A Texas jury decided in 1991 that Steven Kenneth Staley, now 43, should be put to death for killing a restaurant manager, but three days before his February 2006 date with destiny, psychologists testified that he is mentally ill, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a mentally ill person cannot be executed. The solution, declared state judge Wayne Salvant in April, is for the state to inject Staley with enough psychotropic medicine to make him sufficiently sane to understand why he is going to die, at which point he can be killed. (In similar cases, drugs improved Charles Singleton enough for his 2004 execution in Arkansas, but have failed since 1999 to restore Texan Emanuel Kemp's competency.)

-- Questionable Judgments: (1) New York state officials proposed earlier this year to evaluate the state's parole officers in part by asking parolees such questions as whether they thought their officer sufficiently "cared" about their progress (but after criticism, canceled the project). (2) The board of zoning appeals in Anderson Township, Ohio, turned down a couple's request to build a cedar fence around their yard even though the proposal was supported by neighbors and another municipal agency. Angry, according to an April Cincinnati Enquirer report, the couple instead set up 15 donated toilets as flower pots in the fenceless yard, and the zoning board apparently can't stop them.

-- The newly installed municipal sewer system in the Florida Keys town of Islamorada was scheduled to go on line in May, but the real test will come shortly after that if the town cannot hook up a threshold number of residents to allow the system full, efficient functioning. The fallback plan, according to the town government, will require it to buy enough out-of-town sewage to boost the weak flow that would be running through the system.

-- Are We Safe? (1) To free up soldiers for war-zone duty, the Army hires contractors to man the gates at 57 domestic installations, including Fort Bragg and West Point, but in April, the Government Accountability Office announced that, despite three warnings, some of the contractors continue to hire an alarming number of convicted felons as security guards. (2) Nashville's The Tennessean newspaper revealed in April that a man still serving time for hiring a hit man to kill his wife was actually put in charge of the purchasing office of the state's emergency management agency. Inmate Daniel Erickson was participating in a rehabilitation program intended to help prisoners find work when they get out and apparently was so good at his job that agency officials promoted him.

-- Last year, New York Gov. George Pataki, criticizing the legislature's spending priorities, deplored wasting money on trivial state projects like "cheese museums and pro wrestling halls of fame." In 2006, however, another $5,000 of state funds went to the Cuba (N.Y.) Cheese Museum, from a fund nominally controlled by Pataki. The Cuba Cheese Museum is not to be confused with the New York State Museum of Cheese in Rome, N.Y.

-- In April, sculptor Daniel Edwards, creating a "Monument to Pro-Life," ran a 10-day show at a gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y., consisting of his life-sized rendition of the singer Britney Spears, nude, on her knees and elbows on a bearskin rug, at the moment of birth of her first child, Sean Preston. Edwards did not speak with Spears ahead of time but said he was drawn to her high profile and that he "couldn't come up with anybody" better to make his anti-abortion statement.

-- Artist Ira Sherman's high-tech "Impenetrable Devices," exhibited earlier this year at the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, are sleek, wearable gadgets whose common purpose is to thwart rape. Sherman said his "genital armor" and "castration mechanisms" were borne from listening to rape victims recommend instruments to provide bodily security. "The Injector" shoots an identifying dye, and sedatives, at the rapist; "The Bear Trap Corset" and the "Intimate Electric Fence" are self-explanatory; and the complex Cremasteric Reflex Corset employs steel spikes delivered by a pressure-sensitive air valve. Said Sherman, "All my (devices are) plausible."

-- Prosecutors in Dresden, Germany, charged Petra Kujau, 47, with fraud recently for selling at least 500 fake paintings of such artists as Monet, Picasso and Van Gogh. However, the paintings were always clearly labeled as fakes, according to an April Times of London dispatch, and their sale was a crime only because Petra had claimed they had been painted by Konrad Kujau (her great uncle), who had a worldwide reputation as a master faker. Thus, Petra is charged with duping collectors into thinking that they were buying original Konrad Kujau classic fakes.

