-- Two American Legion posts and two other veterans' groups in Pleasanton, Calif., sponsored a class on dowsing in March to study whether domestic terrorists could be identified by pointing sticks at suspicious people to see if the sticks move. One of the veterans' leaders (who vouched that "the government" and oil and mining companies regularly use dowsing) told the local Tri-Valley Herald, "You can't wait for the FBI and police to come up with solutions when you have the bad guys living among us." Following the 9-11 attacks, some Pleasanton veterans received training in so-called "remote (psychic) viewing" and are now reportedly bringing local families up to speed on their missing-in-action relatives from past wars.

-- In March, London's Daily Telegraph reported that North Korea's Kim Jong Il is so terrified of triplet babies that the government places them all in special orphanages. Quoting diplomats who have visited North Korea, the Telegraph said Kim might feel threatened because the number 3 in Korean mythology is associated with rapid rises to power. However, a North Korean official told the United Nations Human Rights Commission that Kim is actually helping the triplets by raising them in better circumstances than the parents could (because of the country's dire economy).

Brian J. Samdahl, 41, charged with stabbing a stranger 15 times at a Wal-Mart, told police he thought the problem was that his government-implanted computer chip was broken (Bridgeview, Ill., February). And Jesus Santana, charged with marijuana possession, told the arresting officers, "I guess God got y'all to get me," since Santana had been rolling his joints using pages torn from a Bible (Athens, Ala., February). And William Veach, charged with scamming friends and family members in a securities scheme, insisted that he truly believed (albeit erroneously) that, as per his sales pitch, he had indeed sold a high-tech keyboard idea to Microsoft for $17 million (Provo, Utah, March).

-- A jury concluded in February that Lonnie W. Hinton Jr., father of a 2-year-old girl who was severely injured when she fell into a swimming pool at an apartment complex in Hollywood, Fla., was responsible for only 1 percent of the incident, with the complex responsible for 99 percent because the gate to the pool area was broken. According to trial testimony, the faulty gate was fairly common knowledge among the residents, and Hinton had left the girl alone near the gate while he took barbecued food upstairs to the family's apartment. Far from being censured for his lax parenting, Hinton and his wife were awarded $10 million for their own pain and suffering resulting from the girl's injuries.

-- The town council in Enfield, Conn., was criticized in December for letting its insurance company pay settlements in two incidents last year to softball players who claimed they hurt themselves sliding into bases in city parks. Mark Brengi said he tore ligaments sliding into third base and settled for $45,000, and one week later, his brother Scott broke an ankle sliding into second base on the same field and settled for $90,000. Said one Enfield taxpayer (and former pro baseball player), "You're supposed to slide before you hit the base."

-- A jury awarded $51.1 million from the New York City budget in March to Darryl Barnes, who was paralyzed by an off-duty police officer's gunshot after he refused to drop his gun. (Barnes, a member of the "Five-Percenters" anti-police group, claimed he was shot in cold blood.)

-- A house cat named Princess survived after being stabbed in the head with a knife whose blade penetrated the skull down to the frontal sinus (Green Township, Ohio, February). And another cat, Fila, taken out of a family home in Yuba City, Calif., in December by a daughter who wanted Fila to live with her in Sacramento, escaped and made the 60-mile trip back to Yuba City five days later, winding up on the parents' doorstep. It was not known if Fila took one of the three roads from Sacramento to Yuba City (state roads 99/70 or 65, or Rio Linda Boulevard) or just walked across farms.

-- BBC News reported that officials at a prison in Sombor, Serbia, shot to death two guard dogs, execution style, in February after concluding that they had been lax recently in failing to bark when five inmates were escaping.

Michael J. Corbett and his wife, Sharon, were arrested in Beckley, W.Va., in March and charged with peddling copies of 53 different obscene videos on the Internet. The Corbetts' specialty: nude women answering nature's call. According to Justice Department and Postal Service investigators, customers bought 100 or more tapes a week (such as "Outdoor Pooping Paradise" or tapes using the Corbetts' inventive "bowl cam") at around $50 each.

