To fund a new Iraqi economy and government after the March 2003 invasion, the U.S. Federal Reserve shipped 484 pallets of shrink-wrapped U.S. currency, weighing 363 tons, totaling more than $4 billion, and, according to a House of Representatives committee staff report in February, most of the cash was either haphazardly disbursed or distributed to proper channels but with little follow-up tracking. By March 2007, The Times of London found bank records revealing, for instance, that two unremarkable Baghdad small-business men (appointed to the defense ministry) eventually deposited over $1 billion in private accounts in Jordan, and that U.S. efforts to buy state-of-the-art equipment for the Iraqi army were seriously undermined because middlemen purchased only cheap, obsolete Polish munitions and pocketed the savings.

-- On Jan. 31, several hundred Japanese husbands recognized the second annual Beloved Wives Day to upgrade Japanese men's notorious, deeply ingrained indifference to their spouses. Among the husbands' vows: be home from work by the unusually early hour of 8 p.m.; actually look into the missus's eyes and say "thank you"; and try to remember to call her by her name (instead of, as many apparently do in substitution, grunting at her). (Divorce in Japan remains relatively rare, but marital estrangement has been rapidly increasing in recent years.)

-- Several matrilineal cultures exist in the world, but on Orango Island, off the African coast of tiny Guinea-Bissau, women's power to choose marriage partners is nearly absolute, according to a February Associated Press dispatch. By custom, the woman selects a man, then prepares a special dish of fish marinated in palm oil, after which any reluctance on his part is regarded as dishonoring his family. Before the couple can cohabit, though, a family home must be built from driftwood and mud bricks, and fortunately for the man, that, too, is her job. Islanders told the reporter that men are becoming more assertive, but that change has brought with it the unheard-of phenomenon of divorce.

-- Spain has long been criticized for its traditions of animal abuse, such as bullfighting and, until recently, one village's festive custom of tossing a live goat from a church tower. German animal welfare activists complained in March about another Spanish "sport": the flinging of live quail into the air (from a catapult) so that hunters can shoot them. (Germany also has its ugliness, according to a March Der Spiegel report, with certain villages' customs of clubbing a hung-up goose and poking a cat with a broomstick through a hole in a crate.)

-- Among the world's emerging messiahs is lapsed-Catholic Jose de Jesus Miranda, 60, of Houston (who has ministries in as many as 30 countries), whose message includes drinking ("Jesus (Christ) drank wine because he didn't have Dewar's (scotch)"), smoking, rejection of the concepts of sin and hell, and condemnation of Catholicism and the pope (according to a March report from ABC News). Though El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras recently banned him, he is said to have tens of thousands of followers, many of whom joyfully have themselves tattooed with "666" to honor Miranda's self-description as an antichrist.

-- A professional burglar was arrested in the village of Klevan, Ukraine, in February (according to a report from the German news agency DPA) after he broke into a church to steal gold fixtures, fell asleep, got locked in the weekends-only facility for five days, and survived on the only liquid available: sacramental wine.

-- A senior Italian member of the Catholic organization Opus Dei, Ms. Paola Binetti, told a television interviewer in March that she often wraps a spiked chain around her upper thigh for two hours a day as punishment for her sins. Said a prominent Catholic writer (interviewed in London's Daily Telegraph), "The world is full of people who, thanks to God, freely choose their own type of suffering." Wrote the Opus Dei founder: "Blessed be pain. Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain ... glorified be pain!"

Preserve That Porn: (1) It looked like just another case of a man's hoarding junk in his apartment and providing a home for several hundred animals (in this case, pigeons and mice), but health officials in Toronto learned in a March raid that the resident was lucid enough to protect, from animal feces, his extensive collection of pornography by carefully wrapping the items in plastic. (2) Reclusive high-tech engineer Michael Palmer, 53, was arrested in Los Gatos, Calif., in April and accused of hiding a massive cache of child porn in 15 ammunition canisters he had buried in seven Saddam-like spider holes on his property, near his ramshackle cabin.

Safety First! (1) Britain's Health and Safety agency headquarters reportedly posted signs in various locations in the building warning workers not to attempt to move chairs and tables by themselves, but to call for porters (for which 48 hours' notice was required). (In April, London's Daily Mail reported, not surprisingly, that the agency's workplace injury record was very low.) (2) The head teacher at Bramhall High School in Stockport, England, decreed recently that students, who wear neckties to class, must use clip-ons and not knotted ties, in part because of the risk of choking.

In March, police in Trenton, N.J., arrested four men in separate incidents and learned that they fancy themselves as "diplomats" from the Abannaki Indigenous Nation and claim immunity from the laws of the "so-called planet Earth" (and, by the way, of Mars and Venus, as well). One allegedly possessed an unidentified "controlled substance," and the others were driving cars with made-up "diplomat" tags. The four showed no ostensible ties to the Abenaki Indigenous Nation, a tribe that first appeared in North America in the 17th century and which is still present in the northeastern U.S.

Anthony Perone, 20, pleaded guilty in March in Connecticut in connection with two stalking letters he admitted mailing to a woman he had fallen for in the third grade but who apparently had spurned him. The rambling, incoherent letters explicitly threatened death, and Perone had intended to send them anonymously, in that he wrote no return address on the envelopes. However, he lived with his mother and had given each envelope to her to mail, and, unknown to him, she had thoughtfully added his name and address before posting them.

A Web site based in Seattle shamelessly encourages pedophiles to look all they want at kids (and gives tips for where the sightseeing is best), as long as they don't touch, and police admitted to Fox News in March that so far, that's not illegal. Said founder Jack McClellan, 45 (whose preference is for girls ages 3 to 11): "I really think this pedophilia hysteria is overblown." "There's a kind of code of ethics that these pedophiles have developed." "(Many people) have the attraction, but they're not going to do anything physical because of the laws." (After the Fox report, the Internet service provider closed the Web site.)

(1) In March, a British Airways economy-class passenger on a flight from Delhi, India, died onboard, and the corpse was moved to the less-congested first-class section, to the chagrin of Paul Trinder, who had paid the equivalent of about $6,000 for his nearby seat. When he complained, he said he was told just to "get over it" and that no refund would be offered. (2) In March, officials at the Gaza-Egypt border noticed that a Palestinian woman entering Gaza had a particularly lumpy upper body and searched her to reveal, strapped to her chest, three small crocodiles, which she had intended to sell to a zoo.

(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.)

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.)