When Alcoa Inc. prepared to build an aluminum smelting plant in Iceland in 2004, the government forced it to hire an expert to assure that none of the country's legendary "hidden people" lived underneath the property. The elf-like goblins provoke genuine apprehensiveness in many of the country's 300,000 natives (who are all, reputedly, related by blood). An Alcoa spokesman told Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis (for an April 2009 report) that the inspection (which delayed construction for six months) was costly but necessary: "(W)e couldn't be in the position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people." (Lewis offered several explanations for the country's spectacular financial implosion in 2008, including Icelanders' incomprehensible superiority complex that convinced many lifelong fishermen that they were gifted investment bankers.)

-- Among the lingering sex-based customs in Saudi Arabia is the restriction on women's working outside the home, which forces lingerie shops to be staffed only with males, who must awkwardly make recommendations on women's bra styles and sizes. The campaign for change, led by a Jeddah college lecturer, has enlisted even some clerks, who are just as embarrassed about the confrontation as the customers, according to a February BBC News dispatch.

-- Only in Japan/Only in Sweden: (1) Sega Toys Co. reported in January that, in just three months, it had sold 50,000 units of the Pekoppa, a "plant" consisting of leaves and branches that flutter when "spoken to," the success of which the company attributes to the epic loneliness of many Japanese. (2) Advocates for children complained in April that Sweden's national library, acting on a standing order to archive copies of all domestic publications, has been gathering books and magazines of child pornography from the years 1971-1980, when it was legal, and, as libraries do, lending them out.

-- The Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace commenced campaigns in February critical of the peculiar preference of Americans for ultra-soft or quilted toilet paper. In less-picky Europe and Latin America, 40 percent of toilet paper is produced by recycling, but Americans' demand for multi-ply tissue requires virgin wood for 98 percent of the product. The activists claim that U.S. toilet paper imposes more costs on the planet than do gas-guzzling cars.

-- Buddhist monks continue to add to their 20-structure compound near the Cambodian border using empty beer bottles, according to a February feature in London's Daily Telegraph. Their building program, begun in 1984, already uses 1.5 million bottles, mostly green Heinekens and brown, locally brewed Chang, both of which are praised for letting in light and permitting easy cleaning.

-- A group of an estimated 10,000 believers is attempting to reverse American Christianity's declining birthrate by shunning all contraception, in obedience to Psalm 127, which likens the advantage of big families to having a "quiver" full of "arrows" (and which calls itself the QuiverFull movement). "God opens and closes the womb," explained one advocate, to National Public Radio in March, noting that in her own church in Shelby, Mich., the mothers average 8.5 children. "The womb is such a powerful weapon ... against the enemy," she said. "The more children I have, the more ability I have to impact the world for God."

-- Australian Marcus Einfeld (a lawyer, former federal judge and prominent Jewish community leader) was once decorated as a national "living treasure," but he suffered a total downfall in 2006 by choosing to fight a (Aus.)$77 speeding ticket. By March 2009, he had been sentenced to two years in prison for perjury and obstructing justice because he had created four detailed schemes to "prove" that he was not driving that day. His original defense (that he had loaned the car to a friend who had since conveniently passed away) was accepted by the judge, but dogged reporting by Sydney's Daily Telegraph revealed that lie, plus subsequent elaborate lies to cover each successive explanation. Encouraged by those revelations, the press later uncovered Einfeld's bogus college degrees and awards and an incident of double-billing the government.

-- A high school student in Oakton, Va., was suspended for two weeks in March when she inadvertently brought to school her birth-control pill (her prescription for which was approved by her mother). It was only then (with two weeks off to research it) that the girl discovered that, in comparison, county rules required only one week's suspension for bringing heroin to school. Officials told the Washington Post that birth-control pills are particularly objectionable because they countermand the school system's "abstinence-only" sex education classes.

-- Bad Decisions: (1) Chrysler Corp. may be on its last legs as a stand-alone company, but that did not stop its representatives from disrupting a funeral proceeding in Cranbury, N.J., in March to subpoena the corpse (which the company said is relevant to a pending lawsuit over mesothelioma). (2) Joseph Milano, owner of Goomba's Pizza in Palm Coast, Fla., was in the federal witness protection program for squealing on Bonanno crime family members in New York but lost his anonymity in January when he was arrested for allegedly pistol-whipping a customer who had dared to criticize his calzone.

