Females in tribes in Kenya and other African nations are finally rebelling at the ancient custom of requiring a newly widowed woman to pay to have sex with the village's "cleanser" to purify her soul sufficiently to be allowed to attend her husband's funeral, according to an August Washington Post dispatch. Said one particularly vulgar, besotted cleanser in Gangre, "It's not bad for me since I get to be with the beautiful ladies. The women like it because who else would be with them. They can't stay alone with the spirits. They need me." Cleansers are believed to be major HIV conveyers since a condom would not allow the spirits to pass.

In Charleston, S.C., in August, graduate student Mohammed Talha Shekhani, 23, was charged with assault and lewd conduct for what he told police was a sincere, though inept, strategy for meeting women. After a friend told him to just walk up to a woman and start touching her, Shekhani said he initiated four public hugging incidents (with two adults and, almost directly in front of their mothers, two teenage girls). His lawyer said Shekhani's poor judgment was caused by the stress of an academic program that will earn him both a Ph.D. and an M.D. at Medical University of South Carolina.

In June, British Airways came to the rescue of Billy, the homing pigeon belonging to John and Maria Warren of Bootle, England, and flew him home; he was supposed to have flown home on his own from Fougeres, France, but he got sidetracked (probably on a ship) and wound up in New York City. And in August, the Shanghai (China) Zoo shipped two dwindling-population Chinese tiger cubs to a preserve in South Africa so that experts can teach them how to survive; the zoo-bred tigers instinctively chase prey but do not know how to kill it.

A car traveling on Interstate 77 just north of Charlotte, N.C., was hit by a flying speedboat at 2:20 a.m. on Aug. 21; the boat was dashing across adjacent Lake Norman, became airborne, clipped the car, and landed in the median, but the only casualties were the boaters. And a 13-year-old girl was expelled from school in Beaver, Pa., in July for performing oral sex on a boy during a school bus ride home in May; her mother had challenged the expulsion, unsuccessfully arguing that the school had never specified which activities were unacceptable.

-- Outside auditors concluded in May that 16 Houston schools with much-publicized "zero" dropout totals actually had at least 3,000. A whistleblower-principal told The New York Times that principals had been pressured to record their dropouts in some other, benign way. According to him, no one within the school district's culture (created by former superintendent Rod Paige, who is now U.S. secretary of education) realized that people would be suspicious if these schools reported "zero" when every other urban school district in America is plagued by dropouts.

-- Apparently, there are few problems in the schools of Longmeadow, Mass., because Mary Ryan-Kusiak, chair of the School Committee, abruptly adjourned the Aug. 25 meeting solely because committee member Laura J. Bertelli refused to sit in her assigned seat. Bertelli said she was tired of Ryan-Kusiak moving her nameplate around, but Ryan-Kusiak said she'd cancel the next meeting, too, if Bertelli didn't sit where she was told.

-- On the ballot in Denver in November will be a referendum calling on the city council to research various proposals on how to reduce residents' stress and to prove scientifically which methods might work. "The buildup of society-wide stress is like a new pollution in the environment," said activist Jeff Peckman, who collected the signatures to qualify the issue for the ballot. Said council member Charlie Brown, "What are we supposed to do, hand out incense sticks at Denver International Airport? Is that the image we want for our city?"

-- The problem of housing for paroled sex offenders is severe in some states, according to an August report in the Los Angeles Times. Parolee Bruce Scott Erbs, unable to find anyplace to live in Oregon, stays in a government-supplied tent behind the Linn County jail. In Polk County, Ore., five parolees live in a parking garage with the blessing of county commissioners, who like the idea that they can easily monitor the offenders. Wisconsin law requires the government to furnish quarters for released sexual predators if placement service fails, and it is about to purchase a $100,000 home in West Allis to house predator Billy Lee Morford.

In August at Scotland's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Sweet Productions company staged "Sweet FA," a "play" in which the audience take their seats, but then absolutely nothing happens on stage for the next hour, and then the house lights come back on, and any remaining patrons leave. (News of the Weird has previously mentioned the "musical" piece by the late American composer John Cage, whose "4'33" consists of exactly 273 seconds of silence, which "Sweet FA" beats by 55 minutes, 27 seconds.)

Jason Glen Humphrey, 29, was charged with taking indecent liberties for what prosecutors said was a year-long spree of leering at mothers as they changed infants' diapers in semi-public places, or questioning women about their toddlers' bowel movements (Hillsborough, N.C., July). And Jeffrey Bernard Fuller, 35, a medical technician working for insurance companies, was arrested after allegedly exceeding the scope of his work at least nine times by giving men gratuitous prostate and pelvic exams (Decatur, Ga., March).

