The Fates of Three Class of '08 Students in Durham, N.C.: Two men did not graduate from Duke University in May because they were two of the three lacrosse players accused of rape in March 2006 and were forced to suspend their academic pursuits in order to defend themselves against the charges that were later dismissed. Another '08 student did graduate in May in Durham, from North Carolina Central University: Crystal Mangum, the drug-abusing, part-time stripper who had relentlessly accused the three of raping her but whose story was later found to be completely unsupported. Mangum's degree is in police psychology.

NOTE: As evidence that the 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.

-- In what would be a new modern record for the lapse of time between a death and its notice, neighbors found the mummified body of a Croatian woman in her Zagreb apartment in May, and police said no one remembered seeing her alive after 1973. (A Croatian news organization said the last sighting was in 1967.) She missed no maintenance payments because her building, which was state-owned when she was last seen, has since become a cooperative, and aggregate charges were paid for collectively by the other residents.

-- News of the Weird informed you in 2007 of camel beauty pageants in Saudi Arabia, but the obsession with the animal runs deeper, based in part on nostalgia for the days when camels were important for transportation. Breeders cuddle and nuzzle them, and at the country's largest camel market near Riyadh in March 2008, they bought and sold based, one breeder told The New York Times, on the standards of "judging a beautiful girl. You look for big eyes, long lashes and a long neck." Said another, "See this one? She isn't married yet, this one. She's still a virgin. Look at the black eyes, the soft fur. ... Just like a girl going to a party." He added (after kissing the camel on the mouth), "My camels are like my children, my family." (In January, a prominent cleric issued a decree condemning the pride people take in their camels.)

-- March is the season for Shinto religious fertility festivals in Japan at which symbolic phalluses are offered to the gods for business fortune as well as good sexual and marital luck. In the small town of Komaki, a 2-meter-long phallus is carried through town every year and presented to the local temple. The best-known celebration is the Kanamara Matsuri ("Festival of the Iron Penis") in Kawasaki, where colorful phallus floats abound and delight the children of all ages who line the streets.

-- Because Japan's suicide rate is so high, there is sometimes collateral damage. In April 2007, News of the Weird reported yet another instance in which a despondent person leaped off of a building (a nine-story edifice in Tokyo), only to land on someone else (a 60-year-old man, who was only bruised). These days, chemical ingestion is the trendy method, and in May 2008, a despondent farmer drank a chlorine solution and was rushed to Kumamoto's Red Cross Hospital, but as doctors tried unsuccessfully to save him, he vomited, and the fumes sickened 54 workers, including 10 who had to be hospitalized.

-- With rising prices paid for scrap metal come the increased threat of theft, and metal dealers are on alert, as well as power companies, which use valuable copper wire. However, as the number of thieves increases, so does the number of clumsy ones who fail to respect that electrical substations are live. In May, at least three men were killed and three others badly injured in attempts to steal wire from substations in Lancaster County, Pa., Somerset County, Pa., Savannah, Ga., Chicago and Edmonton, Alberta.

-- In April in Marion, Ill., an alert newspaper carrier discovered an 84-year-old woman who was alive but had been pinned to the floor for four days without food or water because her much larger husband, 77, had died of a heart attack and fallen on top of her. (In a notorious 1984 incident at a strip club in San Francisco, a dancer had been pinned down overnight underneath the body of club manager Jimmy Ferrozzo, who had had a fatal heart attack while having sex with her. She could not move because they were lying on top of a stage piano that descended on a pulley, for the dancer's grand entrance, and Ferrozzo, in the throes of ecstasy, had accidentally tripped the switch sending it back up, where it jammed against the ceiling.)

-- There was yet another fight in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre this past Easter (celebrated in mid-April by Orthodox Christians). This time, Armenians (one of the six Christian branches that share management of the holy site) believed that a Greek Orthodox priest had encroached on their part of the church and tried to eject him, leading to a brawl in which some in attendance used Palm Sunday fronds as weapons. It usually falls on Jerusalem's Muslim police officers to restore order.

-- For Easter every year in Vrondados on the Greek island of Chios, villagers carry on a 19th-century tradition in which parishioners of two churches attack the other's building with homemade rockets during midnight Mass. Villagers spend the days before Easter boarding up windows in order to minimize damage, and the goal is to be first to hit the other church's bell tower.

-- In 2006, News of the Weird featured the 5-year-old boy who was set to enter kindergarten as a 5-year-old girl after his parents agreed with therapists that 5 is not too young to be formally switching genders. In 2007, pediatric endocrinologist Norman Spack started a gender-identity clinic at Children's Hospital Boston, motivated by his observation that even preadolescents can be at risk to harm themselves if they are confused or angry about their sexual orientation. According to a March 2008 Boston Globe report, Spack first recommends drugs to delay puberty, to give the child more time, before moving on to the usually irreversible effect of gender-changing hormones.

