-- The Alaska Court of Appeals ruled in November that a judge could not take away a man's gun permit just because the man was suffering from a delusional disorder and believes that he has been injected with deadly chemicals and that a computer chip was planted in his head. State law, said the court, allows the denial of a permit only if a person has been taken through a full incompetency adjudication. The man, Timothy Wagner, came to the attention of authorities when he entered a store in Anchorage dripping wet because, he said, he was trying to soak the chemicals out of his body. He had a loaded .357 handgun (fully licensed) with him.

-- Trial got under way in January in which residents of Anniston, Ala., are suing for compensation for Monsanto's (and its corporate successor, Solutia Inc.) routinely having dumped deadly PCBs into the ground and local rivers for 15 years after it knew, from the company's own research, that the pollution was so deadly that fish in the rivers died bloody deaths 10 seconds after initial exposure to the water. According to documents from a chemical-safety organization and published in The Washington Post, Monsanto and its executives actively hid the dangers from its factory's neighbors while also dumping millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. (Monsanto no longer produces chemicals but does make genetically engineered food, which, it assures consumers and the government, is totally safe for human consumption.)

Sentenced to 70 years in prison for armed carjacking in Kansas City, Mo., in December: Mr. Montea Mitchell (whose actual birth name, before social workers got it legally changed, was Murder Mitchell, named because an uncle was murdered around the time of little Murder's birth). Booked for aggravated assault and burglary in Salt Lake City, on New Year's Day: Mr. Joe Snot, 31. Arrested for robbery in Ottawa, Ontario, in November: Mr. Emmanuel Innocent (and, for aggravated assault in Kingsport, Tenn., in October: Mr. Innocent Safari Nzamubereka). Sentenced in December to at least 60 years in prison for the first-degree murder of a waitress in Washington, D.C.: Gene Satan Downing, 19.

-- In January, the brother of one of the seven people killed in October when a deranged man attacked the driver of a Greyhound bus in Tennessee filed a lawsuit against Greyhound and the driver. Apparently, the brother believes that the company should have hired a driver who could safely drive 60 mph while fending off a knife-wielding psychopath (or else trained drivers better to do that).

-- In October, a judge in Rio de Janeiro turned down a defamation lawsuit brought by the daughters of the late Brazilian soccer player Manuel dos Santos ("Garrincha") against a biographer who had written that Garrincha was a "sex machine" with a penis nearly 10 inches long. The daughters had thought the disclosure was an insult to the memory of their father, who died in 1983, but Judge Joao Wehbi Dib concluded that, contrary to defamation, most Brazilian men would view such a reputation with great pride.

-- The family of Paul Waymant filed lawsuits for more than $1 million in October in Salt Lake City against the searchers who failed to find Waymant's 2-year-old son before he froze to death on a hunting trip in October 2000. Waymant had left the boy alone in his truck for a few minutes, which allowed the boy to get out and wander off, and he eventually froze to death. Waymant was convicted for leaving the boy unattended, but in July 2001, rather than serve his 30-day sentence, Waymant committed suicide. Now, Waymant's family believes this tragic chain of events was all the fault of inept county search-and-rescue teams and their dogs, who did not find the boy in time.

-- Lynn Rubin sued the school district in Union City, Calif., in November for $1.5 million because his son Jawaan was improperly assigned to his high school's junior varsity basketball team after failing a tryout for the varsity. Rubin said the family had already made logistical plans to accommodate the varsity practice schedule and that he, as Jawaan's father, was not consulted by the coach before Jawaan was sent back to the JV.

-- According to witnesses, Kevin Rodriguez, 11, choked to death in January 2000 in his Broward County, Fla., school cafeteria after a hey-watch-this exhibition in which he shoved a large part of a hot dog into his mouth. In December 2001, Rodriguez's family filed a lawsuit against the school board because cafeteria and other personnel were not able to save Kevin's life and because hot dogs are too dangerous to serve 11-year-old kids.

Albuquerque Metro judge Barbara Brown was temporarily suspended in November after she and an ex-boyfriend were charged by police with throwing rocks at a Cash Mart check-cashing store that had refused to grant Judge Brown a loan, on the ground that she hadn't yet paid off a previous loan. The ex-boyfriend, Richard "Dickie" Hone, who in post-charge interviews with Albuquerque Journal reporters, implied that the charges would eventually amount to nothing because he would lean on the clients of his sports and entertainment agency, including Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson and others familiar with his humanitarian work, such as Nelson Mandela, boxing's Don King, former energy secretary Bill Richardson, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. (Journal reporters contacted several of those people, but no one recognized Hone.)

