In findings that could surely be matched in the United States, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported in January that the country's 100 highest-paid business executives had, by 9:46 a.m. on Jan. 2, earned an amount equal to what the average Canadian would earn in all of 2007. And The New York Times reported in December that Wall Street bonuses for 2006 were so large that one real estate broker complained at New York City's shortage of $20 million properties and a Greenwich, Conn., Ferrari dealer complained that Ferrari hadn't manufactured enough 599 GTB Fioranos (price: about $250,000) to fill his customers' orders.

(1) Because of recent government campaigns to protect wildlife, snake charmers in India's Rajasthan state are increasingly unable to work with live snakes but nonetheless hope to continue earning tourists' money by performing the same rituals, except without snakes. (2) On New Year's Day at the South African tourist attraction of Cango Caves, an overweight visitor in the "Tunnel of Love" got stuck exiting, and she and the 23 people behind her were trapped for 12 hours until rescuers used a pulley and liquid paraffin (to grease the rocks) to extricate her.

-- Don Karkos heroically regained sight in his right eye in November after 65 years. A 1941 Navy submarine explosion had knocked him out, and doctors had told him many times that he would never see with that eye again, but Karkos, 82 (a retired horse farmer who works as a security guard at New York's Monticello Raceway), was butted in the head by a horse in November and awoke the next day with sight regained. He told the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., in December that the blow he took from My Buddy Chimo was even harder than the one from the concussion.

-- Alarming Science: (1) A researcher at the Minnesota Cancer Center reported in January finding amounts of the carcinogen NNK, most likely from tobacco smoke, in toenail clippings of smokers (and nonsmokers exposed to second-hand smoke). (2) A researcher writing in the January/February issue of Australasian Science magazine reported that the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, carried by many cats, not only can harm pregnant women (as was previously known) but also can lower the IQ of men and make women more promiscuous.

-- Science Gone Too Far: A December New York Times dispatch reports that among the hottest social status symbols in Tokyo is the cute-but-bizarre dog created by inbreeding, such as a blue Chihuahua or a white dachshund. However, inbreeding also produces a high number of deformities, and to get that dachshund, for example, the litter of five contained four dogs with almost unspeakably gross birth defects. Nonetheless, because of demand, dog inbreeding continues. And a Nottingham University professor warned in January that farmers are now at work in the United Kingdom breeding "stress" and "hostility" out of pigs and cows to make them more obedient en route to the slaughterhouse. The professor said the goal of such breeders is to create animal "vegetables."

-- (1) Employees at Wal-Mart's headquarters in China have set up a branch of the Communist Party, according to a December Associated Press dispatch, to go with five existing branches at individual stores (but the party said it would not interfere with Wal-Mart management). (2) Outsourcing of American jobs recently reached a new category of corporate employees: lawyers. An estimated 23,000 lawyers' jobs were lost in the U.S. last year to India, where document review and legal research can be performed at about half the cost as in America, according to a December story in the News Journal of Wilmington, Del.

-- In what one reporter termed "a culture clash of near-epic proportions," Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist (the mostly free online advertising Web site), told a gathering of head-shaking, befuddled Wall Street analysts in December that his company had no intention of raising more money than necessary to cover expenses, much less of maximizing income (even though many analysts believe investors might pay $1 billion or more for the company).

-- (1) About one-fifth of professional rodeo bull riders have given up their cowboy hats and now wear modified hockey helmets with face masks because of the prevalence of serious injuries. Said one diehard, though, "I don't wear a cowboy hat because I'm a bull rider. I wear a cowboy hat because I'm a cowboy." (2) London's Observer reported in November that several UNICEF offices worldwide have complained to U.N. headquarters that celebrities endorsing the charity's work have demoralized the staff because traveling celebrities are so high-maintenance when they arrive to "help" and also because some companies making donations (for example, Gucci) are owned by parent companies whose factories exploit Third World children more than the donations help.

