked out their nose hair with tweezers.

-- In January, suspected serial killer Hadden Clark, 47, led police officers from several New England states to sites around the region in search of bodies of his alleged victims. Massachusetts State Police obtained Clark's cooperation by acceding to his one request, which was that they go buy him some women's panties to wear during the trip.

-- Jason Samuel Lee, 30, was charged in March with improperly disposing of his wife's corpse. Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canmore, Alberta, said Eda Lee, 26, starved to death while fasting with her husband on a remote mountain. Jason, according to the RCMP, is a prophet who believes that food is an "instrument of Satan" and was trying to form a cult but was having difficulty attracting followers.

-- In Milton, N.Y., in March, Thomas Prussen, 42, was charged with endangering the life of a 38-year-old woman he had met through a magazine ad. According to police, the woman was infatuated with a certain Civil War soldier, wanted to "join" him, and so much trusted Prussen (because he, too, claimed to have communed with the soldier) that she asked him to kill her. Admitted a police investigator, of the possibility that Prussen was simply in love with the woman, "It's tough to say what their mindset was."

Minivan passenger Rick Hanson, 27, mooning motorists, was thrown from the vehicle when the driver crashed (giving Hanson a posterior "road rash" and a broken pelvis) (Prunedale, Calif., April). Chris Bailey, 19, was jailed briefly after mooning a police officer, and within an hour of his release had mooned several more and was back in jail (Belleville, Ill., March). Robert White, 49, angry that his trial for disorderly conduct was not going well, mooned the judge, running his total jail time to 40 days (Little Rock, Ark., March).

In 1994, News of the Weird reported the trend of judges ignoring DNA results when they are used to disprove fatherhood among men who have mistakenly accepted legal paternity. Courts put the interests of the child first and thus order support payments to continue unless the actual father steps up. In April 2000, Dennis Caron, 43, went to jail for 30 days in Columbus, Ohio, protesting a court order to continue supporting his 10-year-old "son" despite exonerating DNA evidence, and the same month in St. Louis, Bill Neal lost his lawsuit to extricate himself via DNA evidence from supporting a boy that his girlfriend had convinced him in 1989 was his.

An 11,000-volt cable broke during a Hindu ceremony in Daltenganj, India, in April, electrocuting 28 followers. And police in Baghdad, Iraq, arrested four vigilantes in January and charged them with killing at least 19 men recently who religiously incorrectly were alone with their girlfriends in a downtown lovers' lane. And following deadly meningitis outbreaks in four countries introduced by worshippers returning from the Haj pilgrimage in Mecca in Saudi Arabia, French officials announced in April that traces of cholera were found in 10 barrels of holy water brought back to the Alsace region by the Moslem pilgrims.

An eighth-grade teacher apologized for assigning his kids the math problem of calculating how much gas Nazis needed to fill a gas chamber (Boise, Idaho). A save-the-whales activist had to call off a trans-Pacific protest sail after his 60-foot boat was damaged by two passing whales (San Francisco). National Archives researchers seeking to reclassify 50-year-old nuclear-weapons documents discovered actual uranium dust in some files (College Park, Md.). A 16-year-old boy under house arrest allegedly broke into a neighbor's place and beat two girls, one fatally, but authorities did not know about it because the neighbor's house was inside the 150-foot range of his ankle monitor (Anderson, Ind.). An Army supply clerk mistakenly got an order to parachute jump and obediently reported and bailed out, anyway, without training (Fort Bragg, N.C.).

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

-- Ignatius Piazza, 40, has completed $3 million worth of infrastructure toward his planned gated community 50 miles from Las Vegas in which every resident will be trained in firearms use, creating what he calls "the safest town in America." According to an April USA Today story, the town of Front Sight will have (by fall 2002) 12 shooting ranges, a private school and a convenience store to service buyers of its 177 lots, which cost $275,000 each (but come with various perquisites, including an Uzi).

Short schoolboys are twice as likely as tall schoolboys to get bullied (British Medical Journal, March); female inmates in solitary confinement are lonely (University of Alberta researcher, January); many women who work outside the home feel stressed (AFL-CIO poll, March); and drivers need to keep their minds (and not just their eyes) on the road (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, March).

-- In 1993 Patrick McDougall was convicted of sexually abusing several boys at a reformatory in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in the 1960s and 1970s, and after the trial, according to a January New York Times story, another 89 former residents claimed McDougall abused them, too, leading Nova Scotia to set aside about $17 million (U.S.) in compensation for victims. Publicity from that announcement and from McDougall's death last year has now produced 1,400 "victims" making about 14,500 abuse claims against nearly all of the 363 former employees, so that the claimants can avail themselves of payment scales ranging from about $2,400 for a beating to about $59,000 for sexual assault. The government is now rethinking the payment plan.

