Afghan nationals who work at NATO's Kandahar Airfield must use their own "separate but equal" toilet facilities, according to a March dispatch in Toronto's Globe & Mail. The American officer in charge of administrative contracts said the policy was based on hygiene, in that some locals customarily stand on toilet seats and then squat down, which he said creates unusual messes, but also on some Muslims' carelessness in cleaning themselves in preparation for prayer, when their water bottles sometimes fall in and have to be fished out.

-- In April, two Labrador retrievers (Lucky and Flo) sniffed out another shipment of pirated DVDs (worth about $435,000) in a building in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. It was at least the second such bust since mid-March, when the U.S. Motion Picture Association of America loaned the dogs to Malaysian authorities because they can detect the polycarbonate and unique chemicals in the discs. So successful are Lucky and Flo that an unspecified crime gang has reportedly put out a contract on them.

-- (1) Ada Barak's spa in the northern Israeli town of Talmey El'Azar features a "snake massage" for the equivalent of $70, for which six king snakes or milk snakes slither over the client's body (a therapy said not to be stress-increasing, but stress-reducing, according to a January Reuters dispatch). (2) Another January Reuters dispatch, from Antwerp, Belgium, reported that doctors at the city's Aquatopia animal showcase had scheduled surgery to relieve Mozart, the iguana, of his painful priapism in one of his two functional penises.

-- Veterinarians in Tallahassee, Fla., were enthralled in January when a duck, "killed" by a hunter and placed in his freezer for two days, suddenly sprang to life and was rushed into surgery at Goose Creek Wildlife Sanctuary to repair its leg and wing. Then, on the operating table, the duck (named "Perky" by that time) once again flat-lined, only to spring back to life a second time.

-- American researchers in West Africa believe they've found the first instance of an animal (other than humans) building a multi-step weapon, after observing wild chimpanzees grab sticks from 1 to 4 feet long, sharpen the ends with their teeth, and murderously jab them into deep tree hollows where delicious bush babies may be nesting. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team even reported observing the chimps tasting the tips after the stabs, to ascertain whether they had actually located a prey. (One of the researchers said the ferocity of the jabbing reminded her of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho.")

-- Researchers at the Second University of Naples (Caserta, Italy) recently reported the case of a 65-year-old man who, because of damage to the fronto-temporal region of his brain, habitually assumes an identity appropriate to whatever setting he finds himself in (e.g., a doctor when he's around doctors, a bartender when in a bar), a behavior reminiscent of the Woody Allen character Zelig. The researchers said the man lacks awareness about his tendency to switch roles and in fact suffers from amnesia about his life since the brain damage, according to a March report by the British Psychological Society.

(1) A $60,000 mattress from the Swedish manufacturer Hastens, introduced to the United States recently for people who (according to the advertising) might believe that they're so special that they're entitled to a luxuriously rejuvenating night's sleep; and (2) Holy Drinking Water in half-liter bottles, from Wayne Enterprises of Linden, Calif., which supposedly obtained blessings from Catholic and Anglican priests for the ordinary purified water.

According to a report commissioned by Britain's Department of Education and Skills, some history teachers have dropped references to the Holocaust (and the 11th-century Crusades) out of fear that the regular history curriculum might confuse or anger Muslim students who have been taught differently in local mosques (according to an April story in London's Daily Mail). And London's Daily Telegraph reported in March that the head teacher at a school in Huddersfield had changed the June student festival production of Roald Dahl's "The Three Little Pigs" to "The Three Little Puppies," out of fear that Muslim children would be uncomfortable singing "pig" references. (A local Muslim spokesman immediately condemned the change as unnecessary, and the school overruled the teacher.)

The three Kentucky lawyers who won $200 million for their clients in a 2001 settlement with the manufacturer of the diet drug phen-fen, and whose contract called for a maximum of one-third commission (about $67 million) actually took $59 million more than that, according to clients who testified before a federal grand jury in March, which is expected to indict the lawyers soon for fraud, according to a New York Times dispatch. The lawyers had explained that they were taking an extra $20 million because they had decided to create a "charity" and were simply entitled to the other $39 million because they had to work extra hard. The Kentucky bar association has suspended the lawyers.

Army drill sergeant Edmundo Estrada, 35, was arraigned in January in Hampton, Va., on charges of indecent assault, on a complaint by a young subordinate who said Estrada prescribed a confidence-building regimen in which the two men role-played from a pornographic movie, with the trainee dressing as a Superman character and Estrada performing sexual acts on him. According to the arrest affidavit, when Estrada "torture(d)" the trainee, the man was to respond by "moaning." (Another trainee accused Estrada of trying to photograph his squad bare-chested, claiming he needed to document their physical growth.)

