Pastor Joe Van Koevering speaks reverently of the "precious Jewish people," whom "God loves," but a principal mission of his Gateway Christian Center in St. Petersburg, Fla., is to speed up the end of the world (and, thus, the deaths of nonbelievers) by financially helping to send as many Jews as possible "back home" to Israel. According to the Bible's Book of Revelation, the holy war that will bring the apocalypse will start only after Jews (of an indeterminate number) return to the holy land. According to a May St. Petersburg Times story, Van Koevering became tearful when speaking of the Jews that will be left behind to fight, and die, so that "true believers" can be taken away in the rapture.

-- The East Valley Tribune reported in April that the police department in Mesa, Ariz., was still awaiting word about its $100,000 federal grant request to buy and train a capuchin monkey for its SWAT team. Capuchins are now used as assistance animals for the disabled, in that they can be taught to fetch things off of shelves, and the police want to see if one can be trained to unlock doors and search buildings on command. The Pentagon's visionary research agency, DARPA, is considering the proposal.

-- More Bright Ideas: (1) The state government of Victoria in Australia recently approved allowing the new cemetery in Darlington to economize on space by burying bodies in upright positions. (2) A male inmate and a female inmate in a Turkish prison were given additional four-month sentences in February for destruction of property after they were convicted of having made a 4-inch hole in the wall separating their cells and using it to conceive a child (according to Istanbul's largest morning newspaper, Hurriyet).

-- A DUI suspect (unnamed in a March Toronto Sun report) put a handful of his own feces in his mouth in a police station in what officers said was an attempt to foil a Breathalyzer test. Said an official, "I don't think alcohol alone would make you do (that)." Nonetheless, said police, the man, who had been stopped on Highway 11 near Barrie, Ontario, still registered double the threshold for impairment.

-- After an investigative report by Orlando's WKMG-TV in April, a man who was hired by the Federal Emergency Management Agency last year to help Florida hurricane victims admitted that he bought an elderly woman's $1 million, Melbourne Beach oceanfront home from her for $250,000, but denied that he had taken advantage of her. Gary C. Jones, 62, who is a licensed real estate broker in Missouri but who works on contract for FEMA advising victims about home damage, said it was the woman who pushed for the sale because she was distressed by the $50,000 hurricane damage to the house.

-- Air Travel Blues: (1) In March, a woman suffered a midflight heart attack, leading the KLM pilot to emergency-land at Heathrow Airport in London, but she died before an ambulance could arrive. Six months earlier, Heathrow officials had eliminated costly standby ambulances, resulting in the woman's plane being met by a paramedic on a bicycle (which carried some emergency equipment but not nearly as much as an ambulance). (2) In a major incident on Feb. 11, security officers at Dublin International Airport "booted" (in Ireland, clamped) an ambulance at a terminal entrance, even though it was parked in an area reserved for emergency vehicles; a patient with serious injuries was delayed until paramedics paid cash to have the boot removed.

Gregory Withrow and an associate staged a two-man protest at the California state capitol in Sacramento in April against U.S. policies on Iraq and on immigration, and in favor of white supremacy, among other issues. The associate's role in the protest was to drive 6-inch nails into Withrow's hands on a cross as he stood as a martyr for six hours. Withrow had brought notes with him from a Butte County, Calif., health official (seemingly approving Withrow's plan to hurt himself) and from the Sacramento Parks Department (affirming that no permit was needed for such a protest).

Mr. Brij Dhir, a San Francisco law student and India-licensed attorney, recently filed a lawsuit against a northern California microbrewery for the "hate crime" of manufacturing Indica India Pale Ale with a label featuring the Hindu god Ganesh (a man with the head of an elephant) holding Indicas in one of his four hands and his trunk. In an attempt to accommodate Dhir, Lost Coast Brewery closed down the brand, but Dhir still wants at least $25,000 for his own indignation and said that $1 billion might be necessary to compensate Hindus for their trauma.

In 2002, Boston surgeon David Arndt had his license suspended after he left the operating room in the middle of a procedure in order to cash a check at a nearby bank. (Subsequently, Arndt was also charged with cocaine possession and sexual abuse of a minor.) In April 2005, prominent Boston plastic surgeon Joseph Upton stepped away from the operating room during a scheduled break in surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and walked down the street to Children's Hospital Boston to conduct another surgery that he had double-booked for the time, before returning to Beth Israel and satisfactorily finishing the first job. Both patients are fine, but Dr. Upton was ordered not to double-book in the future and not to leave the floor during surgeries.

