-- Wealthy retired Italian law professor Giacinto Auriti began in July to circulate a private currency, called the "simec," among citizens (and about 40 shopkeepers) in the town of Guardiagrele (about 125 miles from Rome), to "prove" his longstanding theory that any currency, if put in the hands of consumers instead of banks, yields more purchasing power. Auriti prints the simecs, sells them at par with the lira, and then guarantees to merchants that he will redeem them at double their value (by paying out from his family fortune), thereby encouraging merchants to lower their prices. The simec has caused an explosion of consumer sales, but the government believes the whole idea is ridiculous and will collapse as soon as Auriti stops guaranteeing simecs' value.

-- The World Wrestling Federation (whose savage, tawdry matches, under the slogan "WWF Attitude!" top cable TV ratings) filed a lawsuit against William Morris Agency in October, asking a judge to please rescue it from a 1997 contract in which it handed over to the agency a piece of every future dollar it earns. WWF argues that, unable to protect itself, it was bullied by WMA into signing an exploitative contract.

In October, Matthew J. Glavin, president of the conservative legal foundation leading the fight to disbar President Clinton for lying about his sexual affairs, was charged with public indecency, allegedly caught trolling for anonymous male sex partners in a suburban Atlanta park. And John Paulk, whose personal "religion cures homosexuality" experience landed him on the cover of Newsweek in 1998, was demoted as an executive with the Christian group Focus on the Family after he was caught in October reveling in a Washington, D.C., gay bar. And Mike Trout, another Focus on the Family official, resigned in October after confessing to an extramarital affair.

-- Two Altamonte Springs, Fla., police officers were suspended in August after a photograph turned up of one officer exposing his genitals during a music festival. The two officers had been stationed near the stage for security and were being handed fans' cameras to take close-up photos of the performers, and somehow, one fan got her camera back with the extra photo. Initially, the officer who aimed the camera defended his action by claiming, inexplicably, that he and his buddy were just fooling around and that he did not believe there was film in the camera.

-- Jeffrey Bruette and his former roommate filed an $8 million lawsuit against the Montgomery County (Md.) Police in July, alleging that they were humiliated when child-pornography charges were filed against them because of a videotape they had shot and handed to police. In early 1999, the two men, concerned that a teen-age neighbor boy was stealing from them, had set up a surveillance camera, which happened to catch the boy involved in sex with the men's dogs. They ultimately handed the tape to police to facilitate the boy's getting counseling, but then police arrested them as if the video had been made for sexual purposes, and the men now sue to clear their reputations.

-- In July, residents of Wertz Avenue in Charleston, W.Va., were just about at the breaking point because of chronic blocked-sewer problems. Not only do the city's storm drains regularly get clogged, sending raw sewage into the street, but recent sewer line backups have spilled waste from Gunnoe's Whole Hog Sausage slaughtering and processing plant, in the form of waves of blood and meat chunks oozing down the street.

-- Chippewa Falls (Wis.) High School senior John E. Smith Jr. was suspended in September for a revenge-based prank in which he brought a cake to school and announced that it was his birthday and that he wanted to share it with administrators. As the six staff members who accepted his generosity found out with their first bites, the secret ingredient in the cake was clumps of hair from different areas of Smith's body.

-- Darryl Bruce McDowell, 34, was arrested near Cranbrook, British Columbia, in July and charged with assault and seven other counts related to roughing up his common-law wife, against whom he was allegedly retaliating for her having tried to leave him. According to his own testimony at a bail hearing, McDowell uses a wooden rod from time to time to discipline the wife and her children as the Book of Proverbs "command(s)" him to do. Said McDowell, "There is no enjoyment about rodding. It's a biblical imperative."

-- Among the issues roiling the Roman Catholics' Italian Bishops Conference in Turin in September was the pending recommendation that all exorcisms be conducted in Latin rather than in local languages, and an important subissue, according to a report from The Independent (London), was how Satan ought therefore to be addressed: by the formal version of the Latin pronoun "you" ("lei") or the more intimate version ("tu").

-- Sylvia Louise Gillard O'Brien filed a lawsuit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in August, asking about $7 million from Coca-Cola because, while she was pregnant in 1997, a Fruitopia bottle broke while she was drinking from it, cutting her lip and causing her to bite on shards; she claims that her resulting fear of miscarriage caused the fetus, now a child of 3, to fail to trust and like her sufficiently. And Jeffrey and Julie Marie Leinweber filed a lawsuit in Medina, Ohio, in July for $50,000, claiming that Mrs. Leinweber's third-trimester fetus was so stressed by an auto accident (even though the child, now 3, shows no apparent effects) that the "special bond between mother and child" was "taken away" by the collision.

