-- Multinational corporations avoided $45 billion in U.S. taxes in 2000 by buying and selling with their own foreign subsidiaries at sometimes ridiculous prices, according to professors at Florida International University, in a study released in November by U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. For example, U.S. subsidiaries would buy (with tax paid to the other country) a toothbrush for $5,655 or a flashlight for $5,000, while U.S. subsidiaries would sell (tax paid to the U.S.) a bulldozer for $528 or a prefabricated metal building for 82 cents.

-- Isaac Levy, 57, and Zebolan Simonto, 41, told The Washington Post in November that, though they are the only remaining Jewish residents of Kabul, Afghanistan, each had been treated much better by the Taliban than by each other. Their relentless, petty feud began three years ago when both claimed ownership of a handwritten edition of the Torah. Simonto had Levy imprisoned by accusing him of being an Israeli spy, and Levy had Simonto imprisoned by asserting that Simonto had tried to convert Muslims to Christianity and that he had brought prostitutes into his home. Each maintains his own dilapidated, visitorless synagogue.

Willie Prince Cook, 21, on his arrest for peeping into a ladies' room stall at a county courthouse, said he was in the building on business, specifically, to pick up his new marriage license (Rockville, Md., August). And London's The Guardian reported that the U.S. firm OSI Pharmaceuticals is nearing the end of clinical trials for a cream that will make light-skinned people dark and dark-skinned people light. And identical twins Ruth and Rebecca Brown (students at Messiah College, Grantham, Pa.) were written up in their local newspaper for having created 4,386 tiny but highly detailed clay cats wearing Union and Confederate clothing, as part, they said, of their fascination with Civil War battlefields (October).

-- The king of Tonga (Tonga is the island between Fiji and American Samoa) has an actual court jester (until recently, Jesse Bogdonoff), whom he appointed out of gratitude when Bogdonoff discovered that the king's lucrative passport-selling income was being deposited in an interest-free Bank of America account instead of earning interest. It subsequently appeared that Bogdonoff and some colleagues may have absconded with much of the money themselves, instead of re-investing it. Tonga might have made $40 million selling special passports (at $5,000 to $8,000) to prominent people in trouble, such as Imelda Marcos and many lower-level international miscreants.

-- In a November Associated Press report on arson in Tennessee and Kentucky, one state investigator said the two leading causes locally were boredom and the fact that arsonists appear to be following in their fathers' footsteps ("My daddy did it, so I'm doing it," the investigator quoted some as saying; "It passes from one generation to the next (like) child abuse."). A retired arson and bomb analyst for the FBI endorsed the father-son connection and said it was unique to the Tennessee-Kentucky region.

There has been an even bigger worldwide jump in exorcisms recently than in 1973 when the movie "The Exorcist" was released, according to several press reports in September. Official Roman Catholic exorcisms have jumped from one in 1995 to at least 15 in 2001 (and the church has 10 official exorcists on duty in the United States), and a Fordham University researcher said there may be 500 protestant evangelical exorcism ministries in the U.S. alone. The researcher, Michael Cuneo, said he had attended about 50 and seen "lots of fireworks, lots of dramatic activity" but nothing supernatural. Cuneo suggested that exorcisms will increase as people's feelings of helplessness increase.

-- The Archdiocese of Philadelphia recently approved a rare petition from a man to be an official hermit under the Catholic Church's canons. Richard Withers, 46, has vowed to do all the things a priest does except that he spends almost all of his time away from people, in contemplation (based on "an almost unremitting desire to be alone with God"). Brother Withers has a paying job (which he works at in silence) one day a week and exchanges e-mail with other hermits.

-- The Answers in Genesis ministry in Florence, Ky., is building a $14 million creationism museum to compete with classic-science museums, with exhibits that it says will demonstrate that the world was created in six days just as the Bible says. According to a December Los Angeles Times report, a large double-helix of DNA will be on display to suggest that humans are so complex that they could not possibly have evolved, and a life-sized dinosaur will be shown, along with the helpful information "Created on: Day 6." Ministry director Ken Ham said he is targeting Christians who do not take the Bible literally. "This is a cultural war," he said. "They need to know: We're coming."

