-- Istanbul's leading circumciser, Kemal Ozkan (106,000 lifetime procedures), predicted in August that because of the economic downturn, he will perform only half of the 3,000 he performed last year. Depleted government budgets force Turk boys in poverty to wait until military service to get cut, according to an Associated Press dispatch, and business is off by half at the famous Circumcision Palace (the place where well-off parents can have their sons snipped upstairs and then fete them at elaborate parties downstairs). In the traditional Turkish coming-of-age ceremony, boys parade beforehand through the streets dressed like royalty in white suits with capes, holding gold-trimmed scepters.

-- In July, Mr. Justice Bodey of Britain's High Court ordered four men to take blood tests to determine a 7-year-old boy's father, which is a question the mother apparently had tried not to think about until now. She admitted that she was so desperate at her expiring biological clock that, to maximize her chances at the height of her cycle from April 28 to May 1, 1993, she stepped away from her apparently sterile husband and had sex with a different man every night, and now one of the men wants father's rights.

-- Two Utah men, seeking to make Hollywood movies safe for their mostly Mormon neighbors, are creating stashes of major-film releases from which they have dubbed out the cussing and the sex. Ray Lines sells the pristine versions at three CleanFlicks video stores near Provo; David Schenk runs a Clean Cut Video club in Kaysville that contains 62 titles for members to check out. "Great movies are great because they have a great story line," said Schenk to an Associated Press reporter in August, "not because they drop the F-bomb" (139 of which, for example, Schenk had to remove from "Good Will Hunting"). Hollywood studios are aware of the Utah men's work but have not commented.

The head of a research team from the University of Adelaide (Australia), studying whiplash injuries, reported a preliminary finding in April that some victims' pain is prolonged more by "litigation" than by "damage to (the particular) joint." And in March, a female researcher at the University of Central Florida found that female speakers with C-cup breasts were regarded as more professional by males than those of larger or smaller cups. And a University of Cambridge professor announced in April, after lab experiments involving "kinetic energy, centrifugal force and co-efficient of friction," that the cleanest way to eat spaghetti is to roll the strands on a vertical fork against a spoon parallel to the plate and then to eat the pasta off the spoon.

-- Oregon legislators lamented in June that a major windmill-construction project on the Washington-Oregon border, expected to power 70,000 homes and thus a delight to clean-energy environmentalists, would probably be delayed because of the discovery that the property under construction is home to the endangered Washington ground squirrel, the saving of which is also a delight to environmentalists.

-- Among the fresh "zero tolerance" cases in the news recently is the policy of a low-income housing complex in Seaside, Ore., to automatically terminate a lease if anyone in the unit engages in any violent act against anyone in the complex. According to a federal lawsuit filed in July, that policy was too literally enforced against Tiffani Ann Alvera, who has been scheduled for eviction only because she showed the landlord the judicial restraining order she had gotten after her husband beat her up.

-- In June, Father Manuel Torres of Marbella, Spain, showed a London Daily Telegraph reporter his new chart (listing 19 sins and three penances) in use in the 60 Catholic parishes around the Malaga tourist region. Since the number of worshippers rises 20-fold during the holiday season, with few visitors able to express themselves in Spanish, Father Torres said it has become crucial to his efficiency to have penitents find their sins on the list, point to them, and watch him as he holds up either one finger (three Hail Marys), two (one Our Father) and three (one act of charity).

-- In May, a 100-ton boulder slipped off of a 96-wheel trailer while being driven interstate in India from Karnataka to Tamil Nadu, where it was to be sculpted into an idol of the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman. As the word spread, villagers gathered around the rock, consecrated it, and delivered offerings to it, but the temple in Tamil Nadu said it still wants the rock (which was donated to the temple by a quarry owner) reloaded and delivered.

-- The 10-week tour through the U.S. this summer of Indian spiritual leader "Amma" (Mata Amritanandamayi) gave her a chance to pad her lifetime total of hugs, which she dispenses to each devotee who greets her, sometimes continuously for as long as 20 hours a day. Each service of chants and meditations lasts about two hours, followed by the hugs (about 1,000 at a Chicago ceremony in July), usually accompanied by a few back rubs and a kiss on the cheek.

Mr. Irwin Rose, said to be in his 50s, was found dead in his upscale New York City apartment in July, apparently of natural causes. The doorman said Rose had not been out of the building in 13 years, that he had everything delivered; an employee of a restaurant in the next block said Rose had been calling for the same meal three times a day every day for eight years (rice pudding, chicken soup, two eggs over easy, sausages, cheesecake). A friend said Rose used to be a movie and fashion dealmaker until a debilitating leg illness slowed him down.