-- The lawsuit by the family of the late cold-blooded bank robber Emil Matasareanu is set for a September retrial after a hung jury in March on whether the city of North Hollywood, Calif., should pay because police officers might not have taken the mortally wounded Matasareanu to the hospital soon enough. The body-armor-wearing gunman and his partner provoked a televised, 44-minute, daytime firefight with police in 1997 in the bank's parking lot, firing more than 1,200 rounds from their automatic weapons, wounding 17; Matasareanu was hit 29 times and bled to death.

-- People Who Are Just So Upset: Ms. Cleanthi Peters, 57, filed a $15,000-plus lawsuit in Orlando, Fla., against Universal Studios for last year's Halloween Horror Nights exhibit; she said she expected it to be frightening but that it was too frightening. And Charles Settles filed a $2,000 lawsuit in Brunswick, Ohio, in January against his son's high school baseball coach, arguing that, because the team was so bad (winless on the season), it lost out on an all-expense-paid trip to a Florida tournament.

-- A 19-year-old woman, who was conceived by rape, filed a lawsuit in December seeking damages from school officials in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, claiming that since her biological father was a teacher there (and a notorious pedophile who is now in prison), school officials should have done more to prevent him from raping her mother, who was then a student. The woman complains that, since everyone in the community knew of the rape, she has so far led a very lonely and harassed life.

-- National Labor Relations Board lawyers argued at a March hearing that Tenneco Packaging plant (now named Pactiv), in order to disrupt union organizing in July 1999 at a plant in Beech Island, S.C., had activist-employee Gary McClain arrested and, with the help of friendly local law-enforcement, committed to a mental institution for two weeks under the pretense that it feared workplace violence. Tenneco officials said it was just a coincidence that the Aiken County sheriff chased McClain down on the road and arrested him the day after a big organizing meeting.

-- The Swedish Hotel Workers Federation protested in March that maids are at risk on the job because hotels feature hard-core pornography on television, leading some male guests to become "overexcited." Already, maids complain of having to clean off "sticky" television screens, and now demand to be furnished signal alarms in case they are attacked.

-- Ontario's Social Services Ministry, seeking to find savings in worker efficiency, announced in March that some employees would be fitted with electronic monitoring devices that would track their whereabouts nearly every minute of the workday for 16 weeks. A union official called the plan a gross invasion of privacy, especially since the obvious result of the project will be layoffs.

Canada's notorious Karla Homolka, 29, who was convicted in 1993 of helping her husband rape, torture, video and kill three teen-age girls including her own sister, wrote (in a note to her warden in November on why she should be sent to a halfway house and then paroled): "I (have) learned (in prison) to get rid of my mistrust, self-doubt, misplaced guilt and defense mechanisms. I am now completely in touch with my inner feelings. My self-esteem is quite high."

One of the widely reported stories of 1993 was the Vinton, La., crash of a car containing 20 naked Pentecostals from Floydada, Texas, who had received word from God that they should discard all their worldly possessions to make it more difficult for Satan to catch up to them. In April 2000, in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, a state trooper stopped a car containing three women and a 3-year-old girl, all of whom were naked and who told the officer that God had told them to burn their clothes, drive to Wal-Mart, and buy new clothes. Said the trooper, "It's always something. No two days are the same in this job."

More Easy Identifications: Johnny Lee Miller, 32, was arrested for bank robbery in January in West Valley City, Utah; he had left behind a large envelope (in which he had concealed his gun) that contained a personalized certificate from a prison-sponsored course in anger-management, which he had completed during his last lockup. And a four-year credit-card-theft spree ended in March with the arrest of Elnetta Denise Brown, 28, in Tampa, Fla.; she had finally lost her anonymity by sitting for a Christmas portrait and paying with a stolen card.

A sheriff's SWAT team surrounded a house for seven hours because the sound of a blown tire nearby made a police officer believe he had been fired on from inside (Madera, Calif.). Three teen-age fast-food workers were charged in an eight-month-long binge of spiking food with urine, spit, Easy-Off oven cleaner and Comet (Scottsville, N.Y.). Brain-injury victims suffering from aphasia were found by researchers to have an uncanny ability to detect liars. A woman pled guilty to robbing a Bank of America to get money to make overdue payments on her mortgage, held by Bank of America (Richmond, Va.). British breeders announced they have produced six Labrador retriever-Chihuahuas to better serve hearing-impaired clients unable to manage larger dogs.

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