Luis Chavez, 33, was arrested in Cypress, Calif., in February after he allegedly set off aerial fireworks in his condominium bedroom (motive unknown), leading to a $135,000 fire. And Patricia Martin burned down her Kings Mountain, N.C., house in February after she lit a piece of paper, then extinguished the flame, to create smoke to get rid of a nest of spiders in the house but failed to completely extinguish it. And a Massapequa, N.Y., high school student inadvertently set a fire that gutted the second story of the family home in January after he, in frustration, tried to burn some school papers on which he had done badly (and tossed them out a window, but an ember blew back in).

Jeffrey Lee Daniels, 27, confessed to killing a 58-year-old male acquaintance who had paid him $10 just to let him sleep next to Daniels but who then, to Daniels's apparent horror, touched him "in the area of his butt," according to a police officer (Barstow, Calif., December). And Robert Carnathan, 54, was charged with the beating death of a 79-year-old man in a fight over collecting lost balls on a golf course; it was Carnathan's regular turf, but the victim wanted one ball for his grandson (Quincy, Mass., November).

Arrested for murder: Randy Wayne Richards, 40, Courtenay, British Columbia, February; Curtis Wayne Pope, 40, Fort Worth, Texas, February (arrested in Watertown, N.Y.); Ralph Wayne Grimes, 26, Russell Springs, Ky., November; Joseph Wayne Cook, 30, Wilmington, N.C., January. Convicted of murder: David Wayne Pallister, 18, South Shields, England, November. One previously reported arrestee, Mark Wayne Lomax, 33, made history in March by actually getting convicted of "felony murder" even though his offense was causing a traffic death while intoxicated, which is usually treated merely as manslaughter (Houston, March).

Jerry Thomason, 41, was charged with aggravated assault in San Antonio, Texas, in April after police found his 45-year-old wife at home with a heavy chain and padlock around her neck. According to a witness, Thomason said he loves his wife and so regularly chained her at home to keep her from leaving.

A 6-year-old boy was permanently expelled from elementary school (after 18 months of failed discipline) as being too unruly and dangerous (but who, at home, is an angel, according to his dad) (Ashton, England). Officials of the prestigious Crufts dog show began an investigation of whether its current Supreme Champion (the Pekingese, Danny, which beat out 20,000 challengers) had had an illegal facelift (London). Florida family welfare officials finally put their foot down and suspended a woman who had become the fourth child protection investigator recently dating or marrying accused or convicted criminals (this one a convicted killer and accused child-support dodger) (Largo, Fla.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- Lawsuits were filed in Chicago in February and in Hangzhou, China, in January demanding that theaters stop showing advertisements (not just the "previews") that run past a movie's announced starting time. Lawyers Mark Weinberg and Zhang Yang charged the theaters with fraud because of the three- to four-minute ad blitzes they endured recently after they had been expecting the films to get under way. The Chicago lawyer demanded a refund plus $75 in damages; the lawyer in China demanded a refund plus the equivalent of $4.50.

-- Eve Ensler's play "The Vagina Monologues" (a series of explicit speeches on sexuality and repression) was performed at a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in March, by Ms. Ensler and a troupe of local actresses (bundled in their traditional clothing) to an invited audience of 150, who apparently loved it, according to a report in Toronto's Globe and Mail. "If (the play) can happen here, it can happen anywhere," said Ms. Hibaaq Osman, a Somali Muslim activist, who in a fit of enthusiasm renamed the capital city "Vaginabad." "Having these Pakistani women talking about vibrators (is) what it's all about."

Police in Edinburgh, Scotland, put out an alert in March after a man claiming to be raising money through stunts for a charity tricked a young female shopkeeper into allowing him to cover her bare feet in baked beans and other vegetables from cans, before taking several photos and leaving. And in February, a motorist reported as 40ish and balding stopped on the campus of Missouri Western State College in St. Joseph, grabbed a passing female student's arm, licked it, and quickly drove off.

