Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre most recently made News of the Weird in 2004 because of continued petty territorial fighting among the six Christian denominations that share management of the church, which is home to some of Christianity's holiest sites, including that of Christ's resurrection. As Easter approached this year, three of the groups that control one 10-stall restroom could not agree how to divide responsibility for repairing it, leading to a pervasive stench in the building. Furthermore, the path of the outflow sewage pipe (which needed enlarging) passes under property of a fourth denomination, which has resisted helping unless it is granted control of one of the 10 stalls.

-- Britain's General Dental Council found dentist Alan Hutchinson guilty in April of several hygiene violations, including frequent hand-washing lapses, failure to sterilize instruments that he had taken off treatment trays to clean his own ears and fingernails with, and, more than once, urinating in his surgery sink. The council said it needed another hearing to decide whether Hutchinson's habits impaired his treatment of patients.

-- Following a three-year investigation by federal and local authorities in Orange County, Calif., the owners of at least 10 massage parlors were arrested in March and accused of running prostitution establishments. Among the investigators' findings was that, to reduce the cost of supplying condoms, the salons urged customers to use plastic food wrap, which management bought in large quantities. Said District Attorney Tom Rackauckas, "I really don't think about (plastic food wrap) in the same way anymore."

-- Our litigious, anger-fueled, dispute-intensive society took a break in a Folcroft, Pa., courtroom in March, as landlord Genevieve Zumuda, 77, was suing tenant La Tina Osborne, 32. In the middle of Osborne's defense, Zumuda started shaking and suddenly stopped breathing, but Osborne interrupted her argument and gave Zumuda CPR until paramedics arrived. "When people are down," Osborne said, "if you can help them, you help them."

-- (1) New performance-appraisal rules by India's Ministry of Personnel, for the country's senior-level bureaucrats, included a request that females disclose the dates of their last menstrual period, according to an April Reuters dispatch (but within days of the rules' release, the ministry rescinded that provision). (2) In April, near New Orleans, motorcyclist Charles Warren, minding his own business in the left lane of Interstate 12, was hit by a bathtub (which had fallen from a pickup truck in the right lane) and was hospitalized with severe injuries.

-- Tentatively scheduled for July (nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina forced the chaotic evacuation of New Orleans) is the resolution of two dog-ownership cases, in which a judge in Pinellas County, Fla., will decide, after months of relentless haggling, whether the Louisiana owners, Steven and Dorreen Couture, "abandoned" their dogs as they complied with evacuation orders, or merely left them temporarily at a shelter, which wrongly offered them for adoption. Two Florida women claimed the dogs separately, and have fought doggedly to retain them. (One is an assistant district attorney in Tampa who has been represented in part by one of the city's highest-priced lawyers.)

-- The Scandia Family Fun Center, which operates a super thrill ride (168 feet high, spinning at 60 miles an hour, pulling 3.5 g's) called the Screamer, in Sacramento, Calif., decided in March that because of neighborhood residents' noise complaints, riders would be prohibited from screaming (and subject to ejection from the park).

-- The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, released in February, revealed that 12th graders' reading ability is at an all-time low, yet their grades for English class are at an all-time high (averaging 2.82 on a 4.0 scale, up from 2.52 15 years ago). Also, Washington state legislators, faced with 10th graders' declining achievement test scores in math and science, are poised to just eliminate the tests altogether (while retaining those for reading and writing, which do not show declines), according to a March Seattle Times report. (Some math and science would still be tested, but only right after math and science classes, when memories are fresher and, presumably, scores would be higher.)

(1) In Bridgeport, Conn., in March, Fermin Rodriguez, 21, was charged with assault for stabbing his wife several times (after an argument over her alleged infidelity); police said that following his attack, he apparently handed his knife to the couple's 2-year-old son and said, "Now, you stab Mommy." (2) According to the manager of BJ's Pawn Shop in Gretna, La., a customer came in with his diaper-clad boy of about age 2 in April and handed the kid an AK-47 from the store's shelf, instructed him how to hold it in order to "mow (people) down, kill everybody," and told him that "Daddy's going to buy you this chopper." The manager, incredulous, said he took the gun back and shooed the pair out.

Officials in Apex, N.C., finally confiscated the 80 sheep that David Watts had long been keeping in his home as pets (he slept upstairs, they downstairs), with the final straw coming when some of the sheep wandered into the local cemetery and munched on fresh floral arrangements. The town had apparently tolerated Watts's eccentricity for years because of his pleasantness. Said a next-door neighbor, "(Officials) felt like he was (merely) living an alternative lifestyle."

(1) South Carolina Highway Patrol officers arrested Howard Fisher, 54, in March and seized 43 pounds of marijuana from his car, after he for some reason was unable to avoid crashing into one of their cruisers, with which they had blocked two lanes of Interstate 95 while investigating accidents. (2) Three men, allegedly carrying $4,000 worth of drugs, were arrested at a toll station on the Triborough Bridge in New York City in March because, between them, they lacked $4.50 to pay the toll. (They had asked an officer if they could mail it in, but a check of the driver's license revealed it had expired, after eight suspensions.)

In March, the owner of Di's Diner in Bulls Gap, Tenn., reported that a "blond, heavy-framed female" tried to take out a catfish dinner without paying for it and that when confronted, the woman got angry and threw money at the cash register. When the owner followed her into the parking lot, the woman threw the dinner, hitting employee Tina Henry. And in April, David Moser, 28, complained that his Bulls Gap home had been burglarized and that missing were handcuffs, six packs of cigarettes, a set of $1,200 car wheels and 300 tongue rings.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Gary Wayne Ray Jr. (Oklahoma City, February); Larry Wayne Brigman (St. Paul, Minn., charged in February for a 1989 murder, but already in prison for a different murder); Lewis Wayne Fielder Jr. (Laurens, S.C., February); Robert Wayne Wyant (Charlottesville, Va., February). Confessed to murder: Timothy Wayne Shepherd (Houston, March). Sentenced for murder: Jimmy Wayne Bass (Mobile, Ala., February, life in prison for DUI homicide). Re-captured after a brief escape: convicted murderer Michael Wayne Brunner (La Grange, Ky., March).

(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.)

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.)