-- In September, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution profiled desolate Echols County, Georgia (between Valdosta and the Okeefenokee Swamp), well-known to the state's judges because that is where they encourage lawbreakers to go when they really want them to leave the state altogether. The Georgia constitution prohibits banishing people from the state as punishment for crimes, so judges merely banish them from 158 of the state's 159 counties, trusting that they would never voluntarily settle in Echols, anyway, and such strategy seems always to work.

-- While most of North America endures a fear-of-anthrax frenzy, the Ontario Health Ministry in October fired its only five biohazard scientists for budgetary reasons, replacing them with three lab technicians with community-college degrees. Liberal Party spokespeople blamed the decision on the health minister's long-standing philosophy of smaller government, irrespective of consequences.

An April story from the official newspaper of the People's Republic of China reported that convicted killer Fu Xinrong had indeed had his kidneys illegally harvested after execution, by a company in Nanchang. And in October, a man walked into a Porsche dealership in Palo Alto, Calif., and through smooth-talking and luck, convinced an employee that he was the owner of the $125,000 Turbo 996 that the real owner was scheduled to pick up 20 minutes later. And in an incident reminiscent of a partially made-up June Slate magazine story, two men pleaded guilty in Corpus Christi, Texas, in July to having illegally "fished" for coyotes on federal land by reeling them in with fishing poles baited with deer meat.

-- Britain's Legal Services Commission granted imprisoned murderer Shaun Armstrong, 39 (whose victim was 3 years old), legal aid for his privacy-rights lawsuit for about $25,000 against the friend to whom he confessed in writing and who turned him in. Armstrong wants back the letters he sent the friend, claiming ownership of his confession (which reads, "Yes, I'm responsible for the crime, but please don't tell anybody.").

-- An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled in May that spouses have no legal duty to inform each other of their adulterous affairs. A 52-year-old man had sued his estranged wife for about $210,000 (U.S.) for breaching her duty of "good faith" and "honesty" by hiding her affairs from him for 21 years, but the best the judge would do is agree only in cases where "hazardous" sexual activity outside the marriage would subject the spouse to health risks.

-- London's Daily Telegraph reported in July about a recent job opening in Exeter, England: The Austern Electric Circus' knife-thrower Jayde Hanson's assistant had just walked off the job after being nearly hit in the foot, which would have been her third serious wound this season, which is also the number of wounds Hanson's former girlfriend took before she walked off the job last year.

-- Nolan Lett was awarded $17,000 from his former employer, Aramark Corp. (Oak Brook, Ill.), in October. He had fallen and broken his wrist after being chased by a goose as he arrived for work one day at Aramark's building, which he proved in court was a "high-goose" area, encouraged by the company's elaborate pond and garden. "It was very ferocious," Lett said. "It started acting crazy."

-- Municipal clerk Anne Frank filed a lawsuit against Greenwich, Conn., in August for back pay owing to her boss's having had an 11-year affair with his secretary. According to the lawsuit, the trysting couple were so often going at it that much of the secretary's work was passed down to Frank, and it was work that she was expected to complete in uncompensated overtime.

-- From the police column of the weekly Leonard Graphic (Leonard, Texas, 35 miles north of Dallas), May 3, 2001: "A man claiming to be a medical student was charged with theft of service and given a trespass warning after it was discovered he lied about his reasons for being in the local nursing home two months ago. He told aides there he had permission from the home to 'live the life of the patient' and be bathed and diapered as part of a learning experience. However, when he returned to try the scam again on April 17, police were waiting for him. He was found to be a registered sex offender living in Melissa (Texas)."

Six men were indicted in New York City in October for operating a drug ring, which came to the attention of firefighters, and then police, when one of the men curiously refused to evacuate his apartment across the street from the World Trade Center in the late morning of Sept. 11, despite the area's fires, falling debris and widespread panic. The reason: Inside, police found large supplies of drugs and paraphernalia.

An elderly man was accidentally struck and killed by a fire truck that had been dispatched to take him to a hospital (Jacksonville, Fla., July). And a 41-year-old man ejected in a bar fight was accidentally struck and killed by a sheriff's patrol car responding to the bar's call for help (Fort Worth, Texas, August). And a 52-year-old woman was accidentally struck and killed by a friend driving to help her after she fell from her horse due to a bee sting (Middleburg, Va., September).

