Just after classes let out at Callaway High School in Jackson, Miss., on April 28, Mayor Frank Melton, riding down Interstate 220 with his police escort, motioned to the drivers of four school buses to pull off the road so that Melton could board the buses and shake hands with and hug the students, apparently just because, as he later told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, recent weeks had been "stressful." Melton told the newspaper that he's just "passionate" about kids and education. "I didn't do anything stupid or illegal," he said, but a state education official said that it was improper to interfere with the operation of a school bus except in an emergency.

-- Stacy Steel, 38, the former executive director of the Humane Society in Oceanside, Calif., was arrested in April and charged with fraud for using the organization's authority to buy 3,600 Vicodin tablets (a prescription pain-reliever), which she said were for her dog.

-- Not My Fault: (1) Ms. Tyler Bauer, 18, sued TGI Friday's in Frederick, Md., in March, asking $200,000 for serious facial injuries from falling out of a moving pickup truck. Bauer, who registered a .238 blood-alcohol reading, was given beer and liquor by an adult patron of TGI Friday's and claims the restaurant should have found out and stopped him. (2) In March, a jury in St. Louis awarded Gretchen Porro $100,000 for the loss of two fingers at the City Museum's Puking Pig attraction. Although the exhibit was closed, Porro nonetheless crossed a railing and stuck her hand inside the machinery to get it to release a vat full of water. (The jury valued the injury at $500,000 but said Porro was 80 percent at fault.)

-- Yes, My Fault: Michelle Srun, 34, testifying for leniency for her accused-rapist husband in a Montgomery County, Md., court in March, said she must be partly responsible for his attacks on several underage girls, in that she belittled and abused him for years with her overbearing personality and had multiple affairs during their marriage (six simultaneously during one stretch). (Unimpressed, the judge gave Mr. Pov Srun 27 years.)

-- Simon Hamilton, 35, admitted in Canterbury (England) Crown Court in April that he took furtive "upskirt" photos of women standing in public places and even acknowledged having an extensive collection, but he denied that the pictures gave him sexual gratification. Rather, he said, he was merely a habitual collector of things and spent his time cataloguing the photos rather than looking at them. "It was the sort of gratification of a job well done," he explained, telling the judge that he came from a long family line of collectors. (Besides, Hamilton said, his upskirt days ended around 2001, when he decided to re-enter the practice of law and realized that upskirt photography was "no longer ... appropriate." (At press time, no verdict had been reported.)

Outsized Payoffs: (1) The family of an 8-year-old boy in Espanola, N.M., won an award of $221,000 in April, payment for a bad half-hour experience for the boy when he was improperly booked, outfitted in an orange jumpsuit, and jailed after throwing a tantrum in his principal's office. (2) In March, a 10-year-old boy in Torquay, England, was awarded the equivalent of almost $2,800 following his expulsion from school for selling marijuana. The local government agreed that his school had acted too slowly in fulfilling its duty to find the expelled boy alternate schooling.

-- In April, Rudy Rios, the junior varsity baseball coach at Chavez High School in Houston, was fired from that job after the principal learned that he encouraged students to skip school to attend protests over U.S. immigration policy. Reportedly, Rios was not fired, however, from his other Chavez High job, which is as teacher of English as a foreign language, even though Rios wrote, on an immigration-protest flier: "We gots 2 stay together and protest against the new law that wants 2 be passed against all immigrants. We gots 2 show the U.S. that they aint (expletive deleted by the Houston Chronicle) with out (sic) us."

-- Instructions from Britain's Home Office to local police departments in April introduced a "Gravity Factor Matrix" to prescribe significantly lesser punishments for a wide range of crimes, including such serious ones as attempted murder, arson and sex with underage girls. According to the matrix, suspects who confess and who have no prior offenses may, at police discretion, have the crime registered on their record but receive only a "caution" that does not require a court appearance or further punishment. Only the most heinous crimes require detention in all cases. The Labour government's political opponents were livid, accusing the government of taking its "anti-prison bias" too far.

Adventures With Cash Registers: (1) The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, reporting in March on recidivist-robber Eugene Rutledge, 21, found that employees at one Taco Bell were so accustomed to Rutledge's robbing them that as soon as he appeared at the door, they would ritually open the cash register for him. (2) In Denver in April, a man tried to rob a Walgreen's drugstore, but a clerk resisted and, during a scuffle, grabbed the first thing at his disposal to throw at the man, and it happened to be the store's cash drawer. The robber eagerly gathered up the loose money, fled, and according to police is still at large.

Police in the Ibaraki prefecture north of Tokyo arrested a 70-year-old man in April after the manager of a 7-Eleven reported that the man had menaced him with a chainsaw. The would-be customer apparently came to the store every day only to read from various magazines for sale, and after several hours, the manager finally ordered him to leave. The man returned a short time later with the chainsaw, cranked it up, and shouted, "I'll cut you to pieces." He then laid it down and resumed reading and was still reading when police arrived.

At least one judge in recent years accepted the defense of mistaken sexual intercourse when a man enters a dark bedroom and initiates sex with a woman he believes is his sexual partner, only to discover that it is another resident of the home. In a recent case, Paul Chappell, 31, raised the defense at his trial in Sydney, Australia, claiming that he (reportedly intoxicated) erroneously stumbled into bed with his new girlfriend's female housemate. Since the housemate's boyfriend was elsewhere in the house, she assumed that the boyfriend had decided to come to bed and that it was he having sex with her. At press time, the trial had not concluded.

A female guard at a New York state juvenile detention center was raped, beaten and kidnapped at knifepoint in 2004 by one of the inmates, who escaped with the guard in a car and remained at large until he was recaptured six hours later, but when the guard applied for union insurance payments, she was informed that the contract paid kidnapping benefits only for incidents of at least eight hours' duration. According to a March Albany Times Union story, she received worker compensation and about $10,000 in other benefits, but if she had remained captive for two more hours, she would have received between $40,000 and $100,000 more.

(1) A three-year study at the PET Center at Arhus Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, reported in March, affirmed that the designer drug Ecstasy can cause depression in pigs. (2) Drawing heavy fire from critics in March was a Cdn$150,000 (US$135,000) grant from the Ontario government to researchers at Laurentian University, for the purpose of studying the sex drives of squirrels (to assess how wildlife adapt to the environment).

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

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.)