-- In December, Colorado Republican Party activist Randal David Ankeney, 30, was charged in another sexual assault incident, following his July arrest for assaulting a 14-year-old girl he had met in an Internet chat room. (The December arrest involved what the Colorado Springs Gazette termed a "girl" but whose age was not disclosed.) And in February, the National Republican Congressional Committee withdrew the "Republican of the Year" award that had been scheduled to be presented to Virginia party activist Mark A. Grethen, 44; the committee had just learned of his conviction on six counts of sex crimes involving children.

-- Matsushita Electric Industrial runs a state-of-the-art retirement home near Osaka, Japan, and according to a BBC News report in February uses robotic companion bears to comfort the residents (average age: 82) and also to continually check health signs. Among the fur-covered bears' skills: They can respond to voice command and can monitor residents' alertness by timing their responses to spoken questions.

The Washington Times reported in December that the U.S. Forest Service had admitted that three of its employees, and other government environmentalists, had planted endangered lynxes' hairs in Washington state forests, thus skewing a research project on whether to restrict development in those forests. And the FBI disclosed in February that the largest U.S. domestic terrorist group (600 attacks in five years) is the environmentalist Earth Liberation Front, whose spokesman took the Fifth Amendment 50 times during a February congressional hearing. And a Cloverdale, Australia, terminal cancer patient complained that he suffered through an agonizing Christmas because a Greenpeace protest shut down the Sydney nuclear reactor that makes his high-tech pain-relieving radioisotope Quadramet.

-- Now operating in Seoul are at least eight "booking clubs," in which males and females pay waiters to forcibly introduce them to each other because South Korean social rules discourage voluntary contact with strangers. According to a January Wall Street Journal report, men may pay several hundred dollars a night to demand introductions, and women pay a similar amount knowing (and preferring) that they will be physically delivered by the waiters to prospective suitors' tables.

-- Licensing officials in New York City declined to issue a permit for the highlight of the two-day Russian end-of-winter gala in February at Prospect Park in Brooklyn because the festival's signature event, the centuries-old "stenka na stenku," calls for two teams of 50 men to engage in vicious fistfights. Said one organizer, "We will have an ambulance standing by (but if) we lose a tooth, we lose a tooth. No big deal."

-- A January Los Angeles Times report described a dozen emerging businesses in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, devoted to staging elaborate break-up schemes (for couples and for business partners) so that the dumping partner does not have to convey the bad news personally. In complicated cases (highly resisting dumpees, or with much money at stake), the breakup agent might charge $100,000 and employ schemes as elaborate as a CIA caper, perhaps creating false identities and false companies or staging sham events.

-- A December report by St. Louis's KMOV-TV caused an uproar when it revealed that the city's 3,500 euthanized dogs and cats a year are disposed of at a local rendering plant that sells some of its product (recycled fat and protein) to pet food manufacturers. The rendering plant subsequently stopped accepting dogs and cats (which it had been taking for free, as a public service), but the city's crisis continues, in that cremation and other alternate forms of disposal are very expensive.

-- Among the 39 charges leveled by the Tennessee Health Department against former state medical examiner Dr. Charles Harlan in December were that he deliberately mutilated bodies during autopsies so that "no one (could) second-guess me"; vastly overused "sudden infant death syndrome" as the cause of death for babies; and let animals "roam freely in his facility and consume the organs of deceased persons."

Bad Habits: Mohammad Saboor, 56, was arrested in January as the well-dressed man who has spontaneously kissed at least nine female strangers on Toronto streets since November. And Melvin G. Hanks, 54, was arrested in Belleville, Ill., in February, accused of stealing 92 ponytails in 13 attempts from a salon that was collecting the hair to make wigs for children who had lost theirs because of disease. And Ronald Castle Sr., 54, was arrested in Syracuse, N.Y., in January, suspected as the man who has been masturbating into colleagues' coffee cups at the county Department of Social Services.

Three Alaskans were charged recently with ill-thought-out thefts: Todd Shobe, 38, was arrested in Anchorage in January when his SUV got stuck in the mud at a construction site after being weighed down with all the tools he was trying to drive away with. And Roger D. Yost, 40, and William Isberg, 40, were arrested in Fairbanks in February when they tried to get a 500-pound safe out the door of a Moose Lodge hall, seemingly forgetting that they had arrived at the Lodge only on bicycles.

Arrested for murder: Christopher Wayne Davis (Pearl River, La., November), Jerry Wayne Dean (Jackson County, Ky., November), Billy Wayne Cope (Rock Hill, S.C., November), Joshua Wayne Andrews (Woodbridge, Va., January), Jeffrey Wayne Gorton (Flint, Mich., February), Timothy Wayne Adams (Houston, February). Murder Warrant Issued: Jason Wayne Johnson (Comal County, Texas, December). Sentenced for Murder: Mark Wayne Campmire (Litchfield, Conn., January). Executed for Murder: Randall Wayne Hafdahl (Huntsville, Texas, January), Stephen Wayne Anderson (San Quentin, Calif., January). Avoided a Murder Charge Only Because He Was Killed in a Shootout With Police: Danny Wayne Sand (Brandon, Manitoba, December). Appealed or Sought Parole: convicted murderers Kenneth Wayne Woodfin (Richmond, Va., January), Gary Wayne Sutton (Knoxville, Tenn., January).

An education law firm in Adelaide, Australia, recommended that its client private schools obtain student permission in writing before sending report cards home, so as not to violate new privacy legislation that took effect in December. And biology teacher Christine Pelton resigned in December from Piper High School near Kansas City, Kan., after the school board refused to allow her to give grades of zero to the 28 students who plagiarized their term projects. And to cut absentee rates, a school in Sooke, British Columbia, began passing out perfect-attendance coupons this year, good for free fast-food sandwiches and french fries.

A half-ton cow jumped a 6-foot slaughterhouse fence and hid out so heroically for 12 days that when she was finally captured, the mayor said he'd present her a key to the city (Cincinnati). A tenured University of Texas chemistry professor was fired for having a messy office (so many books as to be a fire hazard) and a messy laboratory (corrosive materials) (San Antonio). A 42-year-old man was hospitalized after being stabbed in the stomach with a swordfish during a brawl outside his home (Madeira Beach, Fla.). A University of Greenwich professor announced the discovery of the oldest fossilized vomit on record (of a four-flippered reptile from 160 million years ago) (London).

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

-- 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/.)