A mother, frustrated that a Sallie Mae loan office would not believe that her debtor-son was deceased, mailed them the cremation certificate and two teaspoons of his ashes, which not only was inadequate proof but caused a full anthrax panic (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.). Descendants of the 19th-century feuding Hatfields and McCoys resumed battling, in court, over whether McCoys are being blocked from a cemetery whose main access is controlled by the Hatfields (Pikeville, Ky.). Model (Ms.) Julian Fallon was awarded about $8,500 for career-stifling injuries from the collapse of a second-floor rehearsal studio, which left her straddling a beam and with disfiguring nail holes in her derriere (Dublin, Ireland). Deputies subdued a man after a 10-minute shootout, which he provoked, he said, because he was irritable after a long bout of constipation (Bloomington, Ind.)

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

-- Those dreading the legal morass of casualty claims emanating from the Sept. 11 attacks will be even more disturbed knowing the current status of claims emanating from the 1993 World Trade Center basement truck-bomb attack. As of Sept. 11, according to an October National Law Journal report, pre-trial discovery was still taking place on "hundreds" of 1993 claims (personal injury lawsuits and property-damage and business-interruption claims) pending before a New York state judge, including at least one on behalf of Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm most devastated on Sept. 11.

-- One notable consistency between the Clinton and Bush administrations is that the Department of the Interior still is not certain how to remedy what federal judge Royce Lamberth has called the government's squandering of more than $10 billion in Indian trust funds (payments for grazing, mining, logging and oil-drilling on Indian land) that it was required to manage starting in 1887. In 1999, the department said it was unable to examine some trust fund records because they were filed in decrepit rooms with so much rat feces as to be hazardous. In October 2001, a status report was prepared for Lamberth, but various department officials declined to sign it because of a lack of confidence that it was truthful.

In July, Mattie Charlene Dyer, 70, married Yang Yukun, 71, in Calgary, Alberta, and settled down there; the bride is an American-born teacher who speaks only English, and the groom is a retired pipefitter who had lived all his life in Beijing and speaks only Chinese. The marriage is "hard to explain," said Dyer, but there is "an electricity (and) a magnetism between us." And in August, according to a New York Times profile, medical student Casey Moss, 22, and Kara Price, 16, held hands for the first time following a two-year "courtship." The Tennessee couple, who long ago had pledged to each other, is said to be representative of a growing number of conservative Christians who not only say no to premarital sex but say no to premarital romance.

-- In June, indecent-exposure arrestee Scott Matthew Brackett, 39, had just been booked and bailed out on one nude excursion through an apartment complex in Broken Arrow, Okla., when he was picked up on a second foray. According to the police report, Brackett said that since the authorities were still investigating the first charge and told him they wouldn't finalize their report for two more days, he figured that he had "two extra days of freedom" until a recommendation would be made on that first charge, and thus, he "just went out to celebrate (by taking his clothes off in public again)."

-- According to a dispatch from Nigeria reported in the Cape Argus (Cape Town, South Africa), Ms. Amina Haruna, 22, of Gusau, Nigeria, was turned down by a Muslim court in August in her quest to divorce her husband, Malam Hassan Mujahid, on the apparently sole ground that his penis is too large for her. The court ruled that it could not determine, even after examining doctors' reports on the couple, whether the size discrepancy was sufficiently great to make the couple incompatible.

-- In July in a Suffolk County (Mass.) court, Dr. Marcos Ramos, 59, was convicted of 13 counts of indecent assault on female patients and sentenced to at least six years in prison. His lawyer, Willie J. Davis, had hammered the theme to the jurors that Ramos' gratuitously giving patients breast exams, even though they were unrelated to any medical condition relevant to their cases, was the right thing to do "because you never know when (cancer) is going to appear."

-- Gail M. Follis, 35, was charged with attempted robbery of a convenience store in Elkhorn, Wis., in August after an employee spotted her toward the back of the store carrying a rifle and attempting to put on a ski mask. According to the clerk, Follis said she knew the situation looked bad, but that she had just come in from skeet-shooting (hence, the gun) and just wanted to buy some beer (though beer sales were prohibited at that time of the morning).

-- Bad Memory: In July, a 15-year-old student in Kansas City, Mo., who had previously told police that he and his 29-year-old teacher had been having sex, took the witness stand at a preliminary hearing and said, actually, he also could not remember if he had sex with the teacher or not: "I have a pretty bad memory." And in June, the landmark $3 billion lawsuit victory in Los Angeles by ex-smoker Richard Boeken against Philip Morris was undoubtedly aided by Boeken's testimony that he did not remember any persuasive health warnings against smoking before the 1990s.