News of the Weird last mentioned Bhutan, a kingdom nestled between India and Tibet, in 1999, when the country had just legalized television-watching (and following a New Yorker magazine travel feature describing Bhutan's countryside paintings of the nation's Buddhist icon, the penis. Because the sainted Lama Drupka Kinley supposedly used his penis to flail away at evil spirits, followers today regard it as a symbol of fertility and demon-resistance). A March 2005 BBC News dispatch reported that penis art is still in abundance on houses and stores en route from the airport to the capital city of Thimphu, but is beginning to grate on a new generation, especially young women.

Among the items cleared by senior Israeli rabbis as kosher for Passover this year, according to reports in the Jerusalem Post: (1) the erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra (provided the pill is placed in special gelatin capsules before Passover begins) and (2) dog food and cat food sold by KosherPets of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (approved by the Chicago Rabbinical Council to be kept in kosher homes during Passover week). [New York Times, 4-15-05] [Jerusalem Post, 4-12-05]

Ricardo Guzman, 48, pleaded guilty in October to having fatally shot his partner in crime, Roberto Ortiz, in a barroom argument over who was the better burglar (New York City). And in March, feng shui master Tneo Ho Seng, 50, died in a fire that started on a porch and, unluckily, burned down his house (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). And in January, a 17-year-old boy in the electricity-shunning Amish community was electrocuted when he tried to remove a downed power line that had become entangled in the wheels of his buggy. (Chardon, Ohio).

Three weeks ago, based on an April report in The New York Times, I mentioned with implied skepticism that cyclist Tyler Hamilton, at a hearing on whether he illegally transfused blood before a race, had claimed that different blood found in his test was the result of a "vanishing twin" during the first trimester of his mother's pregnancy. Although Hamilton's claim was rejected at the hearing, a subsequent New York Times report indicates that the phenomenon might be much less rare than the hearing examiners believed, and I now conclude that I ought not to have chosen the story for News of the Weird.

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

Eating disorders have such a hold on many young women that some Internet sites glorify anorexia and bulimia as a quasi-divinity, using religious language to command obedience to a goddess of thinness known as "Ana," according to a May story in Minneapolis' Star Tribune. Said one Minnesota college freshman, "Ana is definitely a higher power, not higher than God, but higher than myself." There are Ana prayers, Ana psalms and Ana commandments. One site has instructions for a ritual at an altar, culminating in a blood contract "with the anorexia deity." An Arizona doctor reported that a 13-year-old anorexia patient suddenly spoke "an incantation, like a hex, as if to scare me off."

-- In April, the Fat Duck restaurant, in the countryside west of London, was voted in a poll by 500 industry experts as the world's best (in spite of specialties such as "sardine on toast sorbet" and "leather, oak and tobacco chocolates"). (It had rallied from a bad health inspection report the year before, according to The Guardian newspaper, in which it was graded "borderline" for staphylococcus and listeria, and experienced "cross-contamination" and hand-washing problems.)

-- Almost ready for release is Spanish designer Pep Torres' "Your Turn" washing machine, developed to encourage sharing of housework. Household users, such as a husband and wife, initially register their fingerprints, and Your Turn will not then operate by the same person's print twice in a row. Another product, still in development, is Briton James Larsson's use of lie-detector technology on restaurant utensils so that socially incompetent diners can better gauge how their dinner dates feel about them, by measuring stress as they eat. Reasoned Larsson, "Geeks have major challenges dating."

-- Tobin Bros. funeral home in Melbourne, Australia, introduced a rental option this year for families that seem to have gotten over their grieving: a leather-upholstered, chrome-outfitted van, with mini-bar and DVD player, so that the family can relax on the way to the cemetery (with room for the casket in back). Owner Martin Tobin said the van might not be for everyone.

-- Professor Mikhail Sokolshchik of Russia's National Medical Surgical Center performed a two-stage penile lengthening early this year on a 28-year-old virgin, adding 5 inches to what was an almost dysfunctionally small organ. Sokolshchik first removed the tip and stitched it onto the patient's forearm so that he could graft more tissue onto it (from elsewhere on the arm). After the tip lengthened, he reattached it to its proper place. According to an April dispatch from Moscow in London's Daily Telegraph, Sokolshchik is optimistic that all functions will be restored (though he said the man will probably be permanently semi-erect).

-- In April, two former Cornell University entomologists, in what they said was a show of respect, named three new species of beetles that feed on slime mold after President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. "We admire these leaders," said Quentin Wheeler, for their "courage" "to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy ...." The Agathidium bushi are found in Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina, while the cheneyi and rumsfeldi are native to Mexico.

-- A French biologist, writing in an April issue of the journal Nature, described a species of Amazonian tree ant that not only builds complex traps (using plant fibers, regurgitated vegetation and organic mold) but then lies in wait to grab a passing insect with its jaws so that it can stretch it out in the trap in a manner resembling (according to an Agence France-Presse report on the article) "a victim on a medieval rack."

