-- In December, transgender aspirant Jamie Cooper, 16, of Birmingham, England, told reporters that he planned to store some of his sperm before he changes sexes so that, with the use of a surrogate womb, he can eventually be both the father and the mother of a child (which, if it happens, would be a world's first). Cooper is now living openly as a girl, has begun anti-testosterone injections, and, under National Health Service rules, will be eligible for surgery in five years. Various church spokespeople were horrified when told of Cooper's plans.

-- In December, a Nevada association of private security guards who work at the federal government's super-secret "Area 51" at Groom Lake, 90 miles from Las Vegas, went on strike for higher wages and benefits. In fact, the association president told reporters he could not even divulge the location of his workplace but that the questioner should "use your imagination." When at work, the guards report to the airport in Las Vegas and are flown in nondescript planes to the site, which they are trained to refer to as "nowhere" and "out of town." The guards are called "camo dudes" locally because they wear camouflaged uniforms on patrol.

-- Recidivist voyeur Daniel W. Searfoss, 43, was charged in November with using a tiny lens in his shoe, attached to a video camera he carried in a bag, to photograph underneath women's skirts at a flea market in Brandon, Fla. He had just finished probation for a similar incident at a Wal-Mart last year, and after detectives scanned 45 videotapes from Searfoss' home, they charged him with another November incident at a Plant City church (perhaps the one in which he performed community service on the Wal-Mart charge). At a December court hearing, the prosecutor told the judge that Searfoss had also tried to point his shoe under the dresses of several women in the county probation office.

A barber from Scotland was flown at government expense to the Netherlands just to cut the hair of accused Pan Am Flight 103 bomber (and Scottish prisoner) Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in July because security policy prevents local civilians from doing it. And police in New Bedford, Mass., admitted in November that they had hurt their case by discarding a partial bomb allegedly made by the high school students recently charged with conspiring to blow up their school, because they wrongly thought that policy was to use as evidence only active bombs. And in September, two Pennsylvania state troopers got in trouble for receiving complete, $60 prostitution services while working undercover, even though policy prevents such sex acts "except in a lifesaving situation or where officers' lives are at stake," according to a state police official.

-- At his October murder trial in Hackensack, N.J., Agustin Garcia, 49, did not dispute that he shot his former girlfriend to death on her wedding day, but he said the jury ought to sympathize with him, in that he could not help himself: On the day that he learned of her wedding, it had been only three days since he had last had sex with her himself. A psychiatrist testified that this was "acute adjustment disorder," but that apparently did not faze the jury, which sentenced Garcia to 30 years in prison.

-- Rangers at the Great Smoky Mountain National Park just across the North Carolina line in Tennessee canceled a massive search they had scheduled on Oct. 19 when the missing man (Chien Nguyen, 47, a school custodian from Smithfield, N.C.) turned up in a homeless shelter in Knoxville. Nguyen said he had gone to the park, and then to the shelter, because he needed to get away from women, believing that his status as a Buddhist monk was being jeopardized by too much intergender contact. (Indeed, the Knoxville shelter was men-only.)

-- Edinburgh, Scotland, postal worker Graham Fletcher, 25, was sentenced in October to only community service, on a plea-bargained charge of hoarding two items he should have delivered (reduced from the original 696 items). He said things started to go bad when he decided to surprise his wife while she was attending a ladies-night-out but found her engaged in a sex act outside a bar, up against a Ford van. Stunned, Fletcher said he wandered around in a daze, sank into depression, and eventually started hoarding mail as a "cry for help."

-- Howard Strumph filed a lawsuit in September against the Voorhes, Pa., Police Department, claiming that they were responsible for his wife's death in 1999 because they failed to enter the family home quickly enough to save her. The reason the police were reluctant to enter was because Strumph had just shot Mrs. Strumph, along with a handyman the couple employed, and police thought they might be in a standoff with a homicidal man. (Strumph later showed he intended only to shoot the handyman, whom he saw attacking his wife, but he was unsteady when he fired from his wheelchair and accidentally hit his wife.)

-- Kane Rundle, 22, filed a lawsuit for $1 million (Aus.) against the New South Wales State Rail company in Australia, based on his severe injuries from a 1994 incident. Rundle is brain-damaged because he hit his head while leaning out of a moving train, spraying graffiti. Rundle's lawyers believe the company knew that some passengers were spraying graffiti out of train windows and thus should have done more to prevent them from doing it.