Finally, after four weeks of one customer's walking out on a dinner check, the staff of an O'Charley's restaurant in Bloomington, Ind., caught him. The diner had appeared on four consecutive Wednesdays nights, ordered two gin and tonics each time, then eaten a rib-eye steak each time, then asked to use the rest room each time, and then walked out on the same $25.96 tab each time. On March 28, the staff finally wised up and waited for him outside as he again tried to sneak out, and he was arrested.

As a result of a 2003 traffic stop in Ohio, Catherine Donkers was convicted of a child-seat-restraint violation (specifically, holding her baby in her lap for breast-feeding while driving), but she appealed, and in April 2007, a court ruled in her favor. The story made News of the Weird in 2003 because Donkers' husband, Brad Barnhill, who was not in the car, demanded that he be charged instead because his First Christian Fellowship for Eternal Sovereignty religion teaches that the husband must take responsibility for all of his wife's public actions (especially when the "public action" involves "the Beast," which is what the religion calls "government").

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (81) Preschoolers and first-graders who happen to find their parents' drug stashes and innocently bring them to school, sometimes even for show-and-tell-type sessions, as happened in March in Shreveport, La., when a first-grader brought in crack cocaine that might have been his 20-year-old mother's. And (82) people who call in fake bomb threats for the most selfish of reasons, such as to delay an airline takeoff that they're running late for, or to postpone a school exam they're not prepared for, or to get off work, as Brandy Killin, 26, allegedly did in Kearney, Neb., in March, to her employer First National Omaha.

(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.)

Doug Guetzloe, one of central Florida's most prominent political operatives (and a subject of investigations by the Florida Elections Commission and a highway agency in Orlando), had long eluded criminal charges by denying any knowledge of unethical activities that prosecutors were sure he was involved in. However, late last year, Guetzloe missed a payment on his rental storage locker, and 50 boxes of his personal and professional records were seized and auctioned for $10 to a curious citizen, who then gave them to Orlando's WKMG-TV, which had several earlier investigations of Guetzloe still pending. Based on early readings of the storage-locker papers, Guetzloe was indicted for felony perjury in March, and the case continues.

A federal appeals court in March turned down Ruth Parks' challenge to her re-election loss in 2001 as the recorder-treasurer of Horseshoe Bend, Ark., which she blamed on a conspiracy by the mayor and police chief. The court concluded that voters, not a conspiracy, had defeated her, perhaps because of the prominence of her belief in UFOs and the conflicting views of her and her husband as to whether she personally had ever been abducted by aliens: She said she hadn't, but her husband said she had, many times, and that the aliens had left scars.

-- Di Yerbury, the retiring vice chancellor of Australia's Macquarie University, is embroiled in a dispute with her successor over her spending habits, leading the successor to seize 1,000 pieces of art that Yerbury tried to take with her as she left. She has asserted that many of the works she had on display are her personal property, including a painting of a woman's derriere that she said she posed for 31 years earlier, and she offered in February to have the then-wife of the painter testify that the posterior in the painting is indeed Yerbury's.

-- Former pastor and Southern Baptist leader Lonnie Latham, who had for years prominently preached against homosexuality, was arrested outside a hotel in Oklahoma City in 2006 and charged with soliciting a lewd encounter with a man. But rather than tearfully apologize and enter rehab, Latham demanded a trial to proclaim his constitutional right to engage in consensual sex with an adult male, and in March 2007, he was acquitted.

-- (1) In January, a news crew for the Milwaukee station WDJT-TV, which was reporting a story on the danger of thin ice covering Big Muskego Lake, watched as their high-tech van's driver mistakenly drove onto the lake and broke through the ice, ruining the expensive vehicle. (2) At a fancy, catered-food affair for the World Social Forum meeting at the five-star Windsor Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, in January (where participants munched between discussion sessions on, among other topics, world hunger), street kids who normally beg for food money downtown raided the facility and picked the tables clean.

-- Mario Sims, 21, had his bail revoked, for a second time, by a judge in Racine, Wis., in March, after he cut off his electronic monitoring device and hopped into a limousine to be driven to Chicago in order to be a guest on "The Jerry Springer Show," where he announced that he will marry his soon-to-arrive baby's mother, who is Sims' half-sister. Sims was also a guest on the show last year, defending his affair with the woman.

(1) Students from rival campus organizations at the Dawood Engineering College in Karachi, Pakistan, had fistfights and threw furniture at each other in a January confrontation over which group should get credit for putting up posters urging students not to fight on campus. (2) A condominium on New York City's Upper East Side filed a $500,000 lawsuit in February against a Subway sandwich shop on the building's first floor, complaining about "nauseating" food odors, but according to a New York Sun reporter, the dominant "smell" involved is a scent highly valued by many clear-nosed, non-New Yorkers: fresh-baked bread.

