-- The Wishes of the Fetus: On Sept. 6, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit by a 7-year-old girl with spina bifida, who had sued her parents' doctors because she wanted to have been aborted (since the doctors knew she would have birth defects). On the same day, in Attleboro, Mass., Judge Kenneth Nasif ordered a pregnant woman held in custody until she gives birth because he feared that she, because of her religion, might decline medical attention if she experienced complications; Nasif said he could "sense" the unborn child saying to him, "I want to live. I don't want to die like my brother (a previous victim of the woman's religion-based medical neglect) did."

-- In August, Elsie Holdren, 68, a security officer working on contract at a courthouse in Viera, Fla., was transferred by her company to a courthouse in nearby Melbourne because her superiors thought she was too courteous. "Due to your caring and giving nature," wrote Holdren's supervisor (with Weiser Security Services in Orlando), "you are compromising your position as a security officer. (Being caring and giving) is not a job requirement, nor is it what you are paid to do."

The mentally retarded Felipe Rodriguez spent 13 months in jail in Swisher County, Texas (near Amarillo), after being accused of a minor theft, largely because his court-appointed defense attorney forgot about him until a Dallas Morning News reporter pestered her about the status of the case. (Rodriguez was released in August.) And a June New York Times report on veteran court-appointed defense lawyer Ronald G. Mock chronicled his career-long, mediocre representation of a series of now-executed men, including June executee Gary Graham, who was convicted based on one fleeting, nighttime eyewitness identification, which Mock neither challenged nor seriously investigated.

-- Robert Jones of Adel, Ga., filed a lawsuit in Atlanta in June against the maker of Liquid Fire drain cleaner after the stuff oozed out of Jones' homemade container all over his legs, causing "extensive, excruciating burns and destruction of flesh." Actually, Liquid Fire comes in a spill-proof container, but Jones was skeptical of its sturdiness and thus poured the contents into his own, "safer" container (from which it eventually spilled). Thus, Jones' legal theory is that Liquid Fire's original package somehow created the impression of flimsiness, which therefore forced Jones to pour the contents into his own container.

-- Two years ago, Javier Polo, 25, filed a lawsuit in Aviles, Spain, demanding that his mother, Maria Delores Ray, 54, be ordered to support him financially while he is out of work. Recently, according to a May London Observer story, a judge ruled for Polo, ordering Ray to pay him 15 percent of her salary (about $192 a month) despite the fact that he does not even live with her. (The parents are divorced; he lives with his father; but she has to pay because she earns more than the father.)

-- In July, Tang Weijiang, 29, filed a lawsuit in Shanghai, China, against Canon Inc. because one of the Japanese company's advertising CD-ROMs left him in mental distress, which he said was deliberate, just one more act in a centuries-long campaign of disrespect by Japanese people and companies against the Chinese. The specific act that caused Tang such anguish was a passage on the CD-ROM text implying that China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were separate countries.

-- Parents in Benicia, Calif., were complaining, according to a June San Francisco Chronicle report, of the public library's policy of denying them access to the names of books their children (regardless of age) have checked out. California law generally provides for confidentiality of government records, but some libraries enforce that more strictly than others. The Benicia library makes an exception only if a book is overdue, so that parents can look for it at home.

-- Australian masseuse Carol Vanderpoel, 52, believing that all she knew how to cure were physical aches and pains, sued her former employer, the Blue Mountains Women's Health Centre in Katoomba, which had required her also to listen to her clients' psychological problems during massages and to counsel them, which she said left her severely depressed. In June, a judge in New South Wales District Court awarded her about $17,000 in damages. (Among the problems that grossed her out were a client's confession of performing euthanasia on her husband and another woman's having been assaulted with a chain saw).

The following people apparently get really set off by the following things: Mark Adam Yazzie, 26 (got into an argument with his brother-in-law about the merits of rap music vs. rock and ran him over with a truck; Santa Rosa, Calif., June). Jane Graham, 77 (pointed a butcher knife at a neighbor man's groin and threatened to "cut it off" because he was playing his stereo too loud; Winnipeg, Manitoba, July). Gerard Corbo, 56 (at his son's wedding, started a fistfight when a guest referred to the groom by the wrong first name; Westlake, Ohio, June).

