-- In April, students at the all-women's Smith College (Northampton, Mass.) voted to replace all of the female pronouns in the student constitution with gender-neutral pronouns. Although males are not admitted to Smith, many students apparently believe that using "she" and "her" is inappropriate for students who were admitted as females but who later identify themselves as "transgendered." According to Dean Maureen Mahoney, a student admitted as a female but who later comes out as a male would still be welcomed at Smith.

-- Dr. Yogendra Shah of Granite City, Ill., was accused by a state regulatory board of performing an abortion on a woman who was not pregnant. In a complaint filed in March and reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in May, a woman said she thought she was pregnant, but wasn't (based on an absence of fetal tissue), and Dr. Shah failed to test for pregnancy before performing the procedure. (A newspaper database search revealed that anti-abortion advocates have been slow to take a position on this story.)

-- Criminals Thinking Small: An alleged February multi-crime spree by Victor M. Cardoze, 23, all started when he prepaid $3 for gas at Joe's Pond Country Store, then pumped $3.50 worth and pointed a gun at the manager before driving off (West Danville, Vt., February). Robert Boyer, 45, was charged with robbery after asking if he could buy lettuce by the leaf rather than the head, being told no, and walking out with lettuce leaves anyway, in front of a police officer (Little Rock, Ark., December). William W. Bresler, Jr., 56, was taken for psychiatric evaluation after he tried to rob a National City Bank of exactly one cent (Westerville, Ohio, March).

-- Giving Up on Their Own Terms: Stephen Ray Carson, 29, in a standoff with police, said he wasn't giving up until he finished the crack cocaine he had just bought with the proceeds of a robbery. (Police got him anyway.) (Panama City, Fla., January) Motorist Christina L. Willis, 36, who was finally caught by police following a 30-minute chase after she hit an officer with her car, still refused to get out until she had finished her beer (Fairfield, Ohio, January). Motorist Troy C. Stephani, 32, trying to elude a police chase so that, he later said, he could finish his crack cocaine, took a wrong turn and accidentally drove into the police station parking lot (Medford, N.Y., April).

(1) (Washington Post, April 11) "Mount Olivet Road NE, 1200 block, March 30. An animal control officer responding to a call about a snake in a bathroom reported that the snake was actually a hair band." (2) (Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian, Jan. 7) "A Vancouver police officer was sent to a home in the 3100 block of S Street ... when a woman called 911 to say a group of 30 cannibals from Yacolt were trying to break into her house. (O)fficers were unable to locate any cannibals." (3) (Grass Valley (Calif.) Union, March 30) "A Dorsey Drive convalescent facility reported that one Alzheimer's patient struck another Alzheimer's patient, but neither of them remembered the incident or wanted medical attention."

-- Some patrons of the Minneapolis Public Library have so freely taken advantage of the lack of restrictions on Internet usage that they have for years been openly viewing pornography, but also subjecting female employees to sexual comments and in some cases have masturbated at the library's computer stations. (These allegations appeared in a March lawsuit by a dozen female library employees, accusing the library of long maintaining a "(sexually) hostile work environment.")

-- Surgeon David C. Arndt, who made News of the Weird last year when he left a patient in the operating room while he ducked out to the bank to cash a check, and who later was arrested for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, filed an application in February to tap into a state legal assistance fund for $15,000 to contest the latter charge, because he said he couldn't afford to pay his lawyer and he didn't want a public defender.

-- Convicted own-home arsonist Merle Crossman, 49, in an Ellsworth, Maine, prison, filed a lawsuit against Middlesex Mutual Insurance Co. demanding payment of $75,000 on the house he burned down, claiming that since he pleaded "no contest," and not "guilty," he is still entitled to insurance payments.

-- In February in Chichester, N.H., Thomas A. Barrett was fined $240 and given a six-month suspended sentence for his no-contest plea to creating a false fire alarm. Barrett told the judge that he was celebrating his 21st birthday at Jillian's Bar & Grill, and as he staggered down a hallway to the men's room, he mistakenly urinated on the floor and pulled the fire alarm, which he thought was a toilet's flushing mechanism.