Bob Bowling, 32, shot himself in the thigh on Jan. 7 while practicing his quick draw on a snowman (Willard, Ky.). And Paul D. Dimoff was accidentally shot in the chest at 2 a.m. on New Year's Day by the shotgun he had rigged as a booby trap to fire at burglars (McVeytown, Pa.). And Juan Manuel Lopez, 25, trying to make a point of his manliness (in front of a would-be girlfriend) by firing his gun at the floor of her apartment in September, accidentally shot himself in the foot (St. George, Utah).

James Clyde Shields, 35, became the latest person in custody to escape by driving off in a law-enforcement patrol car despite having been handcuffed with his arms behind him. Shields had been arrested on drug-manufacturing charges near Vancouver, Wash., in August, and was momentarily left in the back seat of the locked (but engine-running) car. He pulled his hands underneath him to be in front of him, opened the Plexiglas shield, squeezed into the front seat, got behind the wheel, and led a chase up Interstate 5 before crashing into a pole. Said a sheriff's sergeant, of Shields' limberness, "I know I couldn't do (that)."

A North Vancouver, British Columbia, herbalist introduced four owner-friendly perfumes for dogs, marketing them as scents that both owner and dog could wear when they are out and about together (December). A jury in Miami awarded a 79-year-old woman $20.9 million in an auto crash case, despite the defendant's lawyer's argument that she should get only a fraction of that because her life expectancy is so short (and even shorter, due to his client's negligence behind the wheel) (December). Hospital authorities in Australia told the Sydney Daily Telegraph in December that a (now-deceased) 15-year-old terminally ill boy, who had decided that his one dying wish was to experience sexual intercourse, got his wish via a hospital-arranged prostitute, but that the boy's parents, and church leaders, were outraged.

It took emergency workers 45 minutes with hydraulic spreaders, but they finally freed a 2-year-old boy's head from a bongo drum (Fitchburg, Mass.). The mayor of Rio de Janeiro pressured prosecutors to send TV meteorologist Luiz Carlos Austin to jail for incorrectly predicting rainstorms over New Year's (and possibly panicking already-flood-weary residents). The owner of a single-engine plane watched helplessly as it, with engine revving yet no one on board, burst loose of its moorings and made a perfect takeoff and brief flight, before crashing (Sonoma County, Calif.). A 63-year-old woman, watching a supposedly helpful video demonstrating the open-heart surgery she was preparing for, got scared and suffered a heart attack (Workington, England).

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

-- On Jan. 1, John Guth, 32, and Jeff Tweiten, 24, set up outside the Cinerama theater in Seattle, where they announced they intended to await the public sale of tickets for "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones," scheduled for release May 16. Tweiten said he was actually engaged in an art project on "waiting for something"; he keeps a log of his experience and originally wanted to await the film for two years. "I'm becoming very aware just how long an hour is," he said, and "what happens in an hour." The film's distributors have not even confirmed that the film will be shown at the Cinerama.

-- In November, prosecutors in Greenbelt, Md., finally indicted Josephine Gray, 55, for her role in the serial murders of her two husbands (in 1974 and 1990) and a boyfriend-cousin (1996), cases that have long been stymied by several relatives' resolute refusal to testify against her out of fear that she would use voodoo on them. (She was not indicted for murder but rather for collecting on the men's life insurance policies after helping arrange their deaths.) One relative of the eventual second victim said Gray could control the man as long as he was eating Gray's cooking but returned to "his old self" when he ate elsewhere. Other relatives said a spell from Gray caused the eventual first victim once to scratch his face to shreds.

Legal fees had risen to about $30,000 as of November in the Golden, Colo., battle between ex-lovers David Rosenthal and Barbara Newman over whether their 2-year-old child is named "Kyleigh Rosenthal-Newman" or "Kyleigh Rosenthal Newman." And Thailand's minister of tourism said a 27-hole golf course would be built at the juncture of his country, Laos and Cambodia, with nine holes in each nation, though the territory is littered with Khmer Rouge land mines; the minister thought golfers would fly in from all over the world for the challenge. And leaders of the notorious right-wing death squad of Colombia's United Self-Defense Forces sent e-mail Christmas cards this season to their soldiers across the countryside, wishing them "peace."

-- A judge acquitted Yvonne Lancaster of drunk-driving charges in October, even though she had been found passed out in her car in Warrington, England, with an empty vodka bottle at her feet, with a blood-alcohol reading four times the legal limit. Because she was barely conscious and had to be propped up at the station for her breath test, the police declined to read her her rights (because she appeared not to understand anything being said to her), and that failure, the judge said, invalidated the arrest.