-- In 2001, News of the Weird, summarizing a report in the Chicago Tribune, wrote that physician Krishnaswami Sriram of Lake Forest, Ill., had been charged with 64 counts related to Medicare fraud based on billings for, among other improbabilities, two 70-hour days, one day with 131 house calls, and 32 patient-visits subsequent to their dates of death. In April 2005, following hearings on the charges and the sorting out of Sriram's records, federal judge John Darrah absolved Sriram of trying to cheat the government and found him guilty only of "chronically inept" bookkeeping (at a total loss to the government not of $15 million, as prosecutors claimed, but $1,258). Sriram pleaded guilty to three counts and was put on probation.

-- News of the Weird has already reported that some people have a fondness for inserting 3-inch steel hooks in their skin and hanging from pulleys for minutes, or even an hour, at a time. In April, about 100 such aficionados attended a gathering in Providence, R.I., and participants seemed thrilled, according to a Reuters dispatch. A Connecticut teen: "It was euphoric. It was spiritual. I'd do it again today if I wasn't so sore." A woman, watching her boyfriend slowly swing: "Look at his face. He's so serene. We've had some really rough times this year, and he needed this really bad." A Canadian man: "The first couple of times, I didn't enjoy it. The first time, I blacked out, and one time I was convulsing. But the third time I got better. I wasn't blacking out anymore."

-- Vickey Siles, 35, was arrested in New Haven, Ind., last year and charged with altering a check from the Globe Life and Accident Co. The check was for $1, but Siles had badly obliterated the amount and written in "$4,000,000.00." Furthermore, she believed that she could cash a check for that amount at a neighborhood check-cashing shop (but a clerk alerted authorities). The job was so pitifully done that in March 2005, a judge gave her only a suspended sentence and probation.

-- A Chicago gas-station clerk tricked a robber in February by the simple ploy of telling him there was more money "up there," pointing toward the ceiling. The robber looked, then said, "What are you talking about? There's no money up there." However, there was a surveillance camera there, and police were grateful for a full-face shot of the robber, according to WMAQ-TV.

Accidents by elderly drivers who police suspect momentarily confused the gas pedal for the brake: Age 88, crashed into a bank (killing a customer), St. Pete Beach, Fla. (February). Age 85, crashed into a post office, West Salem, Ore. (December). Age 87, crashed into an animal hospital, Lynchburg, Va. (December). Age 88, hit two cars and two people in a Wal-Mart parking lot, Pembroke Pines, Fla. (January). Age 81, crashed into a car dealership after hitting her husband, a salesman, a car and a tree, Fort Myers, Fla. (April). Age 84, crashed into her son, waiting to be picked up at the front door upon discharge from a hospital, Manchester, N.H. (May) (He had to be readmitted.).

In Hong Kong in March, a 21-year-old man, reportedly upset about a recent breakup with his girlfriend, responded in a manner familiar to readers of News of the Weird: He tossed almost everything in his 35th-floor apartment out the window. (No injuries were reported.) And in Gang Mills, N.Y., in March, after neighbors reported a disturbance at the home of Billy Abbey, 31, police surrounded the house and, for the next 11 hours, tried to coax him out, but, as some perps have done in the past, Abbey slept through the whole thing, oblivious to the siege.

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

Not the Hardiest of Citizens: Windsor, Ontario, hair stylist Waddah (Martin) Mustapha was awarded the equivalent of about US$270,000 by a court in April after he testified that he became racked with depression upon seeing a fly inside a commercial bottle of water at his salon. Presumably, damages would have been more if Mustapha had actually drunk from the bottle (or even opened it). As it was, he and his wife vomited, and he required extensive psychotherapy for nightmares, loss of sense of humor, increased argumentativeness, lack of desire to shower regularly, and constipation.

-- In April, Laura and Edmund Gerstein of Boca Raton, Fla., who want to save their beloved backyard grapefruit tree from the state's citrus canker eradication program, formally claimed immunity for the tree under a provision in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Gersteins pointed to a paragraph on protecting crops needed for civilians' survival during wartime, in that, said Edmund, "As I understand it, (the U.S.) is in a state of war." (Responded a state Department of Agriculture spokesman, "That tree will be coming down.")

-- An arbitration panel in April issued a two-year suspension to champion cyclist Tyler Hamilton for having transfused another person's blood for a race in Spain last year. At the panel's hearing in March, according to an April New York Times story, Hamilton and his lawyers had denied the charge and raised the possibility that maybe Hamilton had a "vanishing twin" who had shared the womb with him during his first trimester, which would account for why he wound up with some blood that doesn't match his "other" blood.

