-- About 2,500 festive marchers turned out for Jerusalem's first gay pride day in June, including a few Palestinians. And according to reports in The New York Times, The Times of London and The Scotsman, U.S. and British troops fighting in Afghanistan have been hit on by that country's apparently numerous (and decreasingly closeted) gay farmers. (Afghan men's brazenly taking boy lovers was a major impetus for the Taliban to take power in 1994, and press reports say that practice is slowly re-emerging.)

-- In June in Rotherham, England, Gaak the robot, who is part of a research project into equipping robots to think for themselves, escaped from the lab while it was momentarily unattended and made it as far as the parking lot of the Magna science center before being stopped by a visitor's car. It had forced its way out of a small pen used to house units scheduled for repair. Said Professor Noel Sharkey, "(The robots) have all learned a significant amount and are becoming more intelligent by the day."

Smugglers With Bright Ideas: A woman's snakeskin "belt" was confiscated by airport customs officials when they realized it was an actual snake (exotic and endangered, yet harmless, which had been sedated by chilling but which had heated up) (Glasgow, Scotland, February). Authorities in Chicago and Orlando recently confiscated shirts from Thailand and Colombia, respectively, that had been "starched" with heroin and which would later be chemically soaked to extract the drug. And since Sept. 11, Customs officials say drug cartels' Mexico-to-U.S. tunneling activity has increased, with five new tunnels recently raided, including one that ended near the parking lot of the Customs office in Nogales, Ariz.

-- In June, the Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia, awarded Damien Keller, 31, the equivalent of $313,000 (U.S.) for injuries he suffered while robbing a taxi driver at knifepoint in 1994. Although the driver had fled the robbery, Keller chased him until the cornered driver was forced to hit Keller with a stick and punch him in the face. Keller suffered brain damage because, he said, the police and ambulance service did not treat him speedily enough.

-- On May 6, a 32-year-old woman apparently attempting suicide plunged 14 stories from a window at the Four Ambassadors condominium in Miami, but walked away with only a broken arm when she landed on the roof of a late-model Honda. She had been hospitalized three days earlier after taking an overdose of pills.

-- Russ and Sandy Asbury of Whitewater, Wis., told an Associated Press reporter in February that their two cats, Boots and Bandit, now each 2 years old, have driven up the couple's water bill recently because they have learned to flush toilets. Said Russ, "We have to shut the bathroom door when we go to bed. Otherwise one or the other of the cats are in there flushing away all night."

-- Robert Daniel Irving was cleared in May to receive the equivalent of $28,500 (U.S.) in standard spousal death benefits from the Manitoba (Canada) Public Insurance fund. There had been speculation that he would be denied the award in that the way his 22-year-old wife died was as a passenger in Irving's car when he crashed while drunk-driving. Irving pleaded guilty to impaired driving, but the Manitoba agency said the plea was irrelevant to his eligibility for benefits.

-- The Agence France-Presse news service reported in April that a severely disabled boy (believed to be about age 7) had been taken in by a children's home in Kano, Nigeria, in 1996 after having been abandoned by his nomadic parents and raised with chimpanzees for 18 months. The nursing staff at the Tudun Maliki Torrey home said the kid now no longer drags his hands on the ground as he walks but still often springs at people and makes chimplike noises. The nomadic Fulani people of Nigeria have been known to reject disabled children as too difficult to travel with.

The Doctors Were Wrong: Apparently angry because local doctors kept telling him nothing was wrong with him, Shawn Eric Bird, 40, allegedly mailed more than 100 envelopes containing notes with childlike insults and smeared cat feces and urine to medical offices and other establishments around Belleville, Ontario, before being arrested in May. Police finally caught him when Bird (referring to himself as the "Spiderman" character, the Green Goblin) called a station house to chide them for incompetence, and officers surmised from the background noise where Bird was calling from.

Edward Brewer, 47, serving a 10-year sentence for raping a cerebral palsy patient in a Sandusky, Ohio, hospital, sued the hospital for $2 million in May, claiming that his own predicament came about because the hospital did not protect its patients well enough. For some reason, Brewer also sued his attorney, who had recommended he take a plea bargain in the 1999 case, which got Brewer a five-year sentence; an angry Brewer had then appealed that plea bargain, blaming his lawyer for it, but then on retrial, Brewer was convicted and sentenced to his current 10-year term.

A year ago, News of the Weird reported that a library's resident cat had attacked Richard R. Espinosa's assistance dog, whose injuries have so discomforted Espinosa that he believes he needs $1.5 million to recover from the stress (i.e., his "terror, humiliation, shame, embarrassment, mortification, chagrin, depression, panic, anxiety, flashbacks (and) nightmares"). In April 2002, Espinosa amended his complaint (which is against the city of Escondido, Calif.) to take account that, with his disability, he is in a law-protected class and thus that the cat's actions should be considered a "hate crime" attributable to the library.