According to an August profile in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, local resident Tom Cagley, 66, has chronicled the life of his 21-year-old son, Nick, by making journal entries in writing every day since the day he found out his wife was pregnant (8,019 consecutive days, in 62 spiral notebooks, totaling 7,412 pages and, he estimated, 3 million words). The elder Cagley said he realized that he had not spent enough time with his five children from an earlier marriage and wanted to make sure that didn't happen with Nick (who, while generally appreciative of Dad's effort, admitted that he has not been very interested in reading the journals).

News of the Weird reported in April 2000 that Prince Jefri (brother of the Sultan of Brunei, the oil-rich country on the northern coast of Borneo) had been busted by the sultan down to an allowance of only $300,000 a month, because he had been wasting the family's money (allegedly, $15 billion) in his role as the country's finance minister. In August 2001, Jefri's vast collection of consumer goods (10,000 items, including hundreds of cars, 17 airplanes and several yachts, one of which he named "Tits," with twin dinghies named "Nipple 1" and "Nipple 2") were sold at auction (for a mere $7.8 million). Until two years ago, the sultan was the world's richest man, but his fortune is believed to have shrunk to about $10 billion.

In a road-rage chase that ended when the pursuing car wrapped itself around a tree, its driver and the front-seat passenger who egged him on were killed, and the driver being chased (who stopped twice to attempt to apologize but was threatened and cursed and so kept on driving) was unharmed (Clearwater, Fla., August). And a 19-year-old man became the latest wild-cruising teen-ager to die by sticking his head out the passenger window at the wrong moment (utility pole) (East Meadow, N.Y., September).

A medical examiner said the man who pushed his already-strangled wife off a hotel balcony did not then commit suicide by leaping but actually just clumsily fell right behind her, to his death (Nashville). The British government aborted its study of whether mad-cow disease can spread to sheep after it realized it had been mistakenly studying cow brains for five years instead of sheep brains. Two Floridians filed a $1.1 trillion lawsuit against Osama bin Laden for scaring them (Fort Pierce). Prosecutors revealed that a quirk in state law means that Dr. Dirk Greineder, recently convicted for murdering his wife, nonetheless remains as administrator of her estate for their three children, who are the wife's beneficiaries (Wellesley, Mass.).

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

-- Both the U.S. and Afghanistan might seem to be heeding President Bush's call to act normal during these times of strife: Just a few miles up the road from the anthrax-shuttered National Enquirer offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., officials of the brand-new National Croquet Center staged a two-week series of matches in October, preparing for its grand opening in January. And Afghanistan's application to play in a prestigious cricket tournament in Pakistan, beginning about the same time as the U.S. bombing, was accepted (but the Afghan team eventually lost). Said one Afghan player, "Sport and war are two different things."

-- Susan Heitker and Matt Glass staged a week-long anti-logging protest in Vinton County, Ohio, in August, sitting on a platform they had constructed in two stately trees near a patch of forest to be cut, but the state Department of Natural Resources got in the last lick. The two were arrested for trespassing; the two trees (not part of the forest to be cut) were chopped down, also, on the grounds that they contained the protesters' fingerprints and thus would be needed for trial evidence; and the state billed the two protesters $152 for the cost of chopping down the two trees.

London's Goodfellows company made the news again in September by selling two more whimsical insurance policies: model Claire Roe's coverage (for about $350 a year) against loss of beauty ($170,000 payout), and the male strippers troupe Dreamboys' coverage (premium, about $15,000 a year) to pay off if their genitals are injured by fans ($1.2 million coverage). Among the firm's most popular policies: the Alien All Risks package (about $400 a year for $1.7 million coverage) for being abducted or impregnated by an alien, which Goodfellows has sold to 40,000 people. (Fifteen thousand women bought Y2K immaculate-conception insurance in 1999, fearful they would be called upon to give birth to the messiah.)

-- With great fanfare on Aug. 27, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared the Fresno (Calif.) municipal landfill an historical landmark on the National Register because of its pioneering methods of disposal. Later in the day, the department came to realize, thanks to its environmentalist critics, that the landfill also has a long-standing spot on the Superfund list of the worst-polluted land in America, and on Aug. 28, the department rescinded its order.

