-- Muslim-dominated Pakistan allows a large, prosperous brewery to operate, even though its product is off-limits to 97 percent of the population and is regularly denounced by the nation's leaders, according to a July dispatch in the San Francisco Chronicle. Non-Muslims can purchase Murree Beer by applying for a consumption permit (stating religion, profession, income, drinking history, and for females, the name of her husband). Muslims are allowed to work at the factory, and apparently many Muslims pay consumption-permit holders to purchase beer for them.

-- Ms. Ezola Foster, who is Pat Buchanan's Reform Party running mate and a longtime conservative skeptical of most government social programs, admitted in August that she had submitted a false document in 1996 in order to get California worker compensation benefits. According to a Los Angeles Times report, she claims now that she never had the "mental illness" that entitled her to draw money for about a year before her retirement as a schoolteacher in 1997. Rather, she now says: "I (had) two choices to survive. Since (my condition) wasn't physical, they make it mental, don't they? If I don't have a broken leg or they don't see blood, or I'm not dead, they said I have to be crazy." Her "mental illness" was worked out "between my doctor and my attorney. It's whatever the doctor said that, after working with my attorney, was best to help me."

Arrested in Bologna, Italy, in July and charged with burglarizing a pasta shop: Mr. Stefano Spaghetti. Scratched, as an inappropriately named horse, by Saratoga racetrack officials from the opening-day races in July: a 2-year-old colt named Mufahker (which means "glory" in Arabic). The arresting officer, in an undercover sting operation that charged two 46-year-old men with soliciting sex with other men at Hugh MacRae Park in Wilmington, N.C., in July: Sgt. Bud LaCock. Charged with allowing underage teen-agers to have a keg party in her home near Pittsburgh in March: Susan Beer, 50.

-- Rancher Marvin Edison Hale, 72, was arrested in August in Hays County, Texas (near Austin), after allegedly shooting to death a Department of Public Safety trooper who had tried to pull Hale over for violating the state's seat-belt law. Hale has been feuding with the government since 1982, when his ranch increased in value and property taxes were raised, and a 1999 seat-belt ticket apparently set him off. DPS had advised troopers to be cautious, especially on seat-belt violations, because Hale appeared ready to fight to the death.

-- Fred Craig continues with his intensive, 14-month campaign against a Fashion Bug store in Fulton, N.Y., according to an August Syracuse Herald-Journal report, which started over a pair of $3 panties for his wife that the store would not take back, even though the panties had shredded during their first washing. Craig picketed the mall store, picketed the mall owner's headquarters, picketed the home of a mall executive, and drove around with a large trailer-sign denouncing Fashion Bug. Finally, Craig won a $36 judgment in Small Claims Court but is still picketing because the mall has now barred him from the premises altogether.

-- Donna Harris-Lewis (widow of basketball player Reggie Lewis) announced in August that she would appeal her May lawsuit defeat and thus continue her quest to pin her husband's death on Boston cardiologist Gilbert Mudge. Mr. Lewis, with his wife's blessing, had continued to play basketball despite 12 cardiologists' opinions that his heart was too weak, and when he had a second attack, Harris-Lewis had him transferred surreptitiously to Mudge's hospital because Mudge had given a more favorable basketball prognosis. After Mr. Lewis died anyway, Harris-Lewis (who collected about $12 million on her husband's contract with the Boston Celtics) sued Mudge because, as she told a Boston Magazine reporter, "I need to be taken care of, too. Everybody has to say I'm greedy, but I do want my money back this time around. Why should I lose?"

-- Despite its endearment as a pet in the United States, guinea pigs continue to serve many needs in their native Peru, according to a June Associated Press report. Almost all rural households raise the animals, which are a major source of protein, but folk healers ("curanderos") also use guinea pigs to diagnose illnesses and remove bad luck. The guinea pig acts as kind of a CT scan; the "doctor" rubs the animal over a patient's body and then cuts it open to check for discoloration because the guinea pig is believed to pick up sympathetic illnesses in the same part of the body as the patient's illness.

-- As Russia's economy and drive toward democracy falter, consumption of vodka increases, but drinking habits long ago created a public health crisis for the country, according to a June Boston Globe story. Life expectancy is down to 59; average vodka consumption is three bottles a week; and two-thirds of all adult men are in fact drunk when they die.