Donald James Eversen was arrested in Sparks, Nev., in March and charged with attempting to rob two women and then to steal a beer truck for his getaway. Police found Eversen (who had been drinking) a few blocks from the scene, and when they brought the two women by to identify him, Eversen immediately blurted out that, yes, those were the two women he had tried to rob. And Humberto "The Frog" Banuelos, a man alleged to be a big hit man for the Tijuana drug cartel, was arrested in July in spite of the extensive cosmetic surgery he had undergone for disguise. Police said Banuelos had neglected to change the one thing that they regarded as his chief body characteristic: a distinctive bullet-wound scar on his right buttock.

Earlier this year, News of the Weird reported that the tony Silicon Valley town of Woodside, Calif. (population 5,600), had recently proposed to comply with a state law setting a minimum per-town number of "affordable housing" units by allowing horse farmers to create moderately priced "apartments" inside their barns. In May, Massachusetts state Rep. John H. Rogers proposed that towns in his state, when attempting to comply with laws requiring low-income housing, be able to include jails and prisons in their totals.

The Florida Department of Corrections released DUI-manslaughter convict Casey Bloom, even though he fulfilled his required 4,350 hours of community service by making only two public appearances, which were taped and broadcast thousands of times. Boston Harbor's 10th annual swim to commemorate clean-water progress was canceled due to heavy pollution. A 26-year-old Navy man was rescued from 85 feet inside the Kilauea (Hawaii) Volcano, where he had fallen after chasing his windblown baseball cap. Two mothers of 15-year-old baseball players were arrested after beating unconscious the mother of the rival player who scored the winning run (Salt Lake City).

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

-- Curt Storey, 62, who lives near Pittsburgh, Pa., filed a wrongful-discharge lawsuit in August against Burns International Security Services, claiming he was fired from his job because he refused supervisors' demands that he cleanse his lunchbox and pickup truck of Confederate flag decals, orders that he calls illegal national-origin discrimination. Storey claims he is a "Confederate Southern American," even though he is a lifelong Pennsylvanian and even though courts have not recognized CSA as a protected class under anti-discrimination law.

-- Paul Morgan of Biloxi, Miss., has been busy the last few weeks lining up Web site viewers, at $20 each, to watch him slice off both his feet on Oct. 31 with a homemade guillotine. Morgan's feet are nonfunctional because of an automobile accident, and he wants hydraulically operated prostheses to make him more mobile, but this is the only way he knows to raise the $200,000 to buy them. Although traffic on CutOffMyFeet.com is heavy, as of mid-August, Morgan had signed up only 10 viewers.

-- In August, Naples (Fla.) City Councilman Fred Tarrant demanded that local artist Ted Lay's "Famous Tongue Mona Al Monica" painting (side-by-side impressions of Mona Lisa, Albert Einstein, and Monica Lewinsky sticking their tongues out) be removed from its place at a Naples municipal art center because he thinks Lewinsky's "tongue" too much resembles a penis (which Lay denies). According to a Naples Daily News report, Tarrant is in fact blind but said various advisers have assured him that the tongue is a penis.

In May in Stroudsburg, Pa., Noah Berryman, 19, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter; hours after earning his driver's license, Berryman was trying to get his car airborne on a hill (he launched 63 feet on the fourth attempt) when he hit a tree, killing the two friends riding with him. And in February, a 52-year-old man shot a 21-year-old man to death on I-75 in Tennessee as the men hauled 30 fighting roosters to a cockfight in Kentucky; the older man was angry that the younger man kept kicking the back of his seat. And in June, as Knox County (Tenn.) sheriff's deputies surrounded an auto parts store looking for suspect Charles "Cracker" Dunn, his brother, Melvin "Squirt" Dunn Jr., jumped on cars, waved his arms and defiantly challenged them, before they stormed the store and arrested him (but not Cracker, who wasn't there).

-- In July, according to police, an unidentified man stole an ax from a Home Depot in Oklahoma City and used it menacingly to rob a clerk and shortly thereafter did the same at two other stores, including a Wal-Mart. On interviewing witnesses, police learned that a Wal-Mart door greeter had seen the man enter carrying the ax, but his only impulse was to make sure that he did his job and placed a sticker on the ax so that when the man later tried to exit the store, he wouldn't be charged for it.

-- In May, a court in Edmonton, Alberta, sentenced William Piggott, 55, to 18 months' house arrest for three 1999 offenses in which prostitutes had turned him in for talking too dirty. According to court records, Piggott had merely asked the women if they would have sex with dogs.

