-- In December, NBC News, citing Pentagon and intelligence sources, reported that thousands of Sony PlayStation 2s may have been purchased by Iraqi sources recently, to capitalize on the device's powerful computer processor and video cards, possibly to use in connection with weapons systems. One expert told the World Net Daily news service that an integrated bundle of 12 to 15 PlayStation 2s could provide enough power to control a chemical-weapons-delivering Iraqi aircraft. (A Sony spokesperson said it was unlikely anyone could buy thousands of units.) And among similarly alarming, everyday products described in an October New York Times Magazine report were the 2001 Cadillac Deville (whose sophisticated night-vision system is potentially useful for tanks) and automobile airbags (whose compact explosive charge might be useful to terrorists).

-- In December, CNN founder Ted Turner offered to donate $35 million to cover the shortfall in U.S. dues to the United Nations that Congress is so far unwilling to pay. Two months earlier, however, to show his appreciation to the three local fire departments whose workers had fought summer blazes on his ranch near Gordon, Neb., Turner could only manage donations totaling $3,500.

Al Gore (presumably, the same one who ran for president) was elected by write-in votes as director of the Marion County (Ore.) Soil and Water Conservation board (but was disqualified because he owns no land in the district). And in Hartford, Conn., Terrell Bush beat out Johnny Gore in November voting to become homecoming king of Weaver High School.

-- Child-protection officials removed a 6-year-old boy from the home of his 32-year-old mother in Champaign, Ill., in December after they concluded that she had forcibly breastfed him until just recently. The mother defended her "parenting philosophy," telling the Chicago Tribune that society was too uptight about breastfeeding and denied that she coerced him.

-- London's Observer newspaper reported in November an increasing number of artificial inseminations in which a woman is impregnated with sperm from her husband's father, in order to improve the chances of continuing the genetic line when her partner's own sperm won't work. Two Japanese physicians told The Washington Post in December that they, too, see the practice increasing: "Japanese people put strong importance on the bloodstream. We are a homogeneous people."

-- In July in Tucson, Ariz., Corey Viramontes, 15, pled guilty to murder and faces up to 22 years in prison for viciously stabbing a service station supervisor to death during a robbery. Corey has three brothers: Robert, 21, is serving life in prison for beating a neighbor to death with a baseball bat; Anthony, 22, will be sentenced in January (possibly to death) for beating a man to death for eating his pizza; and Samuel, 18, is already serving a life sentence for his role in bludgeoning the pizza-eater. The boys' records include other frequently vicious beatings. As an Arizona Daily Star writer put it, "Victims of the Viramontes brothers do not die easily."

-- In Chicago in November, Marcus Henderson, 22, was charged with kidnapping and other crimes after he took his 68-year-old grandmother at gunpoint to an ATM and forced her to withdraw money for him. Police said that when they later arrived at the grandmother's apartment, Henderson held the woman in front of him as a shield and opened fire, hitting one officer before being captured.

-- In March, Nathan King, 12, of Helena, Mont., made News of the Weird by surviving a lunge for a football that resulted in his falling on the point of a pencil, which penetrated his heart; if anyone had removed the pencil before he reached the hospital, he would have died almost instantly. Then, in October, Ms. Destiny Lopez, age 6, survived the same fate when she tripped on the way to her first-grade teacher's desk and fell on her pencil; her teacher talked calmly to her until paramedics arrived, and surgeons later removed the pencil, which had penetrated 3 inches into her heart.

-- News of the Weird has reported over the years on prisoners' sometimes-prodigious aptitudes for safekeeping valuables in their rectums. A man arrested on drug charges in Amarillo, Texas, in November 2000 allegedly was rectally housing 80 $100 bills (along with two $50s and money orders totaling $4,200), easily beating the record of $2,000 kept by a Florida State Prison inmate in 1991 (though that man also had six handcuff keys, seven hacksaw blades and 34 razor blades in a pouch in his rectum).

Michael H. Cautela, 39, was sentenced to 300 hours' community service in Columbus, Ohio, in December, specifically targeted to cleaning restrooms and zoo cages, for two counts of assaulting women by spraying them with a mixture of salad oil and urine. (When the judge asked why, Cautela said, "I just like to see ladies with oil on them." But, said the judge, "This had urine in it." Cautela held firm: "It was mostly oil.") And in December in Orlando, Fla., Joseph Edward Nichols, 29, was sentenced to five years in jail after a no-contest plea to squirting as many as 11 people with a water pistol containing his semen.