-- In a well-publicized story in January, two New York City men were charged with fraud after they rolled a dead friend's body in a chair from their apartment to a check-cashing store, propping him up to suggest that he was alive and wanted the men to cash his Social Security check for him. In May, a judge set the men free after they told him that the three had an income- and expense-sharing arrangement and that they thought their friend was merely incapacitated. Since the autopsy was inconclusive as to time of death, the charges were dropped.

-- An Indonesian man whose skin disorder caused him to grow hideous, root-like tissue that overwhelmed his hands, feet and face, and who was featured on a Discovery Channel program in November, has now lost four pounds' worth of the wart-like growths through surgery and a vitamin A regimen, and at last can grip a pen. American dermatology professor Anthony Gaspari, who is helping him, concluded that he has the human papilloma virus, which normally causes tiny warts, but because of an immune deficiency, the man was unable to restrain their growth.

-- In April retired engineer William Lyttle, 77, was ordered by the town council in Hackney, England, to pay the equivalent of about $560,000 for repairing the damage he has caused to neighbors in his 40-year obsession of digging deep into the ground on his property, causing not only collapses of parts of his own home but in some cases the integrity of surrounding houses and the street. Authorities discovered a maze of tunnels underneath the 20-room house, in addition to the many holes in the yard, into which Lyttle had dumped cars and boats.

(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 U.S. military operates a beachfront vacation site for its personnel worldwide and their families at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, with $42-a-night air-conditioned suites, surfing, boat rides, golf course, bowling alley and even a gift shop. One T-shirt for sale reads, "The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort." News of the facility was not widely reported until a British lawyer who represents 28 of the nearly 300 detainees housed there described it to London's Daily Mail in May.

-- Another Criterion for Teacher Certification: Police in Fort Myers, Fla., were called to Royal Palm Exceptional School in April and wound up arresting an 8-year-old boy named Deshawn for punching his female teacher in the face, leaving several bruises. Said Deshawn's grandmother, Dorothy Williams, when interviewed by WBBH-TV: "He gets very upset, and he loves to hit," but "If he was overpowering her that much, I feel like she shouldn't be in that line of work."

-- America in Decline: One of the Internet's successful Web sites (10 million page views a month, with $500,000 in ads from companies including Verizon, McDonald's and General Motors) is a site that merely reports on what celebrities' babies are wearing, in that so many mothers are apparently obsessed with mimicking those clothing choices for their own tots. A May Wall Street Journal feature said sometimes the site's posting a photo of a celebrity baby incites a nationwide run on what it's wearing.

-- Workplace Culture: (1) Salesman Chad Hudgens filed a lawsuit in January against his former Salt Lake City employer, charging that the boss and a "motivational trainer" used, as a "team-building" exercise, what was essentially the controversial "torture" practice of "waterboarding." The boss allegedly said that if salesmen tried as hard to close deals as they're trying to breathe during the simulated drowning, sales would soar. (2) British office worker Theresa Bailey, 43, was awarded the equivalent of about $10,300 by a court in Ashford, England, in May after she complained of sexual harassment by her otherwise-all-male direct-marketing team at Selectabase company. Among the "laddish" behavior was her boss's regularly "lift(ing) his right cheek" and expelling gas in her direction.

-- Most Convoluted Business Plan: Adolfo Martinez, 33, and Mark Anderson, 26, were indicted for fraud in Las Cruces, N.M., in April, accused of passing forged checks. The men's plan was to buy Domino's pizzas with the checks, then have one of the men put on a Pizza Hut shirt and resell the pizzas, by the slice, in a local park or at stores (even though the pizzas were still being carried around in the Domino's boxes).

-- Triumph International, the Japanese women's underwear company, released its latest publicity-seeking creation in May: the solar-powered bra, with enough exposed panels to power an iPod or cell phone. Other Triumph specials include a baseball bra (with fielder's-mitt-shaped cups) and a heated bra (with microwavable gel pads to warm the cups).

-- Joe Weston-Webb, formerly a carnival showman but who now runs a flooring company in Nottinghamshire county, England, told reporters in March that he was exasperated at crime in the area and his inability to legally use enough force to protect his property, and that he had pulled two pieces of non-lethal equipment out from the old days to shoot at criminals: a 20-foot-long cannon, formerly used for firing his wife across the River Avon (now loaded with rubber-tipped projectiles) and a 30-foot-high catapult (now loaded with chicken droppings from a nearby farm). Said Weston-Webb, "(T)he only people who seem to be against what I'm doing are the police."

