-- In April, Luftee Abdul Waalee, 48, was sentenced to three years in prison for trying to pass a fake U.S. Treasury check for $25 million at a credit union in Pittsburgh. According to the prosecutor, Waalee is a member of the "Moors" black separatist group that supposedly believes that each American is endowed with a secret government account worth around $600,000, based on a theory that when the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1933, it began backing its currency not with a precious metal but with the prospective labor of its citizens. (Because the Moors are smarter than everyone else, only they know about these secret accounts and can thus buy and sell them.)

Recent news from the Washington, D.C., public school system, which by some measures is the poorest-performing in the country while simultaneously being the most expensive: D.C. schools were found to spend $234 per year per pupil on security (twice as much as Philadelphia, for instance, and five times as much as Baltimore, according to an April Washington Times report). Also, in one high school last year, 56 percent of students had streaks of at least 15 absences that were unexcused. And in an accounting-firm review of 944 student records in 16 high schools, in "hundreds" of cases the grade ultimately posted did not match the grade turned in, according to the report described in a December Washington Post story.

After a decade of tolerance, the Tokyo metropolitan government ruled in March that used lingerie could no longer be sold in the city's sex shops, where men had been paying the equivalent of $15 to $90 for a pair of panties in a plastic bag, sometimes including a photograph of the former owner. Increasingly, schoolgirls as young as 9 had been supplying the stores.

-- In March, a Shell/Site convenience store manager in North Naples, Fla., found employee Robert Lee King, 41, lying on the floor rubbing off one not-yet-purchased lottery ticket after another, looking for winners, stacking the used tickets neatly in two piles. The incredulous manager said he tried to explain to King that that isn't the way the lottery business works, whereupon King calmly took his stack of winners and walked out. The manager called in a sheriff's deputy, explained the problem, and showed the surveillance tape of King with the tickets, and while the deputy was writing his report, King happened to come back in to ask for his paycheck. He was charged with grand theft.

-- Residents of South Camden, N.J., who (according to a February Newark Star-Ledger report) have spent years complaining about government failure to rehabilitate their rundown neighborhood, have commenced another level of complaint recently. Now that the state and federal governments have finally sent cleanup and restoration money in, the Star-Ledger reports, residents are complaining that the community is starting to look too good (especially the Delaware River waterfront), which will raise property values (and taxes) and force many longtime residents to leave.

-- As usual in the hundred-year-old Easter festival on the Greek isle of Chios, townspeople from two churches in Vrodandos stockpiled small rockets (an estimated 25,000 in all) and fired them at each other's bell on Easter morning while parishioners were inside for services (although the windows had been boarded up in anticipation). As in previous years, misguided rockets started fires in nearby houses, but unlike in some years, there were no deaths.

-- Don Sneed, a theological researcher and gay activist in Dallas, released a video in April that he said provides mathematical and scientific proof that God exists (a theory that he proudly says no one has yet refuted). "The God Number" explains Sneed's "Definity -- Uninity -- Infinity," which he says "substantiates the identification of the specific number that represents God." This first video, he said, was for the layperson, and he is at work on a professional version for mathematicians and scientists.

-- Several parents walked out of a holiday program by the Glassport (Pa.) Assembly of God when the actors on stage began whipping the Easter bunny and breaking its eggs, which church officials said was an attempt to move past the benign symbols of the holiday and focus on the suffering of Christ. As children in the audience cried at the beatings, actors chanted, "There is no Easter bunny."

A man pulled a knife on a cashier at a Family Dollar store in Vineland, N.J., in December and demanded money from the open cash register, but the cashier slammed it shut and said "No." After several more demands and several more refusals, the man walked out. And a potential robber of the Iowa Savings Bank in Des Moines on May 3 suffered a similar fate, except that not only did he finally walk out empty-handed, but he also left behind his own $20 bill he had initially laid on the counter to get the teller's attention.

St. Louis School Board member Rochell Moore was finally removed by a judge for misconduct in April, after incidents beyond the one reported last August in News of the Weird (in which she put a biblical curse on Mayor Francis Slay because she disagreed with his school reform proposals). At the board meeting that ultimately resulted in her dismissal, Moore dumped a pitcher of ice water on an assistant superintendent and later publicly threatened violence against anyone who suggests that she may be mentally ill (though she was involuntarily hospitalized for that in 2002).