(1) In April, the organization Gymnastics Australia ordered cheerleader teams to supply less-revealing uniforms (e.g., no bare midriffs), based not on alleged "indecency" but on its fear that the exhibition of too-svelte cheerleaders' bodies would make overweight girls feel bad and lead to eating disorders. (2) Greater Manchester (England) police filed a criminal charge against a 10-year-old boy who, in a schoolyard spat, called a classmate a "Paki" and "bin Laden" and, allegedly, the "n" word. Judge Jonathan Finestein of Salyer youth court urged prosecutors in April to deal with the matter in some other way (and in fact, the defendant told the court that the two boys are now friends).

-- In Red Deer, Alberta, in April, Jesse Maggrah, 20, listening through earphones to heavy-metal music while walking on Canadian Pacific Railway tracks, was hit from behind by a train moving at about 30 mph, but survived. In his hospital bed (broken ribs, punctured lung, other injuries), Maggrah said he remembers the immediate aftermath: "I thought, 'Holy crap, dude, you just got hit by a train.'" "Maybe the metal gods above were smiling on me, and they didn't want one of their true warriors to die on them."

-- Least Competent Pervert: Benjamin Thornton, 20, was charged with impersonating a police officer and attempted kidnapping in Pearland, Texas, in April, after he allegedly confessed that he had tried ruses to molest adolescent girls more than 100 times, "all unsuccessful(ly)." In the latest case, he tried to convince a 9-year-old girl that the toy she had could not legally be held by anyone waiting for a school bus, but the girl was too smart for him.

The annual for-real crucifixion rituals in San Pedro Cutud, Philippines, took place again this Easter, with at least nine martyrs allowing themselves to be nailed to crosses. Among those scheduled was Scottish media personality (and lapsed Catholic) Dominick Diamond, who publicly vowed in February to endure the 4-inch nails this year as a way of respiritualizing himself. However, when his time came, Diamond knelt before the cross, prayed, contemplated the blood and pain of those before him, started crying and was taken away in an ambulance, as the unforgiving crowd jeered.

Budhia Singh, 4, of Bhubaneswar, India, has been a runner for two years, and on May 2 (under the watchful eye of his coach) ran 40 miles in about seven hours (but doctors quoted in a Reuters dispatch severely criticized the coach for setting Singh up for cartilage damage and other ailments). And Terry Durham of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has been preaching since he was 4, and now at age 8, in his suit and alligator shoes, holds forth at the True Gospel Deliverance Ministry church and elsewhere in the state. Durham, described in a South Florida Sun-Sentinel profile, kicks his leg in the air and wails, "The Lord makes you feel good. He says, 'Who am I?' I am Doctor Feelgood.' Yeah!"

(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 April issues of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the chief executives of two huge companies in politically sensitive industries were revealed to have received such extravagant bonuses or stock options that even veteran industry observers were said to be shocked. While customers of both companies are chronically panicked about rising prices, Lee Raymond, who retired as CEO of ExxonMobil in December, was reported by the Times to have received the equivalent of $144,000 every day for 13 years, and William McGuire, CEO since 1996 of the highly profitable health-insurance manager United Healthcare, was reported by the Journal to be sitting on stock options that, because they were mysteriously timed to kick in at the best possible date, are worth $1.6 billion.

Convicted drunk driver Joshua Campbell, 23, filed a lawsuit in April against the driver he hit, Bloomfield Township, Mich., police officer Gary Davis, asking the police department to pay him for the "humiliation," "embarrassment" and physical injuries he received. Campbell claims that Davis unsafely turned around on Interstate 75 after a traffic stop and that the turnaround was the cause of the collision. Bloomfield police say that Campbell, in addition to having a 0.17 blood alcohol reading, was going 90 mph and that three patrol cars on the scene with flashing lights should have been a signal to Campbell to slow down.

