The parents of wannabe singer-actor-celebrity Marissa Leigh, 16, of Scottsdale, Ariz., employ 10 people for her career development, according to an April Arizona Republic story, including manager; publicist; voice coach; two acting coaches; people to do makeup, hair and wardrobe; musical composer; photographer; and webmaster (plus, of course, an entourage of confidence-boosting friends). "She's spoiled," said her mother, "but hopefully, it's a grounded spoiled." However, on her national TV debut, on MTV's "My Super Sweet 16" (a party which her parents spent $150,000 to stage), she was caught saying "I'm a princess" and "I'm such a rock star that I can do this" and "I always get exactly what I want." Even after MTV cut the two songs she sang, she was optimistic: "(This show)'ll still put my name out there and stuff."

In Yorktown, N.Y., in June, one spouse who was roughed up by the other during a domestic eruption tried (as sometimes happens) to talk police out of filing charges. However, the battering spouse this time was Emily Hanlon-Tarasov, a novelist, and the explanation of her husband (who was knocked unconscious when Hanlon-Tarasov angrily threw a book) was fittingly creative: "A few things began flying at the wall," he said, "and one of them was a telephone book. And unfortunately, my head moved into the space that the book was flying (into)." Hanlon-Tarasov was nevertheless charged with assault.

-- Max Foster, 18, complained to a London Daily Telegraph reporter in June that two police officers in Bath, England, had told him they were under instructions not to pursue a man who had been spotted on Foster's stolen moped, because the man was not wearing a helmet. According to Foster, the town's rules of engagement for officers discourage such chases because the suspect might fall off the moped, hit his head and sue the police.

-- Jay and Laura Flynn of Lilburn, Ga., filed a $111 million lawsuit in June against Home Depot and the maker of Tile Perfect Stand'N Seal Grout Cleaner, charging that a defect caused toxic fumes that permanently destroyed half of Jay's lung capacity, which, among other effects, according to Laura, ended the couple's "extremely active love life." She added, "I mean every day. But now that is over."

-- There Must Be Somebody We Can Sue: (1) Daughter Carriel Louah, 25, is suing her parents for at least $75,000 for the broken ankle she suffered in a fall on their property when she paid them an unexpected visit in Darlington, Wis., in 2005. The mother said she appreciated the surprise birthday visit, but denied any negligence. (A judge refused to toss out the lawsuit in July.) (2) Jaime Pinedo filed a lawsuit in Hackensack, N.J., in June against the estate of his late brother's late girlfriend. Daniel Pinedo and Xiomara Ortiz were murdered in May 2004, execution style, by Ortiz's jealous former boyfriend, and Jaime Pinedo alleges that that was Ortiz's fault.

-- (1) In July, former peace activist Christiaan Briggs, 30 (who had gone to Iraq in 2003 to protest the impending U.S. attack), was arrested in Islington, England, and charged with knocking a man out (leaving him in a coma) in a fight after he allegedly hit on the man's girlfriend. (2) The British watchdog Environmental Agency, which prosecutes pollution violators, was fined the equivalent of nearly $14,000 in May for allowing toxic waste to flow from its monitoring station along the River Exe in Somerset. (3) In July, municipal officials in Provincetown, Mass., held a community meeting to air numerous complaints by heterosexuals that they are targets of hate speech by the town's large gay and lesbian population.

-- What Goes Around, Comes Around: Colin Watson, 63, one of Britain's most notorious illegal collectors of rare bird eggs (having been convicted six times and having had nearly his entire collection confiscated by the government), fell to his death in May from a tree he had climbed in south Yorkshire to check out a nest.

-- In June, the Ministry of Higher Education of Saudi Arabia (home of 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers), along with the country's civil aviation authority, jointly announced scholarships for Saudi men and women for bachelor's and graduate-school study in the United States in such fields as "air traffic control," "flight safety" and "other majors related to the airline transport industry."

(1) In June, Betty Jean Barachie was sentenced to 27 months in prison for embezzling $1.5 million from her employer so that she could indulge a mindless compulsive-shopping habit; among her inexplicable, 1,500-item haul were 58 coats, 16 chain saws, more than 3,000 books, and a John Deere tractor. (2) Nurse Christopher Irvin, 32, was charged in April with molesting a comatose 4-year-old girl under his care at Children's Hospital in San Diego; he told police he had touched the girl's genitals only "to see if I liked it." (He said he didn't and that, because he wasn't sexually aroused, he must not be attracted to children.)

