High-Tech Pet Care: The Japanese company Medical Life Care Giken said it will begin marketing, later this year, a device that measures pets' stress levels. The tiny patch on the bottom of a dog's or cat's paw changes color depending on the amount of sweat secreted, according to the researchers at Toyama University who developed it. And in March, New York's Long Island Veterinary Specialists performed complicated hip-replacement surgery on a 1-year-old shorthaired cat, using a material about the width of a wooden matchstick. Oreo was discovered wedged in the crawl space of a house. (Dogs receive hip replacements almost routinely now, but cats were thought to be too small.)

Local music producer Ricky Lackey, during questioning in March by a judge in Cincinnati to help her determine an appropriate sentence for Lackey for his crime of attempted theft, told her that he has no children but that he has "six on the way." The judge sought clarification. "Are you marrying a woman with six children?" "No," said Lackey, "I be concubining." All six women are due during August, September or October. Lackey, who had recently paid restitution to his victim, was released without additional sentence.

-- (1) So many U.S. executives want to visit India to make deals to outsource their companies' jobs that in March, India's Washington, D.C., embassy said it was forced to outsource the job of processing the executives' visa applications. (2) Yet another U.S. job was outsourced to India in May, that of "local government reporter" covering city hall politicians in Pasadena, Calif. The publisher of the Web site PasadenaNow.com said the local beat could be handled very well from India, through telephone interviews and by watching live city council telecasts on the Internet.

-- In March, the Los Angeles City Council agreed to pay wrongly accused Juan Catalan $320,000 to settle his lawsuit over having been held in jail for five months for a 2003 murder he could not have committed. Catalan maintained all along that he had been at a Dodgers baseball game at the time of the crime, with his 6-year-old daughter, but police distrusted the alibi. However, Catalan's lawyer subsequently learned that the HBO TV show "Curb Your Enthusiasm" had been filming at Dodger Stadium that day for an episode and, poring over time-stamped outtakes of crowd shots, finally found a scene with Catalan and his daughter in the stands.

-- (1) In lawsuit-friendly Madison County, Ill. (termed "the promised land" by some trial lawyers), a judge awarded $311,700 to Amanda Verett for a long series of painful injuries that her courtroom-veteran chiropractor has been treating. Verett said she was holding a door open at a Pizza Hut when an employee yanked it open farther, and calamitous shoulder, arm and hand injuries resulted. (2) In a more traditional settlement upstate in Chicago, Joyce Walker was awarded $4,110 in May for a workplace injury when she hurt her knee in a hospital restroom after slipping on a banana peel.

-- In January, Joshua Vannoy, 18, filed a lawsuit against the Big Beaver Falls School District near Pittsburgh for the disruption to his high school years when he and his family were forced to moved to another school district because Joshua was being too harshly taunted. His troubles stemmed from an incident a year earlier, just before a Denver-Pittsburgh playoff football game when Joshua chose to wear a Broncos jersey to class and was then forced by one teacher to sit on the floor and endure paper wads being thrown at him because he was, according to the teacher, a "stinking Denver fan."

-- At least five convicted sex offenders in Florida's Miami-Dade County have their official residence in a makeshift encampment underneath a bridge on the Julia Tuttle Causeway to Miami Beach, with the blessing of the state Department of Corrections, according to an April report by CNN. Officials say that the state's tough zoning law for sex offenders bars the offenders from most neighborhoods in the county because they are too close to where children congregate (and some sex offenders maintain regular homes even though they can't live in them because of the zoning law). The causeway camp, officials say, at least keeps the men visible to probation officers.

-- "Hey! Pick Up That Wrapper!": Great Britain is now famously saturated with surveillance cameras monitoring public spaces (4.2 million of them), creating alarming privacy concerns. On top of that, in April, after a pilot project in Middlesbrough, the government announced it will attach loudspeakers to the cameras in 20 districts so that officials who monitor the video can actually scold citizens who are spotted engaging in "antisocial" behavior.

-- Who Says the Internet Will Replace the Daily Newspaper? Sixth-grade students at South Hall Middle School in Gainesville, Ga., drew praise from the community in May with their impressive collection drive and charitable donation of 13,580 discarded newspapers (creating stacks totaling 142 feet). The local Humane Society's dogs and cats will put the papers to good use, and furthermore, said the teacher, urinating on the papers will help biodegrade the newspapers' ink.

Try to Read This Without Wincing: A cable broke on a leg extension machine at a YWCA facility in Akron, Ohio, in 2004, catapulting a steel bar forcefully at a 22-year-old football player working out for a shot at a college scholarship, hitting him squarely between his parted legs, whacking his left testicle. Three years later, he still walks gingerly and bow-legged because the slightest contact is painful (although he did manage to father a child in the interim). In April 2007, a jury awarded him $786,000 after hearing that the machine had been in disrepair.

In January, Ronald Dotson, 39, pleaded no contest to attempting to break into a Ferndale, Mich., store in order to steal a mannequin outfitted in a French maid's uniform, which authorities said was his seventh "statuephilia"-related offense in 13 years. "I thought I was getting my life together," he told the judge, even though his arrest came only days after he was paroled for the sixth offense. One of the previous arrests involved an apparently irresistible "woman" in a pink dress and bobbed hair, and in another, he was found in an alley with three lingerie-clad beauties.

Claude White, 34, was arrested in April in Elizabethton, Tenn., and charged with stealing a forklift, which sheriff's deputies later found overturned in the middle of a road, but with a pair of shoes and socks trapped underneath. Around the same time, a call came from Sycamore Shoals Hospital about a patient (White) telling an odd story of how he had suffered a foot-mangling (but not mentioning a forklift). By that time, however, deputies had found an exact match for the patient's missing toe, inside the sock that was inside the shoe that was underneath the forklift.

Updates: (1) Zimbabwe's almost comically sad hyperinflation, which News of the Weird reported had reached 1,593 percent in January (one could buy a house, pool and tennis court in 1990 for the same dollars as would buy a single brick today), was up to 3,731 percent in May, and is expected to get much worse. (2) Star Trek obsessive Tony Alleyne, who News of the Weird reported in 2006 was having a hard time selling his small apartment in Leicestershire, England, that he had fastidiously outfitted to the specifications of the starship Enterprise, and then redesigned as the flight deck of the Voyager, reported in May that he had a buyer, for the equivalent of about $840,000, roughly five times the value of a comparable flat in that neighborhood.

UPDATE: In November, News of the Weird reported the arrest of Michael McPhail of Spanaway, Wash., who was charged with bestiality under the state's brand-new law, having allegedly been caught by his wife having sex with the family dog. In May 2007, a jury in Tacoma, Wash., found McPhail not guilty.

(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.)

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.)