Charged with murder, Edgefield County, S.C., October: Steven Wayne Bowman. Charged with murder, Tucson, Ariz., November: Bryan Wayne Padd. Charged with murder, Sequoyah County, Okla., October: Jeffrey Wayne Leaf. Now embroiled in a marital-estate fight while on death row for murder: Scott Wayne Blystone (who is housed at the State Correctional Institution in Waynesburg, Pa.). Testified against his former partner, Tavares, Fla., October: convicted murderer Terry Wayne Johnson. And in a double-suicide pact in October at the jail in San Marcos, Texas, accused murderer Kenny Wayne Lockwood (who made News of the Weird in July 2000) was successful, but accused child molester Bradley Wayne Dixon survived.

Highway Death Toll: A 22-year-old man died of massive head injuries after jumping reflexively out of an open convertible to avoid a cigarette butt flicked by the driver (Virginia Beach, Va., October). A 37-year-old motorist was killed when another driver hit a piece of debris on the road, launching it through the victim's windshield and into his chest (Fort Worth, Texas, October). A 29-year-old woman was fatally run over by a street-sweeping machine (Washington, D.C., September)

A judge granted John Turner a divorce after a 38-year union, persuaded by testimony that Mrs. Turner compulsively rearranged their furniture every single day they were married (Thornaby-on-Tees, England). The man claiming the world's longest fingernails (47 inches) announced he wanted to sell them to a museum for $200,000 (Pune, India). A 20-year-old hotel parking attendant joyriding in a guest's Ferrari 355 GTS ($175,000) totaled it into a palm tree (Dana Point, Calif.). A federal judge rejected, with a decision in poetic verse, a prisoner's lawsuit against Penthouse magazine for fraud in overpromising how revealing its recent nude pictorial of Paula Jones would be (Austin, Texas).

(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 debut CD from the Thai Elephant Orchestra (Lampang, Thailand) was scheduled for December release, featuring six pachyderm prodigies playing crude versions of traditional instruments (drum, gong, bass, xylophone) and recorded intact, without overdubbing, to create music that (in the words of a New York Times writer) "strike(s) some Western listeners as haunting, others as monotonous." The CD's American producers, pointing to much academic research on elephants' natural musical abilities, said they plan a second album ("easy-listening," engineered, they said, to make it more accessible to a wider audience).

-- In November, federal drug officials busted what one agent called "the world's largest LSD lab," run from an abandoned missile site near Wamego, Kan. Indicted were two educated establishmentarians as the alleged principals: William L. Pickard Jr., 55, deputy director of a University of California Drug Policy Analysis program (and an expert on the illegal drug trade in Russia and a vegetarian, nonsmoking, marathon runner with a master's degree in public policy from Harvard) and Clyde Apperson, 45, a Silicon Valley computer consultant. Pickard obtained personal bail recommendations from the San Francisco district attorney and from a British lord.

The leader of the organized crime family that allegedly controls prostitution in part of southern California (nine of whose members were arrested in October in Los Angeles): Mr. Hung T. Dong. Two University of Nebraska dentistry professors profiled in an October Lincoln Journal Star report: Drs. Jeffrey Payne and Randy Toothaker. Arrested in September for threatening an insufficiently pious judge in Kenner, La.: Mr. Allah M. God Allah. The participants in a police chase in Jay, Okla., in July: Officer Tracy Sixkiller, arresting Russell Hogshooter and Belinda Chewey. A Clover, S.C., planning commissioner charged in October with lewd behavior toward a child: Mr. Rusty Cockman.

-- Federal investigators in November charged Lake Forest, Ill., physician Krishnaswami Sriram with Medicare fraud, based on records indicating that at least twice Sriram worked 70-hour days and once saw 187 patients in a single day, 131 of them in house calls. Records also showed, according to prosecutors, that he saw 32 patients subsequent to their dates of death and 49 patients one day in January 1999 while the city was virtually closed by a blizzard.

-- Engineer Masaaki Fukumoto, 36, of the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo, announced in October that he had developed a prototype of a wireless telephone worn as a wristband and functioning via a device that converts audio signals into vibrations. Incoming calls cause the wrist to vibrate, and the wearer engages the phone by touching the thumb to the index finger. Speaking requires holding the wristband close to the mouth, and listening involves transferring the audio signal to the eardrum, which is done by the user's sticking his finger in his ear.

-- USA Today reported in September on New Zealander Geoff Marsland's new CD consisting of 64 minutes of lawn mower noise, designed for those wishing to retaliate against annoying neighbors. Previously, Marsland released 64 minutes' worth of a crying baby, for couples trying to talk themselves out of becoming parents.

