-- A University College London professor told a Royal Society Edinburgh debate in February that human evolution is basically over, in that modern medicine and lifestyles assure that virtually all genes, and not just the "fittest" ones, are making it through to the next generation. Despite modern improvements, said Professor Steve Jones, brain size and musculature are stagnating, and because of increased human mobility, Earthlings will eventually mostly consist of brown-skinned people without sharp variations in traits.

-- The federal farm subsidy program, renewed consistently since 1933 as help for the struggling family farmer, was revealed in January to allocate 73 percent of its subsidies to just 10 percent of farmers, almost all of whom are well-off (according to government data published by the Environmental Working Group). For example, a man who owns a tractor dealership among other businesses and who lives in a 13,000-square-foot mansion in Elaine, Ark., has collected $38 million in subsidies since 1996. Among other problems with the subsidy program (some of which are being addressed this month by Congress): It guarantees high prices to crops that are already plentiful worldwide; it subsidizes only farms of certain favored commodities and not those producing fruits, vegetables or cattle; and it allows farmers to exceed the subsidy ceiling merely by establishing a second corporation.

Donald S. Guthrie, Lock Haven, Pa., accused of robbing the M&T Bank in January, said he did it to pay the bail bondsman's bill from his previous arrest. Maurice Gladney, 21, accused of a street robbery in St. Louis this month, said he did it to deal with his distress at the Rams' loss in the Super Bowl. Robert Fremer, 48, Inverness, Fla., accused of robbing a Circle K convenience store in January, and Douglas Lloyd Harrison, 48, Salem, Ore., accused of robbing a U.S. Bank branch in January, said they did it because they needed to get back into jail because jail felt like "home" to them.

-- In December, Cuban political refugee Jorge Casanova, 61, was convicted in Albuquerque, N.M., on six counts of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl, despite his claims of impossibility. The girl said Casanova had intercourse with her numerous times and that his sex organ was of normal size, but Casanova's ex-wife corroborated his testimony that, because he was tortured by the Castro regime in his genital and anal areas, he is not able to sustain an erection. (In fact, the ex-wife pointed out, their two eldest children, conceived after the torture, had to be fathered by artificial insemination.) The jury found Casanova not guilty of the 10 counts against him involving actual intercourse.

-- In August, Shane Hedges, a member of the staff of Montana Gov. Judy Martz, was involved in a fatal auto accident while presumptively drunk, and ultimately resigned and pled guilty to vehicular homicide. However, just after the crash, with the police still seeking evidence from the accident, Hedges went to see Gov. Martz while still wearing the clothes that were bloodied from the dead body in the front seat with him, and Gov. Martz promptly washed them. In January 2002, when the laundering became public knowledge, the local prosecutor let the governor off the hook by declaring that Hedges' clothing was not important evidence in the case. Said Martz, of her impulse to launder, "(T)he mother in me did it. A mother does that kind of stuff."

-- Frances Escalera, cited for the third time by authorities in Allentown, Pa., for excessive loudness of her TV set and thus in danger of being evicted from public housing for violating municipal regulations, charged that the city's rule on TV noise was illegal because it obviously targeted Latinos, who like to turn up the volume.

-- Police in St. Peter, Minn., arrested Olga Esquivel Ramirez, 32, in August after an automobile chase that started when an officer observed Ramirez's car veer over the center line several times. Despite sirens and emergency lights, Ramirez did not stop for about four miles, until pinned in by several cruisers. However, she said she was not trying to outrun the police; rather, she said she thought that if they wanted her to stop, all they had to do was call her on her cell phone.

-- Canada's National Parole Board is being sued for about $960,000 (U.S.) by a twice-convicted robber who has been in jail since 1993, according to court documents reported for the first time in January by the Globe and Mail newspaper. Mark Turner had been released by the board in 1987 but found himself back in prison again after another bank-robbery-related conviction, and now says the parole board should not have released him in 1987. He now says he was not ready to deal with the outside stresses, and if the parole board had forced him to serve out his sentence (until 1994), he would have been more mature and better prepared to resist the temptation to return to a life of crime.

In January, a 42-year-old Vancouver, Wash., chiropractor, upset at the deteriorating relationship with his girlfriend, apparently disemboweled himself in his home. The man, a health-conscious former bodybuilder, was found by police (responding to the girlfriend's call that the man was continuing to harass her) lying on his bed, bloody, with his shirt off and a quantity of his intestines resting on his stomach. He was hospitalized, but his condition was not life-threatening.

