-- The prime minister of Latvia, Einars Repse, announced in January the formation of an anti-"absurdity" bureau to deal with the government's excessive "foolishness" and lack of order and the "laziness" of civil servants. The agency, according to a newspaper in the capital of Riga, now receives about 10 complaints a day and has made 460 responses, including referring seven to government prosecutors.

-- The Moral Authority of the United Nations: Dining-room workers at the U.N. staged a wildcat strike at lunchtime on May 2, causing the building's restaurants to be locked down, but what Time magazine called a "high-ranking U.N. official" ordered them unlocked so that staff members could eat (perhaps to pay for food on the honor system). What ensued, according to Time, was "Baghdad style (looting) chaos," in which staff members ran wild, stripping the cafeterias and snack bars bare not only of food, but also silverware and liquor, none of it paid for, including bar drinks taken by "some well-known diplomats."

-- Government at War With Itself: The San Francisco Chronicle reported in March that local priest and accused child-molester Austin Peter Keegan was able to avoid arrest for six months largely through government funding (i.e., the Social Security Administration, which continued to pay his benefits until he was arrested in Mexico on March 1). And prosecutors in Tampa urged a federal magistrate not to grant bail to accused terrorist supporter Sami al-Arian, on the grounds that if granted bail, he surely will flee the country; meanwhile, immigration authorities announced that they have begun the legal steps necessary, in the event al-Arian is granted bail, to deport him.

-- A March investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that it is the policy of the Social Security Administration (even in times of terrorist alerts) that when someone presents what is obviously a phony ID in order to receive a Social Security card, the ID is merely returned to the person and he is asked to leave the building. No document is retained; no report is made; and law-enforcement is not called.

-- Public Officials Gone Tacky: Detroit City Council member Kay Everett outdid colleagues who use the city's printing plant for mere personal fliers and business cards; she had the plant publish for her a 12-month calendar of herself, "Hat's on Me in 2003," featuring a different, fashionable photograph of herself for each month. And Rhode Island state Rep. Joseph S. Almeida was convicted in February of assaulting a repo man who was lawfully confiscating Almeida's girlfriend's car; Almeida's version was that the repo man voluntarily banged his own head into his truck's door three times, smashing his own eyeglasses and mangling his own face.

-- In February, municipal inspectors in Boston threatened sculptor Konstantin Simun, 68, with fines of $50 per day if he didn't soon clean up the eyesore that is his yard, even though he has repeatedly pointed out that he just happens to work in the medium of "junk." "It's my life's work," Simun said at a hearing, referring to the old tires, traffic cones, plastic milk and water bottles, painted buckets, old golf bags, a broken trampoline and other choice items. (For instance, he made a version of Michelangelo's "La Pieta" entirely from cut-up plastic milk bottles.) Simun's work was once housed at the prestigious DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park near Boston, as a "curator's choice" exhibit. (Noted Philadelphia sculptor Leo Sewell also works in this medium.)

-- In early March, as an edgy Washington, D.C., prepared for possible terrorist reactions to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Reena Patel, 22, and Olabayo Olaniyi, 32, were arrested at the Capitol as they sang and danced, with Olaniyi wearing a ceramic mask, and both with objects duct-taped to their bodies resembling the appearance of suicide bombers, but they maintained they were just artists. Said Patel, "We like to make things beautiful, to uplift, to make people happy." Said Olaniyi, "Duct tape is a hot item in D.C. I wanted my art to reflect what was hot here."

-- Prominent Columbia, S.C., surgeon Harry J. Metropol, appearing before a state legislative committee in April to argue that doctors shouldn't have to pay so much money in malpractice awards and insurance premiums, minimized the harm suffered by a woman (not Metropol's patient) who lost both breasts because of an error in cancer diagnosis. "She did not lose her life," Metropol said, sunnily, "and with plastic surgery, she'll have breast reconstruction better than she did before. It won't be National Geographic, hanging to her knees. It'll be nice, firm breasts."

-- The Cadbury company launched a major promotion campaign throughout Britain to fight childhood obesity by donating sports equipment to schools in exchange for candy bar purchases. For example (according to an April report in The Guardian), the company will donate a volleyball net and poles to a school if it hands in labels from 5,400 Cadbury chocolate bars. (In fact, a 10-year-old child getting a basketball for his school would have to play basketball for 90 hours just to burn off the calories in the candy he'd have to eat to get enough labels for the ball.)

Gerard Lancop, 58, was sentenced to nearly two years in prison for stalking a woman in connection with his psychiatrist-described fetish for women's coats (police found 236 in his home) (Windsor, Ontario, January). And Thomas William Hodgson pleaded guilty to harassing schoolgirls by either repeatedly stopping them on the street or leaving notes for them, offering to buy their cardigan sweaters, which he admitted he had a thing for (Christchurch, New Zealand, March).

News of the Weird reported in 2001 on the staffing problem of British circus knife-thrower Jayde Hanson, after his assistant walked off the job after being nearly hit in the foot, which would have been her third injury that season (which was the number of injuries an ex-girlfriend had suffered as Hanson's assistant before she walked off in 2000). In April 2003, Hanson was performing with his new girlfriend, Yana Rodianova, 22, on Britain's ITV program "This Morning," showing off his world-record form as a speed knife-thrower, but one of the knives hit Rodianova on the head, drawing blood before the live cameras.

Gary Lee Owens, 42, was arrested on drug charges in Stilwell, Kan., in April, even though police weren't looking for drugs when they knocked on his door. The police had received a tip that two fugitives were hiding at that address, and since Owens knew nothing about that, he matter-of-factly gave them permission to search the house but then added the restriction "everywhere but the garage." The police naturally decided that that comment was worth a search warrant, and later found the remains of a suspected methamphetamine lab.

Plymouth (England) University, with a small Arts Council grant, did not test whether an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare, but did test what six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys would do on a computer over a four-week period at Paignton Zoo in Devon. The Guardian newspaper reported in May that the monkeys produced about five pages of text between them, mostly consisting of the letter S. Said Professor Geoff Cox, they actually spent a lot of the time sitting on the keyboard.

An international organization of gay men who raise money for charities through drag shows came to the rescue of straight high school girls by providing loaners for those who could not afford gowns for prom night (Houston). Police blamed a traffic accident on truck driver Brian Anderson, who they said lost control on Interstate 75 while making himself a bologna sandwich (Burt Township, Mich.). A motorcyclist was killed on Interstate 95 when he crashed into a cow that had wandered out through a hole in a fence made by trespassers looking to get high from the mushrooms that grow on cow patties (Hobe Sound, 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.)

-- 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.)