-- More Government Procreation Policies: In September, a pro-population town council member in Inari, Lapland (Finland), vowed to give up his political career if only the town's women produced at least 80 babies next year and 85 the year after. At the other end of the spectrum, India's Health Minister C.P. Thakur told the national legislature in August that the key to halting procreation was finding recreational alternatives and agreed to look into the cost of government-subsidized television sets.

-- In July, the Bloomington, Ind., City Council voted to renew Brown's Wrecker Service's towing contract, even though it had proposed to raise the per-car charge to the city from $8 to $20, and even though Joe's Towing (the city's heavy-truck contractor) proposed to tow cars at zero cost to the city. Also in July, it took a court injunction from a judge in Sacramento to stop California prison procurement authorities from awarding a sweetheart contract for peanut butter and jelly to a supplier who charges $175,000 a year more than its competitor; the prison skirted low-bid rules by claiming an "emergency" in that the higher-priced company's PB&J was necessary to prevent inmate riots.

-- England's Wolverhampton Art Gallery reopened in September (after extensive remodeling) with the exhibit "Fluid," composed entirely of artists' works that featured human bodily liquids. Included were a brilliant red and yellow abstract photograph by Andres Serrano (mixed blood and urine); Mona Hatoum's representation of the flow of her food during the hours following a meal (including photographs from her own intestine-invasive procedures); and testaments to sperm and sweat, among other subjects.

-- Austrian artist Wolfgang Flatz's July performance ("Meat") in Berlin came off as scheduled despite an attempted court injunction by a 13-year-old girl, who said the exhibit was too gross. Flatz suspended himself from a crane, crucifixion-style under a bloody sheet; then a helicopter lifted a dead, headless cow that he had packed with fireworks. The cow was dropped onto an abandoned building, blowing it up. (Previously, Flatz has been a human doormat, a human dartboard and a human bell.)

Julie Gable, 43, filed a $100,000 lawsuit recently against the police department of St. Pete Beach, Fla., because it continues to employ community service officer Michael Mehill, 54, who Gable says has been stalking her for 10 years, the last few with the full knowledge of the chief. The chief even allegedly found one of Mehill's notebooks, in which was written very detailed descriptions of his stalkings (e.g., "(August 5, 1998) At 1343 (hours), (Gable) was on a lawn chair, red halter top, white shorts. Waiting for someone?"). Gable said Mehill has an uncanny ability to arrive on the beach, with video camera, minutes after Gable does.

Au pair Ildiko Varga, 25, on the run and wanted for trashing an employer's home and mistreating the toddler in a New York City suburb, was finally caught when she stopped a police officer on the street to show him the article the New York Post had written about the crime and to ask him if he thought she had a good case for a slander lawsuit. And Rikers Island (N.Y.) corrections officer Anthony Lopez apparently stepped over the line when he ejected his wife from the family car during a fight on the way home from a Labor Day party; furious, she called the police and told them about Anthony's computer, which she happened to know was loaded with child pornography, and he was arrested.

In August 2001, News of the Weird reported that amateur British rocket scientist Steve Bennett was continuing to develop the spaceship (capsule made from a cement mixer) and booster that would launch him 10,000 feet up in a test flight for a much more ambitious expedition (an exercise in instant death, according to several engineers who learned his plans). On the other hand, amateur Brian Walker of Bend, Ore. (who has gotten rich as a designer of aeronautical toys), told London's The Independent in October that he was about a year away from launching himself 35 miles up in his homemade ship and booster. Unlike Bennett's work, Walker's has the support of several aerospace engineers and Mercury 7 astronaut Gordon Cooper.

The South African government provided its 100,000 census takers with generous supplies of condoms, fearing that urges would be harder to control as counters went inside people's homes. Barry's Underground tavern near Omaha went up for sale; it had been built in 1961 by dairyman J. Gordon Roberts as a bomb shelter for 250 head of his cattle. Jorge Briceno, head of the Colombian FARC rebels (who by government compromise control a swath of land the government cannot encroach on), has decided that all 15,000 of the residents of the village of Vista Hermosa must be HIV-tested because he read graffiti on a local wall about one resident's having AIDS. Doctors at University Hospital (Cardiff, Wales) removed a regular-size toothbrush from Vania Lucchesi's stomach after she tripped while brushing and swallowed it.