-- Fraternities at the University of the Philippines and other Filipino campuses stage many of the same activities (such as toga parties) that U.S. "Greeks" do except that some apparently engage in murder and bombings in displays of organizational power, according to a February report in the Far Eastern Economic Review. The prestigious UP has accounted for 11 frat-related homicides (of about 100 nationwide) in the last 10 years, in acts ranging from student executions to gang-type rumbles, and frat brothers now in government and industry allegedly help to shield their organizations from police scrutiny.

-- In a decision published in February, Canada's Tax Court rejected Newfoundland magician Hans Zahn's attempt to claim business losses on his income tax returns, ruling that Zahn's record of losing money for the last 17 years, plus the province's economy and the nature of its far-flung communities, urge the conclusion that no reasonable person would think Newfoundland could support a magician. Zahn said he once earned about $1,200 (USD) a week but started suffering setbacks; for example, the rabbits he used in his act started dying in the frigid Newfoundland winters. "You try to bring world-class entertainment to the regions," lamented Zahn, "and Revenue Canada (the taxing agency) penalizes you for it."

-- Police in Jacksonville, Fla., arrested Robert Eric Denney, 19, for a 1998 murder, and a Florida Times-Union report in March revealed that his DNA is linked to the crime scene. Despite close surveillance, Denney had avoided giving up a DNA sample, three times foiling officers (refusing a glass of water; putting a cigarette butt back in his pocket rather than discarding it; declining to lick-seal an envelope) and smirking that he knew what the officers were trying to do. Shortly after that, while walking around outside his workplace, Denney absentmindedly spit on the ground, and officers scooped up the saliva and rushed it to the lab.

News of the Weird has reported several times on cat "hoarders" who may "collect" felines as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but none had the quantity of Jack Wright of Kingston, Ontario (361, down from his Guinness Book record 689 in 1994). He drew the attention of the Globe and Mail newspaper in January when he fell behind several months in mortgage and utilities payments because of litter, food and other cat expenses (about $100 (USD) a day) and also because, unlike the typical hoarding case, the local Humane Society has no issue with Wright, in that his cats appear properly cared for.

-- In March, Charles Douglas Stephens Jr., was acquitted in Panama City, Fla., after only 15 minutes' deliberation, apparently because the jury accepted his indignant denial that he ever robbed a convenience store. Stephens had pointed out to police that he had served time for murder and that he would probably murder again if the circumstances warranted, but that he could not have robbed that Circle K because he would never have been "stupid enough" to leave witnesses alive.

-- The Federal Communications Commission proposed a $7,000 fine against WZEE-FM, Madison, Wis., in January for violating its "indecency" regulations by playing the raw, unedited version of the Eminem song "The Real Slim Shady" during hours when children could be listening. Station personnel defended themselves by saying that they of course had cued up the milder, edited version of the song but that "static electricity" caused the station's CD player to skip that and jump right to the nasty version.

-- King of Denial: A 68-year-old repeat child molester, charged with impregnating his 13-year-old daughter, explaining himself (in Edmonton, Alberta, in February), said he only "accidentally" had sex with her when she slipped into his bed one night and that the whole thing was "a trap the Devil had set, not something I consented to or something I had control over."

-- In February, Australian ex-soldier Frederick Somerfield, 79, won his appeal and will now receive a military disability pension, based on heart trouble that he said was caused by having drunk too much beer while stationed at remote locations during World War II. In fact, he said, some of the locations were so remote that the only alcoholic beverages available were very cheap brews, which were especially bad on his heart.

-- Lawyer Craig Wormley, explaining his client to reporters in January (the client being the 19-year-old San Jose, Calif., college student Al DeGuzman, in whose home were found 60 explosive devices and four long guns along with a map and tape recording detailing a plan to make a Columbine-like attack on the De Anza College library and cafeteria): DeGuzman merely has "an innocent fascination" with bombs.

In December, according to Albuquerque police, James Sammon skipped out on a tab at Paisano's Italian Restaurant, but his chances for success were not good because he was dining with his two young sons that night and left the 6-year-old behind. And a shoplifting suspect (Home Depot, St. Louis, January) left his 10-month-old son behind as he fled the store's security guards; the baby's mother identified Vernell Parker, 41, as the alleged culprit, and he was found and arrested three days later.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported in December that a 9-year-old boy started up a parked transit bus using a screwdriver and drove it an eighth of a mile in morning rush hour in downtown Quezon City before police overtook him. (He said his father taught him the trick with the screwdriver.) And 2-year-old Harry Fairweather caused a furor last winter in Winsford, England, by regularly setting off retail stores' shoplifting alarms just by passing by the detectors; medical exams have to date turned up no certain answers on how Harry could have such a strong electrical field around his body.

