-- After sheriff's deputies in Kalispell, Mont., arrested militia leader David Earl Burgert, 38, in February, they uncovered his group's "Project 7" plot, allegedly to assassinate several county officials (including the local dogcatcher) in a fanciful plan that Burgert is said to believe would eventually create enough local chaos to start a national revolution. Burgert (whose last job was as a snowmobile rental agent) had amassed a huge arsenal of machine guns and heavy weapons in order to carry out the assassinations, defeat the National Guard, and stanch the probable waves of what Project 7 called "Red Chinese" from Canada. According to Project 7 thinking, NATO would somehow then be called on to send troops to Kalispell. Law enforcement officials said Burgert was just a local loudmouth who this time had gotten in way over his head.

-- In March, the manager of a Hartford, Conn., senior citizens' home told residents in the monthly newsletter to "please stop throwing rice in the garbage disposals" and that repairs for such "negligence and carelessness" would be billed to the tenant, but the Spanish-language version of the same newsletter was different (as translated): "You have to get used to the fact that you do not live in Puerto Rico, where leftovers were given to the pigs. We do not have pigsties, but we do have garbage cans." "If (using the garbage can) is too hard for you to do, move and continue with the customs of Puerto Rico." The manager, Carmen Aponte, who is of Puerto Rican ancestry, later apologized.

An editor of a major Sri Lanka astrology magazine resigned in November, concerned that his boss was using planet-alignment readings to make political commentary, thus undermining readers' faith in astrology. And a Nigerian transportation official urged in November that citizens de-emphasize their heavy reliance on automobile icon charms to keep them safe, urging instead that they concentrate on the rules of the road (as similarly urged by the governor of Trang, Thailand, when informed in February of the heavy use of auto charms to overcome evil ghosts at the town's major traffic intersections). And in January, the Kanda Myojin Shinto shrine in Tokyo began selling its own information-technology-prayer charms to ward off computer viruses.

-- A 50-year-old construction worker in Knoxville, Tenn., survived his Jan. 14 impalement by a 3-foot-long, 3-inch-thick metal rod that fell off of a bridge and which went point-first through the man's skull and neck, coursed down his trunk, and stopped only when completely embedded in his body. He was semiconscious at the scene but talkative later at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. The man was not wearing the required hard hat.

-- Canada's British Columbia Court of Appeal reversed the child sexual assault conviction against Hugo Oswald Castaneda in October, even though he had admitted having sex with a 12-year-old girl, because the prosecutor had gone too far in attempting to persuade the jury that Castaneda was a bad person. According to Justice John Hall, the government delved too deeply into Castaneda's admitted drug-dealing and other unrelated criminal activities when, according to Castaneda's lawyer, his general "character" was not at issue in the trial.

-- Rod Yellon, a political science professor at the University of Manitoba, was fined in February for protesting a postponement of the trial in his four-year-long constitutional challenge over a $25 (U.S.) traffic ticket he had been issued in Winnipeg for rolling through a stop sign. Yellon had challenged the law as too vague, in that a "stop" sign did not "specify sufficiently" what drivers were supposed to do when they encountered one.

-- Lithuania's gender-equality ombudsman, Ms. Ausrine Burneikiene, announced in January that she would fight to end the country's requirement that women need a gynecological exam to get a driver's license. The exams apparently are based on the belief that some gynecological illnesses manifest themselves suddenly or cause unconsciousness and therefore would be dangerous to other motorists. (And a study reported in November in Saudi Arabia's Riyadh Daily, from a professor at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah, concluded that women are responsible for about 50 percent of Saudi traffic accidents, even though they cannot legally drive cars; the professor was referring only to women as distractions and backseat drivers.)

-- H. Beatty Chadwick, 65, has served more than 6 1/2 years in jail in suburban Philadelphia for contempt of court for not being able to produce $2.5 million that he was supposed to split with his divorced wife. He was scheduled to be released in February, but a federal appeals court blocked that order. (The U.S. record for contempt is believed to be held by a Chicago man who was released in 1997 after staying in jail for 10 years in order not to reveal the whereabouts of his daughter.) Chadwick said he lost the money in a bad investment, but his ex-wife believes that the money was not lost and that Chadwick is willingly sitting in jail in order to protect its now-multiplied value.

Sheriff's deputies in Glades County, Fla., on the edge of Lake Okeechobee, arrested a 53-year-old farm laborer in February on a single count of incest after discovering that he and his sister had established a 25-year family unit that had produced nine kids and four grandchildren. The family lived in a rural work camp run by his employer and first drew the attention of deputies when a neighbor reported that the couple kept a casket in their living room, containing the remains of an infant son who had died 12 years earlier.

Chaddrick Dickson, 25, was hospitalized briefly in Monroe, La., in December, after being wounded by the .22-caliber bullet he was fooling around with. Dickson said he was trying to remove the gunpowder by smashing the bullet's casing against the floor. He said he needed the gunpowder because he wanted to mix it into his dog's food to make the dog meaner.

In November 2000, News of the Weird reported the startling news that, at a public demonstration in Taipei, three martial-arts masters, without using their hands, had pulled a truck holding 80 people 12 inches with ropes attached only to their penises. In January 2002, the Federal Communications Commission fined Seattle radio station KNDD-FM $14,000 because its morning show personalities had made an on-air offer last year to give free concert tickets to any man who would come to the studio and pull certain heavy objects around with his penis (discussions which the FCC said constituted "indecent language").

A Saudi Arabian woman who was found by a court to have been raped by her sister's husband was sentenced to six months in jail and 65 lashes because she had thus had sex (Jeddah, February). A Mexican immigrant in his 20s, who was returning a purse and cell phone he found to their owner, was shot to death, allegedly by the owner's brother-in-law, who thought the Samaritan's $50 reward request was too high (Whittier, Calif.). A Dallas-area public school system announced it would sell permanent naming rights to dozens of its buildings and facilities (e.g., $1 million for a soccer field), but at least would not sell to corporations (Highland Park, Texas).

A fired health-care association manager filed a lawsuit alleging that his female boss kept a "man sack rack" display (device for hanging male genitals) in her office, supposedly symptomatic of her sexually harassing attitudes (Woodbury, N.J.). A 33-year-old juror, right in the middle of deliberations in a murder case, abruptly took off on an already scheduled Mexican vacation (but the judge jailed her upon her return to town) (Cincinnati). The Georgia parole board issued a rare reprieve, moving a death-row inmate to life in prison because he is so delusional that he sometimes believes that the actress Sigourney Weaver is God. A 47-year-old woman was convicted of animal cruelty for throwing her 3-foot-long pet iguana at a tavern's bouncer, though she argued that the iguana leapt on his own to defend her honor (Isle of Wight, 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/.)

-- 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).