Eventually, robots will have to be given legal rights (and accept certain responsibilities) if advances in artificial intelligence (AI) continue to create sensitive quasi-organisms, according to a paper solicited for Sir David King, the UK's chief scientist. According to one AI researcher, "If (robots are) granted full rights, states will be obligated to provide full social benefits to them including income support, housing and possibly robo-healthcare to fix the machines over time." A December Financial Times report on the paper noted that robots might also have to pay taxes and be available for military service. (Some of the ideas in the paper track visions described years ago by writer Isaac Asimov.)

-- Many voters, and critics in both parties, chided the "do-nothing" 109th Congress (2005-2006) as a body tied up in partisanship and divisiveness. However, the Congress did manage to pass 383 pieces of legislation, except that almost 100 of those laws were merely authorizations to name post offices and other federal structures after famous Americans (such as Ray Charles, Ava Gardner and Karl Malden).

-- Politicians in the German states of Lower Saxony and Bavaria proposed in December to criminalize "cruel" violent acts in video games when they are directed at "humans" or "human-looking characters." Bavarian interior minister Gunther Beckstein pointed to a November incident in which an 18-year-old player of the violent game "Counter Strike" went to a school, shot 37 people, and then killed himself.

-- Following a military coup in November, Fiji's army chief Frank Bainimarama took over and placed classified ads in local newspapers to seek candidates to be ministers and senior civil servants. The minimum qualifications: no criminal record and not to be bankrupt. And Nigeria's People's Democratic Party started screening candidates in December to run for president this year, ranking applicants on the following criteria: patriotism (10 percent), integrity (15), ethnic neutrality (10), knowledge of law (10), tolerance (5), transparency (10), knowledge of development (10) and leadership qualities (15). (Arithmetic ability was not a criterion.)

-- From the Arizona Daily Sun (Flagstaff, Ariz., 12-3-06): "About 1,800 square feet of insulation were reported stolen from the underside of a house on the 5100 block of East Hickory Drive. The victim said the insulation disappeared sometime between September and this week. She said she was having trouble keeping her house warm as the weather got colder."

-- Oops: John Beacham of the Anti-War Coalition in Chicago said he has suspected for a while that police had been spying on his organization, but he was obviously proved wrong when the coalition canceled, well in advance, a planned Oct. 28 demonstration downtown. Unaware of the cancellation, hundreds of police officers lined the streets around the protest area, hoping to prevent the recurrence of a wild demonstration in 2003. Deputy police superintendent Charles Williams blamed the coalition for not keeping the department informed.

-- The Texas Ethics Commission ruled in November that a public official in the Lone Star state, receiving money as a gift such as from a lobbyist, need disclose only that he received "a check" or "currency" and need not reveal the actual amount of money. Said the district attorney in Austin, who was outraged by the ruling, it is now "perfectly legal to report the gift of 'a wheelbarrow' without reporting that the wheelbarrow was filled with cash."

-- Scamming the Horny Panda: One trick that zookeepers have used to get male pandas interested in mating with dowdier females (according to a December dispatch from Sichuan, China, in Australia's The Age) is to let an attractive female roam around a pen, leaving her scent, and then, in darkness, with the male in the pen and frisky at the scent, to introduce the less attractive female into the pen, back-end first, so that the pre-excited male will quickly begin copulating. Said zookeeper Zhang Hemin, "When the males find out (that they've just mated with unintended partners), they get very angry and start fighting the female. We have had to use firecrackers and a water hose to separate them."

-- Rules! (1) Sixty years after Indiana abolished gambling and wrecked the economy of the resort town of French Lick, the state brought it back, allowing casinos, but they had to be located on water and not the state's dry land. Developers of the French Lick Springs Resort thus spent $382 million on a plush "riverboat" casino on a manmade lake barely larger than the boat, and it opened in November. (2) Derek Ogley, 70, had just been discharged from Tameside General Hospital in Ashton, England, in November, but doubled over in pain in the waiting room (eventually diagnosed with pancreatitis). Nurses informed Ogley's family they would have to call 999 (the UK's 911) or drive him around to the emergency entrance about three minutes away, because, since he had been discharged, rules prevented them from treating him.

People Disrespecting Their Bodies: John Sheehan, 33, was arrested in November, nude, near the rapid-transit station in El Cerrito, Calif., and when asked if he was carrying contraband, admitted that he had a "screwdriver" in his rectum. (Police treated the item as a potential weapon, training guns on him while he removed the 6-inch-long "awl" wrapped in electrical tape.) And a week later, in Monkwearmouth, England, a 22-year-old Iraq-war veteran told buddies he was bored and, imitating a prank from a "Jackass" movie, inserted a firework "up his backside," according to a Daily Mail story, and lit it. When it exploded, he was taken to Sunderland Royal Hospital with a scorched colon and other serious injuries.