-- The bond between mother and son in Italy (called "mammismo") appears to be growing even stronger, according to a May dispatch from Rome by the Chicago Tribune. According to Italy's premier sociology research organization, 70 percent of Italian men reach the age of 30 while still living at home, and 43 percent of married men live within a half-mile of their mothers. Of the Italian men not living at home, 70 percent call Mamma every single day. In explaining her relationship with her son, Guiseppa Liuzzo, 88, could be speaking for many mothers: "He's very attached to me because I spoiled him."

In July, the two owners of Hi-Po Inc., which had won a state environmental contract to clean up diesel fuel from two Ann Arbor, Mich., bodies of water, were indicted in Detroit for secretly having dumped the diesel fuel in the water in the first place, in order to create the need for the cleanup contract.

News of the Weird has occasionally reported technological and architectural advances in bathrooms, from full-service toilets (1988) to Singapore's (1996) and South Korea's (1999) national pride in having the world's cleanest or fanciest public restrooms. A July 2000 Wall Street Journal survey on the state of restroom design mentioned the one at the China Grill (Miami), inside which users can order drinks, and the one at the Mandalay Bay casino (Las Vegas), where patrons can use 11 glass cabanas that house televisions playing music videos. At a Royalton Hotel (New York City) restroom, a lavish waterfall is triggered when a patron enters, and at Bar 89 (New York City), the stalls have clear glass doors that become liquid-crystal-activated, non-see-through only when the door is tightly closed.

Life Imitates the World Wrestling Federation: Bank robberies in Worthington, Ohio (July), and Oshawa, Ontario (December 1999), were foiled when the robbers managed to get clobbered by chair shots to the head delivered by, respectively, the president of the Guernsey Bank in Worthington and a 64-year-old man, who was selling raffle tickets next door to the Bank of Montreal branch, heard gunshots, and went to investigate.

Anti-child-abuse vigilantes vandalized a pediatrician's home, apparently confusing her occupation with the word "pedophile" (Newport, Wales). Workers at a seafood plant found a human head inside a 5-foot-long cod and tentatively identified it as that of a former crew member on the boat that caught the fish (Cairns, Australia). A 26-year-old man charged with driving a stolen Mercedes, asked the judge if he could use the car as collateral for bail (Port Washington, Wis.). A candidate for sheriff left town mysteriously after having been caught spreading sugar on the ground (to draw ants) the day before his opponent's fund-raising picnic (Macclenny, Fla.).

-- An August Wall Street Journal dispatch from Nuoro, Sardinia (Italy), described locals' love for "casu marzu" ("rotten cheese"), brown lumps of sheep dairy, crawling with maggots, a "viscous, pungent goo that burns the tongue" and whose "wiggling worms (often) jump straight toward the eyes with ballistic precision." Though the cheese is banned by the government, a black market has pushed the price to double that for ordinary cheese. Some locals believe the maggots provide authentication, in that it is only when the maggots die that the cheese is inedible.

-- Damanhur, a 23-year-old, largely self-sufficient commune in northern Italy, features an underground, five-story-deep temple (an expansion of 10 times the space is under way); 500 full-time residents; its own currency, schools and tax code; and renowned workmanship that produces Tiffany-style glasswork and silk and cashmere fabrics for European designer labels. According to a July New York Times report, Damanhur was a secret until 1992, when an expatriate sued to get his money back, causing the tax collector to take an interest. Among the passions of the New-Age group are active experiments with time travel and an absolute ban (Damanhur's only "rule") on smoking.

In an interview in May in the trade journal of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's safety standards program, Marthe Kent, said she loves her job: "I absolutely love it. I was born to regulate. I don't know why, but that's very true. So as long as I'm regulating, I'm happy." Kent, who heads the agency's controversial ergonomics program (which oversees the effects of, for example, furniture design on back stress), said, "If you put out a reg, it matters. I think that's really where the thrill comes from. And it is a thrill; it's a high."

-- Motorist Michael Eck, 43, a Teamsters truck driver, endured an ultimate-experience, 12-minute thrill ride in his Chevrolet Impala in August on Interstate 83 near York, Pa. According to police reports, another truck driver, James E. Trimble, 65, felt Eck had cut him off during a lane change and angrily bumped Eck's car with his Peterbilt 18-wheeler at 60 mph, and did not stop bumping him. One hit damaged Eck's fuel pump, disabling the engine, and Trimble continued to ram the Impala at full speed for eight miles ("I counted 24 bumps until I stopped counting," said Eck) until police pulled him over and arrested him. Eck was not injured but was disappointed that police would not let him fistfight Trimble before they took him away.