Julio Cesar Cu, 42, and his three diving partners work exclusively by touch because their full-time job is in water so dark that flashlights are useless: to unclog and repair the antiquated Mexico City sewers ("a sea of human waste and industrial chemicals," according to an April Los Angeles Times dispatch). The city itself is in a valley surrounded by mountains, with frequent flooding and poor drainage in its combined storm water-sewage system. Said one environmentalist, "You walk the streets, smell the stench of raw sewage, and can only imagine what's happening underground."

(1) Ben Mann (apparently a very good meditator) fell out of a tree while meditating, down a 30-foot ravine, and had to be rescued (Berkeley, Calif., June). (2) Rural Ottawa County, Mich., trying to stem the migration to the area by prissy urbanites, started handing out brochures that earthily describe the atmosphere of farm communities and which contain a scratch-and-sniff section of the odor of manure (August).

Latest Suspect to Try to Chew His Fingertips Off to Avoid Identification: Nigerian Olugbemiga Olusajo, who initially failed to cooperate with police but finally pleaded guilty in May to identity theft (Philadelphia). Latest Person to Be Buried in a Pet Cemetery: Jean Birkenstein Washington, in June, who, according to her children, admired animals more than people (Aarrowood Park, Vernon Hills, Ill.). Latest Art Treasure to Be Misunderstood by a Maintenance Man: A US$300,000 art object with a flickering bulb (to create a seedy look), which was "repaired" by an earnest electrician in July (at Brunswick Lane in Glasgow, Scotland).

Ingrid Nicholls, a black woman, was originally told by her hospital in Reading, England, that the only foot prosthesis she was entitled to from the National Health Service was a white one and that she'd have to pay extra for black (but two days later, NHS changed its mind). And the city council in Duluth, Minn., tried to help a local community arts group by selling them the old National Guard armory for $1, but then the group's check bounced. And Canada's foreign ministry announced that, for "security" reasons, it would issue no more passports in which applicants' photos show them smiling.

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

Tensions are brewing in the family of Zell Kravinsky, 48, and his psychiatrist-wife, Emily, over what she believes is his excessive altruism, according to an August profile in The New York Times. Kravinsky is not just a passionate philanthropist (from his fortune in commercial real estate), but such a strict utilitarian that he says he would sacrifice his one good kidney (he's already donated the other one) if it were needed by someone doing more social good than he. "No one should have two kidneys," he says, "until everyone has one." He said he cannot value his own kids more than anyone else's, a point that has angered his parents and caused Emily to threaten divorce and two friends to abandon him.

A 31-year-old Philadelphia government employee's surgery is just a radical example of how obsessed some women are to wear excruciatingly painful, but fashionable, shoes, according to an August Wall Street Journal report. For about $10,000, the woman had one toe shortened and another straightened so that now she can wear today's ever-pointier, open-toed pumps. Among podiatrists' other remedies: narrowing of the nails; collagen injections to pad the soles of the feet; and a $225 "foot facial" scrub. But when a Moline, Ill., woman told her more traditional podiatrist that she needed corrective toe surgery, the doctor said, "No, you need different shoes."

The New York Times reported that activists working to encourage organ donations deplored the recent shortage of superior young organs for transplant, in large part because murder and traffic fatality rates have come down (August). And Texas public schools raided the budget to buy state flags for every classroom in order to comply with this month's inauguration of required student pledges of allegiance to Texas (August). And one of the apparently most pressing needs in Varallo, Italy, was addressed when the city council began subsidizing half the cost of Viagra tablets for its residents (August).

-- Broward County, which was one of the "ground zeros" during Florida's 2000 presidential vote-counting problems, mistakenly failed 6,559 public middle-school students in June due to what it later called a computer error. A school official called the total count of students affected "a small number."

-- Single-engine pilot Michael Grumbine flew at barely tree-top level over La Serna High School in Whittier, Calif., in May, to drop anti-abortion leaflets to students (containing a hip reference to the then-hot movie "The Matrix: Reloaded"), but in mid-flight he accidentally stuck his hand into the propeller blades, severing two fingers and sending the plane into a fall, where it crash-landed, injuring Grumbine.

-- Authorities in Phoenix decided to hold the city's loudest July 4 fireworks show this year adjacent to the complex that houses a Veterans Administration medical center and the state's military retirement home, even though some residents of the facilities still suffer battlefield-acquired post-traumatic stress disorders. (However, the facilities reported no adverse incidents.)

-- Sewage-treatment officials in Pittsburgh, wanting to lure crowds to a June showing of their new facilities, thought the best way to attract people was to offer them a picnic of free hamburgers and hot dogs to accompany the demonstration of state-of-the-art raw sewage disposal. (About 300 people attended.)

