-- In court papers filed in 1994 but which only recently drew public attention, lawyers for the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., challenged a child-support claim against a priest by pointing out the culpability of the mother herself for failing to use birth control (which the church regards a grave sin). The 1994 document came to light when the woman went back to court in July 2005 for an increase in child support, but the court turned her down in deference to Father Arturo Uribe's vow of poverty, although Uribe's ordaining order subsequently volunteered more support. (The man who was archbishop of Portland during the 1994 case recently assumed Pope Benedict's previous job as the Vatican's chief doctrinist.)

-- In July, a team of South Korean scientists made history by cloning an Afghan hound, but many experts view the team's revelation two months earlier as even more important, when they derived 11 stem cell lines from clones of patients with specific diseases. The leader of the team, Hwang Woo-suk, told the journal Nature Medicine then that Koreans have an advantage over westerners in delicate laboratory work because of "Oriental hands. We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with the steel chopsticks."

-- Lame: (1) Ronald Schueller, convicted of attempting to hire someone to knock his estranged wife unconscious and kidnap her, said (according to prosecutors) that he was just trying to reconcile with her, based on an idea from a "Dr. Phil" TV segment in which the host said that sometimes people need a good scare to realize their delusions (Port Washington, Wis., August). (2) Jessica Stakelbeck, 22, charged with neglect when two of her diaper-clad toddlers were found on the side of a highway, blamed her lapse not on being high from her admitted methamphetamine habit but on sleepiness from missing her meth for several days (Franklin, Ind, August).

-- Eric Laverriere, 25, filed a federal lawsuit in Boston in July, claiming the Waltham, Mass., police violated his constitutional right to be drunk when they arrested him at a private New Year's Eve party even though there was no evidence that he was disturbing anyone. (The law in many states requires police to detain someone who is incapacitated and who might be a threat to himself, and indeed, some police departments have been sued if they fail to detain someone who later injures himself.) And in July, Britain's High Court declared illegal London's 9 p.m. curfew for those under age 16 who are not with an adult. Lord Justice Brooke said "everyone" should have the right to "walk the streets without interference from police."

-- Geoffrey Moore, 65, of Hightown Green, England, filed an unfair dismissal claim against his former employer, Kevin Mayhew Publishers, for firing him after he was convicted of six counts of sexually abusing a 4-year-old girl. Upon his conviction, Moore was placed on various restrictions but avoided jail time and now says that since he never actually went to jail, the company, which specializes in Christian-themed books, should take him back.

-- In Old Saybrook, Conn., in October 2004, Alan Hauser, who was parked with engine running, sitting with his mother-in-law, accidentally hit the accelerator, causing the SUV to jump a curb and plunge down an embankment into the Connecticut River, where rescuers (who were later cited for heroism) pulled the woman out 30 minutes later. (Hauser managed on his own.) The woman, 75, suffered serious brain damage from being submerged, and in August filed a lawsuit against the city for not having guardrails, not having regular patrols of trained and equipped rescuers, and not having more signs warning people of the danger of falling into the river. (Hauser was also sued, but the family's original plan, to sue individual rescuers, was scuttled.)

-- In July, Jeanette Passalaqua, 32, filed a lawsuit in San Bernardino, Calif., against the Kaiser Permanente medical organization for the death of her husband in June 2004, when he passed out from watching his wife receive an epidural anesthetic, fell over and fatally hit his head. According to the lawsuit, hospital personnel had asked the husband to hold and comfort his wife while the needle was being inserted and therefore were at fault.

-- New World Order: In April, the communist government of China presented its quinquennial Vanguard (or Model) Worker award (in the past, given to loyal factory workers, dedicated public-outhouse stewards, and the like) to Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets' basketball player who lives most of the year in the United States and earns about $15 million annually from playing and from product endorsements (which is about 15,000 times the average earning of Chinese urban workers).

-- More Ironies: (1) Criminal defense lawyer Donald Johnson apprehended the man burglarizing his home in Cornwall, Ontario, in May, and discovered it was one of his clients, Scott Best, 34 (who apparently was unaware of whose home he had entered and wanted to telephone Johnson from the station house). (2) Among the items stolen from the All Souls Church in Peterborough, England, in July was a 2-foot-high statue of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost and stolen items.

About 200 major league baseball players wear $23 titanium necklaces made by the Japanese company, Phiten, according to a June New York Times report, with many accepting the company's claim that they improve circulation and reduce muscle stress. Said a company spokesman: "Everybody has electricity running through their bodies. This product stabilizes that flow of electricity if you're stressed or tired." Said New York Mets pitcher Heath Bell (who has two necklaces): "If you think it works, it's going to work. If you don't think it works, it's not going to work. But I'm going to keep wearing it, because next year, there will be something new we'll all have to get."