(1) A supervisor at the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services told a Billings Gazette reporter in March that some of his employees were complaining that new computers delivered to the office lacked games like solitaire, hearts and Minesweeper, and that it wasn't fair that employees with older computers still had the games. (2) The traffic commander of the Rusafah district in Baghdad told his officers in April to start enforcing the country's seat-belt laws. The fine is the equivalent of about $12.50.

(1) The leader of the Liberal Party in the Australian state of Western Australia said in April that he would not resign even though an accusation against him was true: that at a party staff meeting in December 2005, when a female colleague got out of her chair, he playfully moved over and sniffed it. (2) The Missouri Supreme Court suspended the law license of David A. Dalton II in March for allegedly arranging leniency, with a prosecutor, for one of his clients in exchange for the client's having her godfather, retired football star Terry Bradshaw, autograph a baseball for him.

In May, a New York appeals court rejected a lawsuit by the former mistress of prominent married rabbi Joel Goor, 75, that claimed he would owe her a $125,000 cash settlement if he broke up with her. The court said it was a contract that facilitated adultery and therefore was not enforceable, even though there were several non-adultery-related provisions. According to the New York Post, the contract called for the woman to receive a half-interest in Goor's house in the Bronx if she would "join Joel in his cultural experiences without complaining," get liposuction and "attempt with Joel's delicate guidance to speak English properly."

At One With Nature: (1) Cameron Fritzson, 20, landed in the hospital in critical condition in May after he scaled first the outer, 10-foot fence at an electrical substation in Pembroke Pines, Fla., and then the main electrical tower, where his arm brushed against a live wire. Police said Fritzson was after a parakeet's nest at the top so he could sell the eggs to a pet store for as much as $20 each. (2) Sixteen people were undergoing treatment for possibly having rabies in May in Hilton Head, S.C., after exposure to a baby raccoon later discovered to be rabid. While some of the 16 had merely cuddled it, an unknown number apparently could not resist kissing the wild animal on the lips.

Last year News of the Weird reported on an organic art project, "Victimless Leather," in which artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr attempted to grow embryonic stem cells of a species onto an artificial platform, in this case creating leather from mouse cells without the need to kill cows. However, in the latest demonstration of the project, at New York City's Museum of Modern Art this spring, the exhibit apparently grew so rapidly that it overwhelmed the space available, and curator Paola Antonelli said she was forced to kill the organism. She told the Art Newspaper that it was a difficult decision. "I've always been pro-choice, and all of a sudden I'm here not sleeping at night about killing a coat."

(1) A 31-year-old man was hospitalized in critical condition in Salt Lake City, hit by cars after running into traffic to avoid paying for a taxi ride he had just taken (March). (2) A 25-year-old man, pursued by police after he tried to run down his girlfriend with his car, fled on foot across Interstate 45 near Houston, but was struck and killed by cars (February). (3) Two men who stole a kayak and went joyriding on Moon Lake near New Port Richey, Fla., drowned when the boat capsized (March).

(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.)

-- A provision in Switzerland's constitution recognizes the "dignity" of "animals, plants and other organisms," and a federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Gene Technology declared in an April report that vegetation has "inherent worth" and that humans cannot exercise "absolute ownership" over it but must treat it morally, measured case-by-case. For example, the committee said a farmer's mowing his field is acceptable, but not the arbitrary severing of a wildflower's bloom. The committee would permit genetic engineering of flora, since plants would still retain the "autonomy" to reproduce on their own.

Can't Possibly Be True

-- After officials in Batu, a tourist town in East Java in Indonesia, asked its massage parlors to make clear to customers that they are not houses of prostitution, one parlor owner created uniform pants for his women with a padlockable zipper, and "locks in" each masseuse in front of the client at the beginning of a session. Other parlor owners have followed along. A local women's group representative complained that it is the customers, not the women, who need restraining.

-- In April the Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome (which last year created a watch made from remnants of the Titanic) introduced the "Day&Night" watch, which unfortunately does not provide a reading of the hour or the minute. Though it retails for about $300,000, it tells only whether it is "day" or "night" (using a complex measurement of the Earth's gravity). CEO Yvan Arpa said studies show that two-thirds of rich people "don't (use) their watch to tell what time it is" anyway. Anyone can buy a watch that tells time, he told a Reuters reporter, but only a "truly discerning customer" can buy one that doesn't.