-- A 35-year-old man was uninjured but his Jaguar mangled after he momentarily lost control at 70 mph on Interstate 15 near Pala, Calif., in January and drove underneath an 18-wheeler, with the car getting stuck under the axle and being dragged for a half-mile before another motorist signaled to the driver of the rig.

-- My Bad: St. Louis, Mo., judge Julian Bush admitted in March that a burglary suspect had been locked up for three months because Bush mistakenly signed a conviction order instead of an order for a hearing. And in February, Pratap Nayak was released from prison by India's High Court, nine years after he had officially been freed; Pratap and his five co-defendants had been found not guilty of assault in 1994, but since the other five were already out by that time for other reasons, court officials had assumed all were out.

In the midst of the national debate over fire codes in the wake of the February Warwick, R.I., nightclub disaster, fire safety consultant Philip R. Sherman told a Providence Journal reporter that toughening the codes was not an automatic cure because the codes will still be ignored due to variations in people's intelligence: "Clearly we have to account for dumb things (when we write the codes). Is wrapping the room in foam plastic the level of dumbness we want to account for? Or will somebody do something (even) dumber?"

Tobacco Kills: A 72-year-old woman accidentally, fatally set herself on fire while filling her cigarette lighter (Somerville, Mass., February). A trucking company was ordered to pay a $2.7 million legal judgment because its only employee smoking area was across a 100-yard, poorly lighted parking lot, where a 55-year-old smoker was accidentally run over returning from a break (Pittsburgh, Pa., February). A 42-year-old man died of head injuries caused when he opened the door of a moving car to spit tobacco juice and fell out (Mineral Wells, W.Va., March).

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was ordered to pay $165,000 and reinstate a former staff member whom it fired in retaliation for her having filed a work-related complaint. And authorities in Jersey City, N.J., declared an emergency upon finding 150 tons of rotting fish, lobster and squid in Max's Natural Foods Warehouse (abandoned, they believe, four months earlier). And Thailand's prisons department announced a contest in which inmates would vie to see which one had the most contagious laugh, and one official said that especially tense inmates would be urged to compete.

Thanks this week to Frank Roach, Michael Snider, Joe Donohue, Alexandra Shazo, Ted Lind, Kathryn Wood, Tom Doheny, Mark Seibel, Tom Preston, Aaron Shafter, Mark Terry, Christine Saum, Jana Hollingsworth, Bob deStafano, Jason Santa, Tom Teegan, William Carter, Andrew Smith, Paul Hirschfield, Thea Pratt, and Sonali Rijhsinghani-Sharma, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

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

-- Tony Alleyne, 50, recently placed his small Leicestershire, England, apartment on the market for the equivalent of US$1.7 million, a price he said was realistic because he has spent nearly 10 years crafting the premises as a finely detailed model of the "Star Trek" starship Enterprise. Included, according to an April report in Australia's Herald Sun, are a life-size transporter control, a gigantic warp core drive, voice-activated lighting and security, and an infinity mirror. "If you're going to do something," he said, "you have to go all the way." Alleyne said he started the project as therapy when his wife walked out on him.

-- Connecticut's Supreme Court heard arguments in April on a rather fine point in "Miranda warning" law: whether the police can use a drug suspect's vomit against him (or at least use the eight bags of heroin that came up with the vomit). Arresting officers apparently asked suspect Vincent Betances if he had just swallowed heroin, and Betances (without a Miranda warning) said that he had, leading officers to summon medical help. Betances now says the officers' question was unconstitutional "interrogation," even though without immediate treatment, he could have died.

Pro wrestler The Great Sasuke won a seat in Japan's Iwate Prefectural Assembly, and said he would continue to wear his trademark mask to work ("This is my face," he said.) (April). And many members of India's lower house of parliament, opposed to the finance minister's attempt to raise the price of fertilizer, did the Indian equivalent of a U.S. filibuster by screaming raucously for more than four straight hours on March 15 until the minister withdrew the proposal. Also in March, India's prime minister came under vicious attack from members of the opposition Congress party, who played Indian political hardball by accusing him of eating beef.