News of the Weird has previously mentioned how difficult some Japanese and Singaporean people find it to smile, even when their jobs depend on it, and Chinese people preparing for the 2008 Olympics are having similar problems turning Beijing into a "city of smiles," as the campaign is called. Said one man attending a class on smiling: "At first, I thought (it might be) difficult to smile after you became tired. But later I realized if you don't treat smiling as ... work ... you may find it very easy to smile all the time." (In popular literature in China, people who smile frequently or for no particular reason are often regarded as either silly or devious.)

Retired ad agency executive James Finegan, 76, plays at least 250 rounds of golf a year at a course near his home in Gladwyne, Pa., and 50 to 60 rounds elsewhere, according to an October Wall Street Journal profile. When not playing golf, he writes books about golf (histories of golf in Philadelphia and of a course in New Jersey, and four books about golf in the British Isles). And in Salt Lake City, county sheriff Aaron Kennard, who was caught by a Salt Lake Tribune reporter playing numerous rounds of golf during working hours in August and September, merely shrugged. "I'm not golfing enough," he said, in that golf helps him relax. He said he'd rather just golf a little than take summer vacations.

-- An unnamed, "well-known Adelaide (Australia) model" was seen screaming, "Where's my baby? Someone's stolen my baby" shortly after she paused while jogging and pushing the 5-month-old's buggy along the city's River Torrens in December. According to a report in Melbourne's The Age newspaper, the woman had stopped to answer a cell-phone call, and when she finally turned back around, the buggy was gone. Unfortunately, it had rolled into the river during the phone call, and the incident ended badly.

(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.)

New York City has more than 400 soup kitchens but nothing else like the Broadway Presbyterian Church's, where master chef Michael Ennes presides three days a week, turning leftover restaurant ingredients into gourmet meals. In fact, one pre-Christmas meal included octopus, as well as day-old bread from Le Bernardin restaurant. Ennes told London's Independent that he is motivated by the chance to help troubled people get "real nutrition," but he also likes serving "famous" homeless people, such as diners who claim to be, among others, George Bush, George Washington and Jesus Christ.

-- Buddy, a 6-year-old German shepherd mix, wandered into the emergency room at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower, Calif., in October after having just been hit by a car, and he resisted efforts to remove him, apparently waiting until someone attended to his injured hind leg (which turned out to be broken), according to local animal control officials interviewed by the Whittier Daily News. Owner Fabian Ortega was called (by virtue of Buddy's implanted microchip), and a vet fixed him up.

-- In October, in front of other people, town manager Bonilyn Wilbanks-Free of the upscale village of Golden Beach, Fla., referred casually to her black female assistant as "Mammy" (which is not her name) and then, when the assistant took offense, tried to soften the gaffe by telling her how much she "loved Aunt Jemima." (A subsequent investigation suggested that someone besides Wilbanks-Free might have made the latter comment, but Wilbanks-Free nonetheless resigned in December.)

-- An unidentified man washing windows while tethered to security ropes at the 20th floor of the Fifth Third Bank building in downtown Nashville, Tenn., in November attracted attention when he remained motionless for about 30 minutes, but it turned out that he was just sound asleep. When fire rescue vehicles arrived, the noise awakened him, and he lowered himself to the street unharmed, according to a report in The Tennessean.

-- National Public Radio reported in October that perhaps thousands of prison inmates are using cell phones (which are contraband in all correctional facilities) and that the problem has gotten so bad that Maryland state Sen. Ed DeGrange said he was sitting at his desk recently when an inmate called him on a cell phone with a list of general complaints. Also, a warden in Texas reported getting a call from the mother of an inmate, demanding that the warden do something to improve cell-phone reception in the prison so she can chat more easily with her son.

-- Condoms are proving such an attractive target for shoplifters, according to Phoenix's Arizona Republic, that some stores are putting them in locked display cases that require a customer to call a clerk for help. However, as an official of the Arizona Public Health Association pointed out, condoms are a purchase that consumers choose to make in low profile. A spokesperson for a condom maker mentioned a recent incident in a CVS pharmacy in which a clerk, assisting a customer, shouted several times, "Who's got the key to the condoms?"

Official Judgments: (1) In October, a judge of Scotland's Greencock Sheriff Court released Hui Yu, a college student from Beijing, from a traffic charge by disregarding two police officers' identification of Hui. Said the judge, "(A)ll Chinese people can look the same to a native Scot. It's only when you have time to look that you begin to see the differences." (2) The chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Guy Fournier, resigned in September after giving an interview to a French magazine in which he expounded on, as The Associated Press put it, "the joys of bowel movements."

