LEAD STORIES

-- In a July hearing in Akron, Ohio, Judge James Murphy briefly reopened a 1994 case to take testimony from the victim, who was only 7 at the time but who now claims to remember the incident much better. His rectum had been torn by (according to police) his mother's ramming him with an object because he had soiled his pants or (according to the mother) a sexual attack by the family's pit bull (corroborated, perhaps, by the fact that dog semen was found in the rectum). The mother is serving a life sentence, but her son (who was reticent at the trial, because of trauma) is now positive that the dog did it. A week after the hearing, Judge Murphy let the conviction stand, relying on other 1994 testimony.

-- In August, entrepreneur Adam Bilski received a license from the city of Oswiecim, Poland (aka Auschwitz), to open a disco on the spot of a World War II-era tannery that "employed" concentration-camp workers and became a gravesite for many of them. And in September, "Stalin's World," a tourist attraction devoted to themes of the World War II-era Soviet police state, is scheduled to open near Gruta, Lithuania, which was a gateway through which 200,000 Lithuanians passed en route to Siberian labor camps. The developer said he even plans to have visitors eventually enter the park on cattle cars and eat oat gruel and fish broth, just as the prisoners did.

In Columbus, Ohio, on July 12, Lester DeBoard, 36, was sentenced to five years in prison for luring an 11-year-old girl to a far corner of a public library, where he had fondled her feet. (He faces a similar charge in a library fondling in nearby Worthington, Ohio.) Four days later, police arrested Dwight D. Pannell, 40, for the assault of a 33-year-old female student (a stranger to him) in the main library at Ohio State; with a motive he is keeping to himself, he allegedly pricked her foot with a syringe containing an unknown substance.

-- The same engineering firm responsible for the notoriously wobbly Millennium Bridge in London, England, which has been closed as unsafe, was identified as the consultant for the soon-to-be-released Bioform brassiere, according to an August report in the London Daily Telegraph. The Ove Arup company found that replacing the bra's underwire with plastic bands would more comfortably distribute the load and reduce stress; it is also working on shock absorbers to make the Millennium Bridge once again usable.

-- In May, the Food and Drug Administration approved the prescription product Eros Clitoral Therapy Device, a suction-pump instrument that increases blood flow for the purpose of improving sexual responsiveness. (Rudimentary blood-flow suction-pump devices for men, not approved by FDA, have long been on the market and sell for far less than Eros' $359 price tag, and in fact are illegal to possess in Alabama, Texas and Georgia, which ban devices sold for the purpose of stimulating sex organs.)

-- In July, engineer Roman Kunikov gave a public demonstration in Ufa, Russia, of his gasoline-powered boots that he said would enable the wearer to jump around at about 12 feet per stride and run at a pace of about 25 mph. The boots, not yet on the market, weigh about 2 pounds each, including fuel.

-- While U.S. sewage plants efficiently screen out bacteria and solid waste, many older facilities cannot break down certain chemicals and hormones in pharmaceuticals, including pain killers, caffeine, antibiotics and birth control pills, which, as they spread into wastewater, cause environmental harm, including mutations in the reproductive organs of fish. Findings presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society earlier this year (including studies blaming perfumes), along with recent studies from Europe's waterways (involving antidepressants, seizure medication, cancer treatments and cholesterol-lowering compounds) warn that certain species of fish are in jeopardy of extinction.

-- Latest Useful Genetic Alteration: In June near Plattsburgh, N.Y., Nexia Biotechnologies began nurturing about 150 goats that had been specially bred with a gene from a spider, with the ultimate goal to create silk fibers ("BioSteel") strong enough to use in bulletproof clothing and for aerospace and medical applications. Spider silk has long been admired for its lightweight strength and elasticity.

-- University of South Florida professor Stuart Wilkinson recently developed a robot that fuels itself with sugar and which the professor hopes will be able to power itself even more versatilely by eating vegetation (although unlike sugar, which produces only water and carbon dioxide as byproducts, vegetation would create waste-disposal problems). According to a July BBC News report, E. coli bacteria are provided to break down the food and convert it into electricity.

Police in Durham, N.C., said that the three 15-year-old boys rushed to Duke Hospital on the evening of July 28 with gunshot wounds to the leg had actually shot one another, voluntarily. Said a police spokesman, "They wanted that status symbol of telling their friends they were shot."