Recent Human Biting: (1) Sheila Bolar, 49, was arrested after biting a transit driver because she wanted to ride only a "hybrid" bus (New York City, January). (2) Aleyda Uceta, 30, was arrested for biting her son's principal during a parent-principal conference (Providence, R.I., March). (3) Curtis Cross was arrested for allegedly biting off another motorist's ear in a road rage incident (New Castle, Ind., April). (4) Lyndel Toppin, 50, bit down on his fiancee's arm, resulting in nerve damage, because she had arranged the cheese incorrectly on his meatball sandwich (Philadelphia, April). (5) Blaine Milam, 19, and Jessica Carson, 18, were arrested for performing an exorcism on their baby daughter that resulted in 20 bite marks (Rusk County, Texas, December).

Our Elected Leaders: (1) During an April Texas House committee hearing (according to a Houston Chronicle report), state Rep. Betty Brown suggested a solution to the voter-registration confusion caused by Chinese-Americans' Anglicizing their names (which yields nonstandard spellings): "Do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens," she asked a Chinese-American activist, "to adopt (names) that we (lawmakers) could deal with more readily here?" (2) During a March Florida Senate debate on whether to exempt "animal husbandry" from the law against bestiality, Sen. Larcenia Bullard asked (seriously, according to a Miami Herald reporter), "People are taking these animals as husbands?"

News of the Weird has noted two previous instances of "Weekend at Bernie's"-like attempts by a relative or friend of a newly deceased person to dress up the corpse and bring it to a bank to convince officials that the dead man is merely frail and to request funds from his account. Both of those attempts failed, but in Witbank, South Africa, in March, the Afrikaans-language daily Beeld reported success: A post office supervisor released a government check to two women who had brought in a dead pensioner but only after the women promised that the money would only be used for the man's burial expenses.

Homeless couple Darryl Washington and Maria Ramos were injured in 1992 when a train rammed them as they were having sex on a mattress on the tracks at a New York City subway station. The injuries were not severe, thanks to a quick-acting motorman. Nevertheless, the couple went on to file a lawsuit against the Transit Authority for "carelessness, recklessness and negligence." (The outcome of the lawsuit was not reported, but the couple's lawyer was, at the time, quite aggressive in justifying the filing: "Homeless people are allowed to have sex, too," he said.)

The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration recently postponed its crucial program to rejuvenate quarter-century-old Trident missile warheads because no one can remember how to make a key component of the weapons (codenamed "Fogbank"), according to a March 2 report of the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found that, despite concern over the bombs' safety and reliability, NNSA could not replicate the manufacturing process because all knowledgeable personnel have left the agency and no written records were kept. Said one commentator, "This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he's read them." (The GAO report came two months after the German Interior Ministry reported to Parliament that over a 10-year period, it had lost 332 secret files that were in fact so secret that no one in the Ministry could recall what was in them.)

-- Researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute recently published findings of a cross-cultural study of people's spit. "(W)e can get more insights into human populations (from saliva) than we would get from just studying human DNA," the team's leader told Reuters in February. The study's main conclusion was that spit content does not vary much around the world, even given regional differences in diet.

-- Spanish researchers at Autonomous University of Madrid reported in February that wolves (and almost surely dogs), when relieving themselves, deliberately seek out the most conspicuous places they can find (both as to sight and smell), to assure maximum territorial signaling. Male wolves prefer tall trees (and dogs, prominently located fire hydrants) and try to leave urine as high up as they can to increase its wind-carry, according to a Discovery Channel summary.

-- Biologist Michelle Solensky, of Ohio's College of Wooster, reported late last year in the journal Animal Behavior that male monarch butterflies are such calculating inseminators that they even decide the optimal level of sperm necessary for reproductive advantage. While injecting fluid, the male can "selectively" determine how much of it will be fertility cells, depending on how much residual sperm the female holds from previous suitors (and thus to always inject more than the other guys did). Solensky told New Scientist magazine that the penis acts as a kind of "dip stick" to check the quantity already present.