A federal appeals court in June affirmed the conviction of Aaron Fraser (aka Asante Kahari) for defrauding a Michigan woman he had met in an Internet chat room and had eventually taken for $38,000 in a counterfeit check scam. (Kahari had sent the woman bogus checks for deposit into her account, and then met her to collect the cash, and was gone by the time the bank realized the checks were counterfeit.) Kahari had denied the charges, but the prosecutor introduced portions of a book, "The Birth of a Criminal" by Asante Kahari, which describes in precise detail the very scheme Kahari was accused of pulling on the Michigan woman. "I would get online," he wrote, "meet a broad and be mailing her the (computer-generated counterfeit) check the next day."

-- A July poll of American attitudes on lying, conducted by the Associated Press and the market research firm Ipsos, revealed that many of the respondents could not bear to give poll-takers straight answers from one question to the next. For example, 40 percent said they "never" lied, but in the next question, about 10 percent of that 40 percent said they might even have lied just within the previous week. More than half said lying was "never" justified, but two-thirds then said lying is OK sometimes.

-- British fitness trainer Liz Stuart conducts "powerpramming" classes for new mothers, the centerpiece of which is the women's use of their own infants as weights for such exercises as bicep curls and chest presses (adding a kiss to each rep), as well as resistance in "power walks," according to a May Reuters dispatch from London. Said one mother, of her newfound quality time with her babies, "If I had to go to the gym and put the twins into a (nursery), it would cost me a fortune."

(1) A 47-year-old man was arrested in Milwaukee in June and charged with stabbing a 54-year-old man in (according to the police report) an argument about not having an argument. (2) Marine veteran Christopher Marlowe, 25, was arrested in New Orleans in June and charged with shooting Army veteran Erik Beelman after an argument over which branch of service is tougher. (3) Pamela Majdan, 23, was charged with domestic battery in Wood Dale, Ill., on Memorial Day after allegedly repeatedly beating her sister, Joyce, 31, in a dispute over who had caught the most pieces of candy tossed during the town's holiday parade.

(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.)

Allen Heckard filed a lawsuit in Hillsboro, Ore., in June against Michael Jordan and Nike founder Phil Knight for $416 million each, charging that they are responsible for his "pain and suffering," and his "defamation," in that nearly every day for 15 years, people have mistaken him for Jordan. Heckard admits to being a pretty good basketball player (though 6 inches shorter than Jordan) and to wearing Air Jordans, and in fact curiously told KGW-TV that, all in all, being recognized as Jordan was a "positive" thing. He said he arrived at the "416" figure from multiplying his age by seven (though he appears to be in his 30s, not 59). (Needless to say, Heckard filed the lawsuit without benefit of a lawyer.)

-- Are We Safe? (1) The Washington Times reported in June that a retired New York City police officer had nonchalantly passed through the main security checkpoint at Department of Homeland Security headquarters by showing as his only ID, a long-obsolete Mexican consulate card. (2) Also in June, Delaware governor Ruth Ann Minner complained that Homeland Security's secret telephone hotline to governors, intended for emergency communication, was often tied up by telemarketers, and recommended that the department enter the number onto the government's Do Not Call registry.

-- In June, federal judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. ordered Missouri to suspend executions until substantial changes are made in its procedures, including specifying exactly which lethal drugs are to be used and in what quantity. Gaitan also pointed out that the doctor overseeing the state's executions is dyslexic and may inadvertently be transposing the dosage numbers.

-- In April, a dead, decaying cow got caught on a tree branch at a dam near West Milford, W.Va., and remained there for "several weeks," according to an Associated Press report, grossing out neighbors, while five government jurisdictions declined repeated requests to move it. It was outside West Milford city limits; the state Department of Natural Resources handles only wild animals; the state Environmental Protection people found no ecological danger; the state Agriculture Department called it a local issue; and a regional Water Board also declined. Finally, on May 13, workers from the state Division of Highways, along with local volunteer firefighters, removed it.