-- Progressive Mullahs: The Iranian government, treating addicts as people who need help rather than as criminals, agreed in April to install vending machines offering inexpensive syringes (at about 5 cents each) in five city welfare shelters in order to keep addicts from sharing needles and spreading AIDS and hepatitis. Iran blames its festering drug problem on its common border with opium-producing Afghanistan.

-- Women Certainly Are Different From Men: Sara Tucholsky, all 5-foot-2 of her, marshaled her strength for her first-ever fence-clearing home run in April, which would have given her Western Oregon University softball team the lead against favored Central Washington, except that she tore a ligament rounding first base. Since she was unable to move, by rule she (actually, a pinch-runner) would have had to remain at first base instead of circling the bases, but two Central Washington players picked Tucholsky up and carried her around the bases to allow her to get credit for the home run. "You deserve it," one opponent said. "You hit it over the fence." Kindness hurt; Central Washington lost, 4-2, and was eliminated from the playoffs.

Inexplicable

-- In April, according to police in Fort Pierce, Fla., Amity Joy Doss, 24, grabbed a young McDonald's employee by her shirt to emphasize her dissatisfaction with service and demanded to the manager that she be fired. A call was made to police, and Doss wandered outside, climbed a tree, hung upside down by bended knee for a while, then descended and lay down on the hood of her car before re-entering the restaurant and asking if the girl had been fired yet. She was arrested on several charges.

-- A 2007 decision of New York City's Civil Service Commission reinstated a police officer even though NYPD has ruled him unfit for duty, in large part because he admitted to a "fear of dead people," which the department had thought would make his job difficult. (However, in March 2008, a New York City judge overturned the commission ruling.)

-- Angelique Vandeberg, 28, was arrested in May in Sheboygan, Wis., and charged with felony child abuse after her 8-year-old daughter reported that Vandeberg had intentionally shot her in the leg with a BB gun, leaving her unable to walk without difficulty, in order to win a $1 bet with her boyfriend. (Police said alcohol was involved.)

It's Good to Be a British Prisoner (continued)

(1) A high-ranking official in Britain's prison guards union said in a radio interview in April that the jails are so understaffed and poorly managed that in one (Everthorpe Prison, East Yorkshire), drug dealers actually put up ladders at night and come over the walls in order to sell drugs, and inmates routinely comment that drugs are easier to get inside than on the street. (2) The British government in January acknowledged that inmates in 2007 had been awarded the equivalent of over $250,000 in education "maintenance" grants, intended to provide such expenses as room and board for recipients of education loans. (The ministers said they would soon close that loophole.)

Fetishes on Parade

(1) CNN TV personality Richard Quest was arrested in New York City's Central Park after curfew in April, with drugs in his pocket and a rope around his neck tied to his genitals, according to a New York Post report (which had no explanation of the purpose of the rope). (2) Firefighters responding to a burning house in Crystal Lake, Ill., in April were told by three people fleeing that another man was in the basement, chained by the neck to a post. When rescued, the man denied that anything was wrong. Said the deputy police chief, "We're not really sure what everyone's relationship in this is," and consequently no one was charged.

Least Competent Criminals

-- Poor Ride-Management Plans: (1) Two teenagers were arrested in March and charged with highway shooting sprees near Waynesboro and Charlottesville, Va., that shut down Interstate 64 for six hours. Surveillance video suggested the perps got away in a 1974 AMC Gremlin, and the only one in the area belongs to the 19-year-old. (2) Three men were arrested in New Orleans in February and charged with possession of almost two pounds of marijuana after police were called to a car on fire, which they said started when the men stashed their dope under the hood, and it overheated.

-- Recurring Themes: (1) Mr. Cash Burch, 24, was arrested in Waterloo, Iowa, in April after he broke into a truck and tried to start it but apparently ran down the battery doing so, which triggered a theft-prevention device that locked the doors, trapping him inside, where he was waiting when police arrived. (2) Justin MacGilfrey, 19, was arrested in February for the attempted robbery of a Circle K convenience store in Daytona Beach, Fla. The clerk had chased him from the store when he realized that MacGilfrey's only "weapon" was a pretend gun he made using his finger and thumb.

The Aristocrats!

(1) San Diego City Council candidate John Hartley said he would stay in the race despite his March arrest and no-contest plea, which came after two women said they saw him, parked in front of their house one evening, masturbating into a cup. (He said it had been a long day of campaigning and that, as he later wrote in a mailing, he "had to take a leak.") (2) Officials at Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu City, Philippines, apologized in April on behalf of at least six doctors and other personnel for laughing raucously during surgery and making a party video (that was later uploaded to YouTube) of the operating-room removal of a perfume canister from the anus of a male patient.

(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.)