A 43-year-old driver was shot to death in Lynwood, Calif., in January because, stopped at an intersection, he refused to run the unusually long red light despite the fact that there was no other traffic, a reluctance that annoyed the driver behind him, who pulled out a gun and started firing. And a 56-year-old man who lived in unit 712 of a Miami Beach apartment building was shot to death in February, allegedly by the resident in 512 who had once too often endured the overflow bathtub in 712; the resident of 612, who usually mediated the men's disputes, was not home that day.

Norway's Children and Family Minister said her office might introduce legislation establishing minimum weight requirements for professional models. A 36-year-old bride was charged with battery for smashing the groom with the wedding cake during the reception and kicking him after he fell to the floor (Stuart, Fla.). A strip-club customer who volunteered to assist dancer Sana Fey on stage filed a lawsuit after she gripped his head in a leglock and left him with a perhaps-permanent ringing in his ears (Lake Worth, Fla.). A judge mistakenly released a 37-year-old white man, who had been accused of a felony, after confusing him with a black teen-ager accused of a minor ordinance violation (Syracuse, N.Y.).

(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 Butler County, Pa., in March, Tammy Lynn Felbaum, 42, was charged in connection with the death of her sixth husband, James Felbaum, who died from complications of a botched castration, which Tammy said James performed on himself. Tammy (who used to be Tommy Wyda before allegedly castrating himself in 1980 in order to move up in the sex-change-surgery queue at Case Western Reserve medical school) was known in the community as an amateur medical practitioner, allegedly working on animals, and in a previous career as a stripper was known for crushing empty soda cans between her breasts. A crude surgical-consent form, signed by James, was found in the couple's home, but Tammy told police she had nothing to do with the fatal operation and that the form was actually from an earlier castration attempt by James.

-- In February, the British company Travelman, publisher of short fiction, installed three vending machines in London train stations to sell single-sheet, folded-like-a-map collections of poetry, to supply reading material for newspaper-avoiding commuters.

-- In March, responding to what he calls Europe's "delicate problem" of too few taxpayers to support an increasing population of retirees, former tennis great Bjorn Borg urged westerners in a signed, full-page, English-language ad in Sweden's leading financial newspaper Dagens Industri to step up their procreation. The ad, purchased by Borg's clothing company, urged readers to "Get to it" and to "F--- for the Future."

On March 16 in New Plymouth, New Zealand, Stuart Beech, 31, changed his plea and admitted in court that his high DUI blood-alcohol reading might have been caused by the six beers he had drunk; initially, he had pointed out to police that since he does a nightclub act as a fire-breather, it was natural for him to have methyl fuel on his breath (though he has since switched professionally to kerosene). On the same day, halfway around the world in Los Angeles, fire-breathing magician Randall Richman, 32, told the Los Angeles Times he will argue at his upcoming DUI trial that his breath-test reading detected only the lighter fluid he uses in his act (though the police report said he also had bloodshot eyes and could not stand up).

Former Long Island police officer Dominick Steo filed a $45 million lawsuit in federal court in Central Islip, N.Y., in January, charging the police department with ill-advisedly furnishing him a service weapon during a period of depression, three months before he shot himself with it. And Richard L. Garcia, 17, filed a lawsuit in November against the city of Bradenton, Fla., because police let him go with no penalty after stopping him while he was driving drunk. (He crashed a few minutes later, suffering serious injuries.) And burglar Shane Colburn filed a $20,000 (USD) lawsuit in Penrith, Australia, in November, because his victims and their dogs roughed him up when they caught him in the act.

-- A team of researchers from the Netherlands' Delft University of Technology announced in December that after nearly four years of research, it had solved the perplexing problem of how to store and pour draft beer on zero-gravity space stations. The team injects carbon dioxide against a flexible membrane inside the keg, which forces the beer out without commingling the liquid and the gas (as is done in the conventional keg) and provides the additional benefit of ejecting the beer in liquid chunks the size of table tennis balls.

-- In a February dispatch from Tblisi, Georgia, the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported that surgeons at Tblisi's prominent Institute of Aesthetic and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery had successfully replaced a cancer patient's amputated penis with a substitute made from the man's left middle finger and had created a channel inside to allow urine (and semen) to pass.

