Democracy in Finland: The Intopii computer firm of Helsinki announced in February that it has installed software to assist voters, who, studies suggest, tend to select candidates who look like themselves. When a voter uploads his or her photo, the Web site will use facial-recognition software to find those among the 800 candidates in March parliamentary elections who most resemble that voter, to ease the difficult burden of citizenship in a democracy. And in March, incumbent parliamentary candidate Jyrki Kasvi launched the new version of his campaign Web site, written entirely in the Star-Trek language Klingon.

-- People Confused by "Mother": The head teacher of Johnstown Primary School in Carmarthen, Wales, ordered in February that there be no Mother's Day cards in school this year because it might be upsetting to students without a mother. Also in February, a government-funded advisory report to Britain's National Health Service recommended that medical staffs not use the terms "mum" and "dad" (and use "guardians" or "carers"), especially since the terms might be confusing or alienating to children of gay couples.

-- In February, the grand mufti of Egypt, Aly Gomaa, told a TV talk show audience in Cairo that he endorsed a recent fatwa by noted scholar Soad Saleh that it is religiously acceptable for women to undergo surgical hymen restoration. Perhaps even more controversial, according to Cairo's Daily Star Egypt newspaper, was Gomaa's corollary, that any Muslim man who insisted on his prospective wife's virginity should be prepared to prove his own.

-- The local government's tourist information center in Swindon, England, told author Mark Sutton that his World War I-themed book, "Tell Them of Us," could not be sold in its bookstore unless Sutton demonstrated that he had liability insurance, not for potentially libelous passages but in case readers, for example, suffered paper cuts turning the pages. Said Swindon Borough Council spokesman Richard Freeman, "We have to cover every eventuality."

-- At least a few parents with pronounced genetic abnormalities (e.g., deaf people, dwarfs) have in recent years sought specialized in-vitro fertilization that would improve their chances for a child with the same abnormalities, according to a December Associated Press report (citing a September survey by a Johns Hopkins University research facility). One adult female dwarf told the AP reporter defiantly, "You cannot tell me that I cannot have a child who's going to look like me." Slate.com, extrapolating from the survey, posited that at least eight fertility clinics have provided the service, though many other clinics say they would decline.

In February, the government of southwestern China's Fumin county decided to improve the feng shui (the harmony of the physical environment) for villagers next to mined-out Laoshou mountain, not by planting trees but by spray-painting the mountainside green. An employee at the county "forestry" department declined to comment to an Associated Press reporter.

-- Steven McCuller, 20, was arrested twice in a two-week period for burglary in Pascagoula, Miss., but it was the earlier January arrest that was the more controversial. George Stevenson, 33, a security guard on duty at the Eastwood Townhomes complex, saw McCuller on the grounds late at night and chased him until the pursuit took both men to the nearby Arlington Elementary School, where Stevenson apprehended McCuller and waited for police to arrive. McCuller was charged in that matter, but Stevenson, also, was arrested and charged both with trespassing at a school and carrying a weapon (his service gun) on school grounds (even though, obviously, no students were present).

-- Robert Moore, 37, was arrested in Floral City, Fla., in January, and according to police, he conceded that he had lost his temper and tried to kill his wife after he found out that she had obtained an abortion without informing him. (The charge thus reflects a basic internal battle within the accused over precisely how sacred life is.)

For a story, a KGTV reporter in San Diego called several telephone numbers advertised in local media offering to supply trendy, "boutique" puppies (e.g., Maltese, Bichon Frise) at cut-rate prices, and among the numbers was a seller in Nigeria, who said he was practically giving away the Bichons for just the cost of shipping ($1,000 to $2,000). The reporter, who was recording the call, asked to hear the dog actually barking before he sent any money, and the seller complied. When the reporter played back the barking for acoustics engineers, they all agreed: The Bichon's woof-woof perfectly matched the characteristics of the Nigerian seller's voice.

Everyone Has a Dark Side: (1) Ms. Georgie Audean Buoy, 82, pleaded guilty in February in The Dalles, Ore., to having sex with an 11-year-old boy in her foster care. "(T)his is not the Audean we have known for the last couple of decades," said her pastor at the Covenant Christian Community Church. (2) Denver's City Attorney (and a former state court judge) Larry Manzanares was placed on leave in February after a search found one of the state's stolen laptop computers in his home. Manzanares told KMGH-TV that he had bought it but had no receipt. Said he, "It was rather foolish of me to even think about buying a computer from a fellow in a parking lot." (Manzanares has resigned, and a special prosecutor is now investigating.)