Steven Newell was hospitalized in London, Ontario, in June after his large plastic swimming pool, which he had just placed on his second-floor balcony and then filled with water, caused the balcony to collapse and plunge to the ground. The pool, 8 feet in diameter and filled with water as it was to a height of 20 inches, would require about 640 gallons, weighing more than 2 1/2 tons. Newell had relocated the pool to the balcony in order to avoid the safety requirement of building a fence around it.

Lawyers for horror novelist Stephen King acknowledged in June that King had been sued once again by Anne Hiltner, who now claims that the obsessed, psychotic nurse in the movie "Misery" must have been based on her. She had earlier claimed that a psychic character from King's TV show "Kingdom Hospital" was based on her and sued him before that for allegedly breaking into her home and stealing manuscripts.

News of the Weird has often mentioned cases of bestiality, but the death of a 45-year-old man in Enumclaw, Wash., in July was extraordinary. The death was reported in the local media as having occurred after "sex with a horse," but bestiality usually involves the human as the penetrator. In this case, though, the man died of acute peritonitis from a perforated colon, indicating that the horse was the penetrator. Investigators reportedly also seized videotapes of the activity, which took place at a nondescript farm that was apparently known in Internet bestiality chat rooms to be a covert haven for sex with livestock. (Washington is one of 17 states without a specific anti-bestiality law, and authorities said that the act was probably not a crime, in that the state's animal-cruelty law would require showing that the horse suffered.)

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

In July, film director David Lynch announced that he had formed a foundation to raise $7 billion to fund 8,000 Transcendental Meditation practitioners to bring world peace by creating a "unified field" of stress-free brain waves over the Earth (which TM'ers accomplish, as they unironically describe it, by detaching their minds from the "thinking process"). Training expenses have increased dramatically in 12 years, for TM maven Dr. John Hagelin needed only $4.2 million in 1993 to bring 4,000 TM'ers to Washington, D.C., to reduce crime for eight weeks, and TM founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi asked for only $1 billion in 2002 to train 40,000 meditators to calm the world after Sept. 11.

-- In separate incidents on Tuesday, July 26, mothers in Falls Church, Va., and Zephyrhills, Fla., kicked their young sons (ages 4 and 7, respectively) out of their cars on busy highways and abandoned them as punishment for backtalk. Channoah Alece Green, 22, in Virginia even knocked her son down driving off on Interstate 495 as he tried to climb back in. The problem addressed by Lori Heine, 46, in Florida was that her son wanted a McDonald's Cheeseburger Happy Meal when she had already bought him a McNuggets Happy Meal.

-- In incidents two weeks apart in July, men in New York City and Trenton, Ohio, arrived for Internet-chat-room-arranged trysts with "teenage girls" (who were, of course, police officers operating stings), even though they apparently could not find baby sitters. Alan Schaefer, 43, was arrested in Greenwich Village while walking down a street with his 14-month-old son in one arm and holding the hand of a very young-looking policewoman. Would-be Clinton Township, Ohio, politician Hank Hill was arrested when he showed up to meet a "14-year-old girl," and according to WEWS-TV, in his truck were Viagra, condoms, lubricant and his 22-month-old son.

-- In Brentwood, N.H., on July 30, police responded to an emergency call to find an intoxicated man with a padlock around his scrotum. He was taken to Exeter Hospital, and a locksmith freed him. And the day before that, in Worcester, England, Geoffrey Hughes, 51, was given a two-year "anti-social behavior order" in Magistrates Court for a series of incidents, one of which was appearing in public wearing only a hat and, on his scrotum, a padlock.

-- For a six-month period four years ago, government scientists in Florida studied a "miracle" liquid called "Celestial Drops" as a cure for the canker menace that ravages the state's citrus crops. According to a July report by the Orlando Sentinel, the research was recommended by then-secretary of state Katherine Harris, who later said she had learned of Celestial Drops from New York rabbi Abe Hardoon, who is associated with the popularized version of Kabbalah, whose organizers sell its followers ordinary water that is supposedly "blessed" by being stored in a room with sacred texts. Celestial Drops, which was promoted as having "improved fractal design," "infinite levels of order" and "high energy and low entropy," was ultimately revealed by the scientists to also be water.

-- In May, a Philadelphia Daily News columnist described a cattle-call-type ritual at the local airport Sheraton hotel, by which most of the candidates for the city's judgeships in that month's Democratic primary shuffled into a room and offered checks of $1,000 or $2,000 to each of the city's ward leaders for "election day expenses," with each leader accepting the checks of those he would support. At a similar gathering at the Ritz-Carlton, one candidate said, "I thought to myself, 'What if we all just walked out. Refused to pay.' But none of us had the courage."

