People can develop intimate, romantic relationships with objects (beyond mere fetishism, which produces only short-term arousal), according to one of Germany's most renowned sexologists, Volkmar Sigusch, interviewed for a May report in Der Spiegel. A reporter claimed to find individuals infatuated with a Hammond organ (and who feared infidelity when a technician performed repairs), New York City's Twin Towers (whose lover bathed with a miniature version), and the Berlin Wall (which a woman ceremoniously "married" in 1979 and legally changed her name in acknowledgment). Sigusch said this objectophilia was another indication of society's increasing "neo-sexuality."

-- Sachio Kawabata, 61, was awarded the equivalent of about $5,000 by a court in Kagoshima in January because the police abused him during interrogation over possible violations of election law. The judge found that Kawabata suffered "great mental anguish" when police wrote his family name and derogatory messages on pieces of paper and forced Kawabata to stomp on them.

-- The house specialty at the 800-year-old Yasui Konpiragu Shrine in Kyoto, Japan, is the prayer for strength to end a marriage or other relationship, mostly offered by female visitors who crawl into a "wish tunnel," but also available from on-site priests for the equivalent of about $50. Parents, also, may pray that a son or daughter ends a bad relationship.

-- While the California Assembly debated an open-hand-only spanking bill for parents this spring, the Bethel Baptist Church in El Sobrante continued to demand that spanking by flexible rod is the only punishment acceptable to God and that will produce wisdom in the child. No sturdier weapon may be used, nor the open or closed hand, nor even mere yelling, according to a church pamphlet cited by InsideBayArea.com for a May report. Said one parishioner-parent, "With my girls, the spanking relieved them of their guilt, which allowed them to be happy in a very short time afterward." Said another, "We disagree with timeouts. ... That's an attack on spanking."

-- In May, The Times of London, interviewing witnesses in Diyala province in Iraq, described scenes from the hard-core Salafist version of Islam being enforced (similar to what the Taliban imposed in Afghanistan), including breaking the fingers of those who repeatedly smoked cigarettes, prohibiting grocers from displaying bananas (as "obscene"), and requiring them to screen cucumbers from tomatoes (as the latter are "feminine vegetables"). One local man said he assumed that another restriction that farmers modestly cover their goats' "nether regions" was just a rumor, until he saw a goat wearing boxer shorts.

-- (1) In April, Bishop Michael Babin, for 25 years a leader of Genesis Ministries International in Oceanside, Calif., was charged (along with his son) with beating a golfer unconscious after accusing the man of stealing his ball at a local course. (Two years ago, Babin was nominated for a Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Award.) (2) In April, rival factions of nuns brawled, along with priests, in an Old Calendarist convent in Avdellero, Cyprus, leaving a church floor covered with blood. One faction said that a recently deceased bishop's will gave them control of the convent, but Mother Superior Markella and her nuns had been living there for decades and feared removal.

-- Stylin' and Profilin': (1) For fashionable women this season, the area just above the breasts is the most important part of her chest, according to a May New York Times report. A protruding collarbone is said to suggest a taut, fit (even though covered up) body. (2) Many young Sikhs in India are dispiriting their traditionalist parents by trimming years-long growths of hair and abandoning their signature turbans to favor a more Western look. However, a "turban pride" backlash has developed, featuring support groups, an International Turban Day, and a Smart Turban CD-ROM with tips on choosing just the right turban look.

-- China's Xinhua news agency reported in May that the country is sponsoring an Internet blitz for votes for the Great Wall in the current international contest to name the new "Seven Wonders of the World" (among, for instance, the Acropolis, Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal). Leaders are worried that if the wall fails to be voted in, the country will be shamed. China's other Great Wall problem, though, is how to stop the growing number of mining-company truck drivers who break holes in their Seventh Wonder in southern Inner Mongolia in order to avoid the pricey tolls the government charges at the authorized crossings.

-- In a Palmerston, New Zealand, court in March, lawyer Janet Robertshawe was called as a witness on behalf of an "alternative health" practitioner who had been charged with taking indecent liberties with female clients, and Robertshawe (a long-time client) agreed to help demonstrate the man's massage technique. Just feet from the jury, she removed her top and lay on a massage table while he gave her a vigorous, deep mashing, which shook her chest-covering towel off several times. Robertshawe later testified (while clothed) that the man's treatments had worked wonders for her: "I guess the treatments aren't for the faint-hearted."

