Atrocities, starvation and disease continue in the Darfur region of Sudan as humanitarians try out inventive strategies to get the world's attention. Nashville, Tenn., clothing designer Deborah Denson, for example, sells purple "Panties for Peace," earmarking half the proceeds for Darfur relief. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has written tirelessly since 2004 on the subhuman brutality in Darfur, lamented in a May column that Americans still seem less concerned about the rapes and murders of thousands of children there than, for example, about the 2005 plight of the "Pale Male" hawk evicted from a ledge on a luxury high-rise in New York City, and pointedly suggested that Darfur's victims adopt a puppy as their symbol. Citing research collected by the University of Oregon's Paul Slovic, Kristof imagined a picture of a lovable, tortured, Darfur dog as having a better chance of bringing donations and a demand to stop the killing.

NOTE: As evidence that weird news keeps repeating itself, this week's collection consists of recent instances of people doing the same old things that we've seen before in News of the Weird.

-- Fake police officers have graced News of the Weird (most recently in 2006) for pulling motorists over for officious scoldings on traffic safety, but a March 20 stop in Boca Raton, Fla., by an imitation, off-duty sheriff's deputy was special. He was riding with his girlfriend when he decided to stop a discourteous motorist, and when a real cop later showed up, the "deputy" was revealed to be not a cop and also not a "he." Rachel Otto, 21, wore her hair short on top and shaved on the sides, and her outing as a woman apparently shocked the girlfriend, who had been living with Otto for a week. Police said Otto's rap sheet included nine arrests for impersonating police officers.

-- Wrongly convicted defendants are freed from prisons regularly now, some after many years' incarceration, and lawsuits against the legal system that put them there are proliferating. Three men in Birmingham, England, who were recently freed after, respectively, 18, 18 and 11 years in prison for murders, were (in separate trials) awarded a total of 2.16 million British pounds (about $4.2 million), but the Court of Appeal ruled in March that they will have to give 25 percent back to the government as compensation for their "room and board," i.e., tiny cells and prison food, during all those years.

-- News of the Weird has informed readers several times of the claims by Transcendental Meditation practitioners that crime and war could be stopped cold by the channeling of huge amounts of human psychic energy into productive thought. (The movie director David Lynch led such a project in 2005.) In April 2007, Needham, Mass., psychiatrist Eric Leskowitz told reporters that he and his cousin are making a documentary film, borrowing the TM principle to measure the impact of Fenway Park fans' creating unified fields of brain waves to carry the Boston Red Sox to victory.

-- Men accusing women of "stealing" their sperm appeared in a pair of 2005 stories, including that of a Chicago doctor who impregnated herself with her doctor-boyfriend's sperm (from oral sex). (He sued her for theft, but an appeals court called the sperm a "gift.") In a less spectacular lawsuit filed in March 2007 in New York City, Quoc Pham charged that girlfriend Neli Petkova had exploited him to father a baby, and that as soon as she was pregnant, she discarded him, publicly terming him sexually inadequate and allegedly announcing that she had met another man, who "could make her cervix orgasmic just by thinking." Pham wants $1 million and visitation rights to the now-3-year-old.\

-- Jewelry store thieves sometimes swallow their stash at the scene to facilitate their getaway, but police now routinely wait out such suspects, monitoring the toilets until the "evidence" passes naturally (most recently reported in News of the Weird in 2001). Police in Canton, Ohio, arrested four men in March 2007, reasonably certain that one of them had swallowed a 2-carat ring worth about $30,000. After sifting through the toilets, police recovered the ring the next day, with the store's price tag still on it.

-- Japan's suicide rate is high, with death leaps among the most popular methods. In April in Tokyo, an 18-year-old woman jumped to her death from a nine-story building, but she landed on a 60-year-old man walking by. He suffered only bruises, as did a 27-year-old pedestrian in May 2000 when a 39-year-old suicider landed on him in Tokyo. (However, in March 2000, in Taichung, Taiwan, both the suicidal jumper and the unlucky pedestrian were killed).

-- It was only three months ago that News of the Weird reported that a man vandalizing a church cemetery in Lilburn, Ga., by knocking over gravestones had one fall on him, crushing his leg and causing him to wail for two hours in the middle of the night before he was rescued. On May 6, at Calumet Park Cemetery in Merrillville, Ind., Michael Schreiber, 22, couldn't wail because he was unconscious, with two broken legs, the victim of a half-ton gravestone that fell on him after he had knocked 14 over.

-- When an evangelical parishioner comes to the altar to receive "the spirit of the Lord" and falls backward, church-supplied "catchers" ease them to the floor, usually. Judith Dadd's lawsuit against Mount Hope Church went to trial near Lansing, Mich., at press time, as she sought compensation for head trauma and lacerations after no one was there to break her fall. (In a 1995 incident at a tent revival in Lafayette Parish, La., News of the Weird reported that the first overcome parishioner was caught, but a second, who was apparently overcome too quickly, landed hard on the first woman and broke three of her ribs.)

