-- Following a hearing in Pasadena, Calif., a federal appeals court ruled in January that convicted marijuana smuggler Gary H. Marolf (who is now serving 10 years in prison) was entitled to $400,000 compensation because drug agents had not given him a required document when they legally confiscated the boat he used for smuggling. Agents were required to give the boat owner formal legal "notice" of the confiscation but gave it to Marolf's co-defendant instead, and when it was revealed that Marolf was the sole owner, the agents failed to follow up. (The boat brought only $100,000 when it was subsequently sold at auction.)

-- Researchers at Kinki University (Nara, Japan) announced in January that they had successfully bred spinach genes into pigs (the first mammal-plant combination) and claimed that the resulting meat would be "more healthy" than normal pork. "But," added Professor Akira Iritani, "the significance of this success is more academic than practical."

In December, the Days Inn hotel in Hicksville, N.Y. (near JFK airport), agreed to a fine and refunds to settle charges that, in the days after Sept. 11, it billed people stranded by the air-travel shutdown up to $399 a day for its $139 rooms. And The New York Times reported in October that Providence Inc., a Cincinnati firm that lends money to victims in anticipation of litigation, sent at least 76 relatives of Sept. 11 victims portfolios containing gifts of up to $200, along with a list of suggested lawyers. And New York City police arrested 115 unlicensed Ground Zero vendors in December and cracked down on many more vendors for selling counterfeit logo items of the NYPD and Fire Department of New York (counterfeiting that denied proceeds to the police and firefighter foundations that control the trademarks).

-- A brown bag holding cremated ashes crashed through the backyard deck of James and Jane McDonald in Grand Forks, N.D., on Dec. 29, leaving an 18-inch hole. According to a local environmental health official, the most likely explanation is that someone was attempting to scatter the remains over the countryside from an airplane window but accidentally dropped the whole bag.

-- "Fat Finger" Syndrome: A Nov. 30 typing error exposed the financial services firm UBS Warburg to losses of up to $100 million. In one of 2001's largest initial public offerings, for the Japanese company Dentsu, a UBS Warburg trader typed a sell order of 610,000 shares at only 16 yen each, instead of 16 shares at 610,000 yen. Since UBS Warburg was running the IPO, it had to make up the difference by buying back the sold shares on the open market. The order was canceled minutes later, but so many shares had traded during the interim that UBS Warburg bought at a heavy loss.

-- A judge in Hull, Quebec, ordered a stripper-defendant to sit in the very back of the courtroom in her November theft trial, in that a witness was having trouble testifying because the dancer flirted with him constantly from the defense table. The witness, professional gambler Terry Leblanc, 34, had said the woman was his first real girlfriend and the taker of his virginity and that he remained so smitten with her that in an earlier court appearance, he literally swooned on the stand as she continually winked and air-kissed him.

-- Pro boxer Waxxem Fikes, 35, who spent five days in jail in Akron, Ohio, in October after being arrested for aggressively complaining to an employee of Swenson's restaurant that his cheeseburger was not properly prepared, was acquitted of assault in his December trial. The employee had charged that the 6-foot-2, 240-pound Fikes was belligerent, but Fikes testified that he merely "told (the employee) I expect the onions to be crisp, tender and succulent, and bursting with flavor, (and) they were not. (T)he (employee) had no compassion for what I was talking about."

-- In October, Kew Gardens, N.Y., rape defendant William Scott sucker-punched his lawyer Harold Ehrentrew in the face because, as he explained to the judge, "(T)his man is not doing his job. That's why I had to smack the ("s---," according to a New York Post report) out of him in front of these jurors." Observers believe that Scott was perturbed that damning DNA evidence had just been admitted against him.

Dolly Neff, executive director of the West Texas Food Bank in Odessa for 16 years, stood on a chair at a pre-Thanksgiving event last year and screamed at the food recipients that they should all be showing more gratitude for the charity they were receiving. (She resigned a few days later.) And in December, according to residents at an Edmonton, Alberta, homeless shelter, Alberta's Premier Ralph Klein, in an unscheduled late-night visit, swore at some residents, told them to get jobs, and derisively tossed money on the floor as he left. (A few days later, Klein said the incident was the result of his drinking problem.)