-- At least 30 Texas death-row inmates have pages on dating Web sites, according to a November Associated Press report, and the murderers usually describe themselves in cuddly terms. Wrote convicted cop-killer Randy Halprin, "I think I'm a pretty funny guy. I have a wacked (sic) sense of humor. I can be a big kid at heart. I'm a hopeless (and I mean hopeless) romatic (sic)." However, also in November, Calvin Bennett, 26, a suspect in two Arkansas murders, was traced by police to Rothschild, Wis., by the personal ad he had placed on a dating Web site, describing himself as shy and giving his ideal evening as "a nice romantic dinner with soft music, followed by a romantic walk or a carriage ride."

-- Police in Chesterfield Township, Mich., arrested Calvin Fluckes Jr., 21, in December after he tried to cash a counterfeit check for $848 at a Wal-Mart. Fluckes was apparently oblivious of the approximately 80 uniformed police officers who were in the store for a charity event and whose cruisers Fluckes had to pass when he parked his car in the Wal-Mart lot. According to a police lieutenant, "(Fluckes) was immediately apprehended."

-- Marshall Byers, 28, was arrested in Everett, Wash., in December, and charged with the attempted murder of his estranged wife's boyfriend (who was treated for five knife wounds). According to prosecutors, Byers was surprised at the "attempted" charge. Allegedly, he told a detective, "What? I thought I stuck him like a pig. What do you mean, he's alive?"

-- Also Should Have Kept His Mouth Shut: Jeremy Lyons, 20, was arrested in Hanover Township, Pa., in October for an alleged vandalism spree, bashing car windows with a baseball bat. A local TV station had carried a story of the arrest of another person, and Lyons for some reason called the station and, laughing, told them they had the wrong man. He was arrested when the call was traced.

The following uncoordinated people accidentally shot themselves recently, having chosen to carry their gun not in a holster but in the waistband of their pants: Manranzana Grimes, 16 (Canton, Ohio, September) (shot himself in the leg); a 23-year-old man (Wichita, Kan., November) (shot himself in the testicles); Gregory Quinn, 49 (Lewistown, Pa., November) (in the leg when removing his gun while driving); Evando Minor (Baltimore, November) (in the genitals while drawing his gun to rob a taxi driver).

(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.)

At the December ceremony in Najaf, Iraq, in which U.S. commanders turned over control of the city, Iraqi commandos took the stage carrying frogs and a rabbit and soon were eating the animals raw in a show of feral manliness. As U.S. personnel looked on apprehensively, one Iraqi cut open the rabbit's belly, screamed, snatched its heart in his teeth, and passed the bloody carcass down the line, with each commando taking a bite. According to a Baltimore Sun dispatch, locals said that Saddam Hussein's special forces used to do similar things, but with snakes, dogs, cats and even wolves.

-- (1) Floyd Kinney Jr., 49, pleading guilty in Northampton County, Pa., in December to indecent assault on two young girls, blamed the incidents on his wife's obsessive bingo habit, which he said took her out of the house "three, four times a week." (Said the judge, "Some people, when their wives aren't home, decide to clean the living room.") (2) Kevin Sutherland, 45, arrested in Salt Lake City in December for downloading child porn on his office computer, told investigators that he personally would "never" access child porn but that he has been diagnosed with multiple personalities, one of which is a 16-year-old boy ("Casey") who likes to look at pictures of girls his own age.

-- Numerous witnesses saw Michael Stone charge into the parliament building in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in November, armed with bombs, a knife and a handgun. After he was wrestled to the floor, he was charged with trying to kill separatist leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who were inside. However, in December, Stone said everything he did that day was merely "performance art replicating a terrorist attack." A credulous reporter for the Belfast Telegraph applauded Stone's "use of mixed media and everyday materials," which he said "show(ed) imagination."

-- Charles Littleton, 22, was defiant even after being Tasered by police when he resisted efforts to remove him from a Saginaw (Mich.) City Council meeting. He said he had to stand up for his right to wear his Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap, despite a rule banning hats for men inside. "It means more than just a hat," he said. "It's like my crown. It's like asking a king to remove his crown."

-- IBM fired Vietnam veteran James Pacenza from his job at a research facility in East Fishkill, N.Y., because he had logged on to an Internet chat room at work after being told not to. However, Pacenza responded with a $5 million lawsuit in November, claiming that he is "addicted" to chat rooms, as "self-medication" for his Vietnam-based post-traumatic stress disorder. (IBM said it does accommodate illnesses, but was not aware that Pacenza's obsession amounted to one.)