The Thames Water company succeeded in pressuring artist Mark McGowan to abandon his project at the House Gallery in south London in July in which, to protest society's profligate use of water, he turned on House's faucet and planned not to turn it off for a year (wasting an estimated 3.9 million gallons). And in Chicago, it was only a couple of days after photographer Kerry Skarbakka announced his "Falling" project that he was pressured into abandoning it. Skarbakka said he was awed by the sight of people falling or jumping from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and said he would, in tribute, repeatedly plunge four stories from Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (but was quickly excoriated for poor taste).

-- Reuters reported in July that a court in Macerata, Italy, had scheduled Amelia Cuccioletti's property-rights case for further proceedings at 9:30 a.m. on March 25, 2010. Cuccioletti is 98 years old. (The average civil case runs about eight years in Italy.) And in London in May, lawyer Nicholas Stadlen finally came to the end of his opening remarks for the defense in a creditors' lawsuit against the failed BCCI bank. He spoke for 119 days and referred to files stacked so high that neither side's lawyers could see each other. The plaintiff's lawyer had taken only 73 days.

-- In July, a jury in Los Angeles awarded Robert Johnson, the former "chief physician and surgeon" at California State Prison at Lancaster, $1.6 million in compensatory damages for age discrimination after he had been forced to retire in 2001 at age 80. Most of that award represents future salary for Johnson, signifying that the jury perhaps accepted trial testimony that Johnson was fit to continue in his job until the age of 96.

Adam Tyson, 18, Jason Krueger, 20, and two pals were hospitalized in Clermont, Fla., in July with severe bee stings after imprudently deciding to vandalize a beehive colony in an orange grove; their truck got stuck in the sand just after they had set 50,000 bees swarming. And in July in Sparta, Wis., Darkalena Large, 43, insisted that she and her car were fine, but police arrested her anyway on suspicion of drunk driving after finding her in the car, which was stuck on a curb with one tire missing and the wheel's rim badly mangled (and recently on fire, according to a witness). Also, a nearby resident brought over part of the rim, which had been broken off and propelled into the air and through his second-floor window.

Among the more astonishing repeat stories in News of the Weird are reports of people who had somehow managed to swallow their toothbrushes. The Saudi Press Association reported in January that doctors at King Abdul Aziz Hospital in Taif had removed a toothbrush from the stomach of a 70-year-old man (who claimed to have accidentally swallowed it 22 years ago). And in July, the Associated Press reported that a Taiwan surgeon had removed an eight-tooth, accidentally swallowed lower denture from the bronchial tube of a 45-year-old man. The man said he had misplaced the denture three years ago and had been looking everywhere for it.

Erik K. Low, 37, was convicted of manslaughter in Salt Lake City in June for fatally shooting a friend who had just moments before given him a "wedgie." And Judy Castillo-Thomas, 29, was actually acquitted of manslaughter in July in Brooklyn, N.Y., even though she admitted accidentally stabbing her husband to death after he had beat her and taunted her for having buttocks that were "too small."

-- London's Sunday Times reported in July that Prime Minister Blair had spent the equivalent of about $3,300 on makeup and makeup artists over the last six years, and according to campaign disclosure statements reported by the Boston Globe in May, U.S. Rep. Steve Lynch of Massachusetts spent $2,506 on makeup services only in the previous eight months.

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

In July, after word got out that the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" could be fitted with an online update to make some of its scenes explicitly sexual, an 85-year-old grandmother in New York sued the company, Rockstar Games, for having failed to rate the game AO (adults only, age 18 and up) to take account of the modification. However, Florence Cohen apparently freely purchased the M-rated version (age 17 and up) for her then-14-year-old grandson, even though it invites players to murder, steal and engage in gang violence and attacks on police. She complained only when she found out that the M version's unexplicit sex and partial nudity could be made explicit.

(1) In July, as teams of poverty-stricken soccer players from around the world showed up in Scotland for the "Homeless World Cup," immigration officials denied entry to players from Kenya, Zambia, Burundi, Cameroon and Nigeria because they lacked funds for lodging and meals during the tournament. (2) In March, when Knoxville, Tenn., prosecutors ordered 582 parents of chronically truant students to a meeting to advise them of their responsibility to get their kids to school, 241 failed to show up.

-- Scientists at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh announced in June that they had drained dogs' blood from their bodies, filled them with a replacement fluid, and then revived them by successfully reinfusing blood three hours later, thus creating for a time "zombie" dogs. During the three hours, the dogs were clinically dead, with no heartbeat or brain activity, but after reinfusion and electric shocks, they came back to life, normal with no brain damage. (Not all dogs made it back, though.) A spokesman said the technique could be tried on humans within a year.