-- Latest Survivors: Eugene Slocum, 52, walked three miles with a fractured neck to get help after a rural truck collision (Brighton, Colo., May). Leslie Roth, 35, suffered only a minor headache after being struck by two separate bolts of lightning on July 15 while with an Outward Bound wilderness school group (Killarney, Ontario). Jose Rojas Mayarita, 39, was incapacitated in his isolated boat for two days before help arrived, after a 10-foot-long marlin leaped from the water and speared him, penetrating all the way through Mayarita's abdomen (near Acapulco, Mexico, July).

-- To encourage hunting, Canada's Ministry of Environment introduced regulations in August to allow children as young as 12 to learn to shoot ducks and geese. The country has 60 percent fewer hunters than 10 years ago, said the Canadian Wildlife Service, which has led to animal overpopulations. Participating kids must have had a safety class and must be accompanied by a licensed hunter at least 18 years old, but gun-control and children's advocates were nonetheless enraged.

-- Mount Clemens, Mich., attorney Michael L. Steinberg was sentenced to 10 days in jail for contempt of court in May as the result of his repeated refusal to obey Judge Michael Martone's admonitions to turn off his cell phone in the courtroom. The last straw for Judge Martone was when Steinberg chose to interrupt his questioning of a witness to take a call.

-- In June, Darryl Ennis, 34, called 911 in Slidell, La., for the sole reason of getting police assistance to force his mother to cook him some pork chops. When he allegedly verbally abused the emergency operator for declining his request, officers went to his home and arrested him.

-- Very Much Opposed to Becoming a Grandmother: In August, Glenda Dowis was arrested by police in Lake Clarke Shores, Fla., near West Palm Beach, and charged with forcing her 16-year-old pregnant daughter at gunpoint into the Aware Woman Medical Clinic for an abortion. After Dowis allegedly told the staff that she would "blow (her daughter's) brains out" if she refused the abortion, someone called 911. According to a detective, Dowis is a construction worker who had been trying very hard to social climb and thus felt that having a pregnant teen-age daughter would ruin her standing.

The 21-year-old Lower Paxton Township, Pa., man (still unidentified in press reports) whose teen-age girlfriend used Quick Tite glue to bond his penis to his abdomen on July 11 to punish him for cheating on her, to the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News: "She knew I was a dog and she found out I was fooling around on her, but it shouldn't have come down to that. She could've just slapped me or something."

-- During its first year (1988), News of the Weird reported on a Houston fellow named Patrick Johnson, who was not a bus-company employee but who liked nothing better than to dress up in company uniforms, hop into an unoccupied transit bus and drive a route, picking up and discharging passengers to satisfy his love of buses. In June 2000, Pittsburgh Port Authority police arrested a man with the same obsession: Ronald Johnson (no relation, as far as authorities know), 21, who admitted that he had taken three buses out in recent weeks and picked up and discharged riders. A Port Authority executive said Johnson "does have (bus-)driving skills," had a uniform, and apparently "loves buses."

July 4, 2000: A 43-year-old man in Lombard, Ill., and a 34-year-old man on New York's Long Island were killed when their unlicensed fireworks did not immediately ignite and the men peered down the launching tubes as if that would help them detect the problem, only to catch the explosion full-force. Also, a teen-ager was killed in Des Moines, Iowa, when a firecracker tossed out the window of their SUV blew back inside and exploded, igniting other fireworks, which caused the driver to crash into a pole.

City College of New York announced it will provide students, staff and faculty with professional philosophy counseling in its health-care facility. Officials at Cape Canaveral finally learned the origin of the plastic bags of urine found recently in a launch-pad complex; a worker was too lazy to use the rest room, which was an elevator ride away. Police called to an apartment where a man had been dead for a week were held at bay for two hours by the man's 18 cats, aggressively guarding the body (Cairo, Egypt). A 29-year-old man who broke into a house at night and fondled a sleeping woman's thigh was chased by the woman's boyfriend out the door, where the molester tripped and broke his leg (Chambersburg, Pa.).

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

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/.)