The Texas insanity-defense law requires that a delusional person acting under "orders" from God be judged not guilty by reason of insanity, but that a delusional person acting under "orders" from Satan be considered sane, according to prominent forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz (according to a June USA Today story). Thus, Dietz believed that Andrea Yates (at press time being retried in Houston) knew that drowning her kids upon command of someone "without moral authority" (such as Satan) was wrong and thus that she did not qualify for insanity-law protection. Dietz later concluded the opposite in another Texas child-killing case because God had supposedly assured that mother that her kids would be better off dead.

-- During his 17 months' federal incarceration in Atlanta, Wayne Milton sneaked out nights at least 50 times in order to continue the high-stakes mortgage-fraud business that had landed him in jail in the first place. In May, he received a fresh, 20-year sentence for having bribed the prison guards who allowed his freedom. The smooth-talking Milton (who deftly quoted the Bible, preying on small-town preachers in the South) is such a relentless promoter that within days of his re-incarceration, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitutional report, he was secretly recorded on a prison phone lining up another mortgage loan.

-- Inexplicable: (1) The Rhode Island Supreme Court in June affirmed a $400,000 judgment for Charles Lennon, 68, who had sued the now-bankrupt Dacomed company after his Dura-II penile implant remained constantly erect for 10 years. Lennon said embarrassment had forced him to become a recluse. (2) In Waupun, Wis., in June, a 36-year-old man filed a police complaint against a female bartender at the Alcatraz Pub because she injured him by aggressively nuzzling him to her bosom during horseplay at the bar.

-- Speaking to an international medical meeting in Prague in June, Israeli fertility doctor Shevach Friedler said his research team had found that women exposed to brief entertainment by clowns were successful at in-vitro fertilization at almost twice the rate of women who had no clown exposure. Friedler, who is also a trained mime, attributed the difference to greater stress reduction.

-- In June, three protesters dressed in clown suits broke a lock at a supposedly secure North Dakota missile facility and attacked the top of the underground housing that holds a live Minuteman III missile by beating it with hammers and painting anti-nuclear slogans on it. They were arrested within minutes, but publicly, the government seemed unalarmed that the trio had broken in so easily.

Joseph Weir, 23, who confessed to New York City police in May to forcibly licking the feet of as many as 70 women, said he didn't mean to hurt anyone but just wanted "to make them laugh and smile and open to talk to me." "I get on my knees, grab their feet and bow," he said (according to a New York Post story). "I compliment women, I bow to them."

(1) In June, British worker Mr. Sivanadian Perananthasivam was awarded three months' paid leave plus medical expenses after proving that a supervisor had used two colloquial terms for the man's posterior during an angry office exchange. (2) The Supreme Court of Canada affirmed in June that a woman divorced seven years ago is still so fragile from her husband's leaving her that she should continue to get spousal support (in spite of Canada's no-fault divorce law). (3) Two New Jersey schoolboys separately complained recently that in yearbook sports photos, a tiny portion of their genitals can be seen up the legs of their shorts. (A Colts Neck High School student's lawsuit was dismissed in June, and a Phillipsburg High School student is pondering a lawsuit, even though a school official ordered the offending page ripped out of all books.)

(1) The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in June that a marijuana user need not actually be intoxicated to violate the state's "operating (a vehicle) under the influence" law if the prosecutor can prove that the psychoactive ingredient THC was still in his system. (2) A federal judge in Albany, N.Y., dismissed a state prisoner's lawsuit that claimed that housing two inmates in a cell designed for one was cruel and unusual punishment. The judge rejected the petitioner's toilet-smell argument by using the Pythagorean Theorem to show that the odor-wafting-distance difference was minimal.

(1) Enrique Mora of Montclair, Calif., said that within a few days of his gold detector's having sounded in his front yard, he had dug a hole six stories down (but had come up empty). He said he had only planned to dig three or four feet, but got "carried away," according to a June Associated Press report. (2) Martinsburg, W.Va., physician John C. Veltman, 52, was arrested in May after he (likely intoxicated) commandeered a backhoe and hit a building and a tree and crashed through two fences. Veltman allegedly told an arriving police officer, "I am a (expletive omitted by the Martinsburg Journal) medical doctor, and you are below me."

A 25-year-old American from Boston, in Hanover, Germany, for World Cup matches, was forced to report sheepishly to police that he had no idea which hotel he had checked into or where it was. According to a Reuters report, the man, reportedly sober, remembered being driven past a park and a Mercedes dealership, but since there are several of those in Hanover, police had to drive him around town for an hour until he finally recognized the building.