-- Medical literature reports, from time to time, patients with spiders nesting in their ears, and in May in Albany, Ore., Dr. David Irvine said that he chased a spider the size of a pencil eraser from the ear of 9-year-old Jesse Courtney (and then recovered a dead spider from his other ear.) Jesse thought the whole thing was cool and showed off the spiders in school. In a 1993 News of the Weird story, a British machinist with bad earaches was found to have a pregnant spider living in his ear, but he told a reporter afterward that he had grown fond of the spider and intended to keep her as a pet.

-- Amazingly, criminals on the lam for serious crimes still can't stop calling attention to themselves for the silliest of reasons (such as minor traffic infractions like having expired tags or a broken tail light). In San Diego in March, Larenzo Dixon, 22, was arrested at a downtown transit station during a police crackdown on jaywalkers. A routine check of the illegal street-crosser turned up a murder warrant on Dixon from Louisiana.

-- In January, a judge in Benton County, Ore., acquitted a 46-year-old man of sexually abusing his 10-year-old stepdaughter after he told the judge that he suffers from "parasomnia" and sometimes commits acts that appear volitional but during which he is actually sound asleep. Men in Canada and Great Britain in 2005 were also acquitted of sexual assault after courts heard medical testimony about what is now called "sexsomnia."

-- Nigerian Internet scams were thought for years to be so transparently fraudulent that they would work only on the very gullible, who would send thousands of dollars overseas in the naive expectation of receiving millions in return. However, it was also too good to pass up for a professional money manager, the longtime treasurer of Alcona County, Mich., Thomas Katona, who admitted in court in January 2007 that he had lost $1.25 million of taxpayer money, plus his own life's savings, in a Nigerian scam.

(And for the accomplished and joyous cynic, try News of the Weird Daily/Pro Edition, at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com.)

Religiously strict Saudi Arabia can't have traditional Western-style beauty contests, but there was a pageant in April in remote Guwei'iya, about 75 miles from Riyadh: a beauty contest for camels. More than 250 owners brought more than 1,500 camels to be judged by such standards, said one organizer (according to a Reuters dispatch), as "the nose should be long and droop down" and "the ears should stand back, and the neck should be long" and "the hump should be high, but slightly to the back." Prizes included more than 70 SUVs.

-- Among the long-term disabilities that have been drawing compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs (at a time when the returning wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan are meeting bureaucratic delays in getting their own disabilities properly compensated): 124,000 veterans receiving monthly checks because of hemorrhoids (according to a March Scripps Howard News Service report) and "thousands" of veterans since 1972 having received regular monthly checks to cover venereal diseases that they contracted on their own time while on active duty, including those treated for depression at having caught the disease (according to an investigation by the same reporter, published in May).

-- Fifty-six New York City principals and assistant principals and more than 500 schoolteachers have records so dismal that no school will take them on its rolls, leaving the school system the choice of either commencing long, expensive termination procedures for each or (as the schools chancellor has chosen to do) placing them into lower-status and make-work jobs (at their previously high rate of pay), according to a March report in the New York Daily News.

-- Close Enough for Government Work: (1) U.S. Department of Agriculture officials admitted in March that since the early 1970s, 250 of the nation's 6,000 meat-processing plants, which are all required by law to be inspected daily, have been inspected as rarely as biweekly (probably because they were too far away for an inspector to get to), according to a March Reuters report. (2) KUSA-TV reported in March that a Transportation Security Administration undercover team was able to sneak simulated liquid explosives past screeners at Denver International Airport about 90 percent of the time during a three-day test in February, in nearly every case because, though machines detected the explosives, the undercover agents talked the screeners out of personally searching them.

-- The University of Minnesota campus newspaper reported in February that some students are combining trips to the blood bank to make donations with quick trips to local bars for a drink or two, because they report a quicker and more powerful "high" immediately after blood loss. Said one, "As soon as the needle's out of my arm, I'm out the door (headed for a bar). The rest of the night's a good one."

-- Reuters reported in January that an increasingly popular beauty treatment of women in Singapore is having their eyebrows plucked and hair drawn back artistically by injected ink (similar to tattoos) in a process known as eyebrow embroidery, which the Straits Times newspaper estimated was an industry worth the equivalent of over $3 million.

-- Cops Getting No Respect: (1) Taryn McCarthy, 21, in the course of a contentious January arrest for DUI in Portsmouth, N.H., was further charged with five counts of simple assault, including four separate incidents of grabbing a state trooper's genitals. (2) Felicha Marin, 18, was charged with shoplifting shoes from a store in Richmond, England, in March, and (according to a report in the Edgware & Mill Hill Times) in the skirmish surrounding her arrest, she was charged with assault for "spray(ing) an officer with milk from her right breast."