Grandmother Karren Kinsel, head of the office that regulates content on vanity license plates in Illinois ("WORKSUX" rejected; "BI DAD E" OK), explaining to a Chicago Tribune reporter in July what qualifies her to rule on whether certain applications are in poor taste: "You take some people, they just don't have a dirty mind. Some of my staff doesn't. But I do, kind of."

When News of the Weird first mentioned Summum (in 1988), the Salt Lake City religious organization had just introduced its mummification alternative to burials and cremations, charging $7,000 to preserve a body and an additional $18,000 to create a bronze statue, according to founder Corky Ra. As of June 2000, according to an Associated Press story, Summum is still looking to make its first human mummy (it has done several pets), although 137 people have made deposits toward the current prices of $12,000 to preserve and $36,000 (and up) for statues (plus transportation costs and mausoleum space). Corky Ra's preservation process includes soaking the body in secret fluids, applying lanolin, polyurethane rubber and fiberglass bandages.

A 17-year-old boy was arrested in Loomis, Calif., in July after he was unsuccessful in what might have been an attempt to emulate the notorious "Rooftop Robber," who had burglarized more than 40 businesses in California and other states by entering through roofs (and who was captured in May). Unlike the original, the 17-year-old crashed through a false ceiling in his first job, broke a sink standing on it trying to climb out, then made it to a false ceiling and crawled to an adjacent store, but fell through that ceiling, too, injuring his ankle, and then finally, on his way out, tripped the burglar alarm and had police waiting for him.

An IRS advisory opinion declared that the parents of a still-kidnapped child must stop taking the dependent's exemption while the child is missing. Scientists in India discovered a new chili, whose burn worsens with water and which is 50 percent hotter than the previous world's-hottest chili. A deceased's family sued Forest Lawn cemetery over a bad embalming, though the family admitted that park employees did work diligently to swat flies off of the open casket during the memorial service (Los Angeles). A robber pistol-whipped a pizza deliverer, causing the gun to discharge and fire a fatal shot at the robber's 17-year-old partner (Nashville).

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

-- Campaign 2000: In September, Robert Salzberg finished a strong second (26 percent) in the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat from Sarasota, Fla., despite revealing that he would soon plead insanity (that a robot was attacking him) to a charge that he beat up a police lieutenant inside a station house in March. In Maryland, the estranged wife of U.S. Rep. Albert Wynn (husband and wife are black) is contributing a political telephone ad for his opponent, charging that Wynn "does not respect black women (because) he left me for a white woman." And Lanett, Ala., city councilman Barry Waites was defeated in August, largely through the effort of candidate Rod Spraggins, who finished fourth but whose only issue was to accuse Waites of murdering his own wife two years earlier (but Waites was never charged).

-- Among recent news reports of stupefyingly high real estate prices in the San Francisco area: a plain three-bedroom house in a nice Palo Alto neighborhood, offered for $3.5 million (renting for $12,000 a month), and a 1,000-square-foot house in San Francisco that "needs everything done to it," according to an agent, offered at $279,000 but which will sell for much more because as of the first of September, 48 people had bid on it.

Newsstand clerk Mike Redina, 44, who is blind, was fired in July because an underage boy illegally bought cigarettes from him (Hauppauge, N.Y.). Chevron lost an employment discrimination case in May because its doctor recommended rejecting an application from a man with a liver disorder because the work site was a highly toxic part of a refinery, and the company would almost certainly have been liable if the man had gotten sicker (El Segundo, Calif.). Parents Michael and Jill Carroll were forced by a court to give their son, 7, his prescribed Ritalin to regulate his school behavior despite the boy's loss of sleep and appetite (Albany, N.Y.).

-- Never Laid a Hand on Him: Otto Benjamin II, 39, was arrested in May in Fayetteville, Ark., and charged with second-degree battery after police found that he had been disciplining his 15-year-old son by biting him, including several recent incidents that had left permanent scars (on the ear, upper nose area, lip, finger, left thigh, shoulder and right forearm).