-- (1) The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general revealed in March that, although 52 teams are at work tracking down foreigners who remain in the country even after being ordered out, the agency still has a backlog of 620,000 of these fugitive aliens. (However, the inspector general also admitted that there are not enough cells to detain that many fugitives, anyway.) (2) In February, after a three-month court battle, Indian national Mohammed Yousuf Mullawala, 28, was ordered deported for submitting false documents to authorities after his visa expired. He originally attracted attention at a truck-driving school in Smithfield, R.I., where he was allegedly curious about buying dangerous chemicals. Also, while seemingly intent on learning to drive a big rig, he was reportedly uninterested in learning how to back one up.

-- In March, a 35-year-old Iraqi national was detained at Los Angeles International Airport after security workers discovered a half-inch magnet, wrapped in gum and inside a napkin, tied by a coiled wire and housed in his rectum. He was released after he convinced investigators that he is merely a practitioner of therapeutic uses of magnets. (Earlier in 2007, the medical journal The Lancet published a doctor's letter to inform security officials that patients with perianal sepsis are typically treated by inserting suture material, knotted on one end but with the other extending outside the anus, a sight that might suggest to security monitors that drugs, or explosives, were at the other end of the string.)

(1) Two Bulgarian nationals were arrested in San Marcos, Texas, in January after being caught allegedly robbing coin-change machines at an apartment complex, and police subsequently found apartment guides for several cities in their van, along with a half-ton of quarters ($18,700). (2) Kevin Russell, 21, was arrested in Hobart, Ind., in February when he went to a Chase Bank and tried to cash a Bank One check for $50,000. The check was signed, "King Savior, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Servant."

Traditional Chinese celebrations have been mentioned several times in News of the Weird, including the annual Tombsweeping Festival in April, which calls on people to visit relatives' graves and leave offerings that will improve the afterlives of the deceased. Actual objects (such as jewelry and money) are no longer required, as paper representations are considered just as effective. This year, according to an Agence France-Presse dispatch, paper illustrations of dancing girls will adorn many graves, along with paper "Viagra" pills (and even more questionably, paper renditions of condoms).

-- "(Death row) is the calmest place I've ever been in," said convicted murderer Paul John Fitzpatrick in March to a judge in Largo, Fla., hoping to avoid a mere life sentence, which would place him in the general prison population. "I probably found the most peace I've ever had in my whole life (in his previous experience) on death row," he said. "It's just a hell of a lot easier ... doing time with murderers than it is with fools." (A decision was still pending at press time.)

-- In January, Georgia's devout governor, Sonny Perdue, ignored religion as the reason he supports the state's Sunday no-beer-sales law (and religion would be a constitutionally impermissible basis for the law, anyway). Rather, Perdue said, the real beauty of the Sunday law is merely to force Georgians to manage their time better, by getting everyone to finish their shopping for spirits by Saturday.

(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.)

In March, a jury in Los Angeles listened to nine psychiatrists testify, along with other witnesses who openly described their sex lives, before finally deciding that neither party in the shrink-vs.-shrink contest was all that emotionally healthy. Dr. David Martorano had sued the UCLA psychiatry department, blaming a loss of promotion on a failed affair with his supervisor, Dr. Heather Krell, who denied the affair, especially Martorano's claim of oral sex in a parked car. Krell's witnesses "diagnosed" Martorano with narcissistic personality disorder and being "addicted" to having women fall in love with him. The jury concluded that Krell did have the affair, but did not sexually harass Martorano or sabotage his promotion.

-- In February, when housing officials in Loebau, Germany, ran out of small apartments for low-income residents, they decided to put them in quarters that were larger than regulations allowed. However, the officials made the residents close off some rooms to stay within the allotted space and said inspectors would make regular visits to see that no one cheated.

-- Fire officials in Crystal River, Fla., stopped the planned performance in January of Jesse Aviles, "The Human Bomb," who was set to lie face down across two bar stools at the Oar House Restaurant and Lounge and have himself blown across the room by explosives. According to Oar House, the performance was canceled for the lack of permits. City Manager Andrew Houston, asked by the St. Petersburg Times what kind of permits might be necessary for a person to be exploded from a barstool, said, "I have no earthly idea."

-- Garri Holness, 39, is one of the Britons in a bad place at the time of the July 2005 subway bombings, and he suffered the loss of a leg, for which government programs compensated him with more than 100,000 British pounds (about $190,000). That is more than 10 times the amount of government compensation (in 2005 pounds) received by each of the two teenage girls from a vicious 1985 gang rape that Holness was convicted of participating in (and for which he served seven years in prison).