-- In March, the double life of wealthy Tampa construction magnate Douglas Cone, 74, began to surface when, following the death of his socialite wife, Jean Ann (with whom he lived Thursdays through Sundays and had three kids), he quickly married his socialite paramour Hillary Carlson (with whom he lived in a second mansion 20 miles away as Donald Carlson, Mondays through Wednesdays, and had two kids). Cone's money (donated in both his names, though "Mr. Carlson" never appeared in public) and the women's tireless community service made the "four" of them prominent figures in Tampa. (The consensus among families' members is that Hillary knew; Jean Ann might not have; and friends and associates did not.)

-- Wilbur Daniels, 67, faces sentencing in September in Washington, D.C., on his 2002 conviction for defrauding the Dupont Park Seventh-day Adventist Church of $1.3 million, which, as church treasurer, he might have taken in a sincere attempt to invest the church's money in what turned out to be a Nigerian Internet scam. Prosecutors said Daniels' earnestness was demonstrated by the fact that he also lost his own life savings in the deal.

An inmate tried to escape in August from the parking garage of the jail in St. Charles County, Mo., by dashing through a fire exit door; he seemed unaware that immediately beyond the door was a brick wall, and after the collision, he was taken to a hospital with head injuries. And in Tampa, Fla., in August, one man was arrested and several others sought in a labor-intensive burglary of a Sports Authority store; police estimate that the crew spent a week digging an elaborate 40-foot-long tunnel underneath the store, and once they finally surfaced inside, they apparently got only about $3,500 in athletic shoes and Tampa Bay Bucs jerseys before an early-arriving employee called police.

-- The federal government settled with two prestigious Chicago hospitals in July (Northwestern University's, University of Chicago's) and filed a claim against another (University of Illinois'), on charges that the three improperly moved their own patients up the national organ-transplant priority list; one UI official allegedly told a doctor that favoring its own patients was "the Chicago way." And in August, the conviction of a Dallas bookstore manager became final, for selling obscenity in the form of adult science-fiction comic books; the sales were to adults in an adults-only section, but the prosecutor's main argument about the books's alleged "danger" was merely that comic books are an art form of general appeal to children.

In July, a Los Angeles Times reporter, citing "scientists and others who study the problem," wrote that as many as 10,000 auto collisions since 1985 have been caused by "unintended acceleration" (e.g., hitting the gas pedal instead of the brake, accelerating in a mistaken gear). Recent news stories suggest this problem is particularly acute with (and perhaps even largely confined to) senior citizens. In July and August alone, at least nine seniors (aged 71 to 90) caused unintended-acceleration collisions in Florida, Georgia, California, Massachusetts, Illinois and Tennessee, in addition to the July Santa Monica, Calif., farmer's market incident in which an 86-year-old man killed 10 people because he was unable to move his foot to the brake while traveling nearly three blocks.

-- Tony Martin (introduced in News of the Weird in 1999) is one of Britain's most prominent criminals, sentenced to six years in prison for defending his property by shooting one burglar to death and wounding another. He was turned down for early parole in 2002, and also for a trial home visit in July, on the official ground that he continued to pose a threat to burglars. However, he was granted parole by statute in August and now must prepare to defend a civil suit by the surviving, limping burglar, Brendon Fearon, who claims the gunshot permanently disabled him. In August, London's Sun newspaper surreptitiously videotaped Fearon walking without a limp and effortlessly bicycling and climbing stairs.

A judge in North Platte, Neb., willingly accepted the defense of a 45-year-old inmate on work-release that the reason he had alcohol on his breath was that he had eaten a homemade burrito whose ingredients had been dipped in beer. And Jeremy Bamber, convicted years ago of killing five family members, filed a lawsuit against four surviving relatives for conspiring to deprive him of "his share" of the family estate (Wix, Essex, England). And the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board turned down the petition for asylum by a Venezuelan woman, who claimed she needed to stay in Canada because back home, she would be persecuted for being too fat.

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

Researchers Steven Potter (Georgia Tech) and Guy Ben-Ary (University of Western Australia, Perth) have created a robotic "arm" that makes a painter's rudimentary brush strokes at Ben-Ary's lab, directed over the Internet by its "brain" (composed of 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish) in Potter's lab, according to a July report from BBC News. According to Potter, the brain is not yet classically "intelligent" but does "adapt" (i.e., experience less chaos) and thus strokes more smoothly over time.

In August, St. Louis, Mo., school board member Rochell Moore sent Mayor Francis Slay an open letter, criticizing his school-closing management reforms and advising him that because of his obstinacy, she had placed a curse on him. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Moore's curse was modeled after Deuteronomy 28:21, in which Moses told the Israelites what would happen if they strayed from God, e.g., "The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto Francis Slay ..." (When a former city comptroller later told reporters he thought Moore had "mental problems," Moore allegedly threatened to kill him.)