Nine months ago, the Virginia Supreme Court ordered a new trial for death-row murderer Paul Warner Powell, 23, because the prosecutor had improperly described his crime to the jury in order to legally qualify Powell for the death penalty. Powell (already serving three life terms for rape) then wrote a victory letter to the prosecutor, taunting him for his failure to make the death penalty stick. However, in the course of that letter, Powell allegedly inadvertently confessed to precisely the one detail of the case that the prosecutors needed to legitimately file death-penalty charges, namely that he did in fact attempt to sexually molest the victim before killing her. Thus, in December, prosecutors announced Powell's retrial would again be a capital case.

-- News of the Weird reported in 1999 on a pervert who menaced a McDonald's in Milwaukee by calling up the female manager, pretending to be a police officer, and guiding her by telephone through a strip search of a male employee, who he said should be checked out for theft. The caller was never caught, and a man using a similar modus operandi struck twice in September 2000 at fast-food restaurants in Bismarck, N.D. In December 2001, yet another incident occurred at the Arby's in Noblesville, Ind., when a "police officer" called the female manager and asked her to strip search a certain female employee while he was on the phone, while asking the employee impertinent questions, and then later that month, the same thing happened in Billings, Mont., at a business the Billings Gazette did not identify. (The Gazette later reported that it had received a follow-up inquiry from authorities in Charleston, W.Va., as a caller had struck a restaurant there, too.)

Our Civilization in Decline

-- A 43-year-old man was found guilty of bullying his daughter (now 18) by roughhousing her throughout her childhood (Cardiff, Wales, November). Miss France contestant Aurelie Brun, 19 (winner of Miss Loire-Forez), was disqualified when it was revealed she had endured spine-stretching surgery (a 3.8cm increase) to meet the minimum-height requirement (and anyway, she had since shrunk back under the 5-foot-7 limit) (October). Scotland's educational bureaucracy established a requirement that kids as young as 5 set their own formal "personal development goals" (December).

Because of insurance costs, several resort towns in northern Australia decided to replace coconut palms on their beaches with "less dangerous" trees (i.e., no falling coconuts) (Bowen, Australia). British milkman Steve Leech was honored for quelling a neighborhood fire by dousing it with the 320 pints of milk he was hauling in his truck (Cornwall, England). Police, examining remnants, concluded that the pipe bomb that blew up a pickup truck was constructed out of a 12-inch dildo (East Haven, Conn.). New Zealander Clint Hallam, who received the world's first hand transplant (in 1998) and who later had it removed, told surgeons he has changed his mind again and wants another hand (Lyon, France).

(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 January, after the California restaurant chain Carl's Jr. began televising a commercial chiding competitors' chicken-nugget meals (the ad: executives examining a chicken in a futile attempt to find a body part called the "nugget"), the animal rights group United Poultry Concerns objected, not just because the chicken was mishandled but because the examination hurt the chicken's feelings (treated the chicken "derisively," United's chief Karen Davis told the Los Angeles Times). (A few days later, seemingly in support of Davis, Australian neuroscientists Charles Watson and George Paxinos announced the startup of their project to compile a comprehensive atlas of a bird's "sophisticated and complex" brain, emphasizing features in common with humans' brains.)

-- The Los Angeles Times reported in January that the ex-wife of casino mogul Kirk Kerkorian had recently filed a petition claiming that the $50,000 a month in child support Kerkorian pays for his 3-year-old daughter is insufficient and asking a Los Angeles judge to up the amount to $320,000 a month. Included as little Kira's requirements are $144,000 a month for travel, $14,000 for parties (her first-birthday party cost $70,000), $10,200 for food (about $340 per meal), and $7,000 a month for little Kira to give back to the community (in charitable donations).

Right-to-Life Party candidate Richard Hobbs, 47, overwhelmingly lost his campaign for the legislature of Westchester County, N.Y., in November, probably because it got out that he was a twice-convicted pedophile; he told reporters that he didn't think the convictions were relevant to the campaign because "there are no children at the county legislature." And San Francisco election officials denied any misconduct in counting the November ballots on the initiative that would have authorized public seizure of PG&E electric utility lines (which lost by only a few hundred votes); among the alleged irregularities: ballot-box lids blown off, 240 uncounted ballots stuck in a machine, 400 blank ballots found at a pollworker's house, and 5,500 absentee ballots quixotically moved from a heavily guarded room to a lightly guarded one on election night.

-- In October, police in Fairbanks, Alaska, charged Gail Bergman, 41, with second-degree assault for stabbing her live-in boyfriend in the buttocks with two paring knives in a domestic squabble. Bergman denied it, claiming that the boyfriend actually showed up at the door that night naked with the two knives already stuck in him. According to police, Bergman's main concern seemed to be that she had finally relocated the knives: "I've been asking him where those knives have been for the last three weeks. Why is he walking around town with knives sticking out of his butt?"