-- Hurricane Katrina Trailer Fiascos: In March, while FEMA was busy evicting the last Katrina victims that it had housed in trailers, it also disclosed that it has been stuck with 8,000 mint-condition trailers that have sat vacant for 18 months now in a field near Hope, Ark., because the agency hasn't been able to give them away (to government agencies, as federal law requires). (Also, WWL-TV in New Orleans reported in March that area hospitals continue to be overcrowded while specially equipped medical trailers, which were ordered just after Katrina hit and which took eight months to arrive, continue to sit unused.)

-- Marshall Wolbers, 56, was arrested in Lake Bluff, Ill., in February after he had allegedly ripped off almost two dozen spas in the Chicago area over the last year by luxuriating in massage and pedicure services, etc., but skipping out on the bill. Said one specialist on nails, to an Associated Press reporter, "I just want to look at him (a 300-pound man), like 'You jerk, you didn't even tip me. You made me rub your gross feet and listen to you for an hour and a half.'"

-- Police Blotter: (1) A woman in Bozeman, Mont., complained in March of "strange noises" from "underneath her house," being made by "people from the 'Underworld.'" She told police that her house had been "replaced" "in the middle of the night" and that the original was being stored at an undisclosed location. (2) Brook Akins, 34, was arrested in January in a Salt Lake City suburb after calling 911 12 times in five hours to complain of a toothache and demand to speak to someone who could help him.

(1) Super-charismatic Stacy Finley, 34, pleaded guilty in January in Shreveport, La., to defrauding 22 middle-class victims by somehow convincing them to pay a total of $989,000 to have medical scans done of their bodies by overhead satellite and to be administered secret therapeutic drugs while they slept, by CIA agents who would sneak into their homes. (2) Sacramento, Calif., veterinarian Bert Brooks told a KOVR-TV reporter in February that he had a record of curing pets by having them stare at a computer monitor showing psychedelic images ("harmonic translation"). "I didn't learn this in vet school," he told the reporter, but "(t)here's a lot going on in the universe that we don't understand today."

Ariel Milby explained her ostentatious sweet-16 party (televised in February on MTV) by pointing out that her dad owns his own oil company. "I love oil," she said. "Oil means shoes and cars and purses." "(Oil) smells like money...." But it's not just 16-year-olds who are spoiled. Reuters reported in January that New York City party designers get $25,000 and up for kids' birthday and coming-of-age bashes, including one 60-guest celebration for a 1-year-old, who of course slept through the whole thing. (In December, at a spare-no-expense birthday party for a 7-year-old girl in Coral Gables, Fla., a cougar brought in to dazzle the kids attacked a 4-year-old, who required hospitalization.)

Passions: (1) Entomology doctoral student Rebecca O'Flaherty of the University of California, Davis is a specialist on maggots, even to the point of creating "maggot art" (dipping them in paint and letting them writhe around on the "canvas"), though she doubts her passion is helping her land a teaching job. She told McClatchy newspapers in February that she admires the swiftness and elegance of maggots' ability to devour. (2) Clarence Horner's hobby, apparently, was collecting tombstones, in that upon his death in 2006 in Lincoln, Neb., authorities found 47 of them in his rented storage locker.

(1) Andre Henry was convicted on 27 criminal counts in Philadelphia in February (e.g., bank robbery, threatening witnesses and police officers), despite his cocky attitude on the witness stand. After the prosecution played back a recording of Henry confessing his crimes to a wire-wearing inmate, Henry was unfazed, quickly declaring that the confessor was really Henry's "twin brother" (except that the prosecutor easily showed that he doesn't have one). (2) A 17-year-old was arrested in January in Sheboygan, Wis., and charged with stealing a snowmobile from the Sheboygan Yamaha lot. However, the next morning, even before the dealer realized the vehicle was missing, the boy had brought it in for service.

Apparently, the remote village of Yaohnanen, on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, is preparing to celebrate the 86th birthday in June of their god, Prince Philip of Great Britain (an adoration mentioned in News of the Weird last year). The natives believe the prince is the son of an ancient spirit that resides on a nearby mountain, but so far have been content merely to display a well-worn picture of the prince. Though he has never visited, he did somehow pose for a photograph around 1980 while holding a traditional pig-killing club, which especially delighted the tribe.

(1) Biologists at Germany's University of Jena announced in January that they were terminating a research project on animal movements after three years because they were tired of waiting for a sloth named Mats to leave his perch. (2) In March, the Pascha brothel in Cologne, Germany, introduced an early-bird special for seniors age 66 and above, offering services for half-price between noon and 5 p.m.

CORRECTION: Two weeks ago, I reported that Gary Galleberg, a former vice mayor of Naples, Fla., pleaded guilty to battery for spitting on a diner's table at a restaurant. In fact, he pleaded no-contest. I apologize for the error.

(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.)