-- The technology sector of the economy is in such a precarious state, according to a January story in U.S. News & World Report, that "Imara," a 44-year-old "business intuitive" with an MBA, has attracted a large following among entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (including 30 paying clients) who seek her investment and business-development advice that she says she acquires by extrasensory perception. "In these troubled times," said an Imara associate, "people are looking for a different insight that gives them a competitive advantage." Said Imara: "(C)ompanies don't have time to do market research studies, which can take months. I can give them feedback in an hour."

-- Scheduled for unveiling in May at Britain's National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, is a World War I commemorative statue to honor England's 306 combat deserters. According to the Arboretum's director, "(T)here has been a sea change in attitude, towards more understanding" of the plight of cowards and others who abandoned their comrades, especially for about 100 teen-agers whose principal sin was to run away after fearing they would be punished for lying about their ages in order to enlist. The director said some veterans' organizations support the memorial.

William R. Macera was re-elected mayor of Johnston, R.I., despite being found in October in a car that police said heavily reeked of marijuana smoke; he narrowly edged out write-in candidate Louis L. Vinagro Jr., who had been arrested hours before the election for threatening a state official inspecting his waste-hauling business. And Bobby Banks, 20, was elected to the New Bern, N.C., soil conservation board but was then arrested for having illegally registered to vote as a convicted felon. And in races that ended in ties in Delhi, Minn. (mayor), Fife Lake, Mich. (township supervisor), Louisville, Neb. (city council), and Hickman, Ky. (school board), things were settled by, respectively, a draw of cards, a draw from a hat, a draw of cards and a coin toss.

-- In November, Ms. Lucia Love won San Francisco's sixth annual Faux Queen Pageant, the world's only contest for drag queens who had the misfortune to be biological females and thus not technically qualified to be drag queens (males dressed as campy females). Said Love (of her fondness for impersonating female impersonators), "Drag queens would be nowhere without women."

-- Three Mexican migrant workers told reporters in November that the owner of Poncho's Cantina in Auburn, Maine, forbade them from speaking Spanish at their table while they were dining on Tex-Mex food and said they were considering a complaint to the state Human Rights Commission.

-- Sean Dix has been angry at CNN since 1996, when a reporter was critical of his dental-floss-holder invention (a product review that probably caused Dix's then-sprouting sales to fall off). In the ensuing four years, Dix has reportedly sent 6,000 faxes to Ted Turner and CNN protesting the televised report. In an April 2000 fax (according to a December report in the Village Voice), Dix intimated that he would kill Turner, which he prefaced this way: "It is at this point that I have come to the end of my attempts to deal with you in a rational manner (after 6,000 faxes)."

-- In December, Angela L. Pearn, 30, of Akron, Ohio, won her lawsuit that had charged DaimlerChrysler and Rolling Acres Dodge with fraud for concealing that the car they sold her had a history of trouble and was officially a "lemon" under state law. An elated Pearn told reporters afterward, curiously: "Now people will know that not all car dealers are honest."

-- Jennifer Garves, 22, and her mother, Karen Krause, 43, were charged in Waupun, Wis., with child neglect and concealing a corpse for what police say was a scheme last June to deflect attention from the death by blunt trauma to Garves' 2-day-old boy. According to police, the women took the baby's body to a restaurant, dined while pretending the boy was still alive, then expressed alarm that he had suddenly stopped breathing. Hospital and restaurant employees later expressed their suspicions to police, and after an investigation, the women were arrested in December.

-- To help the Netherlands' meat-exporting business (already No. 3 in the world), but recognizing the country's small land area (half the size of South Carolina), Agriculture Minister Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst recently endorsed a think tank's proposal to build a six-story "agropark" of pig pens, chicken coops and salmon pools. An Animal Protection Society spokesperson likened the building to a concentration camp for animals, but proponents said the facility would be less animal-dense than some farms are now. Said one developer, "If people can live in apartment buildings, so can pigs."

-- Three (possibly four) of the 88 victims of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 in January 2000 led secret (separate) sex lives in Mexico or Guatemala, according to federal lawsuits filed in San Francisco by reputable U.S. attorneys who seek compensation for the men's alleged offspring. However, according to a San Francisco Chronicle investigation in November, foreign mourners (typically a "great-aunt") often run scams, producing "evidence" that a dead man had a clandestine lover and had fathered a child, that the lover had also died tragically, and that the "great-aunt" thus deserves a major payout (in this case, from Alaska Airlines and Boeing). (In one claim, the alleged mother was a flamboyant Mexican Zapatista rebel, killed in combat in 1994.)

Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, 43, was arrested in Great Falls, Mont., in December and charged with killing a 10-year-old boy in 1996, and because of notes he made and a psychiatric evaluation, police believe he may have used parts of the body in meat casseroles. And in December, in the Netherlands town of Best, two men were sentenced to 12 months in jail for conducting a duel with pistols, over a woman. And in November, accountant Gnanasuravi Raveendran, 51, told a UK Regional Press reporter in Bexley, England, that his brother had just suffered an attack of epilepsy shortly after trying to prune Raveendran's allegedly "cursed" hedge, following fatal attempts to prune it by his sister in 1997 and his brother-in-law in 2000.

Seven soldiers from Fort Carson, Colo., were arrested in December, quickly caught after allegedly robbing a McDonald's, cleaning out the cash registers of $400; reportedly, they told police they had spent hours meticulously plotting the crime (but had netted less than $60 a man). Another crime seemingly less remunerative than honest work took place in Springfield Township, Ohio, in December, as three men were charged with stealing 2,000 items from a Marc's store, items which police said the men were trying to resell from the basement of a home. However, the goods were mostly small-ticket items (retailing for as little as 39 cents each, with an average price of $4.12), which must still be discounted to move quickly, and reselling that much merchandise would require dozens of man-hours.

Files stolen from a police internal affairs investigation turned up in a Dumpster in back of a Dunkin' Donuts shop (Baltimore). A 17-year-old girl, who suffered disfigurement and mental impairment six years ago when she was injured while pushing her then-7-year-old friend from the path of a speeding 18-wheeler, sued the friend for nearly $4 million (U.S.) (Hamilton, Ontario). A 27-year-old blind man was issued a permit to carry a gun, which he says he needs because blind people are vulnerable to robberies (Fargo, N.D.). Show business people gave out awards to themselves in 564 ceremonies last year (4,025 "bests"), up 65 percent from 1999.

-- 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/.)