-- (1) Unexpected childbirths happen from time to time, but the genuinely surprised mother in Ojo Caliente, N.M., in February was Kayla Alire, 18, who just two hours earlier had hit two three-pointers as a starting guard for the town's high school girls' basketball team. (2) In March, Matt Robison, 21, of Ottawa, Ill., said he felt "like I've done something memorable with my life" after sitting for a 14-hour session in which he received 1,016 skin piercings to eclipse the previous Guinness Book record. (Immediately afterward, Robison had to remove each one, which he said was just as excruciating as the piercing.)

-- Prosecutors in Chicago are proceeding with the case against Howard Morgan for allegedly shooting at a police officer, although Morgan denies it, but what was clear was that in returning fire, police shots hit Morgan 25 times (from which he is recovering satisfactorily, according to a January WMAQ-TV story). Also awesome was the endurance of a 35-year-old man in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who, according to a February Poughkeepsie Journal report, had just been a gunshot victim for the fourth time in the same housing complex. (The first and fourth incidents involved multiple wounds.)

-- The El Bulli restaurant in Barcelona, Spain, has long waiting lists for reservations for innovative dishes such as strawberry walnut mayonnaise, foie gras ice cream, cocoa butter with crispy ears of rabbit, and Kellogg's Paella (Rice Krispies, shrimp heads and vanilla-flavored mashed potatoes), according to a February report in The Times of London. The meals of the artistic chef Ferran Adria cost the equivalent of $240 a person, but the world's leading restaurant critics rate it at the top of their lists.

-- Shellie White, 30, was apprehended in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., in March, two years after she fled Arizona with her two children in a custody dispute with her ex-husband. For most of the two years, she has been living as a man (with a female partner), having convinced the kids, now aged 6 and 8, that she is actually their father.

In Savannah, Ga., in March, police picked up Carlos Little, wandering around a housing complex with a head injury, which he said was from a street robbery, but they later learned from a witness that Little and another man had fought over who was the better-"endowed" (and that, in the showdown, Little proved littler). And in Mexico, according to an April Reuters dispatch, one distinct presidential campaign theme this year is how candidates explicitly tout their manliness; one radio ad, for example, praises Felipe Calderon's "balls," while a TV ad acclaims Roberto Medrazo for having "big ones."

-- (1) Because of unexpectedly large crowds visiting the new Hong Kong Disneyland in January, park officials limited admissions for the first eight days, provoking some mothers who had traveled from all over China to show their frustration by trying to climb in, after first tossing their children, including toddlers, over the fence. (2) Elizabeth Bragg, 23, was convicted in January in Huntington, Ind., when her 4-year-old stepdaughter suffered a car injury. According to the prosecutor, Bragg, intending to punish the girl for misbehaving, told her other kids to "hang on" but then unfastened the belt in the misbehaving girl's car seat, and slammed on the brakes several times, causing the girl to bang her head.

-- Super-Protective Parents: (1) In Mont-de-Marsan, France, Christophe Fauviau, 46, was sentenced to eight years in prison in the death of a young tennis player who ingested a sports drink Fauviau admitted to spiking with a tranquilizer. Fauviau said he spiked 27 young players' drinks before their tournament matches against his son Maxime and his rising-star daughter Valentine. (2) Dieterich Doerfler Sr. was arrested in Seminole County, Fla., in March and charged with shredding his adult son's child pornography collection, which police said he did in order to help the son avoid a probation violation.

Eleven women in the area around the nation's capital have bonded, according to a February Washington Post story, around a tall, athletic man of German heritage (with a master's degree and who tans easily), whom none has ever met. The man, known as donor 401, is the one whose sperm each of the women chose to be inseminated with, selected from a biographical catalog of the Fairfax Cryobank. That the women's 12 offspring have a common father has provided powerful motivation for them to learn about each other, as a way of learning about 401 (who has now retired as a donor, though there is still a waiting list for his stored sperm.)