News of the Weird has reported several times recently on the "sport" of cockfighting, which is still legal only in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Louisiana, and is under constant criticism from state legislatures and animal-rights activists. However, according to a June New York Times story, the cockfighting infrastructure (33-state breeding industry plus designer-drug developers to enhance roosters' fighting performance) is flourishing, and cockfighting continues illegally in many other venues (for example, police raided events this year in Philadelphia and New York City). Furthermore, an anti-cockfighting bill in Congress, with broad bipartisan support, has been derailed, according to a July Washington Post story, because of the influence of the breeding industry.

T'Chacka Mshinda Thorpe, 25, was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in May and charged with possession of cocaine after a brief chase; police caught up to him after Thorpe tripped on his low-riding baggy pants, fell, and fractured his femur. And in March, Edney Raphael, 39, running from a stabbing in Philadelphia with a bloody knife in his hand, was captured following a foot chase; he had turned his head to see where the officers were and run smack into a parking meter.

A 49-year-old man shot up a bar, wounding five people, on orders from "the Lord," who said subsequent instructions would come from "Nash Bridges" (Topeka, Kan.). A 30-year-old Danish soccer fan returning at night from the Copenhagen-Viborg game in a fans' bus peered out of the skylight and was decapitated by an overpass. And in separate incidents, two elderly people were rescued after enduring three days each, precariously trapped and hidden in rural isolation without food or water (an 83-year-old woman in her car, which plunged off an overpass and hung in a tree above a swamp in Broward County, Fla., and a 75-year-old man in Carroll County, Va., stuck 15 feet down in his outhouse when the floor collapsed).

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

-- Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz, whose best-selling 1991 book "Chutzpah" celebrated the virtues of impudence, asked a team of Florida lawyers in July for a cut of the $3.4 billion judgment they had just won against the cigarette industry on behalf of smokers. Dershowitz, who said it was his strategy that won the case, admitted that "promises" the team made to him were "not in writing," but nevertheless claimed they owed him "1 percent," or $34 million, for his advice, which according to time sheets, he had dispensed over the course of 118 hours, which works out to $288,000 an hour, or $80 a second.

-- Despite televised professional wrestling's on-screen admonitions against trying such stunts at home, the New York Daily News reported in July that as many as 40 amateur (mostly teen-age) "backyard wrestling" clubs are operating in the New York City area, practicing moves nearly as dangerous as the pros'. A Daily News reporter witnessed 14-year-old boys smashing each other with wooden poles until they splintered, landing "chair shots" to the head, diving from platforms or rooftops onto their opponents, slamming each other through plywood tables, and even engaging in "barbed-wire" and "fire" matches. Said one "wrestler's" mother, who watched nervously as her son and his opponent went through their paces: "Easy ... easy...."

Denise Thomas was sentenced to a year's probation by a Littleton, Colo., judge in August for offering her 9-year-old daughter for sale on the Internet for $4,000. Two weeks earlier, Helen Chase had been arrested in Vacaville, Calif., and charged with child endangerment for allegedly giving away for free her 10-year-old son to a couple in St. Petersburg, Fla., whom she had met on the Internet. (Police said the latter kid had been rambunctious and incorrigible despite her threats to give him away, and was apparently thriving in his new home.)

-- John Murphy, 64, was arrested in Toms River, N.J., after a May 10 spree in which he vandalized 12 doctors' offices because they had refused his request to perform prostate biopsies on him without a medical reason for doing so. According to police, an enraged Murphy went from office to office, breaking windows and spraying black paint over the urologists' signs. One doctor, expressing prevailing medical practice, told a reporter that he wouldn't do the procedure unless some alarming sign surfaced because the procedure "is pretty invasive."

-- Firefighters and police called to an apartment in Fargo, N.D., in June encountered thick smoke pouring out of a window, an odor one described as "noxious and terrible," and the tenant standing in the corner with his fists up as if ready to fight. The tenant finally revealed that once a year, he piles into a skillet all the hair he has saved from his haircuts and burns it. He was arrested when he threatened the firefighters, claiming that he worked for the FBI.

-- In July, according to police, John Hawk, 43, the town eccentric of Celina, Ohio, took it to the next level. While communing with his just-deceased uncle's body at the Ketcham-Ripley Funeral Home in nearby Rockford, Hawk allegedly decapitated it with a hacksaw and carried the head away, presumably to fulfill a religious belief that he could bring the uncle back to life by eating the brain (a belief that was the subject of one of Hawk's periodic rants delivered in handbills around town over the years).

