-- Afghanistan's national sport, "buzkashi" (teams of horsemen battling over a goat carcass in a game without many subtle rules), attracted worldwide attention when it was restored in September after years of suppression by the Taliban. However, also attracting attention, according to a February Boston Globe story, is Colombia's indigenous national sport of "tejo," a horseshoes-type game in which a block of mud containing four small powdered charges comprises a target, and the players lob tejos (resembling large paperweights) to trigger explosions that eventually sink the target into the mud. (Points are scored off the number of explosions and where the tejo lands.) According to the Globe, the game's popularity stems largely from pre-game drinking.

-- Board-certified Kansas City, Mo., psychiatrist (and University of Kansas School of Medicine graduate) Dr. Donald Hinton told reporters in February that "Elvis Aron Presley, the entertainer (whom) everybody believes died in 1977," is alive and that Hinton has been treating him for migraine headaches, among other things, for five years. Hinton, 35, said he has several items from Presley containing his DNA and absolutely denied that he's running a scam (even though he is listed as co-author, with Presley, of a slow-selling book of what purport to be letters from Elvis to his fans). An Elvis Presley Enterprises official was unfazed, insisting that Elvis is still "in the garden (at Graceland)."

-- Last summer, Hindu nationalists in India began marketing "Gift of the Cow" bovine urine, touted as a cure for a wide range of human ailments, from obesity to cancer. And the head of Thailand's energy policy office announced in January that following successes in turning pig dung into gas (a project that caught the attention of the Toshiba Corp., which is planning to build the technology into its construction projects in Guangdong Province, China), the office would begin also using human excrement from the country's prison population. And a Newcastle University (England) professor announced in February that he had devised a method to de-pollute water running from contaminated tin and silver mines in Bolivia by treating it in a compost bed of llama droppings to absorb the poisons.

-- Greg Carpenter, 25, started Nitpickers last year in Wichita, Kan., to comb the head lice out of infested schoolchildren at $35 each (even though a thorough job might take more than two hours). Children who have been sent home from school for head lice (2,800 in the city's schools last year) cannot get back in until they are nitless, and Carpenter guarantees they will be.

-- In January, Hiroaki Kushioka, 55, finally filed a lawsuit against Tonami Transportation in Toyama, Japan, figuring that his rights had somehow been violated in that the company has basically shunned him for 27 years over a whistleblowing incident. Since 1974, Kushioka has been given almost no work, and no promotion, and little contact with anyone at the remote training site the company assigned him to. Although he still draws his salary, Kushioka figures similarly qualified colleagues have earned about $250,000 more than he over the years.

-- Zulu traditionalists in KwaZulu Natal province, South Africa, who have routinely tested females for virginity, are trying to create jobs for men to virginity-test other males by performing any of several unconventional procedures. Spraying urine (vs. a straight stream); the lack of a visible penile vein; the looseness of the light underside of the foreskin; and the darkness of a male's knees, are all evidence that the male is not a virgin, said a leader of the pro-testing movement.

-- In a December story, Toronto's National Post reported on the group of scientists whose lives are spent researching mucus, which they say is underrated in importance because of the stigma over expelled secretions. For instance, a certain "mucin" appears to block the body's mechanism to fight a cancer cell, and if the mucin can be eliminated, so may the cancer. The researchers also want people to know that it is not dangerous to consume one's own mucus (even boogers).

-- Among the newest nonlethal military weapons (developed by San Antonio's Southwest Research Institute) is a spray-on, whitish gel (dubbed "banana peel in a can") that is super-slippery and which the Marine Corps believes can be used to coat the ground to keep crowds from advancing on embassies or military bases. In tests, volunteers attempted in vain to walk across a lawn sprayed with the slime, and in fact, had they not been safety-harnessed during the tests, many would have broken bones.

Richard McCaslin, 37, was arrested inside the Bohemian Grove retreat north of Santa Rosa, Calif., in January, dressed in body armor and combat fatigues and heavily armed. He said he had heard on an Austin, Texas, radio show that retreaters (who, in the past, have included such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and former President George Bush and whose male-bonding exercises have drawn protests from women's groups and conspiracy theorists) were engaging in child abuse and human sacrifice and that he intended to put a stop to it. Authorities (who said they had utterly no evidence of abuses at Bohemian Grove) said McCaslin spent a year scoping out the area and amassing his weapons and had painted "Phantom Patriot" on his chest in preparation for the assault.

In January, police in Fort Pierce, Fla., arrested Diana D. Hill and Bonnie Marie Roberts and charged them with shoplifting 18 cans of Spam Lite from a Winn-Dixie store. Also in January, hotels in Scotland announced that part of their big "Romantic Scotland" marketing campaign would be "Hot 'n' Horny Devil Haggis" with chili and Cajun spices, as potentially an aphrodisiac. (As has been mentioned several times in News of the Weird, haggis is one of the least appetizing foods on the planet, typically being a pudding of sheep organs, suet and oatmeal, boiled in a cow's stomach.)

When News of the Weird last visited Georgia state Rep. Dorothy Pelote of Savannah, she had addressed her chamber during the opening prayer ceremony on the day after Labor Day 2001, informing colleagues that through psychic powers, she had caught a glimpse of Chandra Levy's dead body in a ditch. In January 2002, Pelote got down to serious business and said she would introduce legislation to protect pizza delivery people by making it illegal to answer the door while naked. (Pelote has said she will retire at the end of this year.)

A 45-year-old woman was arrested and charged with demonstrating to her daughter, 15, and a friend, 14, the best technique for injecting heroin (Warren, Mich., December). And a Washington Post investigation found that Prince George's County, Md., police dogs have bitten people at an unseemly high rate in recent years, including at least 43 police officers (December). And a Cambridge University (England) study showed that mice given methamphetamines and subjected to loud dance music keeled over and died (November).

A 40-year-old man who was caught on audiotape strangling his allegedly cheating wife while shouting at her, "You are the weakest link, goodbye!" was sentenced to life in prison (Tonbridge, England). Acting earnestly on U.S. research, a British marine center announced it would try to avert a celibacy crisis among 10 of its sharks by playing Barry White music through underwater loudspeakers (Birmingham, England). A 38-year-old woman beat up a 51-year-old woman because, moments earlier in a grocery store checkout, the older woman had brought 13 items to a 12-or-fewer express line (Lowell, Mass.). Doctors at Norway's national prison revealed that, sympathizing with sex offenders who are furloughed to visit wives or girlfriends, they have routinely been dispensing Viagra (Oslo).

-- 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/.)