In March, the Queenstown Lakes District Council (New Zealand), apparently really concerned about clever sex entrepreneurs, amended its recent bylaw aimed at regulating all potential prostitution in the area, including acts on airplanes, ships and ferries, because it had left out prostitution on "hovercraft" (vehicles that float above the surface by the constant downthrust of air). And in April, the Treasury Department's agency that investigates allegedly illegal financing across U.S. borders was revealed to have only four agents working on money traceable to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but 21 agents working full-time on violations of the U.S. embargo of Cuba.

Following a violent collision by Shane Millard and opponent Dean Ripley during a British rugby game, doctors stitching up Millard found part of Ripley's tooth in Millard's head. And veterinarians in Manchester, England, discovered that the reason for the poor health of the golf course mascot Libby, a German shepherd, was that she had swallowed 28 balls (but is now fine after surgery). And a wired-up Hamas suicide bomber in the Gaza Strip, on his way to an assignment, was accosted by two Palestinian street thieves and decided he might as well detonate early and take the two men with him.

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

-- As Illinois legislators debate solutions to the rising cost of medical malpractice insurance, newspaper reports from several cities have chronicled the local exodus of neurosurgeons and ob-gyn doctors to avoid the state's oppressive premiums (typically tripling or quadrupling over the last three years), costs that doctors usually must absorb because of health-insurance contract restrictions. Carbondale brain surgeon Sumeer Lal is moving to South Carolina ($40,000 premium vs. $300,000 in Illinois), and nearly one-fifth of the state's neurosurgeons are closing this year. These days, said outgoing obstetrician Eileen Murphy of Chicago (who makes $170,000 in salary but pays a $138,000 premium), "if anything goes wrong (in delivery), you can almost guarantee you're going to be sued."

In Louisville, Ky., local Republican Party activists John Lowler and Peter Hayes feuded recently over their status at the upcoming state convention, with Lowler alleging that Hayes punched him. Lowler had first accused Hayes of smearing him by suggesting that he had recently had gay sex. (Lowler acknowledges that he used to be gay but says he is now straight). Hayes said it was Lowler who smeared first by denigrating Hayes' religion, the Unification Church (headed by Rev. Sun Myung Moon). Hayes told the Louisville Courier-Journal in April that Lowler had taunted him by saying, "Moonie, Moonie, Moonie, Moonie, Moonie." (However, Lowler said he could recall saying only "Moonie, Moonie, Moonie.")

Lawyer Larry Feingold, 53, testified at his January trial in New York City that he was merely trying to commit suicide in 2003 when he turned on the gas in his apartment and that the subsequent blast that devastated three floors of his building caught him by surprise because he didn't know that gas could explode. "I thought gasoline did," he said, under oath, "but I didn't know about gas." And Bromley Preston, 44, filed a claim late last year after he split his head open on the water slide at The Lakes Resort at Berry Springs, in Australia, even though he admits he tried to go down the 100-foot-high slide on all fours instead of on his back, feet first.

In February, officials in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen established the world's first formal stock-market-type arrangement in which farmers and producers can efficiently buy and sell liquid manure. And the London Evening Standard reported in March that soaring funeral prices in Germany have created markets for cost-saving services, including a thriving business in sending loved ones' bodies to Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic for disposal (a phenomenon known in the trade as "corpse tourism").

-- From a November 2003 article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, on the fatal transmission of Rocky Mountain spotted fever from two dogs to their owner: "One man in Mississippi contracted Rocky Mountain spotted fever when he killed ticks he had removed from his dog by biting them with his teeth. This may seem unusual," the veterinarian-authors wrote, "but we have since encountered other persons who claimed to kill ticks by biting them."

-- A 23-year-old man in Hartland, Maine, was hospitalized in March after apparently attempting to commit suicide by crucifying himself. According to an account in the Portland Press Herald, he built a wooden cross, placed it on the floor, and nailed one hand to it. According to the officer, "When he realized that he was unable to nail his other hand to the board, he called 911," although the officer said he wasn't sure if the call was for an ambulance or for someone to come help him nail the other hand.

