-- A couple of days after the problem was highlighted in a Reuters news story (but several weeks after it had been going on), the Pentagon decided to change the color of the food packages it was dropping in Afghanistan, from yellow to blue, so recipients would be less confused. For several weeks, it had been dropping yellow packages of food and yellow packages of cluster bombs, along with fliers that explained that the square yellow packages were food and the cylindrical yellow packages were bombs, and urging people to open the former but avoid the latter.

-- In Contrast to Those Who Hold Grudges for Five Centuries: An October San Francisco Chronicle dispatch from Cape Town, South Africa, reported that the parents of Amy Biehl (who was murdered by a mob of South African black kids in a racially motivated attack in 1993) have come to grips with their tragedy to such an extent that they have established a foundation in Cape Town to help rescue kids in poverty and have hired their daughter's two principal killers to work for the foundation in order to rehabilitate their lives.

A judge rejected both the ex-wife's and the biological (from-the-womb) son's demands for the ashes of the late Patrick (formerly Pauline) Corn, and disposed of them according to the directions in Corn's will (Monticello, Ind., October). And former police captain Scott Cote said he would help prosecutors and testify about his estranged wife's worker-compensation fraud scheme but would only do so as Stacey Cote, his new identity (Miami, September). And Australia's Green party was represented in November elections in a Melbourne district by candidate Tony Briffa, 31, an open hermaphrodite who recently began living as a man.

-- Arson and Nakedness: The property-eschewing religious sect Doukhobours were in the news again recently. (The sect's breakaway Freedomites ritually burn property and ritually remove their clothes.) Mary Braun, 81, was convicted of setting fire to a college building in Nelson, British Columbia, in October. Her rap sheet for this type of thing is lengthy, and this episode appeared to be another of her revelations. She tried to attend court sessions nude, but staff members covered her with blankets.

-- Israeli security agents scrambled to high alert in September over what they feared was a suicide parachuter from Jordan, landing near the airport in the town of Eilat, Israel. It turned out merely to be Rabbi Shimon Eizenbach carrying out a pre-Yom Kippur ritual of kapparot, floating down in an ultralite glider while holding a hen in one cage (to atone for women) and a rooster in another (for men). Security forces held their fire, and the town was duly blessed.

-- In August, following an Israeli helicopter raid on the offices of the radical organization Hamas, the High Islamic Council in Saudi Arabia decreed for the first time that females would be allowed to be suicide bombers. (Two days later, a 23-year-old mother of two was arrested with 15 pounds of explosives at Tel Aviv's central bus station.)

-- In August, a Yorba Linda, Calif., Catholic official told the Los Angeles Times that a recent $5.2 million pedophile-priest settlement included a requirement that the church begin to install confessional doors that have windows, to help protect parishioners from priests. Said the official, "Building a church that creates a safe and open environment will be very important to (us)."

-- In western Kenya near Lake Victoria, the Wanga faction of the Luhya tribe continue to practice "wife inheritance," in which a woman who becomes a widow is obliged to marry another family member (or risk acquiring a curse), a practice that opponents say is particularly bad in light of the region's high HIV-infection rate. According to a May Agence France-Presse dispatch, tradition provides that if a widow refuses to remarry, the family upon her death pays any available man to have sex with her corpse so that she can be posthumously "inherited" and her soul saved.

-- According to an October Knight Ridder dispatch from Vietnam, a favorite trysting place for prostitutes and their customers is the museum that used to be part of the "Hanoi Hilton" prisoner of war compound, and one of their preferred museum rooms is one in which U.S. pilots were held and tortured. Despite recent government attempts to curtail it, sex (under the street name "boom-boom") still flourishes.

Several Canadian tax-evasion defendants have recently resorted to a language called "In the Truth" (invented by American David Wynn Miller) when they defend themselves in court. However, only true believers can distinguish the language from gibberish (one example: "With the sovereign, hyphen, authority of the Andrew, hyphen, William, colon, Sereda (the defendant) is for the stating of the authority of the noun"). Miller said he created the language to replace the "flawed syntax" of English. So far, according to an October Canadian Press report, most judges' preferred response is to award the "In the Truth" speakers a government-paid mental examination, and Canadian Immigration's response has been to keep Miller out of the country.

William Stewart finally died of his injuries in November, three weeks after hanging himself in his jail cell, the latest tragedy to befall his Parma, Ohio, family. His wife, Joyce Stewart, died a month before William, allegedly murdered by him. William had been stopped on suspicion of DUI but then invited arrest by snapping gratuitously at the officer, "You can't get into my car without a warrant." The garbage bags in his back seat contained pieces of Joyce. Her son, Mark DiMarco, was serving 94 years for rape and murder before he hanged himself in his cell in 1999. Joyce had served time for obstructing justice in his case after having become sort of a house mother to Mark's gang of delinquents, and after Mark's death, Joyce treated Mark's bedroom as a shrine.

A 20-year-old female karate black-belt, after bragging that she could catch in her hand an arrow shot from a bow, failed, merely deflecting it into her eye, which she lost (Jersey City, N.J.). Life-imprisoned Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols (whom many people would like to see dead, anyway) threatened to starve himself if he didn't get a higher-fiber diet. Researchers reported that a woman undergoing in-vitro fertilization had also become pregnant the old-fashioned way, thus producing two fetuses (Palo Alto, Calif.). The 17-year-old winner of a high school Halloween costume contest was suspended for breaking his promise to retire the costume (a full-body-length vagina) (Ann Arbor, Mich.).

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

-- 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/.)