A 15-year-old boy in Hamilton, Ontario, was finally rescued after dangling from a rope, nearly naked, upside down, in the minus-5-degree (F) cold, after a February attempt to spray graffiti on a new bridge went bad. He got his inspiration while tobogganing alone, at about 8 p.m., and left his gloves and cell phone in the sled as he rappelled over the side of the bridge, but when the rope slipped and entangled him, he found himself upside down and then lost some clothes as he tried to wriggle free. At about 10 p.m., when a party was breaking up at a nearby home, someone finally heard his screams for help.

News of the Weird has mentioned instances in which serious assaults have necessitated medical tests for the victim and have fortuitously revealed latent problems that were even more serious than whatever the assault produced. (Some of the latent problems might well have proved fatal had they not been discovered.) In February, a recreational hockey player in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, viciously cross-checked referee Dale Neudorf, sending him to the hospital, where doctors just happened to discover a brain tumor, which was still being assessed at press time. And in October, a New York City mugger nearly choked Jennifer Chow to death, sending her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a latent thyroid cancer. (In March, she reported being cancer-free.)

(1) A 50-year-old man fell through the ice at Donner Lake near Truckee, Calif., in February and drowned. Police said he was ice-skating about 100 yards off shore while wearing 2-foot-tall stilts (thus, the stilts were wearing the skates), and couldn't recover after falling through. (2) California Highway Patrol officers at the scene near Yuba City said the 28-year-old driver that crossed into oncoming traffic and fatally crashed into a Hummer in February was, perhaps, working at his laptop computer while driving. Though the screen was shattered in the crash, the computer was open in the seat beside him and plugged into his car's cigarette lighter.

(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 Kibera neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Dahravi section of Mumbai, India, are two of the planet's most appalling slums, but residents have recently discovered well-off international visitors roaming their toxic, fetid urban hells as voyeurs on travel agency-arranged tours. "(T)hey want to come and take pictures ... tell their friends they've been to the worst slum in Africa," lamented one resident of Kibera (which has one toilet for every 1,440 people), speaking to a Reuters reporter in February, but a March Smithsonian magazine piece quoted a Dahravi tour entrepreneur as promising to show "the positive side of (the) slum" (for instance, the community spirit that discourages street beggars, in a nation otherwise teeming with them).

-- Among traditional rituals still celebrated: (1) Tinku, in Bolivia's high plains, pits two tribes in Sacaca each February in day-long drinking and all-out fist-fighting. Despite the bloodshed, Tinku survives, helped by President Evo Morales' support for indigenous cultures. The mayor of Sacaca called Tinku "a sublime, beautiful act," in a February New York Times dispatch. (2) And at the Historic Carnival of Ivrea, Italy, in February, nine "teams" battled in commemoration of the centuries-old rebellion against noblemen, who enjoyed deflowering commoners' brides on their wedding eves. Today, that battle is waged by people pelting one another with oranges (this year, more than a million).

-- The U.S. Border Patrol has for three decades worked with a small group of Native Americans (Navajos, Kiowa and Sioux, among others) who call themselves the Shadow Wolves and who proudly use ancestral techniques to help track down drug smugglers and human traffickers along the Arizona and California borders with Mexico. According to a February Reuters dispatch, the Wolves can detect "barely visible scuff marks" on the ground and know how to follow trails of tiny fibers.

-- The University of Texas-Arlington fired two employees last year after they had prayed at the cubicle of a co-worker and anointed it with prayer oil, and in December the two filed a lawsuit over the termination. The school said that "praying, shouting and/or chanting over a co-worker's ... belongings without her knowledge and consent constitutes harassment," and that rubbing down the cubicle frame with oil showed "disregard for university property." Evelyne Shatkin and Linda Shifflett said that the co-worker was on vacation at the time, but they declined to say why they thought she needed the benefit of prayer.

-- Britain's Home Office decided recently, in the course of remodeling at the Brixton prison in London, that, because of Muslim inmates, all the toilets should be re-positioned so that users would be respectfully facing perpendicular to Mecca as they answered nature's calls. In China, meanwhile, several multinational corporations, along with the government's television network, said they are de-emphasizing pigs in advertising and promotion even though this is the Year of the Pig in the Chinese zodiac. The Han Chinese majority regard pork as their premier meat and the pig as a symbol of happiness, honesty and fertility, according to a January Wall Street Journal dispatch.

-- TV evangelist Darlene Bishop (Monroe, Ohio) had a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against her in late 2006 by the family of her brother, who died after a battle with throat cancer, which the family says Bishop convinced him (on his deathbed) that he had defeated through her ministry of prayer. Before her brother was stricken, Bishop's main healing example was herself, in that she touted prayer as having enabled her to beat her own breast cancer, but she later conceded that she merely believed herself stricken and that no formal diagnosis had been made. (Bishop's brother was a prominent country and western songwriter, and the family members are contesting his considerable estate.)