-- Tight Money: (1) As Italy's banks (like so many others) curtailed lending during the global financial crisis, the country's 180,000 small businesses had nowhere to turn for liquidity except to the Mafia, whose lending continued (at ridiculous interest rates, of course), unrestricted by the recession, according to a March Washington Post dispatch from Rome. Organized crime in Italy collects an estimate of the equivalent of $315 million a week. (2) In March, because of budget cuts, the Municipal Court in Mount Gilead, Ohio, ordered its clerk to accept no new filings of any kind (including criminal cases) unless the filer brings his own paper for printing the legally required copies to be distributed.

-- London's Daily Mail reported in March that among the recession-themed business start-up grants awarded by the Welsh Department of Work and Pensions was the equivalent of about $6,600 to the Accolade Academy of Psychic and Mediumistic Studies. One of the Academy's owners defended the award, noting that parents who have lost a child need to know that the child is safe.

-- For the past two years, Britain's Jean Driscoll, 72, has been studied by two doctors and three hospitals' staffs, but so far no one knows why she belches constantly every day. "I don't go out anymore," she said. "People laugh and stare at me. One man said, 'Can't you control that?'"

-- The Democratic Process: (1) In March, George Snyder Jr., 39, was removed from the May election ballot in Westmoreland County, Pa., when a judge ruled that Snyder lived outside the county and not really in the garage storage room that he claimed was his main residence. (2) In December, John Kaye, a member of Australia's New South Wales Parliament, proposed a remedy for the recent displays of immature partying by some of his colleagues: "Honestly," he told Sydney's Daily Telegraph, "if you are going to have breathalyzers for people driving cranes, you should have breathalyzers for people (who pass) laws."

-- Vinyl Lust: (1) A 23-year-old man was arrested in February and charged with a series of break-ins at sex shops in downtown Cairns, Australia, in which the intruder inflated plastic dolls, had sex with them and left messes. (In the break-ins at Laneway Adult Shop, the perp appeared to be sweet on "Jungle Jane.") (2) George Bartusek Jr., 51, was arrested in February in Cape Coral, Fla., in his car in the parking lot of a Publix supermarket. He had parked next to the front door, apparently to obtain the optimal audience, and was having sex with two blow-up dolls in the front seat. He told police he had come to the shopping center to buy clothes for his gals.

-- Not Ready for Prime Time: In March, two men were seen on a backyard surveillance camera in St. Petersburg, Fla., attempting a home break-in during the day when no one was home. According to the police report, one of the men assumed a football stance, then ran the length of the yard and rammed the back door. However, the latch held, and the impact sent the man backward, leaving him on the ground, writhing in pain. The collision also triggered an alarm, and the men escaped before police arrived. (2) Two adults and three teenagers were arrested in Waterville, Maine, in March and charged with arson, with all the evidence needed consisting of a video the five made, describing their crime, crafted with theme music and cast-and-crew credits.

-- Several Florida jurisdictions have restrictions on where convicted sex offenders can live, even those who long ago finished their sentences. As noted in News of the Weird in 2007, Miami-Dade, Florida's most populous county, has only one spot far enough away from places where children roam: the approach to the Interstate 195 bridge to Miami Beach (the Julia Tuttle Causeway). Judges routinely give released sex offenders the choice of either leaving town or camping under the bridge. One man has been there so long that he now has a Florida driver's license with his address as "Julia Tuttle Causeway Bridge." In March, the encampment of about 50 men welcomed its first female sex-offender, 43-year-old Voncel Johnson, who told the Miami Herald that she had so far been treated respectfully.

-- Recent Public Appearances: Dade City, Fla., February (Jesus in a stain on the door of a car-dealer sales manager's office). Huntsville, Ala., February (Jesus on a rock on the side of Keel Mountain Road). Near Helena, Mont., January (Mary on a translucent agate rock along the Yellowstone River). Sydney, Australia, January (Mary and Jesus in a lava lamp). Hamilton, New Zealand, December (Jesus on a pita bread). Melton, England, November (Jesus on a chocolate cookie). Fort Pierce, Fla., December (Mary in the MRI brain scan of a cancer patient).

