-- "Dozens" of money-making Web sites have recently been created by parents who post photos they have taken of their adolescent daughters (as young as age 6) frolicking in frilly clothing or swimwear, according to a May New York Daily News report. The sites are operated like pornography businesses, with some free teaser photos, but with $30-a-month "members" getting access to the photo archive and "personal" messages from the "model." Some sites operate chat rooms where members discuss the girls in great detail. One "typical" site has 3,000 daily users, and another had 32 million page views in nine months. The parents say they are helping their daughters with modeling careers or with future college expenses.

-- China's youth and young adults are increasingly beyond the communist government's control in their spending and leisure habits, according to a May dispatch in Toronto's Globe and Mail. Although party leaders still appear on "most-admired" lists, so do Bill Gates and pop stars such as the Taiwanese boy band F4, and older Chinese complain that superficial, amoral kids know more lyrics of Michael Jackson than sayings of Mao Tse-tung. (The government recently banned an imported, 15-episode TV show starring F4, but had to back down because of the boys' popularity among screaming teen-age girls and because of complaints by government TV stations that they needed the advertising revenue the show would bring in.)

Middle-school teacher Timothy Thomure, 46, admitted rubbing a knife blade along a student's finger (and other acts of intimidation) to "loosen (students) up and get them to interact" (Sedalia, Mo., March). Parents of an 8-year-old boy recently asked school officials for counseling help to deal with a lingering 1999 incident in which a teacher disciplined him by dumping a cup of cockroaches on his chest (Houston, April). A middle-school teacher was fired for allegedly throwing a chair at a student during a "behavior management" class (Pflugerville, Texas, May). A Sunday school teacher was convicted of a misdemeanor for counseling a teen-age boy that a good way to curb his masturbation habit was to write "What would Jesus do?" on his penis (Andover, Minn., June).

-- Donna Beck filed a wrongful death claim in April against the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department following the death of her son James Allen Beck in a barricade-shootout last year (in which one deputy was killed). Beck was prepared for a long stand-off, having stockpiled weapons in his home (which caught fire from a tear gas canister, resulting in Beck's death and the destruction of his body).

-- A jury in New York City recently awarded $14.1 million to a 38-year-old woman who was badly maimed after she was hit by a subway train after lying down purposefully on an underground track in a probable suicide attempt. According to a New York Law Journal report summarized in a June New York Times story, the jury found that the train conductor, who had already slowed to 15 mph following a report of someone lying on the tracks, should have been going slower. (The judge lowered the award to $9.9 million after finding that it was 30 percent the woman's fault.) [New York Times, 6-25-02]

-- Scottish train driver Jacqueline Morrison, 29, filed a lawsuit in April against her employer, ScotRail, asking about $25,000 because she bruised a fingernail (which eventually fell off) when she went to adjust her seat in the cab.

-- In April, a court in New South Wales, Australia, awarded a 20-year-old man the equivalent of $525,000 (U.S.) as a result of his being knocked out in a 1995 Narrandera High School fight that he apparently participated in willingly and in which he threw the first punches. Although he was medically cleared the next day, he said serious headaches and neurological problems have developed and that the last seven years have been physically and financially tough for him.

-- June Bond, 34, filed a $300,000 claim against Ventura County (Calif.) because her husband (on a work program for violating probation) stomped a palm frond down into a Dumpster, and it snapped back and severed his ear, causing him, she said, to no longer be affectionate. And Tim and Donna Vogle filed a lawsuit against a restaurant in St. Joseph, Mo., in June, claiming that the owner slapped Mrs. Vogle in the head with a raw steak (after she complained that it was overdone) and that as a result, the couple's sex life has been 75 percent diminished.

Edward O. Green, 24, was arrested in LaPorte, Ind., near the front desk at the sheriff's station shortly after he had arrived to bail out a friend. A deputy had told him to take a seat momentarily, but apparently Green, who was probably inebriated, quickly dozed off and began to snore. As deputies approached to awaken him, they noticed several small plastic bags (which tests later revealed to contain cocaine) in his mouth.

Correction Service of Canada recently touted some prisons' successful model programs of allowing inmates who request it to live in certain wings designated as drug-free zones (even though all sections of all prisons are supposed to be drug-free). And Suffolk County (Mass.) has begun to pay its prison guards a $1,000 yearly bonus if they test clean for illegal drugs. (The programs in both of these stories were enticements to get inmates and guards to agree to random drug-testing, which would otherwise be prohibited.)

A 49-year-old Kingman, Ariz., inmate was killed when he slipped on feces he had expelled in his cell and struck his head on the floor (April). A 60-year-old Tucson, Ariz., model-airplane enthusiast was killed when he was accidentally hit in the chest by his own radio-controlled, 6-pound, 5-foot-wing-span plane (May). A 47-year-old female car passenger was killed when the driver accidentally smashed into a "Welcome to Minnesota" sign on Interstate 94 (April).

Imprisoned Brazilian drug king Fernandinho Beira-Mar somehow arranged for a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile to be delivered to his cell at Bangu One prison before the government confiscated it (June). A high school senior who plagiarized a paper and whose English teacher failed her was nonetheless given a last-minute makeup test in order to graduate, after her parents' lawyer threatened the school district with lengthy litigation (Phoenix, May). A federal environmental official warned of another serious danger of home methamphetamine labs, that they create 5 pounds of dangerous toxic waste for every pound of meth (Bulls Gap, Tenn., May).

Four women were taken in by a man who persuaded them to stand topless at their windows so that cutting-edge global satellite technology could give them at-home mammograms (Algarve region of southern Portugal). The "Barbasol bandit," a 44-year-old convenience-store robber whose "mask" consisted of slathered-on shaving cream, pleaded guilty (Vernon, Conn.). A 280-pound sea lion arose from San Francisco Bay, crossed two runways, and made it to a terminal at SFX airport before security detected it. A Columbus, Ohio, suburb proclaimed that residents with odd street addresses should sit in their yards on Friday nights so that people on the other side of the street can visit them, with the situation reversed on Saturday nights (Worthington, Ohio).

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

-- 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/.)