Whoever tried to burglarize the Cell Comm/Nextel store in Victorville, Calif., in March escaped after bungling the job. The store owner told the local Daily Press that the would-be burglar tried to shoot open the door's lock but that the bullet ricocheted and hit him in the chest, knocking him down. The bullet likely did not break the skin but was probably startling and painful, in that the man vomited at the scene before he fled.

Results and schedules for championship tournaments for grown-ups: (1) Rock Paper Scissors (The U.S. championship was held in Las Vegas in April, for a $50,000 prize.) (2) Marbles (The renowned British and World Championship was held in the parking lot of the Greyhound Pub in Crawley, England, in April.) (3) Paper Airplanes (The world championship will be decided in Salzburg, Austria, in May, among representatives from 48 countries.)

(1) Curtis Gokey filed a claim against the city of Lodi, Calif., after a municipal dump truck rammed his car in December, but the claim was dismissed when it was learned that the actual driver of the dump truck was city employee Curtis Gokey. (Subsequently, Gokey's wife declared that she would sue, instead.) (2) Adult education teacher Robert Colla was hospitalized in Ventura, Calif., with severe burns and shrapnel wounds, and lost part of his right hand, when he tried to smash a bug with the paperweight on his desk. The "paperweight," which Colla had found years ago, was a 40mm artillery shell, which, unknown to Colla, was still live.

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

Salt Lake City fashion designer Jared Gold recently began offering jeweled brooches featuring brightly colored Swarovski crystals affixed to a live, 3-inch-long Madagascar hissing cockroach that a woman can allow to roam a short distance around her dress or jacket via a silver chain affixed to the roach's back. The brooch sells for $80 at Gold's Web site. An April New York Post story quoted an animal-rights spokesman as calling the bauble "just the gift" for the "person who doesn't mind a small animal excreting on them throughout the day."

-- Teachers at several nursery schools in Oxfordshire, England, have been encouraging kids to learn the verse "Baa, baa, black sheep/Have you any wool?" without the word "black," but in its place a variety of emotions (e.g., "Baa, baa, sad sheep") or colors (including "Baa, baa, rainbow sheep") because they believe that kids with black skin might feel disrespected. According to a March Cox News Service dispatch from London, the campaign seems of a piece with a UK media flurry in 2003 suggesting changing the ending to Humpty Dumpty so that he receives merely a mild bump instead of shattering.

-- China's Xinhua news agency reported in March that the police department in Nanjing has gone beyond fingerprints and now has a data bank of smells taken from criminals and crime scenes to aid police dogs in investigations. Officials say that storing the scents at minus-18 degrees Celsius retards degradation for at least three years, and already, they say, the bank of 500 odors has led to the identification of 23 suspects.

-- In March, on state highway 2 near Papamoa, New Zealand, police stopped a 32-year-old man driving 121 km/hr (75 mph), with no license and also no arms, having kept relatively good control with one foot on the gas and the other on the steering wheel. He told officers he had been driving that way for years without incident, a fact that amazed police and an amputee interviewed by the New Zealand Herald. The man still got a NZ$170 (US$106) ticket.

-- (1) The Nigerian Football Association advised its referees in March that they could accept money from teams (since "bribery" is considered part of the way of life in Nigeria), but that they should only pretend to agree to treat the briber favorably because they have a duty to call a game fairly. (2) Joshua Abeyta was charged with arson in Thornton, Colo., in February after he allegedly set fire to the Grand Auto Pontiac dealership, doing $300,000 damage; according to police, Abeyta had no connection to the company except that he was angry with his mother, who drives a Pontiac.