-- Business is brisk for the Seek Ye First Lingerie shop (Louisburg, N.C.), whose two female Baptist owners appeal to religious women who want to be alluring but not sleazy. According to a January report in the Raleigh News & Observer, the most popular part of the shop is the "Thong Center" rack.

-- Latest Food News: Hormel Foods announced in January that it will sell pork and turkey protein products in the form of a binding substance that General Motors will use to make molds for casting metal parts for cars (thus reducing GM's dependence on chemicals). And among eateries recently in the news: Miami's B.E.D. restaurant, where customers are served not at tables, but on large beds (up to 60 feet by 10 feet, for parties of 10), and New York's Ike, which in its appeal to baby boomers has a Swanson's TV dinner on the menu for $6.

-- Personal property of the late opera diva Maria Callas fetched about $1.25 million at a December auction in Paris, with most of the media attention devoted to 13 lots of brassieres and lingerie, which were won by a group of Callas' admirers working through a private foundation. The unmentionables (for example, about $5,000 for a girdle, slightly more for a black lace slip) will be either burned or placed in extremely deep storage because the admirers were appalled at the estate's owners' greed in cashing in on Callas' underwear.

News of the Weird has followed the antics of Pekin, Ill., gardener Robert Norton, now 77, over the years because he does much of his work while nude, to the consternation of neighbors. Despite more than 20 arrests and several convictions, Norton insists his activity is protected by the U.S. Constitution. He has been sentenced twice more since his last News of the Weird mention. And in December in Bellefonte, Pa., Charles Stitzer, 62, was convicted of the same offense (his first), having "alarmed" a neighbor despite being 200 feet away with nightfall approaching.

By mid-March, three reveling college students had died from falls or incompetent leaps during this year's spring break: a Florida man, 20 (climbing balcony to balcony in Daytona Beach); a Kansas man, 18 (climbing balcony to balcony at a Mexico resort); a New Jersey man, 19 (leaping from a balcony into a swimming pool but missing, in Fort Lauderdale). (Another man survived a fall off of a motel building in Panama City Beach, Fla.)

A Buffalo, N.Y., public school program announced it will pay some high school students $5 an hour to attend English and math classes this summer. A slow-handed 27-year-old 7-Eleven clerk was taken by paramedics not to a hospital but to an industrial shop (along with the store's auto-locking safe) to have her fingers extricated from the safe's coin-deposit slot (Aberdeen, Wash.). A stickup man wielding a toy gun robbed the Glebe Side Kids toy store (Ottawa, Ontario). Britain's Princess Anne, 50, was fined about $700 for driving her Bentley about 90 mph and ignoring a police officer chasing her; she said she just assumed that the officer's flashing lights meant that he had come to provide a royal escort (Gloucestershire, England).

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

-- At least 1,400 college students are majoring in "golf" at eight universities, with more schools about to start programs, according to a March Wall Street Journal report. One school just completed a $1.1 million student "learning laboratory" (that is, a model golf clubhouse), part of what is necessary to meet the demand for pros as new or expanded U.S. courses open at the rate of about one a day. Curricula include business classes, turf science, and many, many rounds of golf.

-- In Galesburg, Ill., in January, long-haul trucker Dana Turner, 40, explained to police that the child pornography in his truck was important to him in that it kept him from falling asleep at the wheel. According to the police report, Turner said he was so angry that pornographers would exploit children like that that his agitation kept him alert.

-- According to police reports on March 3 (the first day of sale of the $125 Nike Air Jordan Retro XI sneakers), shoe stores in Detroit, Milwaukee, Columbus, Ohio, and Peoria, Ill., needed officers to quell actual or budding customer violence because of insufficient supplies of the shoes, and in Sacramento, Calif., and Toledo, Ohio, entire malls had to be shut down as consumers threatened to take their frustrations out on Foot Locker and other stores.

The ex-student suing the Oklahoma University law school for expelling him (who announced in January he would appeal to the state supreme court): Mr. Perry Mason. The 58-year-old man arrested for exposing himself in the front window of a business in Nashua, N.H., in December: Mr. Joseph Dangle. The 25-year-old woman arrested in West Haven, Conn., in September for spitting on a police officer and then urinating in his patrol car: Ms. Lonna Leak. A deceased man in Union City, Tenn., the subject of a December obituary: Mr. Finis Newton Drummond. A high-school track-and-field star in Staten Island, N.Y., noted in a January issue of Sports Illustrated: Mr. I-Perfection Harris.