In 1999, News of the Weird reported on two South Koreans who ran insurance scams by chopping off their own feet and finger for payoffs of $40,000 and $7,500, respectively. During a two-week period in August 2000, three more scams were reported: Huang Chun-ming, 35, hacked off his wrist after purchasing additional insurance (Taichung, Taiwan); Chen Shih-hung, 37, chopped off his finger to make his claim (Chiching, Taiwan); and a 28-year-old man was charged with collecting $15,000 in an insurance payout in Dusseldorf, Germany, after he castrated himself and blamed it on a gang's attack.

A 16-year-old boy riding in a car near Gaston, Ore., in August was killed by an airborne, 1,500-pound elk that had just been hit by a truck. In April, another 16-year-old boy, on his bicycle, was killed by an airborne deer that had just been hit by a car in North Canton, Ga. (And in August, Hida Yochikata, 37, survived, but with major back injuries, after being hit by an airborne dog that had fallen from a ninth-floor window in a Paris suburb.)

Murder defendant Gregory D. Murphy, strolling out of his uneventful pre-trial hearing, suddenly turned and coldcocked his lawyer with a left to the face (Alexandria, Va.). A woman filed a lawsuit against the American Red Cross, claiming that she contracted oral herpes from her CPR class's unsanitized dummy (Hammond, Ind.). In a settlement of fraud charges with the Florida attorney general, a psychic hotline agreed to hire only people who swore in writing that they had psychic powers. An off-duty police officer, out on bond after his arrest on suspicion of DUI in the deaths of two motorists, was himself hit by a drunk driver a week later while out bicycling (Kailua, Hawaii).

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

-- Rapidly gaining viewers in the competitive Moscow TV market is a program called "The Naked Truth," on an obscure channel, which features straight news delivered by a 26-year-old female anchor, but who appears from time to time topless, or while undressing, or while being fondled on-camera. According to an October New York Times report, however, the station's policy is that any news of President Putin or other leading officials must be delivered while fully clothed.

-- A Quebec-based sect, the Raelians, announced in September that it would start work immediately, in an unidentified Third World country's laboratory, toward cloning a human being, specifically the American girl who died recently at the age of 10 months and whose parents paid the Raelians $500,000 to duplicate her. According to a Princeton University researcher, the technology exists right now to carry out the work within a year. Founder "Rael" (the former Claude Vorilhon) believes that all humans are clones of extraterrestrials and says Raelians could eventually offer a cloning service for about $200,000.

"Rides" called "The Original Shocker" at a Rockville, Md., arcade and "The Electric Chair Game" at various parks in Italy are simulated fatal experiences in a death-row electric chair, from the strapping-in to the controlled dose of electricity (voluntarily administered, enough to cause heavy vibrations) to the sound of sizzling juice to the cloud of smoke, and capped by a flat line on a heartbeat monitor. "Winning" involves staying in the chair until the machine declares you dead; losers release the electrodes early. And among America's best-selling toys last summer was Death-Row Marv (McFarlane Toys, $24.99), in which a man strapped into an electric chair trash-talks his "executioner," almost begging to be lit up with more jolts of electricity.

-- State officials near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, issued $100 citations in August to two drivers whose U.S. Government water trucks were on their way to fight the Montana fires. The officials discovered that the trucks exceeded the highway weight limit of 17 tons (by 1 and 2 tons, respectively). According to the Helena Independent Record newspaper, the trucks were permitted to head out to the front lines only after they had dumped enough water to satisfy the inspectors.

-- In a video outtake mistakenly telecast on a Cape Cod (Massachusetts) public-access cable channel on July 31, the organizer of a cat-adoption service was shown being yelled at by her cameraman-husband (who was off-camera) to get the adoptable cat she was offering to stop squirming during the taping. One viewer told the Cape Cod Times, "The (cameraman) must have used the 'F' word 50 times, along with verbal threats to the kitten (to strangle it)."

-- In July, a federal grand jury in Charlotte, N.C., indicted 18 people in an interstate cigarette-smuggling ring (profitable because of the wide disparity in state taxes), accepting the government's evidence that at least part of the motivation for the scheme was to raise money for the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah.

-- Cristal Campbell, 29, was re-arrested on July 12 in Boston after pulling a prank to escape and spending five days on the lam. At a court hearing on July 7, she urinated on the floor but claimed that she was pregnant and that her "water had broken" and thus was rushed to a hospital by concerned court personnel (most of whom were males who accepted her claim uncritically). Campbell is wanted on more than 50 con-artist warrants, and indeed, after court personnel took her to the hospital on July 7, she escaped twice more before her July 12 capture.