-- A Philadelphia woman who identified herself to reporters as "M. Smith" and who contracted AIDS and cancer more than 15 years ago, said recently that the company Life Partners has been threatening to back out of its contract to pay her health and life insurance premiums. She entered into a "viatical" contract in 1994, signing over her insurance death benefit to Life Partners in exchange for its promise to pay all premiums for her then-expectedly-short life. However, a new generation of drugs has kept her alive, rendering Life Partners quite unhappy with the deal it made. Although the company has not yet reneged on the contract, M. Smith reports that it constantly pressures her to begin paying the increasingly steep premiums herself.

An Arizona company told the technology Web site CNet.com in April that it has created a polyester fabric that neutralizes shots from a Taser gun, basically forming an electric loop on the cloth and sending the charge back into the gun. G2 Consulting Co.'s Thor Shield is now marketed only to law enforcement and military agencies, for their own personnel to wear. (2) Professor Greg Sotzing of the University of Connecticut at Storrs is developing clothing with electromagnetic polymers that can be manipulated to change colors while being worn, allowing the user to style himself depending on mood or whimsy (according to an April report in New Scientist).

-- Chiropractor James Burda of Athens, Ohio, advertises a miraculous cure in which he sends patients, via telepathy, back to the origin of an injury so they can understand the pain and make adjustments. Dr. Burda says he need not meet the patient, nor even talk by phone, because e-mail works perfectly well, even for people who want chiropractic treatment for their pet. According to his Web site, he discovered his skill by accident, while driving around one day. Not surprisingly, the Ohio State Chiropractic Board announced in April that it would hold a hearing to review Burda's work.

-- Long Island, N.Y., bus driver Michael Cianci, 38, was charged in April with child-endangerment for allegedly setting up a hierarchical social structure to enforce discipline among the Tottenville sixth-graders who rode what he called his "Death Cheese Bus." Cianci, who was the "Emperor," had a 12-tiered ranking system, from "Lord" to the low-end "Speds" ("special education" students). Police said Cianci permitted his high-ranking enforcers to rough up misbehaving kids.

-- Creativity in Perversion: Paul Daniel Metcalf Jr., 39, was arrested in Asheville, N.C., in April and accused of two incidents in which he allegedly doused female department store shoppers with his semen, at least once (according to a store's surveillance camera) by spitting it at a woman through a straw.

(1) Children's Hospital of Orange County (Calif.) announced new rules to guard against wrong-site surgery after a January incident in which doctors opened up the wrong side of a child's skull to remove a brain tumor, only to realize, after finding no such tumor, that it was on the other side. (According to the surgeons, they merely sewed up the first site and proceeded to the correct side, without complication.) (2) Dr. Mary Ellen Beatty was suspended and fined $20,000 by the Florida Board of Medicine in April for a wrong-finger surgery, her third wrong-site error in five years.

Latest serendipitous injuries: In March, Donald Batsch, 54, was shot in the abdomen during a robbery in Bakersfield, Calif., but during surgery, doctors discovered a tumor that surely would not have been identified until much later. And in Southampton, England, in March, college professor Ronald Mann had a heart attack while driving, and his car smashed into a tree, but his body's banging against the steering wheel acted like a defibrillator and restarted his heart. (Doctors said that if the car had had an airbag, Mann would be dead.) And in February in Altamonte Springs, Fla., Ms. Arnie Fairclaw fell, broke her leg, and was taken to a hospital; later that night, a drunk driver lost control of his truck, which rammed her house and smashed into the bed where she would have been sound asleep.

People Who Shouldn't Have Played with Matches: (1) An unnamed man in his 80s, whom neighbors said "hated everybody," was killed in Downey, Calif., in January after attempting revenge by putting an explosive in a neighbor's home but accidentally setting his arm on fire, which then set off his bomb. (2) A 49-year-old woman died in a fire in Milwaukee in January when, trying to get her boyfriend's attention, she stood angrily beside his bed and flicked lit matches onto his sheet-clad body, until a fire started. She was eventually overcome with smoke, but the boyfriend and the five others in the house survived.

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