-- In this year's Maccabiah Games in July in Tel Aviv, historically open only to Jews and Israelis, the 84-kg. weight class of Greco-Roman wrestling was won by Mohammad Babulfath, an Iranian-born Muslim who wrestles out of Sweden. Maccabiah authorities attribute their admission error to the inartfulness of their announcement on a wrestling Web site, phrased as an "invitation" to Maccabiah, which led Babulfath and two non-Jewish teammates to believe that they had been formally invited to compete. Once they showed up, Maccabiah officials decided to let them wrestle.

-- A Philadelphia firefighter was hospitalized in critical condition, and his wife and their three children injured, in Atlantic City in June after an accident at the Steel Pier amusement park. The five were in a ride car on the Big Splash, where after a descent, the car was to slide into the water at a high speed and soak everyone, but apparently the park workers on duty had either forgotten to put water in the basin or had not noticed that it had all drained out.

-- Poor Candidates for Rehabilitation: Paul Meeter, 21, just released from jail in Elk Grove, Calif., in June on traffic charges, was arrested a few hours later and charged with smuggling out the orange jumpsuit he had been wearing while behind bars. And a 15-year-old boy, who had a juvenile-court hearing on a theft charge in Macon, Ga., in July, was accused of stealing about $600 from the blind snack bar operator in the lobby of the courthouse.

-- In Lebanon, Ohio, Donna Rose, 39, pleaded guilty in June after being accused by prosecutors of allowing an older man to have sex with her then-15-year-old daughter. Rose's behavior came to light when the man was arrested, at which time he produced a note, signed by Rose, which he apparently believed would absolve him. The note read: "(Curtis Lee Barnes) always had and will (have permission to have sex) until she is 18 or until they break up." (Barnes was convicted earlier, and both he and Rose were designated as sex offenders.)

-- Disbarred lawyer Robert M. Short, who was convicted in June for stealing $439,000 from his former Vienna, Va., law firm and who had been on the lam for two years, received a suspended sentence from Circuit Judge Leslie Alden (except for four months in jail), in part based on his promise to pay restitution of $245,000 to the law firm. However, Short's offer was to pay it at a rate of $50 a month, which, without interest, would take 408 years to pay off.

High school basketball coach Drew Sanders, 49, was arrested in New York City in July in connection with his method of inspiring two of his summer-program players not to miss free throws. Sanders was charged with more than 20 instances of spanking the boys' bare buttocks for missed shots. And the New York Post, citing a school system investigator, reported in April that high school teacher Rhianna Ellis, 25, had gotten pregnant from an affair with one of her students but had nonetheless later graded the boy a barely passing "65" in her social studies class, due to his laziness and tardiness.

The Chicago Tribune reported in June that a man waiting for a train at the Sox/35th Street station on the South Side had been taken to the hospital after a train knocked him unconscious as he bent over the rail platform looking for the cell phone he had just dropped. And WSB-TV reported in June that a man had been hospitalized in Forest City, Ga., after, according to a witness, attempting to repair a speaker wire by using, in some undisclosed way, a .22-caliber bullet. "At some point," the station reported, "the man ended up with a piece of wire in his neck."

News of the Weird has reported on Americans singularly obsessed, beyond all distraction, with the alleged illegality of U.S. income taxes. In July, an Australian family was convicted in Melbourne of defrauding the Tax Office, after converting its farm in Victoria into the "Principality of Ponderosa," claiming it was an independent kingdom that owed Australia nothing for its income from polystyrene box manufacturing. Virgilio Rigoli and his sons (including "Little Joe," 25) had issued a Declaration of Independence in 1994 and required passports for anyone crossing the border "from" Australia. According to their lawyer, what initially angered the Rigolis was the Department of Agriculture's bulldozing a crop that had become infested with a pest.

(1) The Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in Alameda County, Calif., with more than 5,000 windmills producing pollution-free electricity for 120,000 homes a year, was challenged by environmentalists in July because an estimated 1,700 to 4,700 birds a year get chopped up by the turbines, including birds of dwindling species. (2) In June, two employees of North Carolina People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were arrested for illegally dumping 80 carcasses of euthanized dogs and cats into trash containers at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Ahoskie. (PETA condemned the dumping but defended its use of euthanasia. However, a North Carolina county health director said she had understood that PETA would work harder to find animals homes before resorting to euthanasia.)

An official monitor in the online role-playing game Second Life told BBC News in April that he knows of spouses of game players who have actually paid money to online-game detectives to learn whether their mates are committing "virtual adultery" with other players' characters in the course of the game. (Second Life encourages players to create a character and live out a made-up existence, which can of course include having an affair with another player's made-up character.)

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