-- At least 10 people were killed after steady rains waterlogged and toppled a huge mountain of garbage (tens of thousands of square meters' worth) piled adjacent to a workers' dormitory (Shandong, China). Because of police department budget cuts in Argentina's miserable recession, residents of Junin (population 93,000) have been lending their cars, gassed up at their own expense, for officers' patrolling (May). No brewed coffee could be sold in Berkeley, Calif., unless it came from "organic, shade-grown" (or "Fair-Trade-certified") beans, according to a 2002 voter initiative advanced by 35-year-old lawyer Rick Young (June).

-- A jury concluded that Suzanne Vasquez's epilepsy was not caused by the 13-pound Wal-Mart ham that allegedly fell on her head from over the meat cooler while she looked up to check its price (Bradenton, Fla.). Canadian officials said they could not find a crime to charge a man with after catching him selling "upskirt" videos, in that the female victims could not be identified by just their legs (Toronto). An Australian National University research team succeeded in teleporting (disassembling, then re-assembling) a several-billion-proton laser containing a radio message a distance of about one meter (Canberra). Desperate after a prolonged drought and heat wave, Indian villagers performed a "marriage" of two donkeys in an ancient Hindu ritual to appease the god of rain (Sakkayanayakanur, India).

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

-- Uncontrolled crime (eight times the murder rate of New York City) and a huge wealth disparity (most people either fabulously rich or appallingly poor, with few in the middle) have caused the 1 million wealthiest residents of Sao Paulo, Brazil, to protect themselves by living in 300 gated communities (and have caused some to avoid the city's crime and squalor by traveling exclusively by helicopter), according to a June Washington Post dispatch. About 4,000 people a year without helicopter access armor-plate their cars at twice the price of the car. One walled community (Alphaville) houses 30,000 people, protected by 1,100 armed guards who keep the grounds under constant surveillance and pat down the servants as they head home from work.

-- Israeli police announced in June that they were investigating reports that a syndicate in a town just north of Gaza was running daily betting pools on the site of the next suicide bombing, with odds ranging from 17-1 in the peaceful town of Eilat to 3-2 in Jerusalem. The syndicate's alleged betting cards limit the action to attacks by Arabs on Jews.

A 12-year-old girl was arrested on charges that she coerced younger girls into prostitution in one of several local cases involving adolescent "pimps" (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; April). Jimmy Kave, 75, was charged with 16 sex-related counts for impregnating an 11-year-old girl (although he claimed the girl initiated the whole thing) (Bridgeport, Conn.; April). New Scientist magazine reported in April that a retired U.S. Army researcher's study had found that adolescent African-American girls are reaching puberty as young as age 8 because of the excessive hormones in shampoos marketed specifically for blacks (such as B&B Super Gro).

-- Lawyer Steven Wise, promoting his book "Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights," told an audience at a Washington, D.C., bookstore in June: "I don't see a difference between a chimpanzee and my 4 1/2-year-old son (based on the fact that 98.7 percent of their respective DNA is the same)." (The boy, Christopher, was not available for comment.)

-- Deputy Secretary of Labor D. Cameron Findlay, complaining to a State Department official in March (according to The Washington Post) that the government often ignores the statute requiring it to help American workers who have been harmed by world trade: "(The Trade Adjustment Assistance statute) is treated like a teen-age girl in the backseat of a car. You promise her anything to get what you want. And then when you get it, you leave her."

-- Among recent comments accompanying the confessions of criminals: Jermarr Arnold, in an interview shortly before his January execution in Huntsville, Texas, explaining his record of two murders and two dozen rapes, said: "Sometimes I feel paranoid and threatened, and I (lash) out. I'm not very good with people." And Pattaya, Thailand, police Sgt. Major Charchai Suksiri, 50, explaining why his wife of 25 years was still alive after he fired several shots at her and then several more later the same day in her hospital room: "Luckily, I ran out of bullets before (she could die)." And in April, Darnell C. Smith, moments after being sentenced to life in prison for murder in Minneapolis, told the victim's relatives, "I know I'm a piece of (expletive not reported by the local newspaper). I have been all my life."

-- In May, Tampa, Fla., judge Richard Nielsen, apparently impatient that a 16-year-old burglary convict had not acquired an attorney for his hearing on restitution to the victim, ordered the boy to proceed anyway, to call witnesses and introduce evidence, even though the boy did not know what "restitution" meant and thought at first that the prosecutor was there to help him. (Florida law requires attorneys for all juveniles.) A few minutes later, Nielsen ejected the boy's mother from the courtroom because she would not stop giving the boy advice. (Nielsen's behavior might not have come to light had not a St. Petersburg Times reporter happened into the courtroom by chance.)