-- A couple in Tianjin, China, in a February newspaper advertisement, offered an amount equal to $15,300 for a man aged 25 to 35 to step up and marry their recently deceased daughter, who was 28 and is now, according to a dream the mother had, lonely. In exchange for the dowry, the man must remain "faithful." (These "ghost marriages" were an ancient custom until outlawed by the communist regime, but have made a small comeback in recent years.)

-- Recent Annual Rituals in India: Females aged 14 to 21 in Malajpur village in Madhya Pradesh state had evil spirits once again expelled by broom beatings (sometimes severe) after they stepped into chilly waters to bring the spirits out in the open (January). And women in the city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu state once again allowed a priest to walk on them wearing shoes containing nails in their soles, as an act of devotion and penance at a traditional festival (March). And nude worshipping by female Hindus continued at a festival in Chandragutti village in Karnataka state, celebrating the goddess Renukamba, despite the annual effort to make the women get dressed (March).

-- Ashoura day, the annual Lebanese martyrdom-inspiring tribute to a Muslim saint (grandson of the Prophet Muhammad), was celebrated on March 13 by thousands of Shiite worshippers who slashed themselves on the head. Many in the crowd marched through the city of Nabatiyeh while bleeding profusely, until their faces and clothing were nearly completely red.

-- Recently, many Lithuanians, whose country is poised to join the European Union next year, were cringing at the insistence by President Rolandas Paksas to continue to rely for advice on local mystic Lena Lolisvili. Among Lolisvili's methods for healing people: She wraps them in toilet paper, which she believes God has energized for her.

Larry Ray Pratt, 48, became the first person charged under Kansas' new food-supply safety law after he was arrested in January for allegedly urinating on packages of chicken in the walk-in freezer at a Dillon grocery store in Olathe. (Police said he had a grudge.) And in Bennington, Vt., in December, Lori T. Pratt, 30, was charged with shooting her husband after she found a pornographic video under the couple's bed. (Also, News of the Weird readers will recall a November story on Ms. Kelli Pratt, 45, who was arrested in Modesto, Calif., after allegedly, viciously biting her husband's scrotum in a fit of anger at his refusal to have sex with her, bites that caused an infection from which he died six days later.)

News of the Weird reported in September on a San Antonio lawyer called for jury duty but who told the judge that he'd serve only if the court paid him his regular rate of $100 an hour. (He of course changed his mind when the judge directly ordered him to come in.) In January, Charlotte, N.C., physician Charles Ferree similarly rejected his jury-duty notice, telling the judge his patients came first and that if any patient died (or even suffered) while he was on jury duty, the judge would be held responsible. Ferree also threatened to judge any cases he had quickly and harshly and made fun of judges' relatively lax hours (compared to those of harried physicians). Only Dr. Ferree's subsequently expressed remorse kept him out of jail for longer than the 10 days (for contempt) the judge handed down.

New York City P.S. 192 principal Evelyn Peralta-Tessitore (an anti-alcohol crusader) was charged with DUI after police spotted her at 2:30 p.m. on a February day, alongside a Bronx road, standing by her car, urinating. And Mary Ann Swissler, a part-time professor at Seton Hall University (South Orange, N.J.), was fired after she responded to negative student course reviews with an e-mail calling most of her students "mental midgets" and the most "homophobic, sexist, racist, lying sacks of (word represented as "s t" in a news story) I have ever met in my life."

In January, at a scout camp (for ages 11 to 14) in Denmark, organizers established a game of tag in which kids were the Jews (wearing Stars of David) and the adults pursuing them were designated as Nazis; one scout official admitted later that the game "may have crossed the line." And in February, during the international debate on whether the forcible disarmament of Iraq needed the moral sanction of the United Nations, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia accused many of the U.N. peacekeepers in the region of the enthusiastic off-duty patronization of sex slaves and child prostitutes.