In December, News of the Weird reported on a Welsh inventor's sound device called the Mosquito, which takes advantage of young people's greater audio range and emits a sound annoying to them but which most adults do not notice, which the inventor used to drive young hoodlums from their hangouts without disturbing adults. Recently, the inventor, Howard Stapleton, introduced a youth-friendly spinoff: a cell phone ringtone ("Teen Buzz") that is audible to most young people but not noticeable to most adults (who might prefer ringtone silence).

(1) The Nigerian government began recently to warn its citizens traveling to Europe that those countries are full of scam artists. (The travel advisory mentioned pickpocket schemes, but apparently European e-mail scams are less of a problem.) (2) General Motors executives, trying to explain the dwindling stock market value of the company, have repeatedly complained of oppressive pension benefits owed under United Auto Workers contracts; however, according to a June Wall Street Journal investigation, GM's fund for worker pensions is "overstuffed with cash," while its fund for executive pensions is $1.4 billion in the red and getting worse.

(1) A 23-year-old woman and her 27-year-old companion were accidentally run over and killed, apparently while standing in a far left lane of Interstate 10, arguing (Ocean Springs, Miss., June). (2) A 46-year-old man, breaking through a bedroom window in the home of his estranged wife in violation of a restraining order, accidentally slashed an artery and bled to death (Milwaukee, June). (3) A 51-year-old man, trying to drive around a traffic jam on Interstate 10 as he was fleeing a gas station where he had just pumped $60 worth of gas without paying, fatally struck another car (with only minor injuries to the other driver) (Welsh, La., June).

(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.)

Ron "King Suki" King won the U.S. checkers championship in June in Medina, Ohio, claiming the $6,000 first prize by emerging from a field of 41 competitors whose intensity generally rivals that of more popular and complex games. King, the world "free style" champion, is known as the Muhammad Ali of checkers for trash-talking his opponents. Also competing was another world champion (in a form of checkers in which the first three moves are always at random), Alex "The Mad Russian" Moiseyev, who assured an Agence France-Presse reporter that, as in chess, the top players have to think 10 moves ahead.

-- The Gilgit tribe beat Chitral, 9-6, this year in the annual, bloody, take-no-prisoners, referee-less polo match on a remote, 2-mile-high field on a mountain in Pakistan, an event that, despite its viciousness, some observers credit with forestalling actual war between the tribes. According to a May dispatch in ESPN The Magazine, clubbing of opponents is rampant; horses are treated more reverently than players; and when a star player was thrown and landed on his head, motionless and thought perhaps even to be dead, fans screamed for him to be cleared from the field quickly so the match could continue. (He only had a broken neck and concussion.)

-- Unique Responses to Danger: (1) In May, just after bird flu was discovered in Ivory Coast, hundreds of young people flocked to Abidjan's night clubs to taunt the disease with a new dance imitating a chicken in the throes of death, according to a Reuters dispatch ("leaning backward, shaking (the) wrists, arms and legs ... with a loud clucking sound"). (2) As volcanologists warned of the possible eruption of Indonesia's Mount Merapi in May, nearby farmers continued to listen instead to the mountain's spirits and to continue their rituals and offerings to ward off an eruption, according to an NBC News report. In one region, to preserve the mountain's tranquility, men "gather naked in groups late at night and run in circles around their villages."

-- In May, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel ruled that Scott Panetti remains eligible for execution in Texas despite his delusional and schizoaffective disorders and the opinion of one law professor that Panetti is the "gold-plated craziest" death-row inmate he'd ever seen. Charged with murder after having been drug-addicted since childhood and in mental institutions 14 times, Panetti was nonetheless permitted by his trial judge to act as his own lawyer (and employed a "strategy" of claiming to be under the control of a "Sarge Ironhorse"), and not surprisingly, he lost the case.

-- Cleveland judge Eileen Gallagher abruptly dismissed child-rape charges against Norman Craig, 22, in June when the prosecutor was 45 minutes late for a hearing, and she further scolded the lawyer, warning him, "Don't treat me like a punk."

-- After examining 28 cases in which pro athletes received "community service" sentences for crimes, USA Today found in May that in 24 of them, the "punishment" consisted merely of ceremonial celebrity duties, even though the underlying crimes were serious (included assault, statutory rape, weapons violations and vehicular homicide). One pro basketball player, convicted of having sex with a 14-year-old girl when he was 19, served his 100 hours of community service by being a guest counselor at a youth basketball camp (and included 27 hours' travel time in the 100).

Troy and Jennifer Schally disclosed in June that their son Henry had chosen, among several possibilities as the theme for his third birthday party, PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," and the Schallys supplied a birthday cake with a photo of the show's correspondents and a periodic playing of its theme music. According to a Washington Post report, Lehrer sent along an autographed photo, signed in the name Henry calls him, "Jimmy Jimmy BoBo."