-- In May, several months after the Escondido, Calif., library's resident cat attacked Richard R. Espinosa's 50-pound Labrador-mix assistance dog, Espinosa filed a $1.5 million claim against the city, alleging that he was in bad shape because of the dog's injuries. According to the legal papers, Espinosa suffers "significant lasting, extreme and severe mental anguish and emotional distress including, but not limited to, terror, humiliation, shame, embarrassment, mortification, chagrin, depression, panic, anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares, loss of sleep (and) loss of full enjoyment of life as well as other physical and mental afflictions of pain (and) suffering."

-- In June, Mary Lee Sowder filed a lawsuit in Roanoke, Va., against the local PetsMart store for $100,000 for injuries to her knee that she suffered when she slipped and fell on "dog slobber," which was allegedly drooled upon the floor by the manager's own huge dog (of unspecified breed).

-- Kevin Mackle died at age 21 in 1998 when a Coke machine he was rocking in a dorm at Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, fell on him. In July 2001, Mr. Mackle's family filed a lawsuit for about $660,000 (U.S.) for wrongful death against the machine's manufacturer and distributor, and Coca-Cola, and the university. The lawsuit claims that each defendant was negligent in not posting signs on the machine that college students should resist the temptation to rock it. According to the coroner's report, the late Mr. Mackle was well-known by his friends for securing free sodas by rocking the machine and was once again engaged in his craft when the fatal accident occurred.

According to police reports in the Daily Independent (Ashland, Ky.) in June, Clark Schneeberger, 44, heard that his father-in-law, Richard J. Kouns, was angry that his daughter and Schneeberger had fought several days before and was on his way over to defend his daughter's honor. Schneeberger prepared for the interfamily visit by strapping on body armor and equipping himself with a bayonet and brass knuckles. Kouns arrived swinging, and the two battled until Schneeberger subdued Kouns by biting off part of his nose (an attack that earned Schneeberger a grand jury indictment several days later).

A 26-year-old SWAT police officer in Dallas was accidentally shot to death by a colleague in June as the two men showed trainees how to react to a gunman in a public place. And a 14-year-old girl died when the all-terrain vehicle in which she was riding smashed into a tractor-trailer; she was in the vehicle because she was visiting her father's workplace as part of Take Our Kids to Work Day (Welland, Ontario, November 2000, and for which a lawsuit was filed in May 2001). And the Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in Milwaukee still does not know who the man was who collapsed and died during a meeting on May 23 (because those attending meetings usually do so anonymously).

In July, the University of South Florida agreed to pay $25,000 to a former art student to settle her 1999 lawsuit claiming that she felt sexually harassed by a class-discussion photograph of a naked white woman clinching a naked black man, despite the fact that that day's topic was controversial art and that all 250 students in the class had been warned of the nature of the class and advised they would not be penalized for missing it. (Shortly after the class, the woman's father complained, and the graduate assistant who supplied the photograph was transferred, which ignited a public protest by all the rest of the students in the class.)

Benjamin Sharpe, 47, charged with stabbing a friend, insisted he had to do it because his buddy had vowed to drive home, though inebriated (Aiken County, Ga.). A conference paper by British scientists concluded that female cockroaches lower their standards for a mate as their biological clock runs down (Manchester, England). Accused sex-assaulter Kevin Erwin was cleared by a jury, which found his torturing of his girlfriend consensual, that she for some reason had failed to use the "safe" words to get him to stop ("tomato" and "pepper") (Canton, Ohio). The Japanese firm Takara said it will soon market a "translator" that will interpret barking and other dog sounds, expressing them with a 200-word vocabulary (e.g., "happy," "annoyed," "frustrated").

(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 ruling last year by the Oregon Supreme Court is finally having a major negative impact on police, according to a July Los Angeles Times dispatch. The court had ruled that all lawyers, including prosecutors, must obey the state bar association's nearly absolute prohibitions against deceit, meaning that law enforcement cannot engage in "undercover" and "sting" operations (which involve tricking suspects). Already, one child-pornography investigation has been shut down because prosecutors could not administer a case in which police caught pedophiles by pretending online that they were underage.

-- Film turned up in July of tourist boat operations near Cape Jervis (near Adelaide), Australia, which ferried visitors so they could stand on a dead whale and watch great white sharks munch off the carcass; some tourists even posed for vacation photos petting the preoccupied sharks on the head (briefly). The local environmental minister said he was appalled and would ask for legislation "to protect people too stupid to protect themselves." (Obviously, News of the Weird is opposed to this type of legislation.)

-- The San Francisco Chronicle reported in July that the new dog catcher for San Mateo County will be paid $250,000 a year, more than twice what San Francisco's dog catcher receives and much more than Gov. Gray Davis or San Francisco mayor Willie Brown are paid. Said a county executive, "I hope we have the happiest and healthiest animals in the world because that's an awfully heavy price to pay."

