-- Doctors in England are under criticism, according to a November report in Canada's National Post, for having performed a leg-stretching surgery on Emma Richards, 16, apparently only for the purpose of making her happier about her height. She had aspired to be a flight attendant (minimum height, 5-foot-3) but had stopped growing at 4-foot-9. Surgeons fractured her femurs and inserted pins to gradually separate the pieces so that bone material would grow internally to fuse the pieces back together. (In the 10 months since the operation, she has grown five inches but also has endured a bad infection and two unintentional fractures.)

-- The Netherlands legalized prostitution in October (before that, it was merely tolerated), but also began regulating it as any other business. For example, among the workplace safety regulations applied to brothels: a well-lighted premises, the banning of carpets (too hard to clean), and separate showers and changing rooms for males and females. Also, prostitutes, like other "professionals," are required to register for consumer-protection purposes with local chambers of commerce, which routinely make such lists available to the public (which is not quite the same as having a public list of, say, plumbers).

In September, engineers reported that the mecca of Brazilian "futbol," Maracana stadium, is corroding in places because so many fans, unwilling to miss a few minutes' action by queuing up at the restrooms, relieve themselves on the terraces. Also in a September international incident, Macedonian soldiers captured a very modest Albanian border officer who had wandered across the line; he said Macedonia-side trees provided better cover to answer nature's call than the sparse vegetation on his own side. Also in September, a 35-year-old man was convicted by a Nara, Japan, court for reaching into the next stall at a public restroom, which was occupied, maneuvering a wire and cup contraption, and scooping out freshly deposited urine, which he told the judge he needed for a skin condition.

-- Critics of China's one-child policy say it has produced the country's most overindulged generation ever, a symptom of which is the Jin Duoba camp in Shanghai, famous for its tough-love regimen for overweight kids. According to an October story in the Chicago Sun-Times, the camp is modeled after military training, including requiring kids to crawl on their bellies while fake bullets fly overhead.

-- In September, The New York Times reported on a rhinoplasty fad among upscale Iranian women. Since Islam requires almost every part of women's bodies to be covered in public, getting a nose job has become virtually the only way in which Iran's conspicuous consumers can effectively avail themselves of plastic surgery. According to the Times, even the post-surgical bandages are seen as indicators of wealth.

-- Rome hairdresser Vittorio Giunta has created a stir this year by defiantly keeping his salon open past the decades-old, mandated closing time of 7 p.m., which he does sometimes in order to offer his customers haircuts during a full moon, which some believe is part of the same superstition by which crops grow faster during a full moon. According to a June New York Times report, the hours of operation of hairdressers and dozens of other artisans are rigidly controlled, which opponents say limits competition and proponents say allows Italians the luxury of not having to work so hard.

-- Full-Birth Abortion: Officials in a village near Wuhan, China, allegedly drowned a just-born baby in front of its parents in August for the parents' grossly violating the country's one-child policy. It was actually the couple's fourth child, and officials had earlier injected the mother with a saline solution to kill the fetus, but the baby was nevertheless born healthy. The Beijing government's official position is that the village authorities overstepped their bounds.

-- Wilton Rabon told reporters in Seattle in September that he had no intention of dropping his seven-year-long appeal (that would be 49 in canine years) to get his Lhasa apso dog back. The dog, named Word, was declared vicious and impounded on "death row" in May 1993, but the matter has been tied up in court since then, with Rabon visiting Word's pen periodically yet unwilling to accept a compromise (exiling Word to faraway, but wide-open, spaces).

-- Hard Times for Gay Dogs: In October, Jerry Ekandjo, Namibia's home affairs minister, told police academy graduates in the capital city of Windhoek that constables must "eliminate (gays and lesbians) from the face of Namibia" and must also kill any "gay dog" that belonged to a gay or lesbian. (George Stephens Finley, 58, was convicted in June in Ocala, Fla., of killing his male poodle-Yorkie because he thought it was gay; it had become very playful with the other male family dog.)

Joe Brown, a challenger for district attorney, got into a fistfight with the incumbent's brother at a restaurant in Sherman, Texas, the day before the election (lost the fight, won the election). And on the night of the primary election in September, two members of the Florida legislature got into a fistfight at a Miami radio station when one's father called the other's father a drug dealer. And Robert Votava, running for the Rhode Island General Assembly, was arrested the week before the election for throwing nine punches at a state tree-trimmer in his neighborhood (South Kingstown).