-- Brian Ellingwood had a briefcase stolen from his car in Washington, D.C., in February and reported it, but six weeks later, according to a Washington Post story, he was notified that the D.C. Department of Public Works had levied a $1,000 fine against him for littering because the abandoned briefcase, with contents strewn about, had been found in an alley about six blocks from his home. After what he estimated as "hundreds" of calls to various government offices, Ellingwood could not clear the matter up and was forced to go trial in June to have the charge removed.

-- According to a June Chicago Sun-Times report, Illinois Republican activist Connie Peters has virtually no other duty in her $23,000-a-year state job except to be an "observer" at two state water-management meetings a month. The newspaper estimates that she has collected $185,000 in the 15 years she has been in this arrangement, primarily because the legislature inexplicably kept raising her compensation, which in 1985 was $150 a year.

-- The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged in July that it knew as far back as 1982 that asbestos fibers from a W.R. Grace Co. mill in Libby, Mont., were implicated in the deaths of residents (casualties now number as many as 200) but did not notify the town. The agency had dismissed its own toxicology study and squelched follow-up studies, relying instead on company assurances that asbestos levels were minimal in its building-insulation materials.

Krystin Nicely, 14, in a July St. Petersburg Times story about the closing of the 28th Street Drive-In theater (which her mother, now 30, and father had frequented on dates): "If it wasn't for that place, I wouldn't be here." And Maryland legislator Van T. Mitchell, during a March debate in the House of Delegates on a bill banning marriages between first cousins: "If this law was in effect in 1918, I (wouldn't) be (here).

News of the Weird reported in March 2000 that the stretch of I-95 between West Palm Beach, Fla., and Miami (and connector freeways) was the "impalement capital" of the country because of the frequency with which unsecured objects fly off of speeding trucks. In May, Yanier Torres escaped decapitation by moving his head a couple of inches, avoiding a sheet of 3/4-inch-thick iron that had flown off of a flatbed truck, through his windshield, and which sliced his headrest in two. As is typical, the truck's driver did not stop, and, said a Highway Patrol spokesman, "was (probably) not even aware that this object fell off his truck."

"Higher Education": A Ferris State University (Big Rapids, Mich.) freshman died in March of excessive alcohol consumption (0.42 level) during a drinking game. An intoxicated Keene (N.H.) State College student was killed in May while celebrating his 21st birthday when he jumped into a dangerous waterfall despite the pleadings of eight friends not to do it. A University of California at Davis senior choked to death on his own vomit in April (0.54 blood-alcohol level) after downing 21 drinks at a bar on the day he turned 21.

An Ohio law went into effect imposing a five-day waiting period for a person to buy five or more kegs of beer at the same time. A 34-year-old woman, "Queen Shahmia" (God's only daughter), was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering her servants/disciples to commit five robberies while she lounged at resort hotels (Fort Myers, Fla.). Seven nudists had their feet badly seared in a mesquite-wood firewalking ceremony at a naturists' convention (Jacumba, Calif.). United Kingdom coast guard ships off Wales rescued boater Eric Abbott, 56, for the 11th time this year (cumulative cost: about $90,000), owing to Abbott's habit of "navigating" mainly by an automobile club atlas.

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

-- The U.S. Department of Agriculture is actively proposing that animal carcasses with cancers, tumors or open sores be regarded merely as unaesthetic but safe for human consumption as long as the offending part is cut away. The proposal is part of a general loosening of slaughterhouse inspection standards, whose public comment period ends Aug. 29. One critic already weighed in, saying she did not want to "eat pus from a chicken that has pneumonia," but also included as benign by the proposal are glandular swellings, infectious arthritis and diseases caused by intestinal worms.

-- Devotees of the late, widely discredited psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) convened in upstate Maine in July to exchange papers on his most famous work, his "discovery" of the cosmic life force produced by sexual orgasm. The highlights of the conference were the presentations of more than a dozen variations of Reich's "orgone accumulator," which is a series of partially metal blankets or boxes in which a person wraps himself to attract the excess sexuality out of the body so as to prevent the neuroses caused by the energy that wells up from the lack of orgasm.