-- Two solutions to "bullying": (1) In November, a mother (with her two daughters and a family friend in tow) rushed to a school in Charlotte, N.C., to defend her 15-year-old son, who had been complaining of bullying. (Logically, a defense by one's mother might not put an end to bullying.) (2) The South Korean government commenced a pilot program in March to supply to-and-from-school bodyguards for kids who complain about bullying (to be funded by private donations). However, the bodyguards would not actually sit with kids in class.

-- Seattle parents of 9-year-old "Ashley" announced they have decided to give her intensive hormone therapy, which will likely cause her not to grow beyond her current stature (4-foot-5, 75 pounds), in that she has a likely permanent brain impairment that prevents her from almost all of life's activities (walking, talking, eating, keeping upright). The parents decided that, since she requires constant care, their incentive to take her places and engage her would be increased if she were of a manageable size rather than a full-grown adult.

(1) "Feral Shih Tzus Roam Georgia Condo Complex" (Science Daily); (2) "Son Gets Six Months, Probation, for Dismembering Mother" (WINS Radio, New York City); (3) "Judge Rules Government Supply of Marijuana Is Inadequate" (San Jose Mercury News). (The dogs romped through the Covered Bridge complex in Marietta; the 16-year-old son was found to be emotionally under the spell of a sadistic adult molester; and the federal government's marijuana farm was not producing enough for medical research.)

Brian Ward, 29, was arrested in St. Clairsville, W.Va., in February after a student's parent saw him acting strange while parked across the street from St. Clairsville High School. The parent reported that Ward appeared maybe to be having a seizure, in that his arms were "thrashing around," but police found that that was just his reaction to an illegal inhalant, which was not identified.

Novelist (27 books) David Eddings, 75, accidentally destroyed his Carson City, Nev., garage and part of his next-door office in January while he was flushing out the gas tank of his idle sports car. He said later that his intention was to remove the gasoline from the car to reduce the fire risk, but then he saw that some fluid had leaked onto the garage floor. For some reason, Eddings' curiosity about the leak (water or gasoline?) caused him to light a piece of paper and toss it onto the puddle, just to find out. "One word comes to mind," he later told the Nevada Appeal. "Dumb."

News of the Weird has formally retired the category of household-hoarding stories, but apparently Ann Biglin of West Yarmouth, Mass., has an additional problem: hoarding in her automobile. Police issued her a citation in February after her car jumped a curb and knocked over a light post, which Biglin explained was due to "several old coffee cups" and "assorted pieces of trash" that might have accidently fallen and hit the accelerator. However, police found the seats filled at least chest-high with trash. A Boston Herald photo showed the driver's seat uninhabitable, and its story described the mess as "mountains of trash" that came down as an "avalanche" on her accelerator.

Though much of Pakistan remains devoutly Islamic and sometimes even intensely tribal in nature, 28-year-old Mr. Ali Saleem enjoys modest success on television each week as a cross-dressing diva named Begum Nawazish Ali, whose flamboyant character alternates between coquettish and outrageous. According to a January New York Times dispatch from Karachi, Ali and his fans believe no biological female could do what he does, either because of religious norms or sensitive family "honor" (which sometimes leads relatives to punish or even kill female family members who bring them shame in their community).

(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.)

Mount Diablo High School (Concord, Calif.) students met in racial groups in February to prepare for upcoming statewide tests, to motivate them to improve their race's "team" score from the year before. Principal Bev Hansen defended the strategy of dividing whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians, pointing out both its previous successes (increases of from 46 points for whites to 80 points for Hispanics) and its ability to motivate by positive ethnicity (rather than allowing intergroup taunting over scores to fester).

-- The Money Drop: Germany saw a birth boom during the first days of the new year, attributed mainly to the government's child-bearing incentives (bonuses of up to the equivalent of $33,000, leading mothers to attempt to delay December delivery until the law kicked in on Jan. 1). Meanwhile, in the United States, according to a December New York Times feature, an estimated 6 percent of the annual 70,000 babies scheduled to be born the first week of January were once again induced early, for late December delivery, to take advantage of tax breaks worth at least $4,000 per child.

-- On Feb. 10, at the luxurious Lebua hotel in Bangkok, organizers brought in six master chefs from around the world to prepare the most exquisite dinner they could imagine for the 40 specially invited international gourmets, who dropped in to dine for $25,000 a person. Among the fare: Perigord truffles, "tartare of Kobe beef with imperial Beluga caviar and Belon oysters," creme brulee of foie gras and 10 of the best wines of the 20th century, including 1961 Chateau Palmer.

-- Zimbabwe's almost comically sad hyperinflation rate reached 1,593 percent in January (the dollars that bought a brick house with pool and tennis court in 1990 would today buy a single brick), but that did not stop President Robert Mugabe from ostentatiously celebrating his 83rd birthday on Feb. 24 at a party estimated to cost the equivalent of about $1.2 million. In early February, the government attempted to halt inflation by passing a law declaring it illegal.