Mohammad Afroz Abdul Razak, 25, told reporters in Melbourne, Australia, that he belonged to a cell of 20 al-Qaida terrorists whose missions included flying an airplane into that city's 55-story Rialto Towers, but an investigation revealed, at the least, that he was not even close to passing his flying lessons, having taken 17 months to accumulate 20 hours' flying time and hiding in his bed on the days of particularly difficult lessons. According to a December Sydney Morning Herald profile, Razak also did the decidedly unfundamentalist-Islamic thing of crying frequently about his problems in front of his Jewish landlady, and besides, the Australian government has denied the existence of any such al-Qaida cell.

From the Police Report column of the Jackson County (Colo.) Star, listing a hunting accident on Oct. 6 in the south of the county: "A hunter shot a deer and was apparently trying to arrange his rifle on the antlers for a trophy photo when the gun fired, blowing off the man's thumb and part of his hand. When medical personnel arrived, the man had wrapped the wounded hand in duct tape."

News of the Weird reported a year ago that 1,400 college students were majoring in "golf" at eight universities, taking classes in business and turf science, in addition to shooting round after round of golf. Among other curricula recently reported are workshops at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, on how businesspeople schmooze effectively on the golf course (etiquette, ethics, and inferring a company's culture by the way its executives play golf), and an addition to the Penn State program, Spanish for Golf Course Turfgrass Management Students, to help future golf pros communicate better with Hispanic groundskeepers.

The union representing 1,500 Church of England clergy has arranged for martial arts training after statistics showed being a vicar is more dangerous than being a probation officer (December). Imelda Marcos was awarded an $88-a-month World War II military widow's pension, despite recent charges (with more likely) that she looted the Philippine treasury of $350 million during her time as first lady (November). A 48-year-old polisher was pinned against a conveyor belt and killed by an industrial robot at a vehicle-wheel manufacturing plant (Norton, Ohio, December).

A 39-year-old woman was found not guilty of abducting her children in a divorce fight but moments later convicted of contempt of court because she wouldn't stop putting her finger in her mouth and making popping sounds while the judge was speaking (Toronto). Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen announced that any karaoke bars remaining open in the country would be destroyed by military tanks. On Dec. 17, a 47-year-old naturist announced that he had fulfilled his goal of driving 15,000 miles nude (Des Moines, Iowa). A 28-year-old man shot his wife to death, then drove to a highway overpass and shot himself to death, then toppled over the railing onto a Toyota Camry going 65 mph, killing the driver (Los Angeles).

(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 December, according to New Scientist magazine, Swiss inventor Paolo Rais introduced his solution to the boring dinner party in which unfortunate guests, by the luck of the draw, are seated next to uninteresting people: a 12-to-24-seat dining table whose chairs keep moving so that one cannot spend more than 10 minutes trapped next to the same person. Chairs (and a wooden tray containing your food) move at 3 inches per minute. The models vary in price from about $29,000 to about $44,000.

-- Fourteen-year-old Christina Santhouse lives a normal teen-age life in Bristol, Pa., in almost every respect except for a partial paralysis of her left arm and leg, caused by the removal six years ago of half of her brain. According to an October Associated Press report, her surgery (to eliminate Rasmussen's encephalitis, which caused up to 100 brief seizures a day) has not penalized her compared to her supposedly full-brained classmates, in that she remains a straight-A student and loves 'N Sync.

-- Update: Transsexual Tammy Lynn Felbaum (formerly Tommy Wyda), 43, was found guilty in December of involuntary manslaughter and other charges in connection with the February death of her sixth husband, James Felbaum, from complications after his castration. Tammy at first said James castrated himself, then admitted she did it but at James' specific, written request. The Butler County, Pa., judge reached his verdict based on testimony from a jailer who said Tammy told her that castration was the only way she could see to rehabilitate the marriage after an alleged affair by James, and despite testimony from one of Tammy's earlier spouses, Lynn (formerly Tim) Barner, who let Tammy perform her castration because she was an expert. Said Barner, "She could castrate a dog in less than five minutes."

In September, an executive of the Bolton English soccer team ate sheep's testicles, raw squid and snails to uphold his end of the deal after his players won an impressive victory (but they would have had to eat the meal if they had lost). And South Korean archers cleaned up sewage in Seoul and stared at dead bodies in a cemetery in mental preparation for the grueling September World Outdoor championships in Beijing (which the men won, despite losing four squad members because the training was too rigorous). And in Miami in October, a dozen Burger King marketing people (among 100 in a corporate team-building exercise) were treated for serious burns after they walked on hot coals (which a trainer had assured them would not be painful if they adopted the correct attitude).