The 2003 valedictorian of Alcee Fortier Senior High School in New Orleans failed (for the fifth time) the state's mandatory exit exam, and she cannot graduate until she passes (August). And workers tearing down the reactors at the old Hanford, Wash., nuclear reservation discovered dozens of radioactive nests of mud dauber wasps, but so far no wasp had mutated into a monster (August). And the district attorney of Watauga County, N.C., frustrated at the light sentences judges hand down for methamphetamine producers, announced that he will begin to charge defendants instead (via a recent anti-terrorism law) with manufacturing a "nuclear or chemical weapon" (August).

-- New York City's new 16-page anti-terrorist preparedness manual, produced by a consortium of 20 government agencies and released in July, contains such advice as: If you encounter radiation, go outside (if you're inside a building) or go inside (if you're outside a building); Do not accept packages from strangers; If you find yourself holding a mysterious substance, put it down. Also offered is the familiar advice from a generation ago: If you can't get out of a building, "(Duck) under a sturdy table or desk."

-- In March, in Lisbon, Ohio, after William Neville, 30, allegedly tried to get intimate with a woman who had taken out a stay-away order against him, police chased the man out of her home, down the street through the Lisbon Cemetery, until he accidentally got caught in a briar patch.

-- The St. Petersburg Times reported in July that Pinellas County (Fla.) judge Richard Luce was being investigated for losing his temper in May and thus becoming unsuited to sentence convicted attempted-murderer Tam Thane Vo. Luce became angry when he surmised that Vo's mother had raised her hand, middle finger extended, to her forehead in reaction to the verdict, but the mother said she was merely having an adverse reaction to her shampoo.

-- In Kingsford, Australia, in May, Phyllis Newnham, vying for a larger portion of the estate of her late friend Florence Mather, claimed in court that Mather had made out a subsequent, more generous, superseding will but that one of Ms. Mather's dogs ate it (and she produced DNA testing to show that the dog had eaten a mangled document, but it was unclear if that was the will).

At the Amoco station on Route 59 In Spring Valley, N.Y., on June 22, an unidentified man twice jumped on the counter and shouted, demanding that the clerk hand over money, but twice the clerk pushed him off, and the man finally gave up and left. And in August in Delray Beach, Fla., a man tried to carjack Larry Klein, 53, who is disabled, but Klein repeatedly jabbed at the man out the window with one of his crutches, and he finally ran away.

In June, Jacquelyn Allen-MacGregor, 47, a 20-year executive with United Way in East Lansing, Mich., was remorseful after being sentenced to four years in prison for stealing more than $2 million from the agency to buy show horses; said MacGregor, "I do believe that I'm obsessed with horses." And an independent investigation revealed in August that Mr. Oral Suer, the former CEO of United Way of the Washington, D.C., area, had taken $1.5 million in improper payments during his tenure; among the alleged improprieties was that Suer made several annual gifts to United Way in his own name but then collected bogus expenses from the organization to cover the donations.

Robin Wilkinson, a 19-year veteran prosecutor who resigned after being charged with DUI, said her main defense would be that, at the time of the traffic stop, police did not tell her that she had the right to an attorney (Orlando, Fla., August). And an accountant was charged with embezzling $170,000 from his employer (a union local) and explained that he gave it all to a female assistant for three years' worth of oral sex (New York City).

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (65) Parents who on a hot day leave their infants locked in the car (accidentally or for what they believe is only a brief period), resulting in death, as happens usually to underachieving people but which also happened in August to University of California professor Mark J. Warschauer. (66) And the proliferation of Internet pages by penpal-seeking lonely-heart inmates such as Saul dos Reis Jr., who is serving time in Connecticut for a fatal sexual assault on a 13-year-old girl, and who advertised himself (on Inmate.com, before the ad was recently removed) as "enjoy(ing)" "being silly and funny" and who has "many qualities which make me unique."

Victor Robinson was charged with murder in Miami in April after he allegedly told police he roughed up his 8-month-old son to stop him from crying so that he wouldn't grow up "to be a punk." And in May in Rockville, Md., a 12-year-old girl formally acknowledged at a hearing that she had fatally stabbed her 15-year-old brother during a dispute over whose turn it was to use the phone.

Three teenagers with paintball guns terrorized kids on a playground until they fired into the wrong group of kids, one of whom returned fire with a real gun, wounding two paintballers (Pittsburgh). An expert in workplace violence for the Hawaii state government was allegedly roughed up by his supervisor in a policy dispute (Honolulu). The government of India's West Bengal state began distributing copies of the venerable Kama Sutra sex guide to teach prostitutes creative ways to give pleasure to clients without AIDS-risky penetrative sex.

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