-- An international team of biblical scholars learned recently that the sect thought to have been responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Essenes) became extinct because they were too modest about their toilet habits. According to a November report in London's Independent, the researchers found evidence of heavy fecal bacteria in a secluded area (which was also a graveyard) and deduced from the scrolls that the Essenes rejected defecating in the open (which would have allowed sunlight to kill the bacteria).

-- A January National Geographic TV special revisited an underreported Cold War struggle between Soviet and U.S. scientists rushing to perform head transplants. Russian Vladimir Demikhov, working in secret in the 1950s, grafted the head and upper body of a puppy onto the neck of a large mastiff (and both reportedly bemusedly tolerated the other for the four days that the "puppy" lived). American Robert White of Cleveland, Ohio, reportedly transplanted a dog's brain into another dog's neck and noted which characteristics transferred with the brain (until the dog died days afterward). (When even limited word got out about White's 1970 rhesus monkey head transplant, the public outcry forced his lab to close.)

-- The Royal Bank of Scotland, like other banks in the U.K., is widely criticized for charging onerous fees to customers who make mistakes on their account, such as overdrafts or late payments (levying charges of many times the actual costs of handling the mistakes). Customer Declan Purcell of East London sued the bank over the excessive fees and won a default judgment when the bank failed to respond. Armed with a court order entitling him to the equivalent of $6,600, Purcell led bailiffs into a Royal Bank branch lobby in January to seize four computers, two fax machines and cash.

-- Denver International Airport was reputed to be an "all-weather" facility that would operate seamlessly in a blizzard, but when it failed during the January snowstorms (closed for 45 hours), an embarrassed airport spokesman, Chuck Cannon, admitted he'd like "to choke the person who came up with (the 'all-weather') term." The Associated Press then discovered a 1992 interview with Chuck Cannon, bragging to reporters about his new "all-weather" airport.

Tennessee's death-row-execution procedures came under attack in February when critics realized they were a hodgepodge of lethal-injection rules intermingled with old electric-chair protocol. (Lethal injection thus now requires shaving an inmate's head and having a fire extinguisher ready.) Also in February, at a hearing investigating Florida's botched December execution of Angel Diaz, a special commission concluded that the executioner should have re-checked whether the IV line was in the vein, instead of (as he did) merely continuing to push the resisting chemicals into the arm. (The only formal qualification to be appointed a Florida executioner is to be at least 18 years old.)

Dr. Hugh Tilson, 67, an award-winning public-health researcher at the University of North Carolina, was arrested in January in a men's room at the Atlanta airport and charged with public indecency. Also in January, Lord Justice Richards, 56 (and one of Britain's most senior judges), was arrested for allegedly exposing himself to a woman on a train. And in February, William French Anderson, a world-renowned geneticist, 70 (and runner-up as Time magazine Man of the Year in 1995), was sentenced in Los Angeles to 14 years in prison for molesting an employee's daughter for four years beginning at age 10. Said Anderson, according to court records, "(S)omething in me was just evil."

(1) Clenzo Thompson, 45, was arrested in New York City in January after allegedly robbing the same Commerce Bank branch twice in three days. The first robbery ended when the chemical dye in the money bag exploded and spooked him, and he apparently failed to learn from that, in that the second robbery's money bag also exploded. (And three years earlier, Thompson had been caught after another bank robbery after having accidentally dropped his ID on the bank floor.) (2) Michael J. DeWitt, 39, was arrested for DUI in Fort Wayne, Ind., in February after he drove erratically into the parking lot of an Indiana State Police station early in the morning and told officers that he was there "to get a room." (A Holiday Inn was next door.) (Police later said they matched DeWitt's Hummer to the vehicle that minutes earlier had collided with a car nearby and left the scene.)

The U.S. Navy announced in February that it is planning to use 30 trained dolphins and sea lions for port security in Puget Sound near Seattle. Dolphins' sonar ability makes them excellent at detecting swimmers, and they are being trained to signal via a beacon when encountering one. According to an Associated Press dispatch, sea lions can carry special cuffs in their mouths and are being trained to clamp the cuff around a swimmer's leg.

(1) A 47-year-old registered sex offender died of a heart attack in Palm Beach County, Fla., in January; his body was found, nude, in front of his home computer on which he had been viewing pornography. (2) Another 47-year-old man was killed late at night, in February in Belle River, Ontario, when his snowmobile collided with a tree stump embedded in Lake St. Clair; the man had been waging a notorious, three-year campaign to have the stump removed from the lake because of the danger it posed to nighttime snowmobilers.

(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.)