News of the Weird reported the January 2000 arrest of Samuel Feldman after a three-year, $8,000 spree of squeezing and smashing packages of bread and cookies in various Bucks County (Pa.)-area supermarkets (and who was finally caught in the act by a hidden camera). Though Feldman argued that he was simply a finicky shopper, Judge David Heckler found him guilty in September and told him to get help for this urge to mutilate bakery products. At a November sentencing hearing, Heckler exploded when informed that Feldman was continuing to deny guilt, but after a lawyer-client consultation, Feldman admitted he had "a problem" and promised that his wife would monitor his supermarket visits.

According to police in Pawtucket, R.I., Eugene Allen, 29, and his brother, Kenneth Bartelson, 35, were caught robbing an apartment's inhabitants in October. They were done in by Allen, who was assigned to be the lookout despite being legally blind; he failed to notice approaching police officers and then mistakenly thought he was talking confidentially to his brother when he was actually talking to a neighbor.

Two cousins clubbed each other in the face with farm tools (including a scythe) in a dispute over cornbread, jelly and chitterlings (Evergreen, Ala.). At a conference, AIDS doctors in Swaziland warned that U.S.-donated condoms were too small for the country's men and would break easily in use. A suicide-attempting woman changed her mind and called 911, but arriving attendants assumed she was already dead and walked out, requiring her to call 911 again to have the attendants sent back inside the house (Shawnee County, Kan.). A 15-year-old girl pleaded guilty to assault for beating up her 18-year-old ex-boyfriend (blackening both eyes) because she was mad that he wouldn't kiss her after their prom last May (Skokie, Ill.).

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

-- A court in Council Bluffs, Iowa, will rule in early December on whether to admit "brain fingerprinting" evidence that might free Terry Harrington, who has been in prison for 22 years for a murder he says he did not commit. Iowa psychiatrist Lawrence Farwell developed the technique, which he says measures brain activity (or inactivity) following attempts to trigger memories; tests on Harrington showed him with no memory of the murder or the crime scene but with memories of attending a rock concert with friends on the same night.

-- High school student Brandi Blackbear filed a federal lawsuit against the school district in Broken Arrow, Okla., in October for suspending her twice during the previous school year, once for her Stephen King-type writing journals and once after the assistant principal implied that Blackbear's Wiccan "curse" actually caused a teacher to become ill. "I, for one," said the Oklahoma director of the American Civil Liberties Union, "would like to see the (evidence) that a 15-year-old girl made a grown man sick by casting a magic spell."

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution database match proved that 5,412 dead Georgians had voted since 1980, with 15,000 more potentials this year. Tom Wesson, an Anglo running for constable in Dallas, lost even though he had given himself an edge by renaming himself "Tomas Eduardo Wesson." Kari Brandenburg, the Albuquerque district attorney, won re-election easily over a man who had sent her a syrupy, flirtatious e-mail message in October but later claimed it was really meant for his wife. To comply with residency requirements, a school board candidate in Miami tried to claim he lived in a 9-by-11-foot storage shed on his father's property, but a judge dropped him from the ballot. And "psychic" Jacqueline Stallone, interviewed before Election Day, said her dogs had told her telepathically that Bush would win the presidency by "200" votes.

-- France's communist party, once serious opponents of capitalism and religion but lately in severe organizational decline, hosted a glamorous fund-raising party in Paris in October with the fashion house Prada (featuring supermodels and other trendy guests), and then a week later staged an art show featuring 30 works portraying a heroic Jesus Christ.

-- The Birch K9 Health & Fitness Centre opened earlier this year in Heywood, England, providing hydrotherapy, whirlpool, treadmill and magnetherapy to dogs under the direction of trainer Dave Burdon, according to an August report in The Washington Post. Despite the club's success in rehabilitating dogs' natural muscles that have weakened through dog owners' indolence, one British newspaper quipped that Birch K9 is the kind of thing that could only happen in America.

-- So important is the vodka industry to the Russian economy that in August, police in Moscow forcibly entered the Krystall (Stolichnaya Vodka) factory, ostensibly to seek tax documents but actually to install an insurgent board of directors to commandeer tax revenues and profits. And so important is the tequila industry to the Mexican economy that earlier this year, federal police moved into the western states that grow agave (the cactus-like plant that is the main ingredient in tequila) to guard the crops; recent agave thefts have sent the tequila price out of range for many Mexicans, from about $11 a bottle to about $33.