-- A Los Angeles Police Department report released in January revealed that, because of high turnover of operators and slowdowns in construction of new 911 facilities, a total of 219,733 calls to 911 last year were never answered by an operator, which, even when discounted by the 80 percent that are nonemergencies, averages to 120 emergency calls ignored each day.

-- This month's municipal elections in France marked the first application of the country's recent law requiring political parties to field an equal number of female and male candidates. Female officeholders are scarcer in France than any other European country (one-fifth the incidence as in Sweden), and political parties that fall short of female candidates are subject to heavy fines.

-- In February, Ohio prison officials sent the state finance board the preliminary medical bill for correcting a convicted murderer's severe nosebleed: $160,303 (but final costs are expected to be added). The man, who is serving 15 years to life, is a hemophiliac who asked for surgery to correct chronic sinusitis.

-- Federal marshals seized the Indianapolis Baptist Temple in February for back taxes, 91 days after church leaders and parishioners began occupying it in a vigil and 16 years after it began refusing to deduct withholding and Social Security taxes from employees' paychecks. The church's position on taxes, that it is governed only by God's law, was consistently rejected by courts over the years and finally by the U.S. Supreme Court in January. But in Norwich, Conn., Salvatore Verdirome said he plans no such protest as the state property tax people zero in on his Sanctuary of Love, a hillside field of 47 sky-blue bathtubs that form shelters for statues of the Virgin Mary, and on which he owes more than $100,000 in back taxes and utility bills for the last 30 years.

-- In January, Quebec's health insurance board approved about $3,000 (USD) in payments for breast implants for a 15-year-old girl after a psychiatrist submitted a recommendation calling the surgery "necessary" for her mental health. (The next week, following the predictable outcry, a board official announced, to a chorus of skeptical critics, that the psychiatrist's recommendation was irrelevant and that the girl actually suffered from a medical condition ("aplasia of the breast," or a lack of mammary glands, which made her breasts unusually small) that required surgery.)

Raymond Jones filed a complaint after having angrily stalked off his job during the 1998 holiday season, never to return, at a Shoppers Drug Mart in Vancouver, British Columbia, because his boss told him to set up artificial poinsettias in a seasonal display, which he took as a directive to support the abhorrent idea of "Christmas" (he is a Jehovah's Witness). And the very petite Brenda Marshall said a constable in St. John's, Newfoundland, violated her civil rights as a short person by stopping her car, believing an underage child was driving. (Results: Mr. Jones won a $30,000 judgment from the province's human rights panel in January; Ms. Marshall lost in the province's court of appeals in January.)

News of the Weird noted in February 2000 the ascendance of eunuchs to elected office in India, thought to be attributed to a backlash against traditional corruption and to support for the nothing-to-lose attitude of the "hijras," most of whom are males castrated at birth, who make their living either as prostitutes or professional pests. Following elections in November and December, the totals stood at two mayors, several council members and a state legislator, Shabnam Mausi, who announced that "she" (as hijras prefer) would soon apply for the estimated 500,000 hijras to be an official national political party.

Pediatric pathologist Dr. Dick Van Velden lost his hospital job in the Netherlands in February after an examination of his storage locker in Liverpool, England, revealed that he had removed (for research purposes but without parental permission) and stored the organs of more than 800 deceased children (in addition to a child's head, which he kept in a jar). Two days later, prosecutors in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he also recently worked, asked for extradition so that Van Velden could explain the presence of children's organs in heat-sealed bags in a locker in that city. Colleagues interviewed by Canada's National Post suggest Van Velden was so absorbed with his research that he simply collected organs and forgot about them.

A wind-blown skydiver landed on a woman serving beer during a Daytona Beach Bike Week event at which women wrestle in a vat of cole slaw, sending the woman to the hospital for three days. A homeowner forked over $40,000 to have his house lifted and moved three feet back to comply with a zoning rule (Snohomish County, Wash.). A Hoover, Ala., BP gas station owner, chasing after a customer who skipped out on a $20 fill-up, stayed with him at high speeds down Interstate 65 and U.S. 231 for 130 miles before finally giving up. Though he had not fought since July 1999 and in fact passed away in October 2000, boxer Darrin Morris advanced in the latest (January 2001) World Boxing Organization super-middleweight rankings, from 11th to 5th.

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