-- The Alberta Ferretti fashion house recently introduced, in New York and London, self-described "gorgeous pieces" made from hamster fur, including a reversible multicolored-fur/camel-leather coat (about $6,000) and a skirt suit ($6,300), a patchwork design in which the hamster pelts appear simply laid side-by-side and end-to-end. The London Ferretti store told The Express newspaper in late October that it had sold 11 of its 12 suit jackets (a size 10 remained).

-- Four weeks after admonishing the government for its treatment of scientist Wen Ho Lee, U.S. District Judge James A. Parker scolded federal prosecutors for demanding too harsh a sentence against a convicted New Mexico perjurer, pointing out that the prosecutors' boss, President Clinton, had asked for leniency for his own false testimony in the Paula Jones case. The New Mexico perjurer, Ruben Renteria Sr., 49, was convicted of lying about consenting to be searched, for which Judge Parker imposed a 15-month sentence rather than the five years the government wanted; President Clinton sought leniency and received no jail sentence but was fined $90,000 and is fighting to keep his Arkansas license to practice law.

Ralph Carlone, 48, was charged with corpse abuse in July for failing to report his parents' deaths (his mother's, two weeks before; his father's, 11 years earlier) and continuing to live with their bodies inside the Akron, Ohio, home he shared with them. And in September, a judge in Phoenix acquitted Frank A. Martinez, 71, of killing his wife in 1987; Martinez had continued to live with her body in their trailer home until 1998, when a suicide attempt brought police, who found the corpse. (Martinez's neighbors had long complained of the smell, but he managed to convince them merely that a dead cat had been buried underneath the home.)

-- Rev. Marvin Munyon of the Family Research Forum (Madison, Wis.) told parents at a September seminar at the Eau Claire Gospel Center how to administer the loving and supportive corporal punishment demanded in the Bible: "You spank them right here on the gluteus maximus, which God made for that purpose." Spanking should begin by age 2, he said, and used properly, it will build self-esteem because it lets children know they are loved.

-- A strippers' club in Hove, East Essex, England, applied for a license variance in September, asking for exemption from the current no-touching-the-dancers rule because it discriminates against customers who are blind, in that they would not have equal opportunity to experience the show unless they could touch. Dancers were said to approve the idea, if limited to bona fide blind people.

-- The Florida Court of Appeals in September turned down lawyer Philip G. Butler's challenge to his bribery conviction. Butler had represented himself at trial and lost, and then claimed on appeal that the reason he lost was that he had failed to inform himself adequately that acting as his own lawyer was foolish.

-- The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced in July that an employee fired for his obsessive belief in the validity of "cold fusion" can sue the employer for "religious" discrimination. As long as an employee has a seriously held conviction that in his own value system he regards as "religious," he is protected under federal law, even though the vast majority of physicists believe "cold fusion" is bogus. The petitioner, Paul A. LaViolette, worked at the U.S. Patent Office, but there was no evidence that he was assisting in the patenting of bogus technologies.

-- "Bus driver" Darius McCollum, 35, was profiled in The New York Times in August after his 19th arrest for impersonating a city transit worker. Said McCollum: "I am not insane. I (just) like the (bus) activity. I like the noise. I like the people who work there." Said one official, "(W)hat this guy does is kind of wacky, but he is very much on the ball." McCollum apparently spends much time on the grounds talking to bus and train employees at all levels and is well-versed in transit procedures and techniques. Said McCollum: "To tell you the truth, I wish they would just (hire me). It would be a lot easier."

-- In August, the New Hampshire Supreme Court OK'd worker compensation payments to a state employee, for "work-related" depression, even though the cause of the depression was merely that she had gotten bad performance reviews. The state appeals board acknowledged that the employee, Gail Sirviris-Allen, had been justifiably cited for inaccurate work and a bad attitude.

Lucrecia Ortuno, 30, was charged in August with injuring her 8-month-old son in a car crash in Houston; according to police reports, she was driving while breastfeeding him. And Kenneth Herron, 40, was charged with manslaughter in August in Little Rock, Ark., after his car crossed the center line and collided with another car; according to police, Herron was driving (with his knees) while preparing his crack cocaine. And a 27-year-old woman was killed when she lost control of her car on I-75 near Atlanta in August; according to witnesses, she was driving while applying makeup.

Three months ago, News of the Weird referred to laws in Alabama, Texas and Georgia (until May, Louisiana was on the list) that banned the sale of products whose primary purpose is to stimulate the genitals. In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of Alabama's law, and in August, the Austin Chronicle reported on how Texas sex shops are coping with that state's law (by legally selling "anatomically correct condom education model" dildos). And at press time, the Augusta (Ga.) Commission had a license-revocation action pending against Lucy's Love Shop for violating that state's version of the law.

Federal grand juror Mark Vincent Hinckley, 37, part of the panel that had just voted secret indictments against an alleged Denver drug dealer, was arrested in August after he went to the dealer's office and attempted to sell him information about the government's case, for $50,000. Hinckley had apparently forgotten some of the evidence that he had just heard: that the government had bugged the alleged dealer's office. Thus, Hinckley's proposition was recorded in full. The dealer's indictment had to be dismissed because of Hinckley's misconduct, but Hinckley himself was indicted a few days later.

In a midday public demonstration, three martial-arts masters, without using their hands, pulled a truck containing 80 people 12 inches with ropes attached only to their penises (Taipei). A divorce-court judge awarded the family home to the two kids (ages 11 and 13), allowing the mother three weeks' visitation a month and the father one week (Victoria, British Columbia). USAirways admitted that it had allowed a 300-pound pig to ride in the first-class aisle on a flight from Philadelphia to Seattle, in the belief that it was a customer's emotional equivalent of a seeing-eye dog. Two female prisoners and their boyfriends were arrested for drug-partying at the South Dakota governor's mansion (during the first family's absence), where the women had work-release jobs on the kitchen staff.

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

-- 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/.)