The relatively recent creation of almost-obscene wealth has precipitated a crisis in Britain and New York City because the resulting demand for professional butlers far exceeds the supply. Longstanding butler schools in both countries are running at capacity, turning out debonair, refined manservants at salaries that may exceed $100,000 (plus, in the U.S., an extra $20,000 or so for one who speaks "British"), but fortunes are being created at an even faster pace, so that, increasingly, multimillionaires are just having to make do without one, according to recent reports in The Wall Street Journal and The Independent of London.

-- The Good Hope Hospital in Sutton, England, apparently had an official policy in recent years of reusing sheets from one patient to the next to reduce its laundry bill (estimated at the equivalent of $1 million a year), according to an April report in London's Daily Mail. The policy coincided with a period in which the hospital's reported cases of clostridium difficile infections doubled. (A hospital official said the policy had been discontinued, though some posters announcing it were on display.)

-- A Hall-of-Fame Lawyer: Kenneth Glenn Hinson, 48, who had served time for raping a 12-year-old girl, was arrested last year after two teenage girls reported that they had been kidnapped from their bedroom and dragged into a tiny, dungeon-like hole in Hinson's backyard, bound with duct tape and repeatedly raped. Despite the evidence, defense lawyer Rick Hoefer managed to convince a jury in Darlington, S.C., to find Hinson not guilty on all charges in April (based on the girls' inconsistent testimony), and Hinson remains in jail today only on an unrelated gun charge.

-- Years ago, officials on the Torres Martinez Indian reservation (about 40 miles southeast of Palm Springs, Calif.) decided that the tribe could make more money as a toxic dump than with casinos and luxury hotels, but now faces millions of dollars in federal fines as an out-of-control Superfund site, according to a June Los Angeles Times report. In addition to pits and piles laden with arsenic, dioxin and chromium, there is an area about 1,000 feet by 300 feet by 40 feet high consisting only of human sewage. The site's problems are not easily resolvable, said a UCLA professor who has studied Torres Martinez factions, in that "intertribal relationships" make it "complicated" to change policy.

In May, a curious Joe Heckel of Cincinnati and his son took apart the heavy punching bag Joe had bought for their boxing practice and to their surprise found it full of, not sand or plastic pellets, but men's and women's underwear (some used). According to a May report on WLWT-TV, the manufacturer, Technical Knockout Inc., eventually contacted the Heckels and admitted that it had experienced a "quality" problem and that the people who had thought up the bag-stuffing idea had been fired.

-- New-Age Ethics: (1) Texas A&M's business school punished 24 students in May for cheating on a business ethics exam (and investigated 27 others, but could not meet the school's legal standard of "irrefutable" proof against them). The offense was that some students took exams for others. (2) During the spring term at New Jersey's Kean University, former governor James McGreevey taught a course in "ethics, law and leadership," with the "ethics" part raising eyebrows, in that in 2004, he had hired an alleged potential lover, with almost no security experience, to be his homeland security adviser. (Said a political opponent, "Jim McGreevey teaching law and ethics is ... like Dr. Kevorkian teaching health maintenance.")

-- Community activist Therese Mallik testified against a crematorium's expansion plans in 2005 in Cessnock, Australia, reportedly saying that the building was already a disaster for the neighborhood and that she had seen a "ghostlike figure" above it at one point. After the Cessnock Independent newspaper reported her remarks, she sued the publisher for defamation, claiming that her statements, when published, made her appear "demented" or "irrational." (In June 2007, a jury ruled against her.)

In early March, highway patrol officers near Ontario, Calif., came upon an unlocked rental truck whose engine was still warm and which contained marijuana worth an estimated $20 million, with the driver undoubtedly on the run, and not just from police. And in April, the driver of a cocaine delivery truck took a curve too sharply in Medellin, Colombia, and spilled its 1-ton cargo on the highway. The driver (perhaps luckily for him) was arrested.

(1) In April, Marilyn Devaney, who is one of eight elected Massachusetts officials with authority over certain actions taken by the governor, was accused of assault in Waltham, Mass., after she allegedly hit a beauty-shop clerk with a curling iron when the employee declined to take Devaney's personal check. Devaney had allegedly, indignantly pointed out her status and yelled, "Don't you know who I am?" (2) In May, Philadelphia-area socialite Susan Tabas Tepper was accused of assaulting a domestic employee and then, when the employee threatened to call the police, Tepper allegedly intervened. "I will call the police. I'm important; you're nothing."

(1) In March, police in Ann Arbor, Mich., were called to the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at the University of Michigan after a female trespasser entered during the dinner hour and ignored repeated attempts to get her to leave (even though she merely sat down, removed her clothes and masturbated). Fraternity members said later they would throw out the two sofas she touched. (2) In March, Israel recalled Tsuriel Raphael, its ambassador to El Salvador, after he was found tied up, drunk and naked in the front yard of his residence, with several sadomasochistic sex toys nearby.

Howard Mayfield, 47, and Valerie Lester, 36, were arrested at his trailer home near Damascus, Va., in March as the two, according to police, nearly burned down the home while trying to destroy counterfeit money that Mayfield had printed. Police had served arrest warrants at 5:15 a.m., found the trailer smoky, and upon entering saw Lester near a bed (under which the fake currency was burning, with smoking pouring out), pretending to knit a sweater and to wonder about the commotion.

(1) Michael Wiley of Port Richey, Fla., in News of the Weird last year for his maniacal driving despite having lost both arms and half a leg in a childhood accident, was back in trouble in May, leading police on (and winning) a high-speed chase (but they recognized the notorious Wiley behind the wheel and arrested him the next day). Said an acquaintance, to the St. Petersburg Times, "He's one of the best drivers I've ever seen in my life." (2) In May, countries on the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development elected as its chairman the representative from Zimbabwe (noted in News of the Weird in recent months for its almost comical rate of inflation, which was 1,593 percent in January and 3,731 percent in May).

Recurring Themes: (1) An 18-year-old man intent for some reason on spray-painting graffiti in an electrical substation in Santa Fe, N.M., jumped the concrete wall and razor wire in May and started to work, but soon burned himself badly and died days later. (2) A 29-year-old man from Downers Grove, Ill., deciding for some reason to set off fireworks in his yard, was killed when he picked up an unexploded missile and peered down the tubing to see why it hadn't gone off yet (and the obvious happened).

(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.)

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.)