-- Yell What in a Crowded Theater?: In June, Sasha Aleksandr McClain Coe, 22, was charged with reckless endangerment in Sevierville, Tenn., after setting off a string of firecrackers in a theater during the movie "The Patriot." The 78 panicked patrons struggled angrily to get out the doors but once outside, they surrounded Coe and held him for the police.

-- Man Bites Dog: Richard Nelson, 40, fleeing on foot after being stopped in a stolen car, found his arm in the grip of Bear, a Canton, Ohio, police dog, and decided to retaliate by biting the dog on the nose to get it to loosen its grip. Instead, Nelson's bite caused Bear to tighten its jaw, so hard in fact that one of Bear's teeth broke off in Nelson's arm and had to be surgically removed.

John Roberts (executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, commenting in the Chicago Sun-Times on the ACLU's support for the speech rights of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which is being sued by a Massachusetts couple as having inspired a pedophile to rape their son): "My wife's an early-childhood educator. (Because of the ACLU's position) I was expecting to find my clothes out on the lawn when I got home."

Innocent Middle-Named Waynes? In July, CBS News and three newspapers jointly offered to underwrite DNA testing of an already-executed man to determine whether, for the first known instance in U.S. history, the judicial system had put an innocent man to death. The subject of the test would be the Perry, Ga., man convicted on conflicting evidence of a 1981 rape-murder and executed in 1996, and who made News of the Weird because of his name: Ellis Wayne Felker. Also, in August, Texas Gov. George W. Bush issued a pardon to convicted rapist Roy Wayne Criner (the victim was also murdered, but Criner was charged only with the rape) because his DNA did not match that found on the victim, as reported in News of the Weird in July 2000.

Traffic patrol officers often find that a suspected drunk driver will try to switch seats with a passenger after a stop, before the officer can reach the car. However, that strategy succeeds only if the passenger is more sober than the driver. In July, police in Lake City, Tenn., witnessed a driver-passenger switch, but it did not matter because both failed sobriety tests (along with the two people in the back seat). And in August, Hackensack, N.J., police stopped a weaving van to discover an open bottle of Scotch, an impaired 20-year-old man in the driver's seat, and an impaired 22-year-old man sitting in his lap; apparently, the two men got stuck trying to execute the seat switch.

A female placekicker who was cut from the Duke University football team won $2 million when a jury attributed her release primarily to her gender, despite evidence that several competitors were better kickers. Two prison guards were indicted for smuggling out sperm belonging to organized-crime inmates, who recently became fathers despite their long incarcerations (White Deer, Pa.). The Tampa Bay Devil Rays apologized to members of a local high school band, who were to play the national anthem on the last day of the season, for requiring them to buy tickets to get into the ballpark. A 54-year-old ex-Marine stabbed his new son-in-law (Air Force) during a heated discussion of which military service is best (Linwood Township, Minn.).

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

-- Legitimate Chinese cricket-fight promoters once again staged their national championship matches in Beijing in October despite fears from their ranks that illegal gambling was ruining their "sport" that has endured for 1,000 years, according to a New York Times dispatch. Thousands of men descend on farmers in Shandong province each summer, seeking crickets of the proper physique and character to endure rough matches inside 8-inch-wide plastic containers. Matches end when one contestant tries to flee or gets tossed around hopelessly by the other.

-- The University of Surrey (Guildford, England) announced in October that it was adding to its curriculum in service-sector management by appointing a professor of airline food. A Surrey official said the school intended to beef up its graduate and undergraduate course offerings in in-flight catering and told The Guardian newspaper that the professor would be appointed from either the field of gastronomy (how food is served) or the field of food science (concentrating, for example, on freshness).

Janet Woods, the acting principal of Strong Vincent High School in Erie, Pa., angry at reporters' questions about a rumored gun incident, allegedly displayed a middle finger and told camera operators to "Shoot this!" (August). And in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Kamol Kaewmora, 50, recipient of the gesture, was arrested and charged with shooting to death the 41-year-old German motorcyclist who had displayed it to him (August). In August, a state court in Lancaster County, Pa., and a federal court in Fayetteville, Ark., dismissed criminal charges against people who had made the gesture, and the Arkansas judge in fact ruled the defendant's right to flip the bird at a state trooper was protected by the U.S. Constitution.