-- Prostitutes in Romania's dismal economy have been forced to spruce up their services, according to a June Reuters dispatch from Bucharest, by agreeing to cook and clean up after making house calls. And an exclusive Tokyo club has gone even further: For about $1,000, the customer can visit a brothel decorated as a traditional Japanese man's "home" fantasy, of a beautiful young "wife" who waits on him hand and foot, watches the TV shows he wants to watch, listens to him brag about his day, refrains from mentioning her own problems, cooks him a meal and has sex with him.

-- Latest Survived Impalings: A 22-year-old Spokane, Wash., pizza delivery driver was hit in August by a 2-foot-long piece of rebar that shot through the windshield and penetrated his skull, protruding from the back; he requires extensive rehabilitation. And an 18-year-old University of Southern California student fell out of a second-story apartment window in September and skewered her buttocks on two wrought-iron security bars; four USC football players rushed to help, pushing her body upward to relieve the pressure until paramedics arrived.

-- Christines: A 1982 Chevrolet Citation (faulty wiring) in Winter Haven, Fla., and a 1991 Eagle Talon (ignition came on when the trunk was slammed) in Milton, Ontario, reportedly started up on their own in incidents in August and October, respectively. Firefighters were hosing down the Citation when it mysteriously lurched away from them; the Talon suddenly ran down a bystander (hospitalizing him in serious condition) during a car auction.

News of the Weird has reported cases of severe motherhood envy in 1992 (Texas), 1996 (Alabama) and 1998 (Illinois), when pregnant women were killed and their abdomens slashed open so that the fetuses could be stolen. In September 2000, according to police in Ravenna, Ohio, Michelle Bica killed a pregnant woman and stole her baby, but because police suspected her, Bica shot herself to death several days later. In all four cases, the babies survived.

Retiree Neal Terry, 78, profiled in an October Dallas Morning News story about his "hobby": "I've dedicated my life to irritating people. It's a special gift that I have." "I tell my grandsons, 'You're not going to like everybody you run across, so go ahead and irritate them.'" (Terry insisted that no one has ever gotten really angry at him, even the times he sang the Partridge Family song, "I Think I Love You," over and over at work.)

Troy Carlisle, 28, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in October after being convicted in Brandon, Miss., of forcibly taking the life jacket of a 7-year-old girl and leaving her to drown in a Arkabutla Lake; Carlisle told police, "I was thinking I was gonna die or she was gonna die." And in July, Alvin Latham was charged with second-degree murder after he survived the sinking of a shrimp boat in a storm off of the Louisiana coast; police said Latham stabbed the captain to get the ship's only life vest.

The president of the Caesars Atlantic City casino resigned, seeking treatment for compulsive gambling. A married couple, both with doctorate degrees, shot each other to death in a gunfight while their young daughters were watching TV in another room (Sacramento). Home-invading robbers tied up a family on Halloween night and loaded up their valuables, diligently pausing several times to pass out candy to trick-or-treaters (Westminster, Calif.). Jailers confiscated Derrick Echols' artificial leg after he used it to beat a cellmate with and said they probably wouldn't give it back to him until he is released (Peoria, Ill.).

(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 attorney for alleged San Francisco dog-abuser Steven Maul said in November that Maul only bit the dog in the neck as part of an unorthodox but loving discipline method and that in fact Maul "is very oral" and "has French-kissed his dog." According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Boo, an 80-pound Lab, had darted out into traffic in November (again), and Maul, intending to teach against that, clamped down on Boo's neck in a way he said dogs signal dominance to each other, but did not break the skin. (Researchers have written about bite-training, but the method is currently far out of favor.)

-- In October, Rev. Derek McAleer revealed to his 350 small-town St. Marys (Ga.) United Methodist parishioners that their church had become the recipient of what is believed to be the largest one-time church donation in history: $50 million from the estate of the recently deceased man who founded the local telephone company. Actually, the donor, Warren Bailey, was a long-time church supporter but was also known in town for not having attended services in more than 20 years.

In the Sept. 19 primary in New Ashford, Mass., none of the town's 202 registered voters cast ballots, including the disgusted town clerk, who manned the polls for 14 hours. And a Green Party candidate for the Maine legislature failed to vote for himself in the June primary, leaving him with zero votes and forcing him to return his public financing. And Texas Lt. Gov. Rick Perry sent a fund-raising letter in July that not only shook down lobbyists but asked lobbyists to rank their clients as to how much they could be expected to be shaken down for (from $1,000 to $25,000). And the money flowed so freely at the GOP convention in August that Philadelphia Inquirer reporters discovered an accidentally discarded $5,000 lobbyist's check to a congressman stuck to the bottom of a utility cart outside the hall.