On many weekends a year in parks in the Washington-Baltimore area, 100 or more people gather in medieval costumes and wield soft weapons to wage battle in the 20-year-old Darkon Wargaming Club, according to a May report in Baltimore City Paper. Players point out that their hobby is simply of a piece with historical-battle video games and feature films, but still acknowledge the whimsy. Said a club manager (who is the wife of the player "Shalor" of the "Bloody Axe Mercenary Company"), on seeing the games for the first time: "I didn't want to get out of the car. I thought it was the dorkiest thing I'd ever seen. And 12 years later, of course, I'm running the thing." (An acclaimed documentary film on the club, "Darkon," has just been released.)

-- Oops! (1) Richard and Stephanie North were arrested in April and charged as the ones who had earlier taken a big-screen TV from an appliance store in Middletown, N.Y. Police had stopped their car on suspicion because a rear door was propped open to accommodate the huge TV set sticking out of the back seat. (2) Richard Costello, 29, was arrested in Clearwater, Fla., in May and charged with stealing motorcycle parts after police recovered photos of the parts, which they suspect were snapped by Costello. At the bottom of each photo, the photographer's bare toes are visible and display the tattoos "white" and "trash," matching Costello's own tattooed toes.

-- William Collins, 37, was arrested in Baldwin Place, N.Y., in June and charged with DUI even though his car wasn't moving. According to police, Collins was passed out drunk in the driver's seat of the locked car, in "park," with his body positioned so that the gas pedal was depressed, causing the engine to race and start to overheat. Collins was so unresponsive that only when police broke a window did he awaken and notice them.

-- (1) Researchers from the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center announced in May that they had grown a fully functional, artificial penis from a rabbit (using his own genes), which they hoped would lead to future development of a human penis, for men with birth defects, body trauma or cancer. (2) Ambreed New Zealand introduced in June a go-cart-like machine for ranchers to gather sperm from bulls. A driver maneuvers the vehicle, designed to resemble a cow, so that the bull can mount it. The driver waits patiently until the bull is done and then drives away with the sperm so that manual extraction is no longer required.

-- (1) Pastor John Sabbath of the Christ Christian Center, angry at the denial of funding by the Ontario (Calif.) City Council, announced at a June meeting that he was placing a curse on City Manager Greg Devereaux and his family. (2) And in June, the Motion Picture Association of America, for the first time ever, announced that it was rating a film PG (Parental Guidance) not for any sex, violence or bad language, but just because it is too openly religious (the film "Facing the Giants," starring Georgia preacher Alex Kendrick).

-- Religious Entrepreneurship: (1) Many British churches have recently installed the new Hymnal Plus, a karaoke machine to help congregations recite verses and sing hymns (including risky tunes, such as a disco version of "Amazing Grace"). (2) A violent video game based on the evangelical "Left Behind" novels, "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," was introduced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles in May, and features the Tribulation Force bloodily battling the army of the Antichrist. Reviews have been severely mixed (either a positive step to spiritualize the video games culture, or grotesque violence seemingly sanctioned under the cover of the Bible).

(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.)

The "indecent" CBS drama "Without a Trace" for which the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a $3.3 million fine of the network and affiliates was apparently complained about by only two (at most) actual viewers of the estimated 8.2 million who watched it that December 2004 night, according to FCC records that CBS cited in a June filing to the commission. Those two (and 4,209 complaints from people who apparently only heard about the show) did not start arriving at the FCC until 12 days afterward, which coincidentally was the day that a family watchdog organization began alerting its members about the show. The same CBS program had aired in 2003, with no complaints.

-- Indispensable Devices: (1) Audio software programs whose sole purpose is to re-create the hubbub and screaming of orders on an active stock-exchange floor are coveted by some traders who formerly worked such floors but now buy and sell in quiet offices. Those traders, according to a June Wall Street Journal story, say they miss the energy and wisdom they get from trading-floor chaos. (2) In May, Lester Clancy was awarded a U.S. patent for a ropeless jump rope (a handle that electronically duplicates the feel of a jump-rope handle), which he said would be practical for, among other places, mental institutions and prisons where actual rope is banned.

-- The San Diego firm Allerca Inc. announced in June that it is accepting advance orders (at $5,000 each) for hypoallergenic cats it intends to create by cross-breeding species that lack the noxious bacteria that most cats produce that are so dangerous to asthmatics and others. A competitor, New York's Transgenic Pets, is after the same result by modifying the actual gene that produces the cat saliva bacteria. (Transgenic is expecting to beat Allerca to market, at a price of around $1,000.)