From the May 25 Washington Post Crime Report: "10:55 p.m. May 8. A man directed a driver into a parking space, then grabbed her when she got out of the car. He said, 'I'm not going to hurt you. You're a unique person, and I'm a unique person.' He put a ring on her right index finger and started to chant, then took property from her pocket and fled on foot."

(1) In a fund-raising project in May, parishioners at the Levenshulme Baptist Church in Manchester, England, staged a car wash, using the church's leftover holy water. (2) In May, for the second time in two months, prisoners being moved by Chicago police in the department's new, high-performance transport vans escaped when the vans overturned and the roof's air-escape ventilation hatch opened.

(1) Runway model Tatyana Simanava, 21, was hospitalized in May after she turned the wrong way upon emerging from the rest room of the luxury motor home she was riding in through Brooklyn, N.Y., and fell out the back door into traffic, suffering a broken arm and wrist. Newspaper stories described her as blond. (2) Joseph Zachary, 25, was arrested in Los Angeles in May after allegedly stabbing a man in an altercation; Zachary was dressed as "A Nightmare on Elm Street" villain Freddy Krueger, with knives attached to his gloved fingers. (3) The charismatic Swedish career criminal, Jan-Erik Olsson, 64 (whose 1973 bank robbery, and accompanying devotion by his hostages, originally inspired the term "Stockholm Syndrome"), tried to turn himself in to police in Helsenborg in May, but one officer apparently found him too likable and encouraged him to stay on the run.

Conservative legislators in Ottawa, as has happened in similar cases, became enraged in June after learning that the Canada Council for the Arts had given $9,000 (Cdn) to performance artist Jess Dobkin to stage Lactation Station, a bar serving human breast milk from six contributors in a setting similar to a wine-tasting.

(1) Lance Kocses, 30, was cited by police for causing a $5,000 accident in Seminole, Fla., in May; according to a sheriff's deputy, Kocses was distracted in making a left turn because he was eating from a bowl of Frosted Flakes. (2) According to a lawsuit filed in June in Minneapolis, the reason Minnesota Timberwolves basketball player Eddie Griffin drove his SUV into the plaintiffs' parked car was that, at the time, he was watching a pornographic video and masturbating. (Police cited Griffin only for inattentive driving.)

A June Associated Press account of a deposition by Michael Jackson, given for an upcoming trial in a lawsuit by a former business associate, reports that Jackson habitually carried no money and got none from his business manager and that his only source of occasional cash was from leasing the cows that grazed on his Neverland Ranch. Lawyer: "So all your cash, whenever you need cash to shop or whatever, comes from the cows?" Jackson: "Yes, believe it or not." Lawyer: "I don't, but that's OK. I don't have to." Jackson: "I'm telling you."

(1) On June 26, outside the Community Bank in Miami, two men robbed a Brinks armored truck guard and made a clean getaway, and police have no leads. However, the one bag the men grabbed contained only the bank's deposit slips. (2) Adam Curtis Hunter, 18, was arrested in Cookeville, Tenn., in June after smashing his car into a house and passing out nearby. When police arrived and found marijuana and drug paraphernalia, and discussed citing Hunter for driving while intoxicated, Hunter objected. According to the police report quoted in the Cookeville Herald-Citizen, Hunter said they won't find marijuana "in his blood because he did not smoke it, he just sold it."

News of the Weird reported in 1996 on the eccentric, but legitimate contracts sold by British insurance executive Simon Burgess, e.g., the policy that would pay the then-equivalent of about $160,000 in the event the insured were abducted by an alien, with double indemnity if the insured were also impregnated (and since alien powers are unknown, male pregnancy was covered, as well). In June 2006, three sisters in Scotland revealed that they are renewing their 6-year-old policy from Burgess that would pay them the equivalent of about $1.84 million in the event any of them gives birth to Jesus Christ (should he return), to cover the cost of raising him.

An 84-year-old man became the most recent to accidentally fall to his death after stopping along a highway to relieve himself. The man fell down an embankment along Idaho state road 55 in June, and his body landed on the bank of the Payette River. (The day before that, an unnamed New York City man survived, but had his hand partially severed, when he wandered down the tracks at the City Hall subway station to relieve himself, only to lose the hand when a train sped by in the darkness.)

(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 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.)