-- The school board that governs Lombardy, Ontario, acceded to the request of an offended parent in February and removed the word "gun" from a primary school spelling-test list. Also in February, the head teacher at the Park Road nursery school in West Yorkshire, England, issued instructions that "The Three Little Pigs" and other stories featuring pigs not be used, in order not to offend Muslims. (The Muslim Council of Britain immediately denounced the decision, and the instructions were rescinded.)

-- In December, a judge in Fort Myers, Fla., cleared immigration lawyer Maria Lara Peet, 40, to practice again, excusing her theft of $73,000 from a client the year before, as long as she paid it back. Peet was found to have been mentally ill at the time of the theft but competent to practice law again a year later. (Several years before that, she had been involuntarily hospitalized for a mental illness.)

-- The CIA convened an open panel of scientists in January to discuss potential terrorist uses of life-science research, and the panel concluded that, despite the risks, openness in scientific study was absolutely crucial; in April, the CIA suppressed the panel's conclusions on openness as classified. And in March, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accepted an award by the Cleveland City Club for his contributions to freedom of speech, which Scalia said he would be glad to accept at the club's meeting provided no television or radio coverage was allowed.

-- Psychiatrist Charles Gould, 69, was scheduled for a disciplinary tribunal after allegedly belting a patient with a frying pan and a wine bottle when the patient said Gould should retire because he was "past his sell-by date" (Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland, April). And Catholic high school theology teacher R. Scott Jones, 44, was fired for passing out joke valentines to students reading, "I hate you, I wish you would die" (Phoenix, March). And Fletcher Vrendenburgh, director of the New York City government's customer-service office, was fired for posting a Web site essay on how "dumb," "whining" and "stupid" he thought New Yorkers and city workers are (December).

-- What Goes Around, Comes Around: Lisandro Mateo, 16, and Justine Hayes-Hurley, 18, were charged with criminal mischief in Central Islip, N.Y., in March after vandalizing a car. The car belongs to Winston Hill, 20, who both girls thought was their exclusive boyfriend until they began innocently discussing their love lives at school and realized they were both talking about the same man, at which point they decided to touch up Hill's windshield and paint job with hedge clippers.

Heredity theory got a boost in March when CNN reported that Mr. Shirl Mitchell, 83, the father of accused Elizabeth Smart abductor Brian Mitchell, blamed himself for the way Brian turned out. Shirl said he showed Brian sexually explicit photos at age 7, which perhaps provoked Brian's arrest years later for indecently exposing himself to a 3-year-old girl. Shirl also described himself as a voyeur and the author of a two-thick-volume personal theology that is sexually explicit, dealing largely with diet and reproduction (and having nothing to do with Brian's own tract that authorities found when they arrested him for the abduction).

(1) "Dangerous Chemical Found in Women's Breasts" (a March San Francisco Chronicle report on heavy tissue concentrations of a flame-retarding pollutant, most likely from inhaling foam insulation). (2) "Grisly Mexico Factory Breeds Man-Eating Flies" (a February Reuters story on the manufacture of sterile male fresh-blood-eating screwworms, which are used only to mate with wild female screwworms so that its population will die out). (3) "Girl Headed for Eye Doctor Ends Up With Teeth Pulled Instead" (a March story on the Web site of KTRK-TV, Houston, about the error by a Texas Medicaid worker who dropped the 5-year-old girl off with the wrong doctor).

News of the Weird has reported at least twice over the years on dogs playfully stepping on their masters' guns, with a paw innocently nudging the trigger, to tragic results. In Estes Park, Colo., in February, a 32-year-old woman was shot in the leg and hospitalized after her cat jumped onto a shelf, knocking off a .32 caliber Colt semi-automatic, which discharged a round when it hit the floor. (A second cat-shot-me story, by a 15-year-old boy in Tuscarawas Township, Ohio, in April, has been publicly doubted by the sheriff.).