-- Internationally known West Papuan freedom-fighter Jacob Rumbiak, 49, who was once locked up for 10 years by Indonesia as a political prisoner, was convicted in April of three separate incidents, on the same day in 2005, of masturbating in public on trains in Australia (where he is a research associate at RMIT University). According to Melbourne's The Age newspaper, his record includes arrests for at least three other, similar offenses on trains or airliners. Of the latest conviction, according to The Age's reporter, "If Rumbiak was humiliated (by the judge's decision) ... he showed no sign of it," and following the verdict, he shook hands with the police investigator.

-- Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Lolita Bullock turned herself in to sheriff's deputies in Jacksonville, N.C., in May, confessing to robbing a Bank of America a week earlier. She then immediately requested the "crimestoppers" reward money, which (since she was then under arrest) she asked be given to her friend who accompanied her. (2) Elevator vandals should do their work from the outside, not as two men in their early 20s did when they entered the elevator at the Lillestroem Train Station near Oslo, Norway, in May and then repeatedly kicked the door. The men essentially captured themselves when the damage jammed the motor, locked down the elevator and sounded an alarm, summoning the police.

-- The international movement to anoint apes with "human rights" suffered a slight setback in April when an Austrian judge refused to declare a chimpanzee a "person" (which, under Austrian law, would have entitled it to a legal guardian and allowed individuals to donate money to it). The chimp, Hiasl, and a companion are in limbo after their sanctuary went bankrupt, and their supporters say a guardian is necessary to keep them out of zoos or research labs. Said one activist: "We mean (by human rights) the right to life, the right not to be tortured, the right to freedom under certain circumstances. We're not talking about the right to vote." Austria's neighbor, Germany, prohibits using apes for research.

-- Benoit Derosiers, 51, who police said was so inebriated that he could barely speak when stopped for DUI and who had trouble standing, beat the charge in Provincial Court in Sudbury, Ontario, in April when he proved to the judge a "legal necessity" for driving drunk: He had just attempted suicide and thus was forced to rush himself to the nearest hospital in order to get psychiatric care to head off another attempt.

(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.)

One party active in the recent elections in India's Uttar Pradesh state represents the interests of "dead" people. Lal Bihari, 48, works on behalf of an estimated 40,000 living people who have been victims of relatives having declared them legally dead, usually in order to inherit their property, and once the government accepts such a declaration, the legal system in India is too slow, crowded and corrupt to bring that person back to "life." Bihari himself "officially" died in 1976, and despite several schemes (such as kidnapping a cousin in order to be arrested and thus proven to be living), he remained "dead" until his proof of life was accepted in 2004.

-- (1) Among the latest of Taipei's quirkily styled restaurants (according to an April Reuters dispatch) is the D.S. Music hospital-themed eatery, where diners sit around beds, are served by "nurses," and drink from IV lines hooked up to "medicine" in containers hung from the ceiling. (2) Earlier this year, Britain's Ann Summers sex-product company announced it would stop selling its remote-controlled Love Bug 2 personal vibrator in Cyprus after Cypriot military officials complained that the device's signals were interfering with army radio transmissions.

-- Leading Economic Indicator: The Japanese company Kongo Gumi closed its doors at the end of 2006, the victim of having borrowed too much money in the 1990s for the country's real estate boom. Kongo Gumi had been under continuous ownership of the same family since the year 578, according to Business Week, which noted that for over 1,400 of those years, Kongo Gumi had stuck to its signature business of building Buddhist temples, and failed only when it branched out into the unfamiliar field of real estate.

New Frontiers in Medicine

-- A woman in Columbia University's hospital had her gallbladder removed in March not by traditional abdominal surgery but by running instruments through her vagina, according to an April New York Times report. Doctors said that abdominal-muscle cuts are painful and slow to heal, and that surgeons are considering using the body's other natural openings, also, for some procedures. (In a landmark 2004 operation, doctors in India removed a patient's appendix through the mouth.) Still, a female New York University surgeon said the idea of gallbladder surgery through the vagina is "repulsive."

-- In May, doctors at Schneider Children's Hospital in New York, operating on a 3-year-old girl, removed a brain tumor that had made her one of only a tiny number of people in the world to suffer from a syndrome that caused her to laugh uncontrollably when experiencing a seizure. Her mother described the girl's facial expression before the corrective surgery as similar to that of the Batman character the Joker.