-- From the Crime Watch column of the Leaf-Chronicle (Clarksville, Tenn.), Dec. 5, 2001: "A 36-year-old cab driver reported one of his riders sexually attacked him Saturday morning in the 100 block of Keith Drive. (T)he cab driver pushed the rider away. The rider then forcibly performed a sexual act on the driver, the victim told (Det. Larry) Boren. The report indicated the driver didn't know if the attacker was a man or a woman."

-- From the police report column of the Union Democrat (Sonora, Calif.), Dec. 31, 2001: "1:35 p.m., Groveland: A driver told the California Highway Patrol that two people were parked outside the entrance to Yosemite National Park with the hazard lights on and their hands in the air. Yosemite rangers said the two men admitted ingesting 'speed' and became paranoid that a sniper was in the bushes aiming a high-powered rifle at them."

-- In November, Mexico City began its latest tactic to help drivers cope with the capital's monumental traffic problem, by hiring five mimes to team with four special traffic officers in street theater sketches to encourage drivers at the city's most dangerous intersections to buckle up, curb their cell-phone usage and obey all traffic laws. (A 1999 tactic had the city reassign its 900 traffic cops in favor of handing all citation-writing over to 64 female officers, who, it was felt, would be less likely to accept motorists' bribe attempts, but the traffic problem has soared since then.)

-- Kimberly Herricks, 36, a manager for Donato's Pizza, Lakewood, Ohio, was indicted in December for stealing $38,000 from the company, an amount that included the value of 400 decaying pizzas found in her garage. According to police, she had invented big call-in orders at her store for schools, hospitals, etc., just to get her store's sales figures up and her name in the company newsletter. She would then adjust the books to cover the costs and deliver the pizzas, herself, to her own garage. She was busted when she asked her boss (the owner) to help her move to a new house, and he discovered the rotting pizzas.

On New Year's Eve, Los Angeles police arrested bicycle-shop owner Michael Howard, 47, and charged him with eight counts in connection with a series of incidents in which a man forcibly cut the hair of women on the street. Though Howard's alleged obsession with hair was apparently not well known to his family, one longtime friend told the Los Angeles Times that Howard "liked playing with (hair), brushing it, everything about it. He says he likes the sound of scissors cutting hair."

A judge in Winnipeg, Manitoba, acquitted a 26-year-old man of rape in December after finding that the 45-year-old victim's testimony was not credible. The victim (an acquaintance of the man) presented no evidence of unwillingness except her word that she didn't want to go through with it, did not try to escape when she had plenty of time to do so, and failed to bite the man during oral sex (because, as she told the defense lawyer, "I'm not like that; I'm not a person who likes to be rude").

Applied Digital Solutions (Palm Beach, Fla.) said in December that it will sell human-implantable chips with space for about 60 strands of information starting early in 2002, but only in South America. In the United States, ADS still needs FDA approval, which it might get later this year. Right now, only some livestock have the chips (and, of course, Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University in England, as reported in News of the Weird in July 2001, whose arm-implanted chips open his office door and turn on the lights).

Yeslam bin Laden, half-brother of Osama, said he will introduce a "bin Laden" designer clothing line that he believes will sell big in Arab countries (but his "bin Laden" trademark application in Switzerland has been held up). And the director of housing at Princeton University issued a safety directive to students after two undergraduates fell out of bunk beds in dorms; it is believed to be the first warning on how to use a bed ever issued to Ivy League students. And probation officers in Staffordshire, England, fresh out of rehabilitation ideas, have started a counseling program based on discussing questions and answers from the board game Scruples.

A brothel for female clientele closed because customers were abusing the owner's pay-afterward privilege by claiming the men didn't satisfy them (Waldshut, Germany). A man escaped after robbing an auto parts store of $50, but not before losing his prosthetic leg and his pants in a scuffle with an employee (Kansas City, Mo.). The owner of seven large (up to 6 feet long), house-roaming Monitor lizards died, apparently of natural causes, but then became dinner for his brood before a relative discovered the body (Newark, Del.). A wealthy director of Finland's Nokia telecom company was fined about $103,000 for speeding, based on the country's system of assigning fines by income, but he said his income has dropped, and the fine should only be about $20,000 (Helsinki).

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

-- 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/.)