-- Brazil's Catholic Church issued $650,000 worth of "shares" on the Rio de Janeiro stock exchange in September, aimed at institutional investors who want to contribute to the church's social programs and who receive, instead of dividends, detailed reports on how their money is being used. More capitalistic is the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kan., which in September registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to make a public offering of shares in an ancillary real estate venture, which will start by developing land adjacent to the church.

-- Massachusetts inmate Frederick Ford, serving eight years for paying a hit man $11,000 in 1999 to kill two former associates (and convicted after the "hit man" turned out to be an undercover federal agent), petitioned a court in Boston in September to have the money returned to him, since the killings were never carried out.

-- In October, Ohio inmate Donald Harmon filed a $500,000 lawsuit against his former attorney Martin Emrich, whom Harmon says was supposed to bribe a judge with $10,000 of Harmon's money to get a favorable sentence; Harmon, however, wound up with a sentence almost double what he expected and now complains that he didn't get his money's worth from the bribe.

In December, a man in Kazakhstan turned up alive at his own funeral after surviving a makeshift burial by friends in a shallow grave after he appeared to be electrocuted on power lines. And in October, Ben Holmes, 48, missing and declared dead in 1988, was shot by his ex-wife in Youngstown, Ohio, when he dropped in on her after a 20-year absence to claim half of her furniture.

News of the Weird has kept track over the years of the peril faced by insufficiently dowried wives in India and Bangladesh, noting burgeoning murder rates in 1994 and 2000, and noting in 1999 the preference for sulfuric acid attacks as the way Bangladesh husbands (and their mothers) deal with such wives. A December 2000 New York Times dispatch from Bangalore, India, reported that the new weapon of choice in mother-in-law attacks on wives is kerosene and that hospital burn wards are filled with "thousands" of grotesquely disfigured wives whose primary sin was either to bring too paltry a net worth to the marriage or to underperform household chores.

In October, Dee Blyth reported a burglary of her home in Chadwell Heath, Essex, England, in which thieves had helped themselves to what they thought was her stash of cocaine ("charlie" in local slang), leaving behind the distinctive residue of cocaine "lines" on a table after lifting several electronic appliances and jewelry worth about $3,500. However, as Blyth told police and reporters, gleefully, the container of powder on her mantle (labeled "Newfoundland Charlie") was not a coke stash but was an urn containing the ashes of her late dog, whose name the label bore.

A 26-year-old soldier, going AWOL to have sex with a 15-year-old girl he had met on the Internet, lived in the girl's bedroom for nearly a month before her parents found out (Mount Vernon, Ohio). Among the for-credit curriculum now in Oberlin College's Experimental College is a course on the "life and times" of Drew Barrymore. A baby was "born" in the snowy debris of an auto collision, healthy except for a skinned knee, rescued by a paramedic who found it attached by its umbilical cord after the pregnant mother's abdomen was fatally sliced in half by the jagged windshield (Louisville, Ky.). Spain, which finished third overall in September's Paralympic Games in Sydney, returned some medals after an investigation revealed that 14 of its 200 participating athletes were not at all disabled. [Louisville Courier-Journal-AP, 12-16-00] [Cleveland Plain Dealer, 12-3-00]

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

-- In November, U.S. marshals in Detroit confiscated the belongings of Marie Antoinette Jackson-Randolph, a former high-society, day-care chain owner, who is now in prison for scamming the government out of $13.5 million in meal money for underprivileged children she allegedly fed at her centers. Among her "estate": 100 pieces of Baccarat, Waterford and Lalique crystal, 911 purses, 606 pairs of shoes, 165 pairs of boots, a roomful (floor to ceiling) of costume jewelry, and various fur and skin garments (leopard, coyote, mink, fox, sable, chinchilla, snake, lynx, rabbit, lamb, beaver, weasel and raccoon, in a variety of colors). (Said the owner of the company hired to sell the furs: "I don't know whether she hated animals or loved them. It's hard to tell.")

-- According to a December Wall Street Journal report, Commodity Futures Trading Commission judge Bruce Levine has heard nearly 180 cases of alleged broker fraud against investors (who bet on future prices of beef, soybeans, foreign currencies, etc.) in his eight years on the job, yet has ruled against the investor every single time that he was called on to render a decision. (Some cases were settled privately, but even then, according to some parties, Judge Levine often pressured the investor to accept a tiny percentage of his original claim.) The other CFTC judge decides for investors about half the time.

From Susan Smith, a professor of health and safety sciences, University of Tennessee (July): People who use sign language have up to five times greater risk of hand and wrist injuries than people who don't use sign language. From zoologists at the University of Kerala (India), writing in Current Science (July): After eight impotent gerbils had alcohol injected into their eyes to blind them, five of them began to copulate (possibly due to the release of melatonin).