-- A U.S. Court of Appeals panel agreed with a lower court in December that a Missouri county judge had unconstitutionally denied defendant Gary Moore the right to converse with his attorney during his burglary trial (having ordered the two to communicate only by passing notes back and forth, which was difficult for Moore, who has problems with the written language). The St. Louis County judge, Philip Sweeney, had said at the time, "(T)here's very little that needs to be discussed during a trial."

Louis Papakostas, 35, was sentenced to eight years in prison on drug charges in Corpus Christi, Texas, in May. He had been convicted in 1987 and had gone on the lam for nearly 15 years, but he ran into his prosecutor at a restaurant in May and decided to say a nostalgic hello, apparently believing that authorities were not interested in him anymore. Papakostas even had to jog the prosecutor's memory, but once that was done, the prosecutor notified police.

Correctional Service of Canada was recently rethinking its policy of permitting inmates to keep cats in their cells in two British Columbia prisons after guards complained of dirty litter boxes during prisoner shakedowns and after several drug-sniffing dogs in the facility had gotten hurt tangling with the cats (Mission, B.C.; May). And a previously docile Siamese cat went nuts and mauled a family of four and its baby sitter over several hours, repeatedly launching itself at family members and clawing them bloody, until police subdued it (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; May). And to deal with a flood of mice in the British Parliament, a motion was introduced in June "to invest in a House of Commons cat to try to tackle this problem."

News of the Weird reported in 2000 that New York doctoral student Erik Sprague was part-way through surgically making his body lizard-like (sharper teeth and forked tongue, and with implanted forehead bumps and scale-like skin soon to come). In June 2002, the Michigan House of Representatives considered banning tongue-forking surgery, but by 53-43 decided such bodily transformations were none of the government's business. (The issue had come to light when Bay City, Mich., tattoo artist Seth Griffin began publicly seeking a surgeon for his tongue-separation surgery after once performing it on himself only to see the tongue eventually fuse back together.)

The U.N. World Food Summit, devoted to helping the 800 million people starving worldwide, opened in Rome with a luncheon of lobster, foie gras and goose stuffed with olives for the 3,000 limousine-using delegates (June). Officials at California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory decided that their brand-new, $62 million storage facility for low-level radioactive waste was not secure enough from terrorists and that until modifications were made, the waste would continue to be stored outside, underneath a tent (May). The principal of Franklin Elementary School (Santa Monica, Calif.) banned the game Tag at lunchtime, in part because, she wrote, whoever is "it" is a "victim," "which creates a self-esteem issue" (May).

Opponents of a planned prison near Kaikohe, New Zealand, petitioned the High Court to halt construction because officials had not considered the environmental impact of "taniwha" (folkloric monsters in the area). A beekeeper was called to rid a house of thousands of bees from 12 honeycombs that had been built between the walls of the house (Kansas City, Mo.). The deputy director of Child Support Enforcement for the District of Columbia was sued by his own office for foot-dragging on support for his own 20-year-old, born-out-of-wedlock son. McDonald's began test-marketing a breakfast meal of egg, rice and Spam at its restaurants in Hawaii (where Spam is a highly revered food).

(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 minimum age for attendance at tennis, soccer and golf academies has dropped to 2, according to a June CNN story bolstered by interviews with instructors, parents and doctors in New York City and the Washington, D.C., area. Most parents are motivated, say experts, by visions of their toddlers growing up to become top pro players or at least earning college scholarships. Said one parent, whose 3-year-old daughter hits 70 tennis balls a day, "I think you have an edge starting at 3 with all (my daughter's) friends starting at 4 or 5."

-- A May 26 high-speed car chase and Mafia shootout in Lauro, Italy (just east of Naples), illustrated the changing face of organized crime, according to local newspapers and a Reuters dispatch from Rome. The participants in the lengthy gunfight were not the usual lieutenants and soldiers but middle-aged women and teen-age girls associated with the Cava crime family, shooting it out with rival Camorra family head Salvatore Graziano and his granddaughters and their mother, presumably over control of business in and around Naples. Two women and a 16-year-old girl were killed.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (53) High-tech male perverts who hook up tiny video cameras to, among other things, bathroom smoke-detectors or bathroom ceiling fans, or their shoes, to videotape women intimately, as did, respectively, a Gibsonburg, Ohio, landlord in February, a Ballarat, Australia, factory owner in February, and a Tokyo TV personality in December. (54) And Japanese men who are rejected by women and decide to retaliate by making hundreds of silent hang-up phone calls, as with a Waseda University lecturer who allegedly made 920 such calls earlier this year to the woman who declined his offer for a first date.

-- Perth, Australia, brothel owner Mary-Anne Kenworthy closed down for a day on April 30 because the influx of 5,500 U.S. Navy personnel on shore leave had left her workforce worn out. "We're the biggest and the best," she said, "(and) I'd rather take nothing than offer a poor service." She added, "I just wish they could dribble-feed the Yanks in, fly a thousand (in) at a time." (The Bremerton (Wash.) Sun carried a wire-service version of this story but later apologized for it to its readers since many Navy families in the Bremerton-Seattle area apparently did not appreciate learning this news.)