In July, a man who has served time for fatal bombings was convicted of attempting to firebomb three Montreal coffee shops because the owner refused to give them French names. Protestors broke windows at the Tennessee capitol in Nashville in July, furious that legislators might adopt a state income tax. Three New Mexico regulators reported receiving death threats in May during the Public Regulation Commission's deliberations over whether to change the telephone area codes in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

-- The then-executive director of the Tampa, Fla., Make-a-Wish Foundation pleaded no contest in March to grand theft charges for misappropriating almost $20,000 that had been donated for dying children; she served three months in jail, and is now on house arrest, and with an order to repay $6,500. In June, she filed a lawsuit against the foundation demanding back pay and unused vacation and sick pay dating from the date of her firing in June 1999 and demanded a court order restoring her as the foundation's executive director. Her first name is Delores, and she uses the surname of her husband, the lawyer who filed her lawsuit, Jack W. Crooks.

-- Sherman P. Hawkins' impressive application for the vacant position of director of the Montana Department of Corrections was turned down in July by the governor, despite Hawkins' 28 years' experience in the department and his master's degree in administration. As the governor noted, however, Hawkins' 28 years were as "inmate," in that he is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife.

-- Virginia Green, a patient in the August (Maine) Mental Health Institute and who was convicted of bludgeoning her 75-year-old mother to death in 1996, had filed a lawsuit alleging that the facility's 8 a.m. wakeup policy violated her rights and ordering that the institute be instructed to permit her to sleep until 11 a.m. (In June, the Maine Supreme Court turned her down.)

-- In June, the Ontario Court of Appeal reinstated DUI charges against Christopher Dominski, finding that his right to be notified that he can have an attorney present under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was not violated. According to court records, when a police officer asked if he would like to call an attorney, Dominski responded, "Yeah, whatever," which a trial court thought indicated ambiguity but which the appeals court said was a sufficiently serious question and answer.

-- In June, the city education commissioner of Berlin, Germany, publicly suggested that the pro soccer league bar players from spitting on the field and especially their increasingly popular habit of clearing a nostril by pressing a finger against the opposite nostril and blowing, saying such behavior sends the wrong message to kids. Several players immediately defended the right to blow: Said one, "We can't carry a packet of hankies on the pitch."

Strongsville, Ohio, lawyer Daniel Todt killed his wife and two children in June as the government closed in on him for what prosecutors described as a series of outlandish attempted frauds. The Todts (both lawyers) were a traditional, middle-class, community-involved family except for one thing: Todt believed that in the 1940s, Mr. Thor De Allah Kahn from the planet Atlantis met top Earth officials and left with them securities (to improve the planet's welfare, in one instance for reconstruction in the Philippines) in staggering amounts (e.g., $33 billion, $13 billion), which Todt very earnestly and naively tried to present to many banks in several countries for payment, even after U.S. Treasury officials warned him they were worthless. Todt had also painstakingly explained his theory in various venues (e.g., local bar association, the Securities and Exchange Commission), usually to open-mouthed silence.

Detroit police arrested five suspects in connection with the robbery of a McDonald's restaurant in June, shortly after they made their alleged getaway; they appeared to have rehearsed the robbery, but inside the car, one of the men discarded his bandana by tossing it out the window, where it inadvertently snagged on the radio antenna and acted as an identifying flag for police chasing the car. And Elizabeth McDonald, 24, pleaded no contest in June to robbing the VFW hall in Medina County, Ohio, where she used to work; she was wearing a mask, but it did not disguise her waist-length red hair, which was instantly recognizable by at least one former co-worker.

News of the Weird loves stories about haggis, the Scottish meal that some people believe is the world's most disturbing formal dish (aesthetically, because of its gray color, and flavorfully, in that it typically is a pudding of sheep organs, suet and oatmeal, boiled in the animal's stomach). In May, police in Manchester, England, reported they were investigating an attack against the house of a Scottish woman, age 45 (and who has been living in England for 35 years), as a "hate crime," in that a haggis was thrown through her window. A police spokeswoman said the haggis had been "taken away for examination."

After an emergency airlift for treatment, a man survived his "attack" by an already-dead (but venom-retaining) timber rattlesnake that "bit" him while the clumsy man was mounting the carcass on a board (Quincy, Ill.). Iranian officials found a smuggler with 3.5 pounds of opium in his belly, said to beat the old world's record of 2.4 pounds (Kenarak, Iran). Nurses and doctors were among the 400 attending the unauthorized, drug-drenched, deafening rave party at Paris' Sainte Anne psychiatric hospital, whose patients were said to be oblivious of the commotion in that most had been heavily sedated for the night. A water heater at a shopping center video store exploded, rocketing itself through the roof, over a Taco Bell, and landing in a Pizza Hut parking lot in the next block (Burien, Wash.).

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