-- Flipping: Former highly regarded Texas drug agent Barry Cooper (800 arrests) announced in December he would begin selling his video, "Never Get Busted Again," instructing drug users on how to conceal their stashes. (Cooper called the "war on drugs" counterproductive.) And in December, former New York City parking court judge Haskell Nussbaum published "Beat That Parking Ticket," in which he advises that harried judges look for the slightest defect in a ticket, in that it's the easiest way to move quickly through a docket. "Every ticket is worth fighting," he told the New York Post in October.

-- James Joseph Dresnock, 65, a native of Norfolk, Va., who has lived the last 44 years in North Korea, again pledged his allegiance to Kim Jong-Il, whom he refers to as the "Great Leader" in scenes from a British documentary to be shown at Utah's Sundance Film Festival in January. According to an October New York Times report on the film, Dresnock (who defected from the U.S. Army in 1962) has probably lived a heartier life in Pyongyang than he would have lived in the United States, given his abandonment by his parents, his teenage turmoil and his limited education. Said Dresnock, "I wouldn't trade (the North Korean) system for nuthin.'"

-- According to prosecutors, Irenia "Lamb" Cotner, 34, managed to enlist four adults in rural Claremont, Ill., to help her murder a pregnant 16-year-old girl, by convincing them they all had hexes on them that could only be lifted by killing the girl before a candle with her name on it melted down. (They failed, but a man died fighting off the attackers.) One defendant said the hex was real because she got migraines every time Cotner came by. Another defendant said he learned about hexes and spells so that people would like him and said Cotner planned the murder for a remote location so that the gates of hell could open for the mother's and fetus's souls. In December, Cotner was sentenced to 57 years in prison, and two others go on trial soon.

An unidentified man fled after an unsuccessful attempt at robbing a Git-N-Go convenience store in Des Moines, Iowa, in December, which was foiled when the clerk noticed that the "gunman's" thumb was visible from his pocket, where he was holding his hand to pretend he had a gun. The clerk said he actually had to argue with the man, who continued to insist that it was a gun in his pocket. Said clerk Terry Cook later, "I know what a gun looks like."

One of the legendary American lawsuit successes is the 1970 award of $50,000 to Gloria Sykes, whose injury on a San Francisco cable car left the previously modest Midwestern woman with an unrestrained libido. In 2005, warehouseman Stephen Tame, now 29, of East Bergholt, Suffolk, England, won a judgment against his employer when he was injured in a fall at work and left with an aggressive sexual disinhibition that has exhausted his wife (and annoyed her) and led to infidelity and a resort to pornography. The church-going wife said that Stephen is not the man she thought she was marrying eight months earlier. In December 2006, a court awarded him the equivalent of about $5.9 million.

(1) After a domestic tiff, Steven Rautio took the Christmas tree that he and his girlfriend had just decorated, cut it into pieces with a chainsaw, and burned it in a wood stove, but the stove overheated and burned his house to the ground (National Mine, Mich.). (2) The U.K. Noise Association and a British labor union suggested in December that they might take legal action against the "torture" of retail clerks by stores' forcing them to listen to continuous holiday music. (3) According to a Reuters report, Christmas is widely celebrated in non-Christian countries with "traditional" dishes such as bats cooked in coconut milk on the island of Sulawesi and, in Japan, feasts of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

(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.)

Bungee Baby: Nick Fennelly, 31, was rushing his in-labor girlfriend, Sharon Taylor, into the parking lot at Calderdale Royal Hospital in West Yorkshire, England, just as their baby's head started to appear, and, in a corridor inside, little Ashleigh shot out of her mother so quickly that Fennelly couldn't grab her in time. She hit the floor, skidded, and then came back on the umbilical cord, according to a December report in the Halifax Courier. Except for a bruise, Ashleigh is fine.

Melody Howell of Richburg, N.C., expanded her collection of full-sized, designer-decorated Christmas trees this year to 52, all placed inside her 2,500-square-foot home. (Said Howell's adult daughter, "My mom is over the top. (E)verything she does is over the top." On the less joyous side, the city council in Kingston Upon Hull, England, prohibited its trash collectors from wearing their traditional Santa hats this year, declaring that the hats "(do) not create a professional impression."

-- Checking a boy just before his bar mitzvah, Orthodox rabbis in Sydney, Australia, found that his rabbi-supervised circumcision had not quite been "complete" and ruled that it must be done again because, officially, the boy was not a Jew. The boy's mother objected and instead found a Progressive synagogue for the bar mitzvah (although the Orthodox rabbi, Moshe Gutnick, said she is "fooling the child" into believing he is Jewish).

-- Islamic Blues: (1) Ginnah Muhammad, 42, who was suing a rental car company in Hamtramck, Mich., in October, refused to remove her veil (which covered all but her eyes) on the witness stand, and consequently, the judge refused to accept her testimony and dismissed the lawsuit. He said judges must evaluate witnesses' credibility, which the veil prevented. (2) According to an October dispatch from Bangkok appearing in Melbourne's newspaper The Age, some Muslim teenagers are mixing Coca-Cola, codeine and the native kratom leaf to get high. "Muslims cannot drink alcohol," said one, but if you get "drunk" on that mixture, "(it) is not a sin."