(1) A 43-year-old man was murdered at 9 a.m. on Jan. 31 at a gas station on a busy street in Washington, D.C., to utter indifference by a fellow gas-pumper, who (according to the surveillance tape) stared at the body, finished pumping and drove off. (2) A 911 call on a fatal house fire in Washington on Jan. 6 was not picked up for several minutes (as many as 40, said some residents) because five operators had gone temporarily off-duty without permission. (3) A new, part-time Washington, D.C., high school coach was accused of fondling two students in January. He had been convicted on a sex charge in 1994 and his file marked "do not rehire," but this time, two principals did not bother to check his file.

John Gladney, 40, was arrested by Columbus, Ohio, police about a block from the National City Bank that he had allegedly robbed a few minutes earlier on March 27. According to the officers, Gladney was easy to spot because of his conspicuous gait, demonstrating pain, in that he had stuffed the money bag down his pants, only to have the bank's chemical dye pack explode near his groin.

Sister Mary Catherine Antczak (Order of Dominican Sisters), armed with financial backers' money and aiming to raise even more for an elementary school in South Los Angeles, won about $200,000 by picking six straight winners at Santa Anita racetrack. And a health-conscious New York City couple went on trial for "assaulting" their baby (through starvation) by earnestly feeding her mainly mixtures of dandelions, oat straw, cherry bark, slippery elm, kelp and an herb called horse tail. And the Kentucky Supreme Court approved the "character and fitness" of lawyer-applicant Ms. Taylor Strasser, despite the state bar association's rejection of her for a pre-law-school arrest for prostitution.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- Scientists at the University of Southern California will soon begin testing an artificial brain prosthesis (a silicon chip that mimics the hippocampus), which, if successful, can help people who cannot store future and recent memories of their experiences. One problem with the project (according to a March story in New Scientist): Subjects might not remember anything about the research or consenting to participate in it. (Another problem: Nearly everyone is glad not to be able to recall some negative experiences.)

-- The small Jewish Skver sect of Hasidim (New Square, N.Y.) was energized in March when a fishcutter in the sect (along with his Christian co-worker) swore they heard a 20-pound carp shout apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew. The co-worker thought the carp was merely Satanic, but Zalmen Rosen, 57, said the fish's soul was cautioning that the end is near, perhaps because of war in Iraq. Although the news spread throughout the community (aided by a feature in The New York Times), the carp itself met an inglorious end when the co-worker butchered it and sold it for gefilte fish.

In March, former Northwest Airlines flight attendant Daniel Reed Cunningham was charged with slyly drugging the apple juice of a severely rambunctious 19-month-old baby during a 2002 flight. The mother became suspicious after tasting the juice and so slipped some into a container for later testing (which revealed Xanax).

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (61) Parent(s) who leave young children home alone for days at a time, certain that they can care for themselves, while they frolic, as a 31-year-old Placentia, Calif., woman did in December, leaving her kids, ages 7 and 4, for three weeks to go see a North Carolina man she had met on the Internet. (62) And men who steal industrial (slow-moving) vehicles and apparently try to outrun pursuing police cars, as a 29-year-old man did in February with a farm tractor (towing an 18-foot-wide chisel plow), piddling along for 20 miles from near Wheaton, Minn., into South Dakota, "chased" by sheriff's deputies until he finally crashed.

-- Israeli Aircraft Industries Ltd. is now testing an "airplane" the size of a credit card (flight time: 20 minutes), containing cameras and transmitters to relay intelligence from battlefields, or from the insides of buildings by going through open windows. And the company TrapTec (Escondido, Calif.) is now in the final testing of "anti-graffiti" sensors that are so responsive that they can identify taggers who use spray paint just by the distinctive hissing sound of the aerosol can (and automatically tell police the taggers' location, via global positioning system technology).

-- According to a January Los Angeles Times profile, biologist Gerry Kuzyk recently came upon, in a remote area of the Yukon, an 8-foot-high, half-mile swath of what he learned was caribou droppings; since no caribou had been sighted in the area for over 100 years, Kuzyk concluded that it was a massive, centuries-old accumulation that had been frozen but recently melted. And the Reuters news service reported in February that Antarctica's oldest building has become largely unvisitable because it is being blocked in by droppings from the area's 100,000 Adelie penguins.