-- New York City defense lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg zealously claimed on behalf of her client in a December murder-rape-robbery trial that the 81-year-old victim begged, and paid $20 for, kinky sex from her client, a 37-year-old crackhead with a long rap sheet. The jury convicted Elbert Marcel Mitchell on DNA evidence but not before Van Leer-Greenberg had insinuated in argument and questioning that the victim, a kindly Harlem socialite, had consented to the swollen cheek, the split lip, and the black eye, and that the dog leash Mitchell strangled her with was around her neck as part of an erotic game.

-- Heart surgeon James McClurken of Abington Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia reported in November that his 70-year-old bypass patient was exhibiting an old wound that surely indicated that an object had entered and exited his heart. It turns out that the man had indeed taken a slug, in the Korean War, but thought at the time that it must have missed the heart, but now the surgeon says it passed through so quickly that the wound closed up tight with no ill effects.

-- The Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star reported in November that a state inspector, using new guidelines from North Carolina's Early Childhood Environmental Rating System, had downgraded the Kids Gym Schoolhouse day-care center in Wilmington only because she had found nine 2-inch-high toy soldiers in a play area and thus concluded that the center was engaged in "stereotyp(ing) violent individuals and promot(ing) violence."

-- The District of Columbia Department of Corrections admitted in August that it had illegally detained a deaf-mute man, who also has a serious mental illness, for 669 days on a minor misdemeanor charge (that ultimately was dropped) because it had lost his file. Jail records showed that the man never had visitors (not even the required public defender). The department director said it was "kind of unbelievable to me" that his agency could have done that.

Brian D. Beaudoin, 42, who was charged in August in Providence, R.I., with embezzling more than $100,000 from his mother in an investment scheme, first aroused suspicions when the mother and her two daughters entered Beaudoin's private bedroom to search for papers and discovered what the Providence Journal called a "stomach-churning, garbage-strewn mess," including "moldy food and soiled clothes" and "bottles and jars of thick liquid with unusual substances floating in them." Beaudoin later admitted that he sometimes urinated in bottles because he was too lazy to go to the toilet, which was in the next room. The sisters told reporters they suspected Beaudoin was storing strange liquids in order to poison their mother for insurance money.

From the Police Blotter column in the Oct. 30 San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News (during the nation's anthrax craze), about a mysterious bag of white powder that had been found in the waiting room of Good Samaritan Hospital the previous week: "The area was evacuated and the bag was secured by hospital staff and security personnel. Before the fire department or police department arrived, a security guard smelled and tasted the powder" and determined that it was not anthrax.

In June 1997, News of the Weird reported on Troy Hurtubise, a scrap-metal dealer from North Bay, Ontario, who had become so obsessed with grizzly bears that he had embarked on a 10-year, $100,000 project (sending him into bankruptcy) to build a suit out of rubber, steel and titanium that would enable him to safely wrestle a grizzly. In a December test at a special facility in British Columbia, Hurtubise hung a version of his long-awaited Ursus Mark VI suit in a cage, where it was promptly ripped up by a 1,200-pound Kodiak bear, forcing Hurtubise to go to plan B, in which he donned another suit and went face-to-face for 10 minutes not with the Kodiak but with a small, female grizzly. He said he would improve the suit and go face-to-face with a Kodiak later this year.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (49) The hit-and-run driver who, either impaired or incompetent, drives on, oblivious to the victim (or parts of the victim's vehicle) being embedded in the grill or windshield of his car, as did a 25-year-old man in Pueblo, Colo., in November (14 miles with the motorcycle he hit stuck in his grill). And (50) the "man bites dog" stories in which a criminal suspect, cornered by a police dog, manages to get in a bite himself, before the dog subdues him (resulting in an additional battery charge against the suspect), as happened to a 28-year-old man in Virginia Beach, Va., in December.

Ms. Takako Konishi, 28, was found dead, of probable suicide, in Detroit Lakes, Minn., six days after being spotted in Bismarck, N.D., inquiring how to find the money that had been buried by a character in the movie "Fargo." A Tokyo hospital official was ordered by a court to pay about $2,350 to a colleague whom he had verbally assaulted at a board meeting last year by calling him an "idiot" or a "moron" 74 times. Yale Divinity School dean Ralph William Franklin resigned over charges of mismanagement, including using Yale funds to pay for clearly personal expenses, in "flagrant violation" of his contract. An environmental official in Kagoshima, Japan, was arrested for threatening to knife a bar owner if he didn't start separating his garbage according to the country's strict trash laws.

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

-- 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/.)