-- Ruth Bell Graham, the frail wife of evangelist Billy Graham, has split with her elder son Franklin by rejecting as her burial place Franklin's planned memorial library for Billy near Charlotte, N.C. (in favor of her mountaintop retreat west of there). According to a December Washington Post report, Ruth's long-time friend, the crime writer Patricia Cornwell, told Ruth that the largely bookless "library" is "truly tacky," featuring for example a mechanical cow that greets visitors, and straw on the floor to resemble the barn of Billy's youth. Franklin's thinking is that the memorial should draw a new generation of worshipers and donors, including kids who would be attracted by the farm motif.

(1) In November, Arkansas' outgoing Gov. Mike Huckabee and his wife, who have been happily married for 32 years, nonetheless set up a wedding registry at two department stores because it was apparently the easiest way for them to receive going-away gifts. Arkansas law prohibits gifts to public officials of more than $100, with a few exceptions, such as wedding gifts. (2) In October, Judge Robert Armstrong of Riverside, Calif., dismissed an indecent exposure charge against a woman solely because a state statute makes criminal only a person who "lewdly exposes his person, or the private parts thereof," which to Judge Armstrong clearly limited the law to males. (The prosecutor quickly filed an appeal.)

-- Dan Hinkle is the commissioner of the South County Youth Association, which plays in a large football league in Fairfax County, Va., and also the father of Scott, who played on the age-12-to-14 Raptors, who were fighting for a playoff spot in October when Hinkle fired their two coaches for violating his order to play Scott only on defense. (The coaches used him successfully on offense for one game.) The Raptors, to support the coaches, voted to disband the team even though they had made the playoffs, but Hinkle wouldn't change his mind.

-- Five star cheerleaders at McKinney North High School near Dallas apparently had the run of the place over the last year, often immune from school rules thanks to the aggressiveness of their parents and the timidity of school officials, according to an independent report to the school board (disclosed in December by The Dallas Morning News). The "Fab Five" walked out of classes, ignored teachers, dressed salaciously and posed for scandalous photos on the Internet, and whenever sanctions were suggested, parents rose in anger at comparative unfairness toward their particular daughters. One staff member said the girls acted like they hadn't "been punished properly since the seventh grade." District officials are reviewing the report.

(1) Morgan Conatser, 29, was arrested a short time after making his way awkwardly out to the parking lot of the Guitars and Cadillacs store in De Queen, Ark., in November, with a guitar stuffed inside his clothes. The manager initially stopped Conatser, recovered the guitar, and let him go, but decided to call the sheriff's office when he realized Conatser had probably also hidden a wireless sound system in his pants. (2) Derek Pierson Jr., 21, was arrested in Shreveport, La., in November after allegedly attempting to rob a convenience store. He was an easy collar, as he had somehow not noticed that among the customers waiting in line at the cash register was uniformed police officer L.J. Scott, of the armed robbery task force.

(1) In an incident likely to be repeated as Americans get larger, the body of a 600-pound man who was cremated at the Garner Funeral Home in Salt Lake City in October started a grease fire when leaking body fluids overheated the conventional oven. (2) John Leonard Young, 46, pleaded guilty in October to the now-familiar charge of using the Internet to lure an underage girl for sex, but the backstory was unusual. Though Young had bought her a plane ticket to Seattle, she decided to buy her own ticket but mistakenly booked "Washington, D.C." When she arrived there all alone, she sought help from authorities, and Young's plot unraveled.

(1) Jeffrey Turpin, 41, was arrested in August in Wytheville, Va., for malicious wounding of a woman after chasing her across two farms on a tractor. According to a witness, when the woman fell, Turpin dropped the tractor's bucket to the ground and rolled it over her, breaking her leg. (2) Three women were arrested in Columbus, Ga., in September and charged with forcing a pregnant teenager to drink turpentine, which the three (and several other family members) had heard would induce an abortion.

-- About a dozen Asian women living in Seattle flock to Bigelow Street every September, for hours at a time, to gather fallen chestnuts to take home and boil, according to a report in The Seattle Times. The residents of the upscale homes say they've come to accept the ladies, some elderly, who thoroughly search yards for hours and make themselves at home on the properties (including relieving themselves in the shrubbery) while waiting for the next batch to fall.

-- After the aircraft maintenance staff of Turkish Airlines finished up a repair job ahead of schedule in December, they celebrated by sacrificing a camel at Istanbul airport, with hundreds of pounds of meat distributed to workers. (The government of Turkey, which is working hard to be accepted into the European Union, might have preferred the sacrifice be done elsewhere.)

(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.)