In November, Philadelphia City Councilman Angel Ortiz was revealed to have been driving for the last 25 years without a license, including the last 17 years when he has been a municipal employee or council member. Said Ortiz, "I kept trying to make time to get a new license, and it seemed that something pressing always took precedence." A few days later, Ortiz was discovered also to have 53 outstanding parking tickets (face value, about $3,000), and as is often the case with public officials' misconduct, Ortiz made the story more interesting by denying that he knew about any of the tickets.

-- Expensive single acts of sexual intercourse occasionally hit the newspapers when celebrities are involved (such as tennis star Boris Becker's recent out-of-court settlement paying a reported $2.5 million in child support for the product of a brief interlude with a model in a restaurant closet). In November, a court in Birmingham, England, ordered plumber John Walker, 25, to pay what amounts to nearly $100,000 for an episode in which a much older woman seduced him when he was 15. Though he never saw her again, she remembered him and now claims she needs help raising their child. After a positive DNA match, Walker must pay until the kid turns 19 (or later, if the kid stays in school).

-- News of the Weird reported in 2001 that Kepler College in Seattle had won state higher-education certification for a curriculum in astrology and that the U.S. Department of Education had decided that vocational astrology students could qualify for federal loans and grants. Recently, India's higher-education curriculum planners decided that colleges in that country could offer courses in astrology at the graduate, post-graduate and research levels, and about 25 programs have been established. Critics say the policy is an ill-conceived plan by Hindu nationalists to extend their influence, but a New Delhi astrologer applauded the move, pointing out that astrology "seek(s) wisdom which no other science provides."

Firefighters in Argo, Ala., found a well-preserved (but dead) 6-foot-long brown shark lying on the side of Micklewright Road just off U.S. 11 and disposed of it after no one called to claim it. A 53-year-old man was hospitalized after two of the four homemade bombs he was carrying around in case he got mugged exploded (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.). A fired postal worker pleaded guilty to splattering former colleagues with a mixture of worms and porcupine feces in a vengeful return visit to the workplace (Grand Rapids, Mich.). A large woman was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after the 49-year-old man she was sitting on (attempting to persuade him to pay for the sex act he had allegedly purchased from her) died (Peoria, Ill.).

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

-- Two professors recently quit West Virginia University in protest of its new-agey Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health, an anxiety-reduction study organization named after a welder whose epiphany "catapulted him from a routine life of stress and insecurity into a state of deep peace, hopefulness, security and clarity." According to one professor in attendance at a recent Banks conference in Seattle, a Banks speaker presented photographs of "ice crystals formed in the presence of positive thoughts and (ice crystals) formed in the presence of negative thoughts," and then noted that the negative-thought ones "weren't as pretty," and then remarked, "I'm not a scientist myself, but this looks like evidence to me."

-- Rev. Jamyi Witch, a Wiccan, was appointed in December as one of the two official chaplains at the Waupun (maximum security) Correctional Institution, Waupun, Wis. She won the job over nine rivals despite the fact that only 30 of the 1,200 inmates are of Wiccan denomination and despite the fact that Wicca does not preach fear of eternal damnation, which many regard as a crucial message for that population.

According to the attorney for several Benicia (Calif.) High School students suspended for toilet-papering the school in November, principal Robert Palous, in meting out the punishment, described the kids' actions as the school's own World Trade Center attack. And in an October Associated Press story about turning the Miami house in which Elian Gonzalez lived into a shrine, one visitor said, "To us, (the day that Elian was taken away) was almost equivalent to the Twin Towers day." And in November, outgoing Frederick, Md., Mayor Jim Grimes, who for months had been trying to prevent the local newspaper from getting an arrested prostitute's files publicly disclosed (allegedly to protect some friends), reacted to a judge's finally releasing them by saying: "I absolutely feel that the same thing that happened at the World Trade Center has hit me. I was terrorized (by The Frederick News-Post)."

-- The city council of Edmonds, Wash., voted recently to toss out a 60-year-old, cheap-looking totem pole that had been donated to the city, but before it got to a landfill, demolition company employee Sydney Locke plucked it out of a trash bin and took it home. City officials for some reason resented Locke's action, and have filed a lawsuit against Locke to regain legal ownership of the totem pole, though not because they have found a use for it but rather to make sure it gets to and stays in the landfill.