-- Honesty Is (Sometimes) the Best Policy: Connecticut state trooper candidate Jon Van Allen decided that he would have a better chance to be hired if he were totally truthful on his application and in person and decided to tell his interviewer something no one else knew: that he had on two occasions fondled an adolescent girl as she slept and that he had been duly ashamed. Van Allen was immediately rejected for the job and arrested in April based on the admission, even though the girl said when questioned that she had no recollection of any of it.

New York Mets baseball fan Frank Martinez, 40, was ejected and then arrested at Shea Stadium in April after he allegedly shone a high-beam flashlight into the eyes of Atlanta Braves player Edgar Renteria during a game. A former neighbor, interviewed by the New York Post, said Martinez was once evicted from his apartment because he would commandeer the hallway after a Mets victory, and into the middle of the night, screaming "M! E! T! S!" as he paraded from one end to the other.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Eric Cunningham, 18, was arrested and charged with robbing a Hess gas station at gunpoint in Orlando in April, done in by his forgetting to take his gun case with him as he fled; inside was the receipt for his gun, made out to "Eric Cunningham." (2) Jazrahel King, 29, was arrested in Norwalk, Conn., in April when he tried to use, as a trade-in for a larger vehicle, the very Jeep that he had allegedly stolen from that very Wholesalers of America dealership several weeks earlier (and which still showed the temporary plate Wholesalers had put on it).

Last year, a BBC News correspondent in Sudan reported that village elders in the Upper Nile state had punished Charles Tombe, who had been caught being amorous with a goat, by requiring him to pay a dowry to the goat's owner, to endure a "wedding" to the goat, and to treat the goat as his "wife" to embarrass him. The dispatch ran worldwide and was the most popular story on the BBC News' Web site for 2006. BBC News reported in May 2007 that the goat, "Rose," which had given birth to one kid in the interim (clearly, not fathered by Tombe), had recently passed away after choking on a plastic bag.

(1) The Des Moines, Iowa, woman who was the victim in December of an Iowa Methodist Medical Center policy on disposal of amputated body parts (the woman wanted to take her toe with her): Gladys Goose. (2) The 41-year-old woman charged with assault in February, in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., after she allegedly grabbed a high-heeled shoe and smacked her boyfriend in the head several times: Kari Barefoot. (3) The name dog breeders apparently give to the increasingly common crossbreed of a shih tzu with a bulldog (according to a March story in London's Guardian): bullshih.

At a special session of Arizona's Court of Appeals in April, judges heard arguments on whether a bag of methamphetamine had been legally seized by police, who had a search warrant but not the authority to inspect body "cavities." The bag had been partially protruding from a certain cavity, and an officer pulled it out. The defense lawyer argued that the only legal precedent involved items hidden between posterior "cheeks" (i.e., where contraband would not be so secured), and thus that pulling it out was an invasion of privacy. However, the prosecutor, claiming that the bag was in plain sight and would have fallen out eventually, asked rhetorically, "Where does the butt end and the anus begin? ... The buttocks is just the bell end of the trumpet, and I don't think you (judges), for constitutional reasons, want to go there."

(And for the accomplished and joyous cynic, try News of the Weird Daily/Pro Edition, at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com.)

Barney Vincelette, who says his autism renders loud noises sickening to him, has been feuding for several years with neighbors in Houston, Del., over their rock music. At first, he invented his own sound-jammer, according to an April profile in the Wilmington News Journal, but a judge curtailed its use. Subsequently, he recorded super-annoying sounds of his own (including a foghorn) and had them written out as music ("Sonata for Calliope of Truck Horns About to Be Transcribed for Locomotive Horns Opus No. 1"), at which point the judge decided that permitting the neighbors' Bon Jovi but not Vincelette's sonata amounted to selective law enforcement, and the feuders settled their differences. (Vincelette, by the way, lives in a house shaped like a flying saucer.)

-- The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which operates mass transit just south of San Francisco, and whose employees stage about three dozen office parties a year, issued 33 pages of specifications in January to invite local companies to bid on a contract to supply sheet cakes. The winning bidder must be versatile enough to offer cakes in 11 specified flavors, 16 fillings, five icings and six toppings (but must also carry $3 million in liability insurance!).

-- Peru's Emilio Cordova, 15, won the South American chess championship in January, but rather than wind up a chess-obsessed nerd, he flew from the tournament site in Argentina to Sao Paulo, Brazil, and moved in with a 29-year-old stripper. After Emilio's two months in the fast lane, his father, with government help, went to Sao Paulo and snatched him back.