A student at George Washington High School, Charleston, W.Va. (who was not identified because of his age), was disciplined after he accidentally wedged himself in behind the shower wall in the girls' locker room, after allegedly taking a choice vantage point for peeping. Virtually immobile, the boy waited until school was out for the day and called his father on his cell phone. The father went to the gym and rescued the boy but later turned him in.

A February Boston Globe dispatch from Guangzhou, China, reported that a recent favorite tactic of employees who are owed back pay is not to sue but rather to make serious attempts to commit suicide in public; said one construction worker who dangled from a high-rise, "There was no other way to get what the company owed us." And a 22-year-old man robbed a bank in Cleveland on March 12 by walking up to a teller and sticking a gun in his own mouth, threatening to kill himself if he didn't get the money. (Five days later the man was shot to death after he pulled a gun on an Akron, Ohio, police officer.)

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry officially declared that the country had no weapons of mass destruction and did not even believe in "any form" of them, except for its nuclear weapons. Firefighters in training, erroneously believing they had permission, set fire to a vacant house that belonged to the police chief, who was planning to fix it up for his parents (Elma, Wash.). Rev. William Keller (an evangelical Christian), who has led the Muncie, Ind., May 1 National Day of Prayer program for 10 years, said priests from other religions were welcome to attend but could not use the microphone to pray because he doesn't believe "in other gods."

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

-- An April Wall Street Journal report highlighted several states' elementary school "anti-bully" policies that have banned rough-housing, name-calling, and even "mean looks" and pointed gossip, and encouraged teaching the little kids a language of sensitivity and tolerance. However, one problem some kids fear from such training and language is that, as they move up to middle schools and run into other kids who will be baffled by such sensitivity, the tolerance-trained kids are even more likely to get beaten up.

-- In mid-March, as war started in Iraq, a resolution was introduced in the Seattle City Council offering support for U.S. troops. However, some council members wanted to use the resolution to express opposition to the war, while others wanted to go beyond troop support to commend the war itself. When the Council finally agreed on a politically bland-enough resolution on April 14, it meant that the members had been fighting over the wording of the resolution for a longer time than it took U.S. troops to enter Iraq and capture Baghdad.

A 17-year-old boy lost sight in both eyes in a "potato gun" accident in Denton, Texas, in April. The "gun" (a length of pipe in which a household explosive is ignited, propelling a potato out the other end, although in this case, it was not a potato but a frog) was being experimented with by several teenagers but failed to fire, and the victim, who had been a mere bystander, stepped up to have a look down the pipe to see what might have gone wrong, just as the gun finally fired.

-- According to an Associated Press report, six candidates for city offices in Charleston, W.Va., misspelled their party affiliations in their official filing forms in January. Among the variations were "Democart," "Democrate," "Repbulican" and "Repucican." In fact, one of the city council incumbents had, four years earlier, also declared himself to be a "Democart."

-- In Center Township, Pa., in January, Mark Ferrara called for paramedics when his daughter, 7, couldn't resist trying to lick a frozen metal pole at her school bus stop, and got stuck. And according to a BBC News report about a colder-than-normal January in Russia, a young man in the southern city of Stavropol, answering a call of nature behind a bus stop shelter, turned abruptly so that his exposed organ inadvertently stuck to the metal siding; a bystander hustled up a kettle of warm water to unstick him.

-- The Rent Stabilization Board of Berkeley, Calif., which regulates residential rates and fights landlord abuses but which is increasingly frustrated by the sky-high cost of local housing, adopted a tactic in February that could not be successful in many places besides Berkeley: It sponsored a "poetry slam" that invited local citizens to rant against the problems of tenants. The winner of the $100 first prize attacked the "platonic master/slave relationship" and recalled how his last landlord so traumatized him that he "chose to be homeless for nine months just to escape the memory."