David W. Bolton, 45, was charged in July with assault for hitting a fellow boardinghouse resident in Clarkstown, N.Y., after trying at first to drive a sharpened wooden stake through the man's heart with a hammer. (Police said Bolton told them he was acting on "instructions from a higher authority.") Two weeks later, in San Francisco, hitchhiker Eric David Knight was arrested for assaulting a 28-year-old driver who had picked him up; Knight had allegedly bit the driver in the neck and sucked his blood after thanking him for the ride, and had later told police, "I need the cure. I need blood." (San Francisco's 1998 "vampire killer" Joshua Rudiger had an alibi this time: He's in prison, serving 23 years to life.)

-- After a Schneiders Hot Dog promotion machine (the Blaster, intended to shoot free wieners into the stands at Toronto's SkyDome during baseball games) went awry in April, pulverizing the franks and spraying fragments on fans, a vegetarian Blue Jays' fan told the National Post newspaper she would sue if she got spritzed. "What if I had my mouth open and a piece of hot dog landed in my mouth?"

-- Homeless man Dennis Downey, 42, complained to a Chicago Tribune reporter in March that the sprinkler system at a building on Lower Michigan Avenue was drenching him and some colleagues as they had settled in for the night. "They're trying to get rid of the homeless," said Downey. (The building manager said the sprinklers are necessary to clean the feces and urine left by the homeless who camp alongside the building at night.)

-- In March, to bolster his client's defense that a surreptitious police station videotape (which caught Constable Graham Hunt taking something from a room) violated his right of privacy, Ontario lawyer Clayton Ruby pointed out that later in the tape was another officer, caught receiving oral sex in the room from a female police employee. Obviously, reasoned Ruby, police officers who used that particular room had a legitimate "expectation of privacy" (beyond the reach of a surreptitious video) because, otherwise, why would the other two employees have gone in there for oral sex?

-- In May, the Quebec Superior Court and Quebec's Administrative Tribunal ruled that Alain Desbiens had the right to have his tattoo removed at government expense in that the tattoo adversely affects his psychological well-being. The estimated cost of erasing the blue and gray caricature of a death's head above his right bicep was estimated at $2,000 to $3,000.

-- Felicia Vitale, 41, told reporters in February that she would sue the New York Police Department for wrongly arresting her after she walked away from a sting operation at Staten Island Mall carrying a planted purse containing $2. She admitted that the purse did not belong to her but denied she intended to steal it and pointed out that she suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and thus must go through a list of tasks in rigid order every day and that she simply had many other things to do before she got around to returning the purse.

-- According to an April Seattle Times report, the Great Ape Legal Project, headed by a Seattle lawyer, is moving toward a goal of demonstrating, within the next decade, that chimpanzees should have some of the same legal rights as humans (beyond being mere property, according to the Times, "to (becoming) people with rights to life and liberty and perhaps even the pursuit of happiness"). Though it would be possible for a chimp to sue his guardian, a reassuring spokesperson said animals such as cockroaches and ants "will never be eligible for any kind of rights."

Just three months ago, in mentioning dental-office abuses, News of the Weird reported on the Australian dentist hauled before the licensing board for the unauthorized practice of relieving facial pain by administering ozone through the patient's rectum. The practice apparently is known in the United States, as well. Two weeks after that issue of News of the Weird appeared, a jury in Scranton, Pa., convicted Richard Harley and his wife, Jacqueline Kube, for defrauding investors in their company that offered to treat AIDS patients by pumping a mixture of ozone and oxygen into the rectum, at $250 per session, sometimes prescribed for 30 days at a time.

Inman, S.C., police arrested Donald W. Melton, 29, in July and charged him with robbing a CCB Bank. He was easily tracked down on his getaway because he had failed to ask for a bag at the bank to carry the money away in and thus was left to stuff it all into his pants and socks. The result was that enough of the currency came loose during his run that residents along his escape route called police every few minutes to report that another bill had been spotted, and within 40 minutes of the robbery, Melton was in handcuffs.

-- An Iranian judge jailed a man for ogling the judge's wife, but hundreds rioted in support of the man, who they said is merely cross-eyed (Ghir, Iran). Centers for Disease Control found that people who go online to look for sex partners are more likely to have sexually transmitted diseases than those who do not look for sex online. The governor of Arkansas (where 12 percent of the population live in mobile homes) and his wife moved into a triple-wide manufactured home next to the Governor's Mansion, which will be undergoing repairs for the next year. A holdup man saved his own life by forgetting to load his gun before robbing a pawnshop; the clerk wrestled it away from him and pulled the trigger, but the crook escaped (Miami, Fla.).

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