-- A November report in the Northwestern University daily newspaper described Dr. Michael Bailey's research project (which had already been vetted by the school's ethics people) to determine sexual arousal rates of females by, respectively, heterosexual erotic images and lesbian erotic images. Coeds were recruited at $75 an hour (two to three times the going rate for campus research guinea pigs) to have the "vaginal photo-plethysmograph" inserted to measure moisture and swelling. Dr. Bailey's preliminary conclusion: Women (whether straight or gay) get aroused by either straight or lesbian scenes, whereas comparable research had shown that men were aroused only by images depicting their own sexual orientation.

-- In a December report in The Times of London, University of Nebraska geologist John Shroder (an Afghanistan specialist) said the Pentagon has a Remote-Sensing Gas-Detection Device that is so finely tuned that it can distinguish ethnic groups based on faint aromas of the foods that they eat.

-- The hottest arcade game in Japan recently has been Boong-Ga Boong-Ga, in which a player virtually jabs an oversized finger up the clothed derriere of one of eight loathed targets (e.g., "ex-boyfriend," "golddigger," "con man"), with the more aggressive the jab, the more pained the expression on the target's face. Japanese consumers are said to be more comfortable with the anal theme than consumers in the United States.

-- The Braehead Shopping Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, announced in November that for the holiday buying season, it would offer the female shopper temporary boyfriends/husbands on loan so that she would have someone to browse with if her own mate tended to reject the shopping experience. Said the organizer: "The Shopping Boyfriend is the ultimate retail therapist: enthusiastic, attentive, admiring and complimentary" and will "even say her bum looks small."

-- China Youth Daily and other Chinese newspapers reported instances in November and December in which job-seekers in Shanghai and the northern city of Anshan were turned down solely because their blood type was other than the desired type O. One interviewer allegedly said that type B people "lack independent thought, discretion and ability," but a Shanghai interviewer said he rejects only types A and AB because their possessors are reserved and temperamental. An Anshan employer said he got the idea to screen by blood type by studying in Japan, where he said the practice is common.

Dwight Pichette was serving 14 life terms (concurrently) on 58 convictions for robbery and related charges, yet his lawyer and others said he is one of the most intelligent and sensitive people they've ever met, and since he has been in prison (in Victoria, British Columbia), he has published three books, with a fourth having won a pre-publication arts award. In May, he received a supervised leave to attend a philosophy discussion downtown, gave his escort the slip, and tried two more bank robberies before being reapprehended. Pichette said that he was probably subconsciously sabotaging his future because, on that supervised leave, he realized how he'd tossed away his life. And the self-sabotage worked, because he now has 16 concurrent life terms.

Unlikely Model for al-Qaida: Twenty-one people who claim now that they speak for Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult (which killed 12 people and injured 5,000 in a 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack) said they have become a benign religious organization and changed their name to Aleph, and in November they started a computer business with the goal of earning enough money to compensate the cult's victims. So far, they have raised about $2.5 million. The most famous member, Shoko Asahara, remains in custody and on trial (trials are not constitutionally guaranteed "speedy" in Japan) for murder.

A 38-year-old, alcohol-fueled man, taking up the challenge of a 50-year-old man that if the younger man could outswim him in San Francisco Bay, he'd give the younger man his car, drowned (Berkeley, July). A 45-year-old surfer from Denver, attempting to capitalize on the 10-foot waves of Hurricane Juliette at the southern tip of Baja California, drowned (Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; July). A 48-year-old man was killed while attempting to pass a car he had been expressing his displeasure with for traveling too slow; as he swerved his pickup truck right to gently nudge the car, he lost control and smashed into a light pole (Laval, Quebec; November).

According to a lawsuit, a Wal-Mart manager, informed that an employee had allegedly fondled a 10-year-old girl in the store, offered the girl's mother a $25 gift certificate to forget the whole thing (Columbia, S.C.). A 49-year-old man was arrested for DUI with a record-challenging blood-alcohol reading of .532 (Lorain, Ohio). Arizona Cardinals' placekicker Bill Gramatica made his 16th field goal of the year (in 20 tries), against the Giants, leaped into the air in celebration, and ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament as he landed, ending his season and jeopardizing his career. Towing company employee Joseph Thomas Johnson, 33, was arrested for joyriding in rap singer Missy Elliott's 2001 Lamborghini (price: $330,000), during which he hit a stop sign and crashed, inflicting $160,000 damage.

(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 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/.)