-- In a three-hour operation in February at the Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College Hospital in Calcutta, India, doctors performed what they claimed was the world's first penis transplant. Dr. Ashok Ray, lead surgeon, had been in the process of removing a troublesome second penis on a 1-year-old boy when someone elsewhere in the hospital informed him that a baby boy had just been born without one.

-- New Concierge Services: In Melbourne, Australia, in March, John Stark, 60, and his wife and son pleaded guilty to running a scheme in which the Starks "ordered" large quantities of upscale goods, which two shoplifter-associates would then go "acquire" for them so that the Starks could resell them in the family's Shopaholic discount stores. And a burglary ring in New York City was even more specific: According to March indictments, they stole only items specifically requested by individual patrons who had heard by word of mouth that they could drop off a wish list and then buy the items at a deep discount when the goods "came in."

-- New Frontiers in Advertising: In February, a British ad agency began paying college students about $20 for each three-hour stint in which they walk around in public with a company's logo semipermanently tattooed on their foreheads. And in December, another British agency signed up Sony Ericsson to pay for draping its advertising messages over large dogs (St. Bernards, Great Danes) whose owners accepted free dog-walking service in public parks in exchange for allowing the "moving billboards."

Recent Obsessions in the News: Stanley Jollymore, 90, was written up in Toronto's National Post for the "ball" he made out of 139,620 metallic wrappers from cigarette packages from his 70 years of smoking (February). And Gary Duschi, 52, was written up in the Virginian-Pilot (Hampton Roads, Va.) for his 8-mile-long chain of chewing gum wrappers (38-year habit, a million wrappers) (March). And Carl Masthay, 62, was written up in Riverfront Times (St. Louis) for compiling (over the last 12 years), and self- publishing, an exhaustive, 757-page dictionary for translating between French and the Illinois Indian Kaskaskian dialect (a language no one has spoken for hundreds of years).

Burglars broke into a county Humane Society office and stole about $1,800; they apparently entered by squeezing through a dog door (Pittsburgh, January). And Macy Panel Products was fined by an industrial tribunal after machine operator Keith Sanderson accidentally chopped off the tip of his thumb and then, showing bosses how the accident happened, accidentally chopped off his entire index finger (Newcastle, England, March).

A 23-year-old professional snowboarder (in Nagano, Japan, for a competition) fell about 50 feet to his death while playfully sliding down the handrail of a staircase at the Panorama Land Kijimadaira hotel (February). A 13-year-old boy drowned while trying to swim with a heavy tow chain around his waist (inspired by a scene in the movie "Blue Crush," where a surfer trains by swimming while towing a large rock) (Port Salerno, Fla., February). A 28-year-old student actor accidentally hanged himself while rehearsing, alone, a scene in which his character survives a hanging (Baton Rouge, La., December).

News of the Weird from time to time reports on the vile, anti-homosexuality crusades of the indefatigable Rev. Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church, Topeka, Kan.) and his extended family. The latest: The clan plans to be in Pittsburgh on April 13 to picket several organizations that had been associated with the late Fred Rogers, whom the Phelpses believe led kids in "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" to feel that being gay was acceptable. Said one of Phelps' daughters (a Westboro attorney): "This country has forgotten God and effectively flipped Him off, and Fred Rogers is in part responsible." (At a November demonstration at the University of Maryland, the Phelpses carried the sign, "Thank God for Sept. 11," an event which they view as proof of God's wrath.)

New Salem Missionary Baptist Church members voted 67-10 to fire pastor Stanley Hall, who had refused to reschedule his consecration service even though it conflicted with the telecast of the Super Bowl (Birmingham, Ala.). A 19-year-old woman learning to drive took a turn too fast and mowed down her two kids, her sister and her niece (all survived) (Santa Ana, Calif.). A 39-year-old driver, celebrating his car's 100,000th mile with a bottle of champagne, accidentally smashed into a tree (Boulder, Colo.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)