Bryan Allison, 24, was hospitalized briefly in Buffalo, N.Y., in November after falling 20 feet to the ground while tossing a television set off a second-floor balcony at his home. According to police, Allison was watching the videotape of a 1989 National Hockey League playoff game with his brother and got angry once again that his team had lost. He picked up the TV set and attempted to toss it off the balcony but apparently failed to let go of it in time.

Returning to the TV screen on Christmas morning was the WPIX-TV (New York City) "Yule Log," a two-hour "program" consisting of a shot of a log burning in a fireplace; it garnered a 3.1 rating (10 percent of all TVs on at the time) and helped the station to its day-long ratings victory. And Andy Park, 42, of Melksham, England, is still going strong, though concerned about his health recently; 10 years ago, he decided that Christmas dinner was so tasty that he should eat it (turkey and all the trimmings) every day of the year, and he figures he has since consumed more than 5,000 helpings of turkey, 7,300 helpings of mince pie and 8,000 glasses of sherry.

The South Korean human-rights organization Sarangbang charged that the country's highly detailed public-school dress codes violate the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (December). And a Ukrainian company, New Men Travel, announced a $460 hands-on tour of Chernobyl (site of the 1986 nuclear plant accident), claiming that radiation has dissipated enough that an hour or two in protective clothing would be safe (January). And among those nominated by world leaders or previous winners for Nobel Peace Prizes this year are California death-row inmate (four murders) Tookie Williams (January).

Per Olympic rules, one member of Canada's gold-medal-winning team in Duplicate Bridge (held the week before the opening of the Salt Lake City games as a "demonstration event") was selected for a random drug test. A judge ruled that an employee who was injured in an amateur boxing match, off-site, during his lunch hour, was covered under worker compensation laws because lunch hours are for "refreshing" oneself for work (Wellington, New Zealand). A few days after closing a plant and laying off 4,500 auto workers, Ford Canada proceeded with a previously scheduled campaign to ask all its workers to wear "Ford Pride" buttons on the job. Police attempting to inform a homeowner that his mailbox had been knocked over stumbled on a $2 million (U.S.) marijuana farm in the man's basement (Vercheres, Quebec).

(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 leadership of the Aryan Nations white supremacy organization kicked out its founder, Richard Butler, in January for allegedly tarnishing the organization's name, in that, according to one leader, Butler "surrounded himself with idiots." That current leader said the group needed to get rid of the "troublemakers and riffraff" to "clean up (our) image," though he was the same leader who recently threatened to "leave the dead bodies of the enemy scattered everywhere." (Butler's associates lost the group's 20-acre Idaho compound last year after an incident in which they fired at an innocent motorist whose engine had backfired, thinking the loud noise was the start of a government siege; the motorist's subsequent victorious lawsuit for $6.3 million forced the sale of the compound.)

-- In January, murder defendant Ernest Spann, 35, an 11th-grade dropout serving as his own lawyer (dressed throughout the trial in his prison uniform because he is serving a 10-year sentence on drug charges), embarrassed a prosecutor by convincing a jury in Tampa, Fla., to acquit him in less than three hours of deliberation. At an earlier trial, Spann (with the help of a public defender) earned a hung jury, but he told the judge this time that he thought he could do better by himself.

In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that federal inmate William Gerber had a constitutional right to procreate and so reinstated Gerber's lawsuit against his warden for preventing him from mailing sperm home to his wife; the future Gerber baby would not only have a questionable genetic legacy (Dad's a recidivist drug and firearms convict) but a single-parent family (Dad's serving 111 years). And in October, Mexican singer Gloria Trevi, wanted by police at home but jailed in Brazil, was reported to have inseminated herself with smuggled sperm so that, due to pregnancy, she could avoid extradition (Rio de Janeiro). And the sheriff in Syracuse, N.Y., reported in November that a female inmate had been impregnated by her husband-inmate during a two-minute "contact" visit; the woman said later it took them only 30 seconds, anyway.

-- As one of his last acts in office in November, outgoing Atlanta city councilman Lee Morris tried to vote through name-changes for two obscure streets, to the names of his two youngest kids (in that they had complained to Dad that he had six years earlier gotten a street named for his other daughter). Morris defended his action as an appropriate reward for his apparently nearly perfect children: "The only thing they ever asked from me was this." (Several days later, after constituent complaints, he changed his mind.)