-- More Compelling Explanations: (1) Police in Morrisville, Vt., who arrested a teenager in April for allegedly removing a corpse's head in a cemetery tomb, said the suspect had spoken of using the head as a marijuana bong. (2) A young woman who in December sued an Austin, Texas, distributor of steamy "spring break" videos, admitted that she had consented to be in a video topless, but now said she was only 17 at the time (and therefore a minor) and now fears the video's circulation will hamper her in "college," "career" and "church."

-- In March, Jonathan P. Mitchell, dressed in black and wet from crawling in the nighttime mud up to a store in the KOA campground near Watsonville, Calif., was found by police, stuck and dangling from the rafters after trying to climb in through the roof. However, the manager admitted that he had not locked the door that night and that Mitchell could have just walked in. Three weeks earlier, in Fostoria, Ohio, thieves broke in and carried off a safe in the office of a local organization that serves the poor (Fostoria Bureau of Concern), but director Susan Simpkins said that not only was the safe empty but the bureau had decided to junk it a while back and was looking for someone to haul it away.

-- Thanh Nhat Le, 51, was arrested in Dorchester, Mass., in April, when he tried to cash a check he wrote to himself for $7,550 on his account at a Sovereign Bank. He had opened the account two weeks earlier, handing over $171 in small bills. He was certain that he had plenty of money in his account, though, because in the interim, he had also mailed the bank three checks for deposit: one for $250,000, one for $2 million, and one for $4 billion.

In Springfield, Mass., in April, Thomas P. Budnick became the most recent man who was convicted at a trial in which he had persuaded the judge to let him act as his own lawyer, to then argue with a straight face on appeal that his conviction should be overturned because his trial lawyer was incompetent. (The decision is pending.)

(1) Homelier-looking kids get taken care of by their parents less attentively than do the good-looking ones (e.g., they don't get buckled into carts as frequently in supermarkets, and are allowed to drift further away in the store) (reported Dr. Andrew Harrell, University of Alberta, April). (2) Gay men resemble women in their approach to reading road maps (determining directions by, for example, use of landmarks, rather than the typical heterosexual male approach of spatial reasoning) (reported by psychobiologist Oazi Rahman, University of East London, February).

-- Arrested for murder recently: Darrell Wayne Maness, 19, Wilmington, N.C. (January); Timothy Wayne Ebert, 40, Cleveland, Texas (February); John Wayne Blair, 49, Sevier County, Tenn. (April); Derek Wayne Jackson, 18, Norristown, Pa. (April); Nathaniel Wayne Hart, 34, Austin, Texas (April). Convicted of murder: Donald Wayne Shipe, 37, Winchester, Va. (May). Sentenced for murder: Emmanuel Wayne Harris, 28, Bisbee, Ariz. (February). Executed for murder: Dennis Wayne Bagwell, 41, Huntsville, Texas (February); Lonnie Wayne Pursley, 43, Huntsville, Texas (May). Committed suicide while suspected of murder: Eric Wayne Jacobs, 27, Castroville, Calif. (April).

-- And a Classic Middle Name Special: In April, in New Scotland, N.Y., Jean Balashek, 86, was found murdered, and police charged her daughter, Corianna Thompson, with the crime. Thompson's birth name was Corey Wayne Balashek, and before his sex change, he had served nine years for another killing. (Thus, Thompson/Balashek may be the first American ever charged with homicide in both genders.)

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (73) Pranksters who playfully carry away a prominent local mascot figure and abuse it or subject it to a "ransom" demand or photograph it in zany places, such as people who took the stuffed buffalo from the field house at Milligan College (Elizabethton, Tenn.) and suspended it from the ceiling of the campus chapel (April). And (74) the toddler who grabs the family's car keys and somehow manages to drive a respectable distance at least semi-safely, as did the 4-year-old boy in Sand Lake, Mich., who drove his mother's car a quarter mile to a video store in the middle of the night (February).

The Defense Department's March 30 progress report on the post-9-11 upgrading of its needs for foreign language professionals showed the Pentagon (41 months after the attacks) just now getting around to learning how many of its people already speak a foreign language. According to the document's chronology (reported in April by Slate.com), it was not until May 2004 that a formal decision was made to "assess (foreign) language needs" and form a "steering committee." By July 2005, the Pentagon is to issue "guidance" for how to manage a stepped-up program, and by December 2005 to create a database of personnel with foreign language skills. The management system for how to run such a program is to be in place by September 2007, after which, presumably, attention to the actual upgrading of skills can begin.

In January, a 69-year-old minister at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oviedo, Fla., suffered a fatal heart attack in mid-sentence during a sermon, as he was quoting the scholar John Wesley, "And when I go to heaven...." And in April, at least 52 Hindu pilgrims drowned in India's holy Narmada River when a power-generation dam upstream released water. And in February, at least 59 worshipers were killed in a fire in a mosque in Tehran, Iran, when a worshiper's veil ignited from a kerosene stove.

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