-- In a murder trial about to conclude at press time in Martinez, Calif., the circuslike cast of characters included Glenn Helzer (already convicted of several bizarre murders designed to vault him to power as the one true Mormon prophet), his brother Justin (charged in Glenn's crimes and described as one who takes his meals on the kitchen floor on all fours), Dawn Godman (a self-described "good witch" who pleaded guilty as Glenn's helper and then, as the government's star witness, described Glenn's plot to recruit Brazilian orphans to go to Utah and kill Mormon elders, thus hastening the apocalypse), and a former Playboy centerfold (September 2000), not charged with a crime, who was Glenn's girlfriend and took the stand to vouch for Justin's good character.

In April, a New York appeals court ruled that Leon Caldwell was entitled to a $50,000 state worker-compensation death benefit on behalf of his son, Kenneth, who died at age 30 at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, even though Leon had abandoned Kenneth shortly after birth and had seen him only twice since. The court said that Leon "met the legal definition of a parent" (but ordered him to pay Kenneth's mother her long-overdue $20,000 in child-support).

(1) House of Lords member Norman Tebbit told a radio interviewer in May that homosexuality in Britain is "intimately connected" to the rise in obesity. (His explanation: The breakdown of the family means fewer family meals and more fast-food meals.) (2) Florida state legislative candidate Ed Heeney told a Palm Beach County political meeting in May that homosexuality has made it difficult for him to enjoy his pastime of billiards. (His explanation: "(Y)ou have a situation where the lesbian community is buying restaurants and bars (and, presumably, removing the pool tables).")

In May, Anchorage, Alaska, public defender Leslie Hiebert, representing murder defendant Kenneth Padgett, explained why Padgett's having stuck his mother's corpse between two walls of her mobile home and sealed up the space as a tomb, was not evidence that he had killed her. Hiebert told the jury that Padgett was just trying to help her. She died of natural causes, Hiebert said, but "really loved her trailer" and "would not have a problem" with her remains being buried there. (Padgett was convicted.)

-- James Samuel Steward suffered severe brain damage in May 1998 after he took an overdose of methadone that someone had smuggled into jail for him while he was an inmate in Goulburn, Australia. In May 2004, Steward's parents filed a lawsuit on his behalf (because he is now unable to care for himself), claiming that it is the government's fault that their son got tempted, in that it did not smuggle-proof the jail, and the Stewards are asking the equivalent of US$2.7 million.

-- Earlier this year, a worker compensation commission in Sydney, Australia, awarded benefits for "psychological injury" to teacher Jeff Sinclair, caused when Baulkham Hills High School fired him. The basis for the firing was his romantic relationship with a student, which began in 2000 when he was 49 (and the married father of three) and she was 15. Sinclair will receive from the government the equivalent of US$19,000, plus US$215 monthly for as long as his "injury" continues. Teacher and student now live together, as Sinclair and his wife have divorced. (And in May, Sinclair's ex-wife said she would soon file a similar claim for "psychological injury," before the same commission, also based on the firing of her then-husband.)

-- In April, the Alaska Court of Appeals upheld the legality of a police traffic stop of a car that an officer believed was the same car about which a report of occupants fighting had just been called in. The officer said he saw, through the rear window (according to an Anchorage Daily News report) that "the woman in the passenger seat was facing the driver (while the car was stopped for a red light), her left leg on top of the driver's seat, wrapped around his head rest," followed by the man's moving to "lean over" the passenger. That the activity was sex, instead of fighting, was irrelevant, said the court, because either one creates a traffic-safety problem.

-- Lame: Mr. Angel Jones, 27, was convicted of aggravated assault against his girlfriend, specifically, biting off most of her nose in a rage; he admitted the nose was in his mouth but said that due to her using weight-loss medication, her nose had become brittle, and that it just fell off (Toronto, May). And Maurice Williams, 24, was charged with perjury after he told a judge he was not "Williams," even though "Williams" was tattooed on his back. Said Maurice, "I can't see what's on my back. If there's some tattoos on my back, somebody's been bothering me when I'm asleep" (Muncie, Ind., May).

-- In April, Joshua Baldwin, 24, was sentenced to 180 days in jail for 16 incidents of indecent exposure to women in stores in downtown Bay City, Mich. His explanation to the judge: "I was only hoping to get lucky, but I went about it the wrong way."