-- According to a November Los Angeles Times report, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has issued 5 million "smart cards" to permanent residents since 1998 (containing all the unique personal information now being discussed to improve security against terrorism) but has not yet acquired any machines that can read the cards. Among other INS problems: INS's fingerprint system has been, and is still, unconnected to the FBI's fingerprint system; and its electronic database to track foreign students, created following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, now covers students in only 21 colleges.

-- To resolve a problem unknown in American governments, state authorities in Queensland, Australia, decided in October that local bureaucrats were taking too much time to process applications to open legal brothels and thus decided to adopt a fast-track program to jump-start the industry. The state government announced it would appoint an independent official to get more brothels up and operating, thus stymieing town officials who are opposed to having them in their neighborhoods.

-- In August, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection pleaded guilty to two felony counts, acknowledging that the agency itself had polluted the city's water (and that of Westchester County) with mercury and the suspected carcinogen PCB that leaked for years through its water-circulation equipment. According to testimony in federal court, the agency had known of several dozen leaks since 1988 but disregarded them. In one incident, six pounds of mercury was left in the system three years after the agency promised to clean it up, and the deputy director's excuse was that the area involved "is dark and is difficult to see."

-- A September Associated Press review of Department of Agriculture records revealed that more than 60 percent of federal farm subsidies given out last year went to just 10 percent of farmers, almost all of them well-to-do in the first place. Among the recipients were farms owned by David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson and basketball star Scottie Pippin. Asked one farmer, "Why are we giving millions of dollars to millionaires?"

In Singapore in September, Shahul Hameed Kuthubudeen, 17, had agreed to a favorable sentence on his conviction for obsessive hand-kissing of girls: He had been enrolled by his family into a religious school in India to break him of his habit, which in the latest case involved seven counts of extending his hand to girls, receiving her hand innocently in his, and then kissing the back of her hand repeatedly while refusing to let her go. Two weeks after the schooling was arranged but before he had left town, Kuthubudeen was arrested again for a similar attack on a 16-year-old girl in an elevator.

In November, the decayed body of a man who apparently died three years ago at age 46 was found in his apartment in Warminster, Pa. While this genre of news stories occurs often enough to be regarded as No Longer Weird, this story is different because of the number of people who had an opportunity during those three years to discover the body but did not. The regular postal carrier; the postal service supervisor; at least one neighbor; village officials who towed the man's car for expired registration; the condominium association president; the police (who received many calls from various people suggesting that something was amiss in the apartment); the condo association management company agent; and a sheriff's deputy (delivering a foreclosure notice, which he merely tacked up on the door) all failed to inquire seriously about the whereabouts of the resident or about the odor emanating from the apartment.

Fulton County (Ga.) police said the only reason Derrick Van, 36, got caught at all was because he dropped some coins in the course of a November home burglary. When he reached to pick them up, he locked eyes with the homeowner, who was hiding under a bed. Though the homeowner was originally hoping that Van would just leave, when their eyes met, he felt threatened and fired his .357 Magnum, wounding Van badly and sending him to the hospital.

A court in Sweden ordered a certified sperm donor to assume parental rights just because the lesbian couple he assisted have split up and the child needs support (about $265 a month more) (Orebro, Sweden). Yet another Swedish court, hearing a case of four teen-agers who threw a cake at King Carl Gustaf, found them guilty of high treason (but ordered only a fine, of about $370 each) (Stockholm). Police chased down and arrested a 42-year-old man suspected of shoplifting six packages of corn removers from a Wal-Mart, an easy collar because his corns slowed down his getaway (San Diego). Florida judge Joyce Julian, 44, was arrested at 2 a.m. at a resort's conference center after she, intoxicated and nude from the waist down, verbally challenged security officers and then fled (Amelia Island, Fla.)

(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 man appointed by the governor of Texas as the state's director of homeland security in the U.S. war on terrorism, David Dewhurst, is also a candidate for lieutenant governor, and his recent patriot-themed campaign ad featured a large U.S. flag with a smartly dressed soldier standing in front of it. However, it was later discovered that the soldier in the photograph was not an American but a German soldier in a Luftwaffe uniform.

-- In Cleveland, police charged Joshua Brissett, 19, with fracturing the skull of his 5-month-old boy, and prosecutors say he likely was trying to pound or mash the head so it would be more like the shape of his own head. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History (questioned by Channel 5 News) said that some ancient cultures engaged in head-shaping, to help a child grow taller.