-- Monacan High School (Richmond, Va.) art teacher Stephen Murmer was placed on leave in December, and then fired in January, for his extracurricular work painting with his posterior (literally, dousing his backside with paint and rubbing it onto the canvas). Though he had taken steps to work under a different identity, he was exposed in a video that circulated on the Internet and was thus forced to go public. Murmer said he is contemplating an appeal and added, "I'm certainly proud of the ass painting."

-- Parents of some Castro Valley (Calif.) High School girls, led by aggressive county judge Larry Goodman, have waged a campaign to oust the school's girls' basketball coach, Nancy Nibarger, claiming that she insufficiently valued their daughters' skills in team tryouts. In October, school officials, in a compromise, created a committee to pick the team, but that committee, too, found the complaining girls not worthy enough. (Several of the parents, undaunted, vowed to continue seeking Nibarger's dismissal.)

-- More Ironies: (1) Doug Milliken was elected treasurer of Colorado's Arapahoe County in November on a promise to help families protect their property from foreclosure (Colorado had the country's highest foreclosure rate for most of last year). However, on Nov. 6, Milliken, himself, was served foreclosure papers that cited debt of $253,624 on his home. (2) California's Golden State Fence Co., which has a contract to build part of the United States' immigrant-impeding barrier on the Mexican border, agreed in December to pay fines totaling nearly $5 million because it had been employing illegal aliens.

(1) Britain's Darts Regulatory Authority announced in November that professional darts player Robbie "Kong" Green had been suspended for eight weeks after a positive drug test (marijuana). (2) The Federation of Black Cowboys, of Brooklyn, N.Y., with 35 members and 45 horses, lately must do its riding on city streets in traffic that was not a problem until urban sprawl enveloped their Cedar Lane Stables, according to an October New York Times profile.

-- Some British and German drivers have over-relied on their cars' satellite-navigation devices, according to a December Reuters dispatch, sometimes with tragic (or hilarious) results. A 53-year-old German man thought the device's instruction to turn "now" meant not at the next corner but right that second, and he crashed into a building. Another followed instructions but ignored a prominent "closed for construction" sign and plowed into a pile of sand. Said an exasperated German auto club spokesman, "It's not as if people are driving in a tank with only a small slit to see out." (In November, an ambulance in London went 400 miles to make a 20-minute trip, and in May another took 90 minutes to take a crash victim to a hospital 10 minutes away, both due to faulty "sat-nav" programming.)

-- Burglar Sheldon Reece, 32, was shot in the abdomen by homeowner Abel Sisneros in Fort Worth, Texas, in December. According to a report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, to enter the house, Reece had to boldly disregard two signs outside: "Warning. Nothing inside is worth risking your life for. Owners of this property are highly skilled to protect life, liberty and property from criminal attacks" and "No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again."

In October, the Rhode Island Supreme Court entered a final judgment for Charles "Chick" Lennon, 68, against the manufacturer of a penile implant he had received in 1996 but which perpetually remains somewhat erect. (He says he has to wear a fanny pack in front to conceal it.) He had originally won $750,000 for his pain and humiliation, reduced to $400,000, but then back up to $950,000, which he is scheduled to receive. In Chicago, dozens of men have sued Dr. Sheldon Burman after having their penises deformed in lengthening surgeries, according to lawsuits reported by the Chicago Sun-Times in September, even though Burman said he stands by his original methodology, involving vacuuming and stretching (on which he is said to be self-taught). And Blake Steidler, 25, of Reamstown, Pa., who said he received botched penis-augmentation surgery, was sentenced in November to almost five years in prison for mailing a bomb to the surgeon.

(1) Police in Sydney, Australia, arrested 19 people in a two-family street fight in January and, according to Sydney's Daily Telegraph, confiscated "knives, baseball bats, metal poles, planks, branches, cricket bats, pick handles, screwdrivers, golf clubs, curtain rods and glass bottles," as well as hammers and machetes. (2) Chytoria Graham, 27, was arrested in Pittsburgh in October after a fight with her boyfriend, culminating in Graham's grabbing the couple's 1-month-old son by the legs and using him to clobber the boyfriend.

(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.)

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.)