-- Newcastle, England, body piercer Lorna Larson accidentally hit a vein while working on the tongue of Gemma Danielson, 18, in July and by the time Danielson got to the hospital, she had lost four pints of blood. Said Danielson, "(Doctors) said they had never seen anything like it." Larson said she was mortified: "That's the last tongue I do."

-- Joseph Pileggi, 69, filed a lawsuit in Akron, Ohio, in July seeking money damages over his 1997 marriage to Carli Buchanan, 61. He claims he intended to marry not Buchanan, but his long-time girlfriend, who is Buchanan's mother, Ducile Palermo, 83. He claimed that he did not realize until May 1999 that the "wrong" woman's name was on the license (despite Buchanan's insistence that Pileggi consummated the marriage with her on the wedding night).

-- Latest Highway Truck Spills: 26 alligator carcasses, weighing nearly 5 tons (headed for a processing plant near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., October); U.S. Army Multiple Launch rockets (from a military truck, adjacent to an elementary school near Hugo, Okla., August); and a load of completed Advanced Placement tests (being taken from a New York City testing center to Educational Testing Service in New Jersey, of which 84 were never recovered, thus hindering those students' college careers, May).

-- In August, Davidson, N.C., police officer Scott Searcy asked to search a woman's car for drugs, giving as his legally required basis ("reasonable suspicion") solely the fact that on the front seat was a copy of the weekly newspaper Creative Loafing, whose cover story on local drug enforcement was illustrated by a photo of a marijuana plant. Said Assistant Chief Butch Parker, "(Searcy) thinks he had reasonable suspicion, and we do, too." (The woman consented to the search, and nothing illegal was found.)

-- In July, Rev. Nelson W. Koscheski, a delegate from Dallas to the national Episcopal convention in Denver, was seen scattering salt under the tables of openly gay and lesbian delegates. According to some authorities, tossing the salt is a symbolic gesture to rid the premises of Satan. After some participants expressed their outrage, Rev. Koscheski resigned as a delegate.

-- Lisa Alger of Roy, Wash., had to take her claim all the way to state judge Paul Treyz in June, but she finally got a dismissal of one of the municipal citations against her for housing an unlicensed cat named "Patches." Reason: "Patches" is a stuffed animal. (The local Humane Society monitors for violations of licensing law by knocking on doors and asking kids the names of their pets, so it can check license lists. When Alger's 7-year-old son mentioned the highly regarded "Patches," and the Humane Society found no license for it, it wrote Alger up without investigating.)

Jail guards employed by the Nova Scotia government had their "privilege" of being able to eat free in the inmates' dining room taken away in July because of budget cuts and must now pay $2.50 to get their prison meal. And Brazilian multimillionaire Jair Coelho, 68, was arrested in August and locked up before trial; he had made a fortune on the country's jail contracts, supplying nearly inedible food, but the government proved that he got the contracts through bribery, and thus he must now eat his own food.

News of the Weird mentioned in 1999 that the Safety Tanteisha detective agency in Osaka, Japan, was selling about 200 aerosol spray kits a month (at $400 each) to help women find out whether their men are having affairs, by detecting the presence of fresh semen on their underwear. In July 2000, according to a Phoenix New Times report, a venerable local medical lab has introduced Forensex, which charges spouses and lovers from $350 up to test partners' underwear for semen (hers, to see if sperm is present; his, to see if he has ejaculated at inappropriate times).

In August, a 20-year-old man who worked at a landscaping business in Phoenix proposed to his girlfriend (she accepted), took her to the worksite, turned on a woodchipper, climbed in, and tried to pull her in, too. He was killed, but she escaped. Also in August, the style and etiquette columnist for The Times of London was found dead, clad only in a shirt, beneath his fourth-floor apartment window, but colleagues said the suicide scenario was too tacky for the man. Said one friend, "(H)e'd have wanted to be really dressed appropriately." Said the coroner, "It would be likely that he would write a letter to explain, and no doubt on the Smythson's notepaper that was found in the (apartment)."

The new head of a Hudson River environmental organization, on a well-publicized maiden kayaking voyage around New York City, discovered a floating corpse. A Zambian man was granted a divorce after testimony that his wife routinely locked him in the bedroom at night to stop his philandering (Lusaka, Zambia). Police said two burglary suspects, left alone briefly in a stationhouse storage/interview room, stole some Twizzlers and the change from the office coffee fund box (Albuquerque). Police-dog trainee Ben, let out of a squad car on a rural road to relieve himself, picked up the scent of a nearby, 125-plant marijuana field (Perkins Township, Maine).

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