An 18-year-old student at the University of Arkansas fell to his death in October from a fifth-floor ledge, where he had gone to light up because he lives in a smoke-free dorm. And in November, a Greyhound bus capsized about 50 miles south of Phoenix, injuring 33, when a passenger fought the driver for control of the steering wheel at 70 mph, stemming from his frustration at not being able to smoke on the bus. And in October, early in the Afghanistan fighting, one of the first Taliban soldiers to become a prisoner of war had left himself vulnerable when he departed his post near Deshitiqala in order to buy cigarettes (and he was captured by the Northern Alliance).

-- In October, jurors in Austin, Texas, rejected the request of convicted child molester Milton Wayne Somers, 45, to be released as no longer posing a threat to kids, instead sentencing him to life in prison. Somers' main argument for leniency was that, a year ago, apparently annoyed at his uncontrollable love for little girls, he stuck a shotgun between his legs and blew off his testicles (and then he reloaded and shot himself again, for good measure). He said he is not dangerous because he has no sexual impulses, but his ex-wife said that Somers told her his self-castration was just a ploy to stay out of prison.

-- In an Ontario Provincial Police raid near Brechin in October, authorities seized 20,000 marijuana plants, but only a few samples were kept as evidence, with the rest hauled away to a landfill via 50 truck-trips. However, the word quickly got out, and a gold-rush of prospectors swarmed over the dump, taking away as many of the decaying plants as they could, until police were able to close it off. Several dozen people were said to have grabbed some of the trees, but only six were caught and arrested.

-- Paul Claren, 52, a psychiatric nurse at an Ohio state hospital in Akron for 18 years before he was fired, was himself ordered to a similar facility in November with diagnoses of paranoia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, after he shot out the home windows of several ex-co-workers he didn't like.

-- Buffalo Bills running back Travis Henry was sentenced in November to 100 hours' community service after pleading guilty to attempted sexual misconduct with a 15-year-old girl, but the court then assigned him to Buffalo's St. Augustine Community Service Corp., where most of his duties will consist of counseling youth.

Mr. Tom Leppard, in his late 60s and having retired after 28 years in the military, lives alone on Scotland's Island of Skye (about 125 miles from Glasgow), after having spent about $9,300 to tattoo leopard spots all over his body and be outfitted with fangs by his dentist so he will look the part of the leopard he so admires. Leppard told Britain's Daily Record in October that after he retired, he "couldn't mix with ordinary people" and now spends weeks at a time without seeing anyone except for the periodic trips he makes by canoe to pick up supplies.

Avant garde British artist Damien Hirst, who first made News of the Weird with his exhibit of a dead sheep, skinned and suspended in formaldehyde, saw his brand-new installation at London's Eyestorm Gallery go missing briefly in October. The work is a collection of found objects recovered from an artist's launch party (cigarette butts, beer bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers, etc.), and a cleaning man mistook it for the nightly garbage and tossed it out. Gallery officials re-created it later by referring to a photograph of the exhibit to get the exact placement of the items.

A coroner's inquest fixed the cause of a 14-year-old girl's death as hitting her head on a concrete piling after she fainted at gross photographs in FHM magazine (Harrogate, England; September). The father of a high school football player was accidentally killed by a blast from the cannon that the team uses to celebrate touchdowns (Trenton, Mo.; September). A 35-year-old man died while practicing archery in his back yard when his cesspool collapsed underneath him, creating such a cave-in that it took 18 hours to pull the body out (Huntington, N.Y.; September).

Radio personality "Dave the Dwarf" Flood, 37, filed a federal lawsuit to overturn Florida's ban on dwarf-tossing exhibitions in bars, as an unconstitutional restriction on his freedom (Tampa). British police proposed a register/database to keep tabs on troublemaking children, down to age 3. Several female cheerleaders were suspended from the squad for their onfield banner calling on their football team to "rape" the Eaglecrest High Raptors (though they claimed they didn't mean it that way) (Denver). An 8-year-old boy saved his teacher's life with the Heimlich maneuver, which he learned merely from having read about it in his mother's day-planner (and he said he was prepared to do a tracheotomy with a pen knife if that hadn't worked) (Issaquah, Wash.).

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