After several reports of grizzly bears intimidating people near Alaska's Russian River, the state Department of Fish and Game recently gave several usual-suspect bears makeovers, using ordinary hair dye in bright colors (yellow, green, orange, blue) to make it easier for people to identify the specific bears that are menacing them. Environmentalists were critical, objecting to turning pristine wilderness into a gaudy, "punk"-colored park. Animal-rights activists, too, suggested that colored bears might find socializing difficult (but a bear researcher quoted by the Anchorage Daily News discounted that fear, based on a previous, similar project).

-- On one fateful day in 2003 in Sikeston, Mo., according to Holly Adams, she had sex at different times with Raymon and Richard Miller, who are identical twins and who did not know about each other's encounter. Adams became pregnant, but both Millers deny paternity despite, of course, an identical DNA match for each brother (with both claiming that it must have been the other). Adams has named Raymon the father, and a court must decide paternity and child support just like courts did before DNA testing was developed.

-- Sarah Dacre, 51, walks around all day dressed like a beekeeper, which she says she must do following her 2005 self-diagnosis of "electrical sensitivity," according to an April profile in London's Daily Mail. The hallmark of her outfit is a veil that she says keeps away the incapacitating waves from appliances ranging from cell phones to refrigerators. Her house's windows have gauze shades, and the wallpaper a tinfoil lining, and Dacre, who still uses a computer three hours a day, nonetheless believes "wi-fi" will be the "tobacco" of our times, ultimately to be reviled for causing so many as-yet-undiagnosed illnesses.

-- Police in Rapid City, S.D., stopped a car at about 1 a.m. on June 5 and found the female-looking driver to be intoxicated and, at 18, too young to drink. They also found that the passenger was local alderman Tom Johnson, who called the driver his "helper" at his middle-of-the-night task of personally putting up yard signs for his campaign for mayor. According to the Rapid City Journal, Johnson continually referred to the driver as a woman, but police later learned that the driver was a man dressed as a woman, which Johnson claimed he was shocked to find out.

-- Older and Younger: (1) In January, a judge in Farmville, Va., declared a mistrial in an attempted-murder case after the defense lawyer (James Sheffield, 74), said he had lost his train of thought right in the middle of his closing statement. (2) At the other end of the spectrum, Victor De Leon III celebrated five years on the pro videogaming tour, according to a June profile in The New York Times, which means that, at 9, he has been a pro gamer since age 4.

(1) In June, Indian farmer Shiv Charan Yadav, 73, failed his high school gateway exams (normally given at age 15) for the 38th time, and what's worse, he had vowed the first time not to marry until he passes; he said he would immediately start studying for number 39. (2) In May, the San Antonio (Texas) Independent School District announced that Elizabeth Rojas had been fired as principal of Smith Elementary school after failing for the 38th time the required state educators' test. (However, she was reassigned to a lesser position at Smith, at almost her old salary.)

-- About 100 people were able to escape the perhaps-fatal effects of a sinkhole that collapsed under their one-story apartment house in eastern Sarawak, Borneo, in April, only because Renjis Empati, 57, had arisen in the middle of the night to go to the communal toilet. He noticed the ground moving and awakened all the residents. Said one woman, "If it were not for him, most of us would be dead by now."

-- Pardon Me: (1) Helen Gallo, 61, charged with shoplifting in Cape Coral, Fla., in April, told police she was forced to bypass the slow checkout line because her irritable bowel syndrome was acting up. (2) Cedar Rapids, Iowa, TV station photographer Gerry Edwards was fired in March for unprofessional conduct because a November funeral he was covering lasted so long that he had to urinate outdoors in an area that was visible to funeral guests. (3) Former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, after the first Republican presidential debate in May, explained one awkward answer he gave (about firing a worker who was gay) by claiming, in part, that he was distracted by his need for a restroom break.

In April, FBI officials warned of a disturbing series of threats dating from 2004 to college athletic officials and news organizations from someone apparently upset that television coverage of cheerleaders emphasizes those showing the least amount of skin (such as Ohio State's, who often wear long-sleeved, jacketed outfits). According to an FBI agent interviewed by The Columbus Dispatch, the writer appears to be growing angrier and may have recently included an insecticide-like substance in letters, with the last batch predicting that, unless changes are made, there will be "88" assaults, based on the writer's arcane formula.

Can't Stop Ourselves: Sheriff's deputies in Hilmar, Calif., arrested Tasha Silva, 30, in April and charged her with stealing a deputy's pickup truck, but her boyfriend and co-suspect, Marcus Schulze, fled. According to the sheriff's office, the couple drove away, thought they were in the clear, and stopped to have sex in the truck, but left the engine idling, and the truck ran out of gas before they were finished. When deputies finally spotted the truck, the couple had to flee on foot, and only Schulze escaped.

In Congo, which has lost an estimated 4 million people in the civil wars of the last decade and where many must get by on about 30 cents a day, "gangs" of designer-clothes-wearing men periodically square off against each other in preening contests in the streets of Kinshasa to prove that Versace and Gucci look better on them than on others. Papy Mosengo, 30 (interviewed for a November 2006 Los Angeles Times report), still lives with his parents, sleeps in a dingy, closet-sized room, and leaves child-care expenses to his ex-girlfriend, but he owns 30 top-of-the-line outfits and spends $400 monthly on clothes. Said he, "This is just what I am." (The "cloth cults" of Congo are said to have been around since the 1970s.)

In early May, "scores" of Taiwan lawmakers brawled on the floor of parliament, wrestling, throwing punches and spraying water at each other over an election reform bill, according to a Reuters dispatch. However, a week later, one legislator, and also a U.S. political scientist who follows the Taiwan legislature, told a Reuters reporter that most of the legendary brawls on the floor are staged in order to impress constituents that their members "fight" for them. One legislator said a leader may call in advance for his allies to wear soft shoes, in anticipation of a shoe-throwing fight, to limit injuries.

(1) The most recent instance of someone killed by a flying cow occurred on a road near Carnarvon, Australia, in May, when a 26-year-old man in an SUV accidentally crashed into a cow and knocked it into the air; it landed on the vehicle's roof, collapsing it and crushing the driver. (2) In April, a prominent cat veterinarian (who was director of the Feline Health Center at Cornell University) was killed near Marathon, N.Y., when he swerved, on his motorcycle, attempting to avoid a cat on the road, and was thrown from the bike.

(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.)

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.)