-- News of additional bizarre species was released recently from last year's deep-sea research voyage by scientists from Australia and New Zealand (and reported in News of the Weird in October). The oddest this time was the "deep sea angler fish," because of its sex life. According to Dr. Mark Norman, curator at Museum Victoria in Australia: "The female is the size of a tennis ball. It has big savage teeth" and "a rod lure off the top of its head with a glowing tip to coax in stupid prey." The male "looks like a black jellybean with fins." The mating male bites into the female's side, drinks her blood and gives her sperm. Their flesh eventually fuse together permanently. Said Norman, "They have found females with up to six males attached."

-- Mice Living the Good Life: University of Southern California researchers announced in February that they were able to breed mice with a certain skin gene "overexpressed," resulting in the mices' growing thicker hair, more whiskers and "significantly larger" "external genitalia."

According to a March Arizona Republic profile, Phoenix's Haskell Wexler, 73, is in his 12th year of contesting three $31 parking tickets, a dispute that has taken him through 12 so-far-unsuccessful lawsuits. His complaint is that he thinks the ticket charges were unfairly raised by the city in 1992 from $6 to $16 and that the $15 late fee was entirely inappropriate. Even more burdensome than the lawsuits are Wexler's almost-daily telephone calls seeking his $93 back. A city attorney said Wexler's crusade plays the same role in his life as golf might for other retirees.

A 40-year-old man and his 16-year-old son (carrying a shotgun) were walking home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in March when they decided to rob passing pedestrians of the beer they were carrying; in the ensuing fight, police later said, the beer did not change hands, and the son accidentally shot the father. And according to police in Toledo, Ohio, in March, during the robbery of the Gold Star Market, Joseph Allen Wilson, 18, accidentally shot and killed his 30-year-old accomplice, who was posing as a customer and whom Wilson was "threatening to kill" as part of the clever plan to get the clerk to open the register.

-- Rev. Dwayne Long, 45, a Pentecostal preacher in Rose Hill, Va., died the day after being bitten on the finger by a rattlesnake during a serpent-handling sermon on April 11. He had refused treatment because, as a parishioner said later, "(I)t's the Lord's will." (According to Mark 16:17-18 in the New Testament, "(Believers) shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.")

A speeding pickup truck went out of control, hit a low wall, and became airborne, landing on the roof of Fish Bowl's Bar and Grill, where firefighters rescued the driver (Jefferson, W.Va.). And after visitor Dave Alsop stopped his car in the West Midland Safari Park to photograph Sharka the rhinoceros mating, Sharka uncoupled and instead passionately mounted Alsop's small Renault automobile, heavily denting it before Alsop could drive away (Bewdley, England). And a bill was introduced in the Louisiana legislature to make it illegal for anyone to wear pants that ride below the waistline.

(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, choreographer Jenefer Davies Mansfield staged her "NASCAR Ballet" production at the Roanoke (Va.) Ballet Theatre, featuring 20 colorfully unitard-clad dancers, wearing corporate patches of the theater's sponsors, prancing and leaping around a banked-racetrack stage (to new-age music and the sounds of revving engines), "racing" but occasionally crashing into each other, to be rescued by other dancers who are the "pit crews." Mansfield was hoping for a big crossover audience of NASCAR fans gathered for a big race in nearby Martinsville. "In this business," she said, "you've got to take chances."

In December, police in Lewiston, Maine, chased down a patient from St. Mary's Regional Medical Center who, apparently fed up with his hospital regimen, had fled the building on foot, clad only in his gown in the icy rain, and dragging his wheeled IV pole behind him. And Gary C. Laine, 48, wanted on a fugitive murder warrant from California, turned himself in to police in Kerrville, Texas, in February and, apparently seeking to look cooperative, had already handcuffed himself before walking into the station.

William Rhode, 53, was arrested in February and charged in several incidents in which he visited daycare centers in the New Jersey towns of Hardyston, Jefferson and Pequannock and inquired about employment, even though at the time he was dressed in pink women's tights and wore a large diaper. The first two visits were alarming enough to officials, but police arrived in force after the Holy Spirit School in Pequannock reported that Rhode had actually relieved himself in front of students.