Streator, Ill., school superintendent Bill Mattingly apologized in January after an investigation found that he called a black basketball player at Streator High into his office and ordered him to start passing the ball more often to "white kids," including Mattingly's son. And in March, Andy Schmeltzer, baseball coach at Hirschi High School (Wichita Falls, Texas), was placed on leave after he took a bat into a teacher's room, asked her to change some grades, and then slammed the bat down on a desk, for emphasis.

Arrested recently and charged with murder: Estell Wayne Buck (Monroe, Ohio, June); Jerry Wayne Wright (Monroe County, Tenn., March); David Wayne Marsh (Hagerstown, Md., March); Jonathan Wayne Larrabee (Wakpala, S.D., March); Jerald Wayne Harvel II (Pawhuska, Okla., February); Robert Wayne McMillion (Miami, Fla., December). Arrested on suspicion of murder: John Wayne Warrener (Thornton, Colo., June). Convicted of murder: Charles Wayne Green (Pocahontas, Ark., May); Mark Wayne Hauseur (Joshua Tree, Calif., April). Attempted suicide while in custody for murder: Kenneth Wayne Gregory (Land O'Lakes, Fla., April). Death sentence upheld on re-sentencing: Robert Wayne Lambert (Sapulpa, Okla., May).

A 46-year-old South African soldier, part of an African Union peacekeeping force in Bujumbura, Burundi, was killed in May when a large, rotting tree fell over onto the portable toilet he was using. And a 45-year-old television cameraman was struck and killed by a car at a dangerous Omaha, Neb., intersection while he was working on a story about how dangerous the intersection is (June).

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

"Fishermen" using pistols, shotguns and assault rifles are permitted on two U.S. lakes (in Vermont and Virginia) for a few weeks each spring to fire away at pike and several other species, according to a May report in The New York Times. Sportsmen (who wait in tree "fish blinds") aim just in front of their prey to kill by concussion because a direct hit renders the fish inedible. Describing the fascination, one shooter struggled in awe: "It's something that once you've done it ..." The relatively few shooters are so avid that attempts to ban the activity have gone nowhere.

The West Virginia secretary of state ordered the polls still to be open in the town of Littleton for the June 8 municipal election, even though no candidates ran for any of the seven offices and write-ins were disqualified. (The town will probably disband.) And in May, former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who presided over the state's 2000 presidential recount, revealed that her absentee ballot in a March 2004 local election was not counted because she forgot to sign it. And in March, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, trying to persuade traditionalist men to let women register to vote, said in a speech, "Please, my dear brothers, let your wives and sisters go to the voter registration process. Later, you can control who she votes for, but please, let her go."

(1) According to an April New York Times dispatch, the quiz show "The Mission," on the satellite TV channel of Lebanese militants Hezbollah, challenges contestants in categories such as naming Arab suicide bombers, with the winner receiving points toward the game's ultimate destination, "Jerusalem" (the retaking of which is a unifying theme of all the channel's programs). (2) Craig Gross, 28, and Mike Foster, 32, run the Christian Internet site "XXXChurch," designed to help the faithful overcome pornography and masturbation, according to a May Wired magazine report. (Recent advice: "Remain calm and tell yourself, 'You don't own me, masturbation!'" Recently, several online "parishioners" commenced a 40-day abstinence, to match the time Satan tempted Jesus in the desert.)

Alaska is reputed to be the state most laden with congressional overspending (thanks to its powerful U.S. Rep. Don Young and U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens), and an April New York Times dispatch described two proposed, marginally useful bridges for the state that will eventually cost taxpayers more than $2.2 billion. One, almost as big as the Golden Gate bridge, would connect Ketchikan (pop. 7,800) with a 50-resident island and the town's modest airport (and would replace a five-minute ferry boat ride), and the other, a 2-mile-long span, would connect Anchorage, according to the Times, to "a port that has a single regular tenant and almost no homes or businesses."

-- Universal Health Care (for Prisoners): A judge in Wilmington, N.C., had to officially "release" accused murderer Shirley Spaulding in May, as a ploy, to get the state to start picking up her medical bills. Brunswick County was running out of money because it has paid nearly $400,000 to treat her respiratory illness while she awaits her death-penalty trial. (Fortunately, she was too sick to depart custody.)

-- Donnie Newsome, the chief administrator (called the "judge-executive") of Knott County, Ky., was convicted in October 2003 of buying votes, then denied bail during his appeal because the judge found him a "danger" to the community, and then sentenced in March 2004 to two years in prison. But Newsome still manages the county's affairs from a detention facility in Lexington, getting briefings from an assistant during visiting hours. (Kentucky law does not require the resignation of convicted officials until their appeals are exhausted.)