-- A subtle but apparently widespread corporate practice came to light earlier this year when the family of a deceased Wal-Mart warehouseman in Texas learned that the company had taken out a $64,000 life insurance policy on him, naming the company as beneficiary. Companies often buy policies for their top executives, but so-called "dead janitor" policies are usually purchased in secret, as tax dodges. Critics say that such companies lose the incentive to make their workplaces safer if they stand to collect on employees' deaths. Wal-Mart purchased about 350,000 such policies but canceled them this year after the practice was exposed.

-- According to Spanish biologist J.J. Negro (Estacion Biologica de Donana), reporting in the journal Nature in April, male Egyptian vultures compete for females on the basis of how brightly yellow the males' faces are, and that brightness varies directly with the amount of excrement they eat. Cartenoids in dung produce the yellow around the vultures' eyes, and only the strongest vultures can safely eat enough bacteria-laden feces to get a rich color.

-- Scientists at the Department of Primary Industries in Queensland, Australia, involved in ongoing research to reduce ozone-layer-corrupting methane production among cattle and sheep, reported in May that they have been studying why kangaroos are less flatulent than other animals and will soon begin testing 40 potentially methane-reducing bacteria found in their digestive tracts. Australian cows and sheep release 60 million tons of gas each year.

-- Hebrew University (Jerusalem) agriculture professor Avigdor Cahaner told reporters in May that he has been breeding featherless chickens (which supposedly are less expensive to raise) for a while now and believes they (which he calls "naked chickens") can be in commercial production in two years. An Israeli animal rights activist condemned the breeding because feathers protect the bird in several ways, but Cahaner said his new birds are more likely to survive in hot climates, where the premature death rate is more than 10 percent.

Kimberly Fennessey was injured in Bryan, Texas, in May when, to test whether a .22-caliber pistol worked, she fired it at a frying pan she was holding, and it ricocheted and hit her above the right eye. And in Green Bay, Wis., Susan Winkler, 44, was charged with reckless endangerment in May for shooting her husband, Brian, in the groin, sending him to the hospital; she said the couple's sexual foreplay often included their shotgun, but this time she had forgotten it was loaded.

Police in Norfolk, Neb., are still trying to find Curtis Boyd, 23, after he skipped out on bail after allegedly trying to pass a check for $22 million at the Bank of Norfolk drive-through in May. Boyd had purchased a computer software check-writing program and apparently figured all he had to do to get the bank to give him money was to present a realistic-looking check with certain Federal Reserve code numbers. When the bank declined to take it, Boyd took the check back, decided apparently that the one imperfection in the check was the lack of an "issuing bank," and thus returned to the Bank of Norfolk after hand-writing the name "Reality Perspective Bank" at the top of the check. This time, the bank employees called the police.

A 20-year-old man on his way to an eye doctor's appointment was injured when he accidentally walked into the side of a transit bus (Ambridge, Pa., May). Iowa City High School won the Iowa State Math Championship, but afterward, officials went back over the scores, discovered they had miscounted, and named West High School (also in Iowa City) the winner (April). A 39-year-old man with a bad stuttering problem claimed unlawful discrimination when he was turned down in his quest to become a licensed driving instructor; his trainer found that the man could not utter the word "stop" fast enough (London, April).

South Korea's Supreme Court overturned theft convictions (31 incidents, about $2,400 worth of merchandise) against a woman on the ground that she was menstruating (which, according to one justice, made her like a "mentally deranged patient," "unable to control her impulses") (June). Hundreds of teen-age humans, admitted to the Buffalo (N.Y.) Zoo for free on Memorial Day, trashed the grounds and several exhibits, abused animals, vandalized toilets and set a fire (but all the zoo's nonhumans were reportedly well-behaved) (May). The Glasgow, Scotland, city council voted to give about $1,700 worth of computer equipment to each of 30 habitually truant schoolkids, in the hope that they'll begin studying at home (March).

Six people were injured (two seriously) as croquet players and softball players pummeled each other with mallets in a late-night brawl over which sport is more manly (Calgary, Alberta). After a homeowner allegedly reneged on payment, the owner of a wild-animal removal service brought back the raccoon he had taken from the property and put it back under the house (Grand Blanc Township, Mich.). A Catholic priest closed down his "Junior Professional Wrestling Association" Web site, which featured photos of teen-age boys in wrestling tights, allegedly a charitable fund-raising venture (Mont Clare, Pa.). The acting director of the Maryland Transit Administration decided she needed an indefinite leave of absence after the wheels fell off of a transit bus for the 17th time in nine months (Baltimore).

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