-- The Golden Tower Project, an installation by Seattle artists at this year's Burning Man festival, consisted of 400 jars of urine from other artists, stacked and electroluminescently lighted ("gorgeous," "faintly blue and gold," "warm, kind of like biological stained glass," according to Seattle's The Stranger weekly). (In 1993, News of the Weird reported that New York City artist Todd Alden had asked 400 art collectors worldwide to send him samples of their feces so he could offer them for sale in personalized tins. Said Alden, "Scatology is emerging as an increasingly significant part of artistic inquiry in the 1990s.")

-- News of the Weird has reported on scientists who borrow the jellyfish's "green protein" for medically productive genetic modifications, but Chicago artist Eduardo Kac created controversy in September by proposing to create embryos with the jellyfish's green-light-producing gene just to make visually appealing organisms, such as a glowing rabbit. (Kac's major work so far is "Genesis," a sentence from the Old Testament, translated into Morse Code, transposed onto DNA, inserted into fluorescent bacteria, and lit up when anyone accesses the piece on Kac's Web site.)

-- In a summer contract with the city of Montreal, artist Devora Neumark performed "The Art of Conversation," which consisted of her standing at the entrance to a subway station from noon to 4 p.m. every Tuesday and "conducting spontaneous interchange with interested parties on a variety of topics."

Frontiers of Science

-- A U.S. Forest Service researcher announced in August that her team had discovered the largest living thing ever found, a 24-centuries-old fungus, covering 2,200 acres in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon; DNA testing confirmed that the underground, stringlike structure was all the same organism. And three weeks later near Lake Okeechobee, a University of Florida biologist discovered what he called an "evolutionary relic," a previously unknown, carnivorous, flowering plant that grows entirely underground but by photosynthesis.

-- An August British Broadcasting Corp. documentary, "Brain Story," featured a man whose cranial lobes were surgically severed in order to treat epilepsy and who now is able to do what he calls the "party trick" of drawing different designs, with each hand, at the same time.

-- Japan's Mizuno Corp. has developed a synthetic material for men's underpants that would keep the covered area one Celsius degree cooler than cotton underwear and therefore helpful, for example, to skiers (and, say doctors, to those desiring increased sperm production), according to an August New Scientist report. However, Canadian polyester-mesh underwear manufacturer Stanfield's Ltd. disputed Mizuno's claim of superiority; said a spokesman, "We just haven't got up the guts to measure the temperature of someone's crotch yet."

Thomas Lavery, 56, was indicted in Akron, Ohio, in August on nine counts of roughing up two of his high-achieving, home-schooled daughters when they performed worse in their endeavors than he expected. According to the indictment, when one daughter came in second in the National Spelling Bee, botching "cappelletti," Lavery threatened to kill her and had to be physically restrained. The girl told the Akron Beacon Journal that Lavery would punch them in the head for their failures and that screaming and profanity were common. Lavery complained to the Associated Press that he was "easier on (his kids) than my father was (on me)."

News of the Weird reported in 1999 on the lawsuit by 5,400 descendants of the 18th-century Welsh pirate Robert Edwards, claiming ownership of 77 acres of lower Manhattan (including the World Trade Center and the New York Stock Exchange). In August 2000, four descendants claimed to have found a copy of a 1778 lease for the land, which had been given to Edwards shortly before by a grateful King George, stating that Edwards' heirs would get the land back in 1877. The value of the land now is conservatively estimated at $750 billion, or $140 million per descendant. Courts in South Wales, New York City and Pittsburgh have opened proceedings.

Customs Agent Adventures: Cocaine "mule" Jose Antonio Campos-Cloute was arrested at the Melbourne, Australia, airport, in September after a momentary lapse; as he was filling out the Customs form, he absentmindedly checked the "yes" box on whether he was carrying illicit substances, and that led to a search. And Briton Alison McKinnon was sentenced in August to five years in prison in Turkey for attempting to smuggle six pounds of heroin out, strapped to her chest; she was ready to board a plane home from Istanbul but was designated for searching only because one of her body-piercings set off a metal detector.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn a Californian's drug-possession conviction even though one juror admitted he decided guilt by flipping a coin (which the juror defended by noting that he did two out of three). An Atlantic City casino introduced a row of stationary bicycles rigged with 25-cent slot machines. In separate incidents four days apart in Chicago, two cab drivers accidentally drove off with customers' toddlers sleeping in the back seat and required police help in reuniting the families. Doctors revealed that transplanting part of a woman's ovaries into her arm was successful in growing new eggs, for in vitro fertilization (San Diego).

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