-- In April, London's National Portrait Gallery showed an hour-long video of star soccer player David Beckham, sleeping; artist Sam Taylor-Wood said she wanted to do an original of the ubiquitously photographed Beckham and realized there was not much that hadn't already been done. And at a March exhibit at London's Nelson's Column, guest performers took turns reading Japanese artist On Kawara's book that consists only of 271,000 selected dates that occurred between 998,031 B.C. and A.D. 1,001,980. (Said a gallery director, "On Kawara's work speaks simply and directly about a subject relevant to us all, the passage and marking of time.")

-- Not only does San Francisco's Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center (i.e., the city dump) have an "artist in residence," but sculptor Rick Carpenter is actually the 43rd person to hold that position, according to an April San Francisco Chronicle report. Carpenter said his specialty is discarded bulk items, citing, for example, the weaving he made from 40 orange extension cords, and his latest, an object stuffed with the contents of a 5-gallon bucket of wigs someone tossed.

William Basil Armstrong, 56, was charged with robbing the Clark Mart in Akron, Ohio, in May; he gave up partway through, though, and had to ask the clerk to please run out to Armstrong's car and retrieve his oxygen tank, which he requires for a respiratory condition. And in November 2003, Mark Shleifer, 48, pleaded guilty in Doylestown, Pa., to possessing more than 1,000 pictures of child pornography, even though he is legally blind.

In 2002, the director of Washington, D.C.,'s National Zoo was criticized for impeding a Washington Post investigation into a spate of animal deaths at the zoo; the director had refused to release the medical records of a giraffe on the ground that she had to protect the animal's right of "privacy." In May 2004, the policy of the University of Georgia's veterinary hospital was also revealed, in an Associated Press report, to voluntarily give privacy rights to animals similar to the rights hospitals are required to give to humans under federal law.

Joseph Micale, 34, charged with manslaughter in the death of his wife, said she accidentally died while being choked during sex to heighten her orgasm (Syracuse, N.Y., January). And Sheila Davalloo, 34, was convicted of attempted murder, though she said her husband was accidentally stabbed during one of the couple's consensual rough-sex sessions (Pleasantville, N.Y., February). And Donald Marks, 40, abruptly pleaded no contest to murdering a 38-year-old prostitute, though he had claimed for over a year that she accidentally died while he was choking her in consensual rough sex (Honolulu, May).

A small crime wave hit south Philadelphia streets late last year, with a gang of five or more men randomly attacking pedestrians, seemingly for fun, and in at least three of the incidents, the men wore boxing gloves to beat up their victims. And in April, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of part of the Patriot Act (a public document) but couldn't publicly reveal what its lawsuit claimed because such disclosure without Justice Department permission is forbidden by the Patriot Act. (The Department OK'd a heavily censored press release 22 days later.)

Several George W. Bush-supporting punk rock bands have gained prominence in the United States recently to challenge the generally assumed dominance of rock music by political liberals, according to a May dispatch from New York by BBC News, which reported that bands such as Gotham Road and Bouncing Souls "are not raging against the machine, they are raging for it." A Rolling Stone writer attributed the upsurge to conservatives' general pugnaciousness, but one maven of "conservative punk" laid it to Republicans' and punk's joint "emphasis on personal responsibility."

(1) After a 10-year study with a global positioning satellite system (reported in February), researchers at England's Oxford University concluded that homing pigeons do not get their bearings from the sun, as previously thought, but rather just follow roads and highways home. (2) Mr. Jian Feng, of Hegang in northern China, suspicious when his wife gave birth to a baby he regarded as seriously ugly, got her to admit that, though she was not adulterous, she had herself been seriously ugly before she met Jian, but had had major plastic surgery in South Korea and now did not much resemble her genetic look. (Even so, Jian divorced her and in May sued her for fraud.)

The Miami Herald reported in April that BellSouth called state Rep. Julio Robaina three times by cell phone on the floor of the Florida legislature during debate on a massive telephone rate increase and ordered him to abandon his Democratic Party cohorts and vote for it; BellSouth had influence with Robaina because for the nine months a year that the Florida legislature is not in session, Robaina is an installer for BellSouth, and he was described as close to tears at BellSouth's lobbying. And in Tennessee in January, state Sen. John Ford, faced with a claim for increased child support from the mother of his 9-year-old daughter, formally challenged the constitutionality of the state's child-support rules; however, among the rules challenged were those ushered through the state General Assembly last year by Sen. John Ford.