-- Progress With Flavors: (1) Researchers at England's University of Birmingham announced in May that they had powered a fuel cell by giving chocolate waste to Escherichia coli bacteria, which converted the sugar into hydrogen. (The bacteria are also expected to produce precious metals from discarded automobile catalytic converters.) (2) Researcher Mayu Yamamoto of Japan's International Medical Center said her team had succeeded in extracting vanilla from ordinary cow dung, although she conceded the flavoring could only be commercially used in non-food products like shampoos.

Zimbabwe's world's-worst inflation officially reached 1,042 percent in April, with prices doubling every three or four months and unemployment rising to 70 percent. Only the unsophisticated fail to spend any money they have promptly, even though, for example, toilet paper sells for $145,000 a roll (about 69 U.S. cents). According to an April New York Times dispatch, President Robert Mugabe's remedy is simply to print trillions of dollars in new money (which he needs to keep his government workers loyal, to prop up his dictatorship).

As Congress debates whether to retain the federal estate tax, two advocacy groups released evidence in April that 18 super-rich families (including the owners of Wal-Mart, Gallo wine, Campbell's soup and the Mars candy company) spent as much as $500 million in the last 10 years through industry and trade associations to urge abolition of the tax, and if their campaign is successful, the families will have saved themselves an estimated $71 billion in taxes, a return of 142 times the investment. (Polls show that around 70 percent of Americans favor abolition, even though only one taxpayer in 400 owes any tax.)

In May, The Times of London reported on Japan's Shingo Village, which is well known to locals, and practically no one else, as the burial place of Jesus Christ. According to documents written in ancient Japanese, Jesus supposedly moved to Shingo from Jerusalem as a young man, married Miyuko, became a farmer, and died at age 106. However, that cannot be true, according to Katherine Jhawarelall, 35, a Hindu woman with a criminology degree, living in Durban, South Africa, because she is certain that she herself is Jesus Christ (after awakening one day in 2004 with a swollen arm containing a miracle-producing stigmata), according to a report in Durban's Post.

Cities feel fortunate to have even one dependable group of dedicated volunteer caretakers for a public park, but Boston's Ringer Park has two. However, they hate each other. According to an April Boston Globe story, Ringer Park Partnership Group and Friends of Ringer Park spread nasty rumors about each other, compete ruthlessly for new members, resist mediation more fiercely than some street gangs do, and, allegedly, commit park vandalism in order to embarrass the other group. The origin of the feud appears to be differences in aggressiveness and in attitudes toward dogs, and according to the Globe, peace is not in sight.

In June, another client who did her own lawyering, eccentric Susan Polk, was convicted of murdering her husband, after a long trial in Martinez, Calif., in which she spent two weeks on the witness stand as both questioner and witness (and in a judge-allowed departure, as her deep-voiced husband, as she re-created their conversations). Polk also told the jury that she is psychic, that she called the Sept. 11 attacks in advance, that her husband was an Israeli intelligence agent, that she once foiled an assassination attempt on the pope, and that Colin Powell is the Antichrist.

-- James Otis Denham, 49, was arrested in May after attempting to sell a 375-year-old etching by Rembrandt ("The Raising of Lazarus") that police later learned had been stolen. Denham was unsuccessful, largely because he said he'd take just $1,500 for it and because his sales venue was the trunk of his car, to a potential customer he had met in Torchy's Legends bar in Broken Arrow, Okla.

-- Not Cut Out for a Life of Crime: (1) Paul Wendell Gunn was arrested in May, sitting on a sofa in the reception area at the First State Bank in Round Rock, Texas, minutes after he had allegedly robbed it. According to Austin's American-Statesman, Gunn, for reasons he has not yet disclosed, chose to remain in the bank and read magazines until police arrived. (2) In Kumagaya, Japan, in May, a 58-year-old unemployed man commenced a robbery of the Saitama Resona Bank, but then asked a teller for suggestions on bank-robbing. When the teller angrily ordered the man out, he left, but in his haste, cut himself on the leg with his knife.

The 13-year-old blond, blue-eyed, twin white-supremacist singers, Lynx and Lamb Gaede ("Prussian Blue," mentioned here in December), might lower their profile temporarily while their divorced parents fight over custody in Fresno, Calif. Though mom April Gaede is still a white supremacist ("I'm a racist ... Everybody's a racist"), dad Kris Lingelser said he has renounced his separatist ways and would like to soften the girls' views, too, but so far, he has only limited visitation rights to April's home in Montana.

It Worked Out, After All: In May, a 30-year-old man from Waterfoot, England, attempted suicide by tying a rope around his neck and the other end to a telephone pole, and then drove off in his car. However, the rope quickly broke, dooming the suicide. The impact, however, jarred the driver, causing him to lose control and crash into a tree, fatally. And in June, a man attempted suicide in Huntington Beach, Calif., by hanging himself off the side of the Adams Avenue Bridge, but he accidentally came loose, fell to the dry riverbed below, and was killed.

(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.)