-- Spectacular: (1) Last year (according to a March 2007 Associated Press report), a computer technician for the Alaska Department of Revenue accidentally erased a disk containing all the data for paying the state's 600,000 residents their annual oil-revenue dividends, and a duplicate disk was also erased, and the fail-safe backup tape was discovered to be unreadable. It took two months of around-the-clock work for state employees to re-computerize all paper records. (2) London's Daily Mail reported in April that it was probably a 17-year-old apprentice plumber, on his first day of work, who mishandled a blow torch and started the fire that quickly burned to the ground a waterside mansion in Devon, England, worth the equivalent of about $9.8 million.

-- John Brandrick told London's Daily Telegraph in May that he will seek compensation from Royal Cornwall Hospital in Treliske, England, because he's still alive. He was diagnosed in 2006 with pancreatic cancer, with about a year to live, and he quit his job, stopped paying his bills, and used his life's savings to enjoy his last days. However, he was recently told he merely had (non-fatal) pancreatitis, and now he's broke.

A team of biologists from Yale University and the University of Sheffield in England reported in April that some species of ducks have genitalia so complex that they provide the female with unusually effective mating control. Both the male and female sex organs are sort of corkscrew-shaped, but the female's spirals in the opposite direction, allowing her (in the event of rape or opportunistic, nonmating sex) to "lock down" her procreative organs. Only when the female relaxes, the researchers point out, can sperm approach her eggs.

Just Shoot Me: Men continue to consider that having themselves shot (nonfatally, of course) might provide them sympathy and a valid excuse to avoid some unpleasant task. In February, John Amos wanted pal Emanuel Houston to shoot him, to get his upcoming rape trial in Martins Ferry, W.Va., postponed, but Houston refused, and the two then struggled over the gun until Amos forced Houston's hand (and the gun) against Amos' stomach and pressed on Houston's finger. And in May, in Baltimore, police said two college students had a third shoot them so they could avoid an onerous fraternity hazing ritual, but then later confessed that they are National Guardsmen and had themselves shot to avoid deployment to Iraq. (A National Guard spokesman said there is actually no deployment scheduled for their unit.)

-- New York public-access TV personality "Glendora" has filed a lawsuit against a Cablevision employee who allegedly bad-mouthed her to sponsors, and her latest filing, detailed in May by New York Law Journal, consists of (according to Yonkers Civil Court Judge Charles Wood) 360 handwritten pages, "completely irrelevant," with "multiple copies of a 60-year-old photo of the plaintiff with Bob Hope," "sheet music," "commentary about the impressive geographic expanse of the City of Yonkers," "details of how she 'writhed' while her chauffeur shot insulin into his abdomen," "an account of a near-miss with a deer on the Taconic State Parkway," "jokes" and "threats or exhortations to 'sue judges.'" Wood barred her from further filings without his approval.

Timothy Rouse, 19 (and who had been charged with assaulting an elderly person), was matter-of-factly released from the Kentucky Correctional and Psychiatric Center in LaGrange in April after jailers accepted as official a crudely written, ungrammatical fax ordering him freed, supposedly from the state supreme court but whose originating line clearly showed a local grocery store. Furthermore, it took the jailers two weeks to realize they had been scammed. (Fortunately, Rouse was easily re-arrested at his mother's house.)

"Zoo," a movie about men in quasi-romantic relationships with animals (based on the notorious farm near Enumclaw, Wash., that was the site of the 2005 death (from receptive sex) of a horse-lover), was released in April, and is generally not judgmental toward the human characters, according to a May review in Slate.com. "(Zoophilia)'s just like if you love your wife," said one of the men, and, "You're connecting with another intelligent being," said another. The characters throw parties that resemble mundane, all-male, suburban nights out. "These were people I could trust," said one. "I'd invite them to my home. (I) did ... Thanksgiving, I did Christmas dinners." However, noted the reviewer, the bonhomie was interrupted when one suggested, "Hey, let's go out to the barn and pester the animals."

(1) In April, a woman in Braintree, England, took her 2-1/2-year-old son to local firefighters (according to a Reuters dispatch) to ask if they would remove the toilet seat that had become tightly stuck to his head. (No explanation was reported.) (2) In February, Norwegian artist Jan Christensen placed his latest work, "Relative Value," at a gallery in Oslo, but it was quickly stolen (and hardly surprisingly, in that the piece contained about $16,300 worth of Norwegian money stuck to it).

(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.)

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.)