(1) After a street assault in January, a 22-year-old New Zealander was rushed to Wellington Hospital to have surgeons remove his car key, which was embedded behind his right ear. (2) After a vicious attempted carjacking in March, an 18-year-old Australian was sent to Fremantle Hospital in Perth, where surgeons removed a screwdriver embedded in his face.

-- (1) Mexico City taxi driver Manuel Quiroz was seeking a sponsor earlier this year for his pursuit of the world raw-chili-pepper-eating contest. Supposedly, he can guzzle dozens of them at one sitting and even harmlessly squeeze their juice into his eyes. (2) In February, Dublin, Ireland, software engineer Michael Killian demonstrated his sideways-traveling bicycle, in which a rider sits and pedals facing perpendicular to front and back, with each hand controlling a wheel, e.g., squeezing the right handlebar and pedaling moves the bike rightward.

-- In March three homeless men were awarded $10,000 each in a settlement with the city of Las Vegas because they were arrested in November for violating a since-repealed ordinance. The men had been cited for "illegally" sleeping within 500 feet of public urine or feces (a restriction the city thought would drive the homeless to isolated parts of town to relieve themselves and/or to sleep.) (In December, New York City panhandler Eddie Wise won $100,000 from the city when a judge ruled he had been illegally arrested 27 times under a law that had been ruled unconstitutional in 1992.)

-- In breathtaking attention to detail reminiscent of the movie "The Great Escape," some inmates at Michigan's Kinross Correctional Facility chipped through 8 inches of concrete, then continued tunneling until they had cleared the facility's two external walls by an extra 25 feet, but then a guard spotted an irregularity near a cell wall and discovered the operation. When stopped in March, the inmates were only 6 feet away (straight up) from freedom. (As in the movie, their greatest accomplishment was figuring out how to dispose of all that dug-out dirt without being noticed.)

-- To get her reluctant terrier "Missy" to eat dog food, Elaine Larabie decided to be a role model and eat some herself, after which, Missy indeed began nibbling at it. The next day, both Larabie and Missy were in Ottawa, Ontario, hospitals, vomiting and foaming at the mouth. The incident occurred in March, during the first days of the alert over rat-poison-laced pet food, and doctors suspected that as the culprit, but no definitive conclusion was reported in the press, and both Larabie and Missy recovered.

Stewart Laidlaw, 35, was banished from Thirsty Kirsty's pub in Dunfermline, Scotland, in March, following numerous complaints about his excessive flatulence. (A shocked Laidlaw said no one had complained before, but conceded that was probably because cigarette smoke had been masking the odor until Scotland's recent smoking ban.) And in December, an American Airlines flight made an emergency stop in Nashville, Tenn., when passengers reported the smell of burning matches in the cabin. A female passenger was found to have been lighting them at her seat in an effort to vanquish her flatulence odors.

In February in Bethlehem, Pa., middle school principal John Acerra was arrested and charged with selling crystal meth from his office (but not to students) (and when arrested in his office, after hours, he was reportedly nude). And in April, in Lorain, Ohio, principal Robert Holloway resigned after apparently too eagerly delivering on a wager. He had bet with some boys on a student-staff volleyball game and lost, and then paid off as agreed by kissing the boys' feet (but he was too much into it, the boys thought).

Tools of the Trade: (1) Michael Derenberger, 40, was charged with illegal voyeurism in Hernando, Fla., in March after being caught sticking a long pole with a hook on it through a girl's bedroom window, to pull down her comforter as she slept. (2) A 48-year-old man in Stockton, England, was found dead in January, naked, inside a large plastic bag attached to a vacuum cleaner, with police concluding at an April inquest that he got his sexual kicks through asphyxiation by having the vacuum suck all the air out of the bag.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Aaron Hudgins, 26, and Ruan Rucker, 24, were reported missing and presumed lost inside a coal mine in Kanawha County, W.Va., in April, and after a search-and-rescue operation, they were pulled out 24 hours later. They had no time to be grateful, though, for they were immediately arrested because the sheriff said they had gone into the mine only to try to find copper to steal. (2) Two men walked into a postal annex in Portland, Ore., in April, with one wielding a folding pocket knife, and announced a robbery. However, seconds later, the employees began laughing as the man with the knife couldn't get the blade out with his thumbnail, and the pair fled.

Beijing continues its intensive citywide upgrade campaign to impress visitors when the Olympic Games open in August 2008. In February, the city designated the 11th of each month as "voluntary wait in line" day to begin training Chinese to queue up for services in an orderly fashion rather than by their customary chaotic swarming. In April, retired restaurateur Guo Zhangi began a program offering people money (the equivalent of 25 cents each) to bring in dead flies. Also in April, guidelines were issued for taxi drivers, calling for a two-day suspension for cabbies who spit or smoke, have bad breath or dress garishly. (Taxi drivers in Shanghai have been issued special sacks to spit in, housed on the dashboard, to break their custom of spitting out the window.)

(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.)