-- In March in Hartford, Conn., Rebecca Messier, who was convicted with her husband, Joseph, in 1998 of giving $8,500 to a prosecutor to get a lenient sentence, petitioned in Superior Court to get her $8,500 back. And Jeffrey Cameron Fitzhenry, 17, was arrested in Palm Desert, Calif., in May after walking into a clinic with a 9 mm handgun and shooting his girlfriend because she was about to abort his baby.

-- In February and May, respectively, Father Paul Shanley and Father Robert Meffan were finally defrocked by the Catholic Church for having had sexual relationships with boys (Shanley) and nun-recruits (Meffan), starting in the 1960s, according to church records. Included in the church's actions were notifications that the men are now officially "dismissed from the obligation of clerical celibacy." (Shanley is still scheduled to stand trial in Massachusetts, though most of his alleged activities are protected by the statute of limitations.)

-- Robert Hesketh was acquitted of drunk-driving in Chilliwack, British Columbia, in March because police were actually too zealous in getting him a lawyer. After arresting Hesketh, Constable Rick Murray asked him several times if he wanted a lawyer, but Hesketh each time refused, until Murray himself called one on Hesketh's behalf. Only after the lawyer and Hesketh talked did police administer a breathalyzer test, and Judge John Lenaghan ruled that that was too much of a delay and tossed out the test's results.

-- From a police report quoted in Seattle's newsweekly The Stranger (April 29): "(A) witness stated that he and another witness watched the suspect walk up to several different men (at the University Book Store on the University of Washington campus), get on his knees, and sniff their anuses. He would then lean forward as though he was getting a book off the lower shelf. (One witness) also said that when one male got up from a bench and walked away, the suspect walked over and started smelling the area where the male had been sitting. When the witnesses confronted the suspect about the incidents, the suspect said, 'Sometimes I forget myself and get carried away.'"

-- The May robber of a Bank of America branch in St. Mary, Fla. (near Orlando) was still at large at press time, but police released the surveillance tape showing the man in a bright Hawaiian print shirt, holding his newly acquired stash to his lips and kissing it, before making his getaway.

Thinking Outside the Box: Teresa Jones Smith, 44, was arrested in Lexington, N.C., in January after trying to spring her incarcerated boyfriend, Roger Johnson, from jail. According to deputies, Smith, who had been seated across from Johnson at a visiting room bench, was found with a mini blowtorch and other tools trying to cut through the Plexiglas shield that separates prisoners from visitors, but more smoke was created than she was prepared for.

News of the Weird reported in 2002 and 2003 on ever-more-daring exploits of "extreme ironing" athletes, who set up boards and press creases under competitively difficult circumstances, such as while sailboarding or bouncing on a trampoline. Several British "ironists" made a publicity tour of the United States in May in their campaign to make their obsession an Olympic sport. (Events are now judged at 120 points each, half of which is based on the quality of the pressing.) Founder Phil Shaw said he got the idea one day in 1997 when he faced a load of wrinkled shirts and thought he would be less bored if he hooked up a long extension cord and ironed while he went rock-climbing.

An 18-year-old man survived (but was in critical condition) after losing at a variation of Russian roulette (six open cans of Mountain Dew, one spiked with antifreeze) at a party (Princeton, W.Va., May). A high school student survived (at one time in critical condition, bleeding from the mouth) after drinking an unidentified chemistry-lab substance in order to win a $2 bet (Odessa, Texas, May). And Fidel Cueva, 41, survived with only scrapes and bruises after he bailed out of an emergency window of a Greyhound bus, at 55 mph, in the fast lane of California's 101 freeway at rush hour because the bus, an "express," had just bypassed his stop. (Ventura, Calif., May).

After an investigation, the FBI concluded that a motion sensor found on the tracks near Philadelphia's 30th Street rail station just after the Madrid train bombings was not related to terrorism but was put there by a employee trying to sleep on the job but worried about a supervisor catching him. And just as gasoline prices cleared $2 a gallon in May, Minnesota's Commerce Department levied a $70,000 fine against Murphy Oil Co.'s 10 stations for charging too low a price. (A 2001 state law requires that dealers make at least 8 cents a gallon profit.)