-- An October New York Times dispatch from India highlighted the growing problem of intra-family frauds in which one member will claim a living relative's land or wealth by swearing to the government that the relative is dead. An advocacy group, the Association of Dead People, helps aggrieved citizens figure out just how to prove that they are indeed alive, which can be a difficult concept for India's bargelike bureaucracies to accept. The association's founder said he remained officially dead even after he ran for office, filed lawsuits and got arrested just to get his name on public records.

-- Protests: California environmental activist Dona Nieto ("La Tigresa") appeared topless at several logging sites in Humboldt and Mendocino counties in October in a demonstration ("Striptease for the Trees," featuring "nudist guerrilla poetry") to save giant redwood trees; loggers' reactions ranged from embarrassment to a defensive recital of Bible verses. And in October, when three neighborhood planning officials in the village of Barlestone, England, arrived at the house of Brian Statham to supervise the council-ordered clearing of his yard, Statham jumped in his forklift and systematically picked up the three men's cars and set them down on their sides.

-- In October, an appeals court in San Francisco became the first to test whether a relationship amounted to "dating" under California's new domestic-violence legislation that permits victims to collect judgments even if they aren't a cohabiting couple. The rejector, Joyce Oriola (who said she was stalked by Adam Thaler after she refused to go out with him), had to claim the couple were actually dating in order to qualify her for money damages. Thaler, the heartsick rejectee, logically had to claim that the two were just friends. (The court ruled they were not dating.)

-- After 100 employees took ill (dizziness and nausea) at the National Pen Corp. offices in Rancho Bernardo, Calif., in September (with 24 being sent to the hospital), white-suited hazardous-materials crews went over the building from top to bottom, looking for gas and chemical leaks, among other possibilities. The official cause, determined the next day by the San Diego Fire Department, was an excess of urinal cakes in a third-floor men's room.

-- In October, the prosecutor in a rape case in Lewis County, Wash., said he was thinking of subpoenaing Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit (via his Earthly channeler, spiritualist J.Z. Knight), who reportedly "heard" the defendants confess to the crime during a session at Knight's retreat in Yelm, Wash. However, Knight then told reporters that she had been "in a trance" during the session and therefore could not recall what the defendants and Ramtha had talked about.

-- In October, David B. Smith, the lawyer who formerly represented North Carolina death-row inmate Russell Tucker, admitted that he had sabotaged an earlier appeal because he had come to believe Tucker was guilty and deserved to die. (Tucker's execution date has been postponed, anyway, on other grounds.)

Wayne A. Louden was profiled in the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle in September for his history of at least 37 traffic collisions in the last 10 years (23 of them serious, though none of any kind this year); he admits to some problems (bad vision, diabetes, depression). And in July in Ponta, Texas, Charles and Jennifer Smith and their three preschoolers purchased a new Dodge Intrepid, which was totaled in a collision the next day; on Aug. 11, fire destroyed their trailer home; then Jennifer drove over the family dog, whose leg is now in a cast; and in September, after the community banded together to get the Smiths a new trailer home, a storm totaled that one, too.

News of the Weird has reported several times on husbands or wives who were victims of murder attempts by their spouses, yet who quickly forgave and asked the judge to forget the whole thing. In October 2000 in Denver, Tom Mason, 52, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for hiring a hit man in 1998 (really an undercover cop) to stage a fatal truck-crash murder of his wife (he had bought her a Hyundai Excel to reduce her chance of survival); the wife, who divorced Mason after that, remarried him in April 2000 and begged the judge not to send him to prison.

A 28-year-old man was shot to death by his first cousin during a dispute over how to paint the floor at a construction site (Banner, Ky., October). And one man was shot to death and his killer then beaten to death by relatives and in-laws at a Labor Day barbecue, all because of a request by one of the relatives that another man move his car (Marshall, Texas, September). And a 30-year-old man was shot to death at a bar by a fan of race car driver Dale Earnhart who was angry that the victim was wearing another driver's (Jeff Gordon) cap (Spencer, Ind., October).

Five police drug-squad members were reassigned pending allegations that they had searched a suspect's rectum, said a police spokeswoman, "manually and possibly with a pair of pliers" (New Orleans). A 9-year-old boy was charged with making more than 90 prank phone calls to 911 in one evening (Columbia, Tenn.). Mr. Derby Ray Herrick allegedly robbed a Firstar Bank, went home, found his apartment on fire (burning cigarette), and was identified that night by firefighters and bystanders after bank camera photos were released (Des Moines, Iowa). The first of a series of church-approved comic books on the life of Pope John Paul II was published, featuring little Karol Wojtyla skiing (yelling, "Outta my way!") and playing soccer (Rome).

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