-- Teachers as Role Models: Columbia University literature professor Edward Said, 65, visiting Lebanon on July 3, was photographed throwing stones at Israeli soldiers at the border. (He later explained, "The spirit of the place infected everyone with the same impulse, to make a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation had ended.") And two weeks later, New York City high school teacher Ryan Ward, 30, was charged with grand larceny after he allegedly rode his bike past a woman on East 26th Street in Manhattan and swiped her purse.

-- Des Moines, Iowa, anesthesiologist Eric Meek filed a lawsuit in July against surgeon Scott Neff over a February incident that Meek felt took their ongoing professional feud too far. Meek said that when he walked into the operating room to work with Neff on a routine hip replacement at Mercy Medical Center, Neff grabbed the hose attached to a fluid-draining machine and banished Meek from the room by spraying him with a "blood-laden" liquid.

-- Jeff Schmidt was fired in May after 19 years as a staff writer for the magazine Physics Today just after the publication of his book "Disciplined Minds," which argues that a hierarchical organization's structure almost guarantees that its workers cannot devote their full energy to the job. He was canned after a supervisor came across a publicity interview by Schmidt, admitting playfully that he had sometimes worked on the book during office hours at Physics Today.

-- In July, Genevieve Simenon, a great niece of the late French mystery writer Georges Simenon, confessed to killing her husband and expressed dismay that, but for one detail, she would have gotten away with it, just as the perpetrators in Georges Simenon's stories believe they will. Genevieve had injected her husband with Valium, then beat him to death, scrubbed the crime scene, and convinced the family physician that her husband had merely suffered a heart attack and that the bruises on his face came when he hit his head on a table. However, the funeral director looked under the husband's long hair and noticed that his ear had been beaten off in the attack.

-- Additional Recent Ironies: An arsonist burned down the Heart of Fire Church (Fern Creek, Ky., June). The founder of an alcoholics' self-help group that advocated allowing recovery through moderate drinking pled guilty to DUI that caused the deaths of two people (Ellensburg, Wash., June). A very abled executive with the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind was fined $100 for issuing himself a handicapped parking card (Boston, August).

In July, the Law Society of Alberta, Canada, announced it had begun an inquiry into whether lawyer John M. Grindley should lose his license to practice because he had harmed the reputation of the profession. Grindley had been convicted in June of drunk driving, but the Law Society filed charges against him only later, after a residential eviction order had been upheld against him based on an inspector's having declared Grindley's home so grungy and putrid-smelling that it was a hazard to public health. Grindley admitted that his apartment is "messy" but said he would fight the charge.

One of the most widely circulated offbeat stories of 1999 was the Michigan conviction of canoeist Timothy Boomer under a seldom-used state law banning public cussing. (He used the F word at least 25 times, in an area occupied by recreational boaters, including many kids.) In May 2000, Sioux Falls (S.D.) high school senior Oakly Haines, who had just won the gold medal in the 400-meter dash at the state track tournament, was disqualified when two volunteer officials overheard him cuss at himself ("damn it" and "son of a bitch") that he had failed to beat the record time of his older brother. Said one of the tattling officials, "When you have children, you want them to be exposed (only) to wonderful, good things."

In June, a 16-year-old boy accidentally fatally shot himself in the head while fleeing a sheriff's deputy who had tried to question him; according to the deputy, the boy had clumsily attempted to shoot back by firing over his shoulder on the run. And in August, during a workplace scuffle in Irvine, Calif., one man grabbed another in a headlock, pulled his gun, and shot him in the face, but the bullet passed through the target's cheek and into the shooter's own chest, killing him.

Federal prison officials, angered at a recent bribery convict's boast that he planned a lot of golf at a minimum-security facility, shipped him instead to the same New York lockup as John Gotti's son (Lake Placid, N.Y.). A veteran skydiver got his foot caught outside the airplane door two miles up and dangled for 30 minutes, and was still hanging during the landing, but was not seriously hurt (Pittsburgh). An ex-Marine gunrunner and minor figure in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair was arrested for masturbating in a Kmart parking lot (Brookfield, Wis.). A 36-year-old driver was shot in the abdomen during a one-vehicle collision when a handgun in the glove compartment fired as it was jarred by the impact (Eastford, Conn.).

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

-- 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.).