-- Hopeless Recidivists: Eduardo Rivera, 43, in court awaiting a hearing on a charge of receiving stolen property, was rearrested after he carved his name into a courtroom bench (Reading, Pa., February). David Joe White Jr., 32, having just pleaded guilty to 42 burglary charges, was rearrested after swiping his lawyer's portable tape recorder from the defense table (Attalla, Ala., February). Chan Kwok-keung, 34, was sentenced to four months in jail for stealing a court interpreter's purse; he was in the courtroom at the time on theft charges (but had just been cleared) (Hong Kong, March).

-- In December, Saskatchewan's Court of Queen's Bench upheld a ruling of the province's human rights commission that four Bible verses (referred to in a newspaper ad) created illegal hate speech because they subjected gay men to "ridicule." The ad consisted of citations to verses that are considered by many Christians to condemn homosexuality, and a silhouette of two men holding hands, inside the symbol for prohibited behavior (a red circle with a red line through it).

-- Jeannie M. Patrinos, 32, was sentenced in February to five years' probation for sexual assault. A judge in Lancaster, Wis., found that Patrinos, who was estranged from her husband, broke into his home, climbed into bed with him, and was "having sex" with him, against his will. The husband's girlfriend was asleep in the same bed, until the man's protests woke her up.

In February, Wesley Fitzpatrick applied to a Kansas City, Kan., judge for, and was granted, a temporary restraining order against a female whom he said was stalking him (making him "scared, depressed and in fear for my freedom"). However, the order was rescinded when Fitzpatrick showed up to ask that it be made permanent, in that the "stalker" was actually his parole officer carrying out her lawful supervision. In fact, Fitzpatrick was immediately arrested for not having met with her. (Temporary restraining orders are usually granted by judges without investigation.)

Palmer, Mass., construction contractor Anthony Morales, tired of fighting customer Gail Kapulka over payment of his bill, planted the freshly severed head of a deer on the front seat of her car on Christmas night, according to police. And a frozen sheep's head was left inside a car owned by a Democratic political official in Lake Station, Ind., in January. And in March, at a rock concert in Oslo, Norway, the part of the act in which the lead singer of the death metal band Mayhem carves up a dead sheep went wrong, and the sheep's head was knocked into the audience, where it struck a fan in the head, requiring hospitalization. (Fan or not, he pressed charges.)

Door-to-door salesman Gerald L. Thompson, 19, was arrested in a neighborhood near St. Augustine, Fla., in February after he had become exasperated that no one was buying his magazine subscriptions; allegedly, he forcibly prevented one homeowner from closing the front door, then screamed obscenities, pounded on the door, and refused to stop ringing the doorbell. And Robert M. Suszynski, 47, was arrested in Rochester, N.H., in February after he allegedly slugged a neighbor with a baseball bat because he got tired of listening to the guy tell how much pain he was in from a recent fire.

A 77-year-old man drowned in February while fishing, after a tire flew off a car in a nearby auto accident, hitting him on the head, and knocking him into a canal (North Highlands, Calif.) And boulders estimated at 5 tons each rolled down hills and killed people near Honolulu in August (a 26-year-old woman asleep in her bed) and Navajo Lake State Park, N.M., in February (a 20-year-old man). And a 67-year-old man was crushed to death in Shamokin, Pa., in January when two paramedics, carrying him in his wheelchair up about 20 steps, accidentally dropped him, and one fell on top of him.

A British rock music fan offered to sell his own flu germs derived from Paul McCartney's recent bout of the flu (which the fan said he caught from a backstage session with McCartney), via either a coughed-into plastic bag or a vial of mucus. And a British designer introduced a 135-foot-high plastic inflatable church that he said Anglican Church vicars could carry around with them to recruit parishioners (inflatablechurch.com). And to express their new religious freedom, Iraqi Shi'ite pilgrims celebrated a long-suppressed holy day by the traditional, bloody slashing-open of their heads with swords (Karbala).

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