-- Thinking Outside the Box: It was a black male police officer who arrested her, and a black female officer who searched her, but drunk-driving suspect Donna Mills, who is a black New York City judge, still played the race card at her March trial. According to a New York Post report, Mills' lawyer said that the presence of the black officers meant that Mills' race-card defense was being undermined, and that that in itself might be evidence of police racism. (Mills was acquitted, but in subsequent interviews, jurors said the racism argument was inconsequential.)

-- Lame Excuses: In Los Angeles in February, Michael Marks, 25, raising an insanity defense to attempted murder, said he was drug-crazed at the time of the crime because someone on a balcony above him had spilled PCP on top of his head and that it must have affected his thinking. (He was convicted.) And Michael Cammarota, 57, asked a judge in New York City in February not to imprison him for engineering a multi-victim investment fraud but rather to send him to a mental institution because he needs help with what he called his "addiction" to "money." (He got four to 12 years.)

-- Missouri high school principal Robert D. Blizzard, 58, was arrested in Oklahoma in December and charged with indecent exposure after he was reported driving with his inside light on and his pants down, flashing motorists. When the arresting officer asked him how he could still keep control of the car like that, Blizzard modestly explained that it was no more difficult than "talking on a cell phone." (And in April, a Toronto musician was ticketed on the very busy Highway 400 after an officer spotted him behind the wheel of his VW Jetta practicing the violin.)

-- In Cleveland in March, John Struna won his lawsuit against a convenience store owner who had sold him Ohio Lottery tickets, claiming that the man ought to have explained a Lottery rule to him (even though the rules are printed on every ticket). Struna had bought 52 tickets playing the same numbers in a game that pays $100,000 per winning ticket, but somehow he never noticed that the payout would be capped at $1 million, meaning that his 52 winning tickets would be worth only $19,230 each. Despite being a heavy lottery player (spending $125,000 a year), Struna said it was up to the store owner to explain that rule to him, and the jury agreed.

-- Frank Chancellor filed a lawsuit against Burger King in Greenville, S.C., in March, claiming that, unknown to him beforehand, his chicken sandwich was too hot and that it scalded his mouth. And two months earlier in West Palm Beach, Fla., Thomas Gould filed a lawsuit against Raindancer steak house, claiming that, unknown to him beforehand, his baked potato was too hot and that it scalded his mouth and esophagus, sending him to the hospital.

Serial thief Colin Sadd, 41, pleaded guilty in April in Sheffield, England, to his latest capers, including swiping five cars that he had gotten dealers to let him test drive. As with his previous car thefts, Sadd drove them around, cleaned them up inside, and washed and waxed them before abandoning them. Said his wife, "(H)e desperately needs help with his obsession." And Debra Janan Goins was charged with theft in February in Mount Carmel, Tenn., after writing three checks taken from a purse she stole, but each time carefully filling in the check register with all the details of the illegal transactions.

Cardinal Rules, Broken: (1) Don't Carry Around the Holdup Note: Christopher Alexander Fields, 42, was charged in Hillsborough, N.C., in January after police found him acting suspicious in front of a Central Carolina Bank branch. The only real evidence of his intention was a note in his backpack reading "I want $10,000 in $100 bills. Don't push no buttons, or I'll shot (sic) you." (2) If You're Paying With Counterfeit Money, Pay and Go: Anthony Lee Lamb, 20, and two alleged accomplices were arrested in Berea, Ky., in March after Lamb paid for a meal at a McDonald's and then sat down to eat it, thus giving the manager a chance to examine Lamb's $20 bill more carefully.

A 21-year-old junior at the University of California at Berkeley became the latest drinking-contest fatality, in a March game among friends repeatedly downing shots of tequila, vodka and whiskey. ("(He) was a competitive guy," said his roommate.) And a 20-year-old Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario) student plunged to his death in February during a contest to see who could spit the farthest off an 11th-floor balcony. He had taken a running start.

In a heavily Hindu section of Bali (Indonesia), dozens of couples participated in a traditional good-luck public "kissing" festival until Muslim clerics showed up with buckets of water and drenched them for their immoral behavior. And a 24-hour camera on a German Internet site, showing only an extended family of wild boars, drew 1.5 million viewers in its first two weeks. And businessman Sam Walls, at first competitive in the Republican primary for a seat in the Texas legislature, lost after recent-year photographs surfaced of his cross-dressing days as Samantha Walls.

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