-- In November, Mayor Carolyn Risher of Inglis, Fla. (pop. 1,400) issued an official proclamation (and embedded copies in posts at four entrance points to the city) declaring her town to be a Satan-free zone. She said she was concerned with kids dressing "Goth," as well as DUI drivers and child molesters: "We are taking everything back that the devil ever stole from us." (In January, the Town Council ruled Risher's action was unofficial.) And in December, another Florida mayor, Greg Bittner of Howey-in-the-Hills (pop. 850), resigned after complaints from the Town Council over his repeated rants that the town should buy a machine to make "colloidal silver" supplements, which he believes kill anthrax spores and otherwise improve public health (despite government warnings of their toxicity).

-- In an earnest anti-terrorism exhibition in Kayseri, Turkey, in October, the top prizes were won by (1) two bakers who made a 5-foot-high cake topped by two skyscrapers, one with a hole near the top and the other with an icing-made plane embedded in it and (2) a men's hairstylist who created a swept-up look that formed hair into twin towers.

-- Britain's most prestigious annual award for unconventional art (the Turner Prize, with more than $30,000 in prize money) went in December to Martin Creed, 33 (who once described his work as about the qualities of "nothing" and who was described in a news report as "looking utterly bewildered" upon being named the winner), for an installation consisting only of an empty room in which lights switch on and off automatically every five seconds.

-- The French artist Cho was profiled in a December BBC News report for his street-beautification project of sticking little flags into some of the many piles of dog droppings on Paris sidewalks (an estimated 5,800 tons per year) and then painting artistic borders around them.

-- In October, authorities in Louisville added Kentucky to the list of states in which Dennis Lee has been charged with violating consumer protection laws. Lee was arrested when he attempted to conduct his standard seminar selling dealerships for a machine that supposedly generates free electricity. Despite abundant evidence of Lee's quackery submitted by physicists and engineers in Vermont, Maine, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico and Alaska, he continues in sincerity to tout his technology. As an example, he says a fuel he created, consisting of equal parts pickle juice, soda pop, water, crude oil, gas, soy sauce, human urine and perfume, can power an internal combustion engine.

In January, only days after outgoing Cleveland mayor Michael R. White left the city on what he said was "solid financial footing" with an $11.8 million surplus, the incoming mayor found that White's finance director Kelly Clark had never bothered to balance the books and in fact had no idea how she came up with the $11.8 million figure. According to the incoming team, Clark actually admitted being unaware that reconciling the books was a prerequisite to declaring a surplus.

Law enforcement authorities continue to contend not only with people breaking out of jails but into them, too, such as Joel Damen Montoya, 26, found in September with bolt cutters outside the fence at the prison in Salem, Ore., from which he had been released earlier in the day, and an intoxicated Mark Delude, 39, trying to come in over the fence at the County Work Camp in St. Johnsbury, Vt., in December, apparently bringing beer back for the boys. And James J. Cesarez, 36, was arrested at a St. Croix Falls, Wis., Wal-mart in November allegedly shoplifting toys and medications and was released on bond; that night, someone smashed a window at the police station and grabbed only the box containing Cesarez's shoplifted items. (Cesarez was re-arrested a short time later.)

Under Oregon's system of grading its public schools' performance, 99 percent scored satisfactory or better last year, including schools in which half to two-thirds of students failed state reading and math tests. And former Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic, still being hunted by the United Nations for war crimes, published a book of poetry, "From the Crazy Spear to the Black Fairy Tale" (January). And in the new "Dibbles and Dollars" board game, on sale in prominent stores in England, players earn money-points by selling drugs and bribing the police, and can actually draw a card that awards them about $250,000 in points for kidnapping a young blond-haired girl (December).

A 40-year-old man smashed a theater's soda fountain and cash register and a plant in the lobby because he was upset at the excessive violence in "Lord of the Rings" (Terrace, British Columbia). Researchers found that men with high levels of the pollutant PCB in their bodies are more likely to father boys than girls (East Lansing, Mich.). A 32-year-old man (5-foot-6, 160 pounds) became the first inmate to escape by squeezing through a prison's "escape-proof" cell windows only 6 inches wide (Frostproof, Fla.). Two female streakers were acquitted of indecent conduct because state law penalizes only "exposure" of the genitals, which, said the judge, almost never happens to females since their organs are mostly internal (Bangor, Maine).

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

-- 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/.)