-- Inexplicable: Police in West Vancouver, British Columbia, assured residents in April 2001 that they had stopped a three-year petty-crime spree in an upscale neighborhood when they arrested multimillionaire Eugene Mah, 64, and his son, Avery, 32. Police said the two were responsible for stealing hundreds of their neighbors' downscale knick-knacks, such as garbage cans, lawn decorations and even municipal recycling boxes, and hiding them at their own luxury home. Mah's Vancouver real estate holdings are reported at about US$13 million, but among the recovered goods were such tacky items as one neighbor's doormat and, subsequently, each of the 14 doormats the neighbor purchased as replacements.

Through the years, News of the Weird has reported on restaurants around the world with singularly quirky themes and signature dishes, such as the one in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, that seats all diners on toilets and the Beijing restaurant whose cuisine features animal penises. Last year, a group of doctors in Riga, Latvia, opened Hospitalis, a medical-themed restaurant whose dining room resembles an OR, with "nurse" waitresses bringing food on gurneys, accessorized with syringes and forceps in addition to knives and forks and with drinks served in beakers and test tubes. Hospitalis' signature dish is a cake with edible toppings that resemble fingers, noses and tongues.

-- It was thought to be the backwoods version of an "urban legend," but the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department reported in March its first documented case of a deer hunter's attempting to avoid detection after shooting a doe (instead of the permissible buck) by gluing antlers onto its head. Marcel Fournier, 19, used epoxy and lag bolts, said a game warden, but the finished product looked awkward because of the angle of placement and the size mismatch of the antlers. (Fournier was jailed for 10 days and fined, and had his license revoked.)

-- "It was initially just an experiment," said the 26-year-old, Sebastopol, Calif., midwife apprentice who last year talked her boyfriend into photographing her cervix for 33 straight days so that she could chart its physical changes while monitoring her own mood, libido and body temperature. It was not easy, she told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat in February. "It's so dark in there (that) even with (a lamp shining on it), the camera wouldn't focus." However, the boyfriend made it work. "He's a very talented guy." Eventually, the photos made it to the Internet, with her cooperation.

-- Christos Kokkalis, 19, allegedly doing 65 mph in a 30 mph zone, was charged with assault in Framingham, Mass., in March, for reacting badly to a pedestrian's hand gesture suggesting he slow down. According to a police report, Kokkalis swerved across a street into the man's path, drove by, turned around and did it again. The report said Kokkalis denied fault, claiming that his car "turns on its own" because of an "alignment" problem.

-- Herman Rosenblat, whose best-selling "memoir" of his Holocaust love affair with his wife was yanked off the market by the publisher when parts were proven false, insisted to ABC News in February that he never lied. Of his heartbreaking, well-worn story that his non-imprisoned future wife lovingly tossed apples to him over a fence at his concentration camp (which physically could not possibly have happened, according to historians), Rosenblat said: "It wasn't a lie. (E)ven now, I believe it, that she was there and she threw the apple to me. In my imagination, it was true."

-- In March, Dominique Fisher, a "tattooist," received a probation-type sentence by Britain's Burnley Crown Court despite having carved her name and other marks with a box cutter on her new lover's body while he was passed out. She and Wayne Robinson had been on a four-day drinking binge, and he panicked when he sobered up. However, Fisher said that Robinson knew all along that she did tattoos and told him, "I thought you'd like it."

-- Angel Galvan-Hernandez, 26, facing a long prison term after being convicted in a Seattle court, begged the judge in February to execute him, that he'd rather die "a thousand times" than be jailed. The reason, he said, was his fear of being raped in prison because of his petite frame and his history of being attacked as a youth. He admitted that he was a coward, "but I just don't want to be raped." His crime: He had pleaded guilty to raping two women. (He got 20 years.)

-- What We Say, What We Do: (1) About 200 members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) launched a protest campaign in March, accusing their employer of improper layoffs, unlawful bans on union activities, and reclassifying of workers in order to disempower the union. The employer of the workers is the national SEIU office, where they are staff members. (2) A federal arbitrator ruled in March that an employer had, for years, "willfully" violated the Fair Labor Standards Act in exploiting workers by failing to pay overtime. The guilty employer: the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

-- (1) New Zealand's Employment Relations Authority ruled in February that a worker who, in a fury, tells his boss to "stick his job up his arse," has not officially resigned unless he follows up the incident with a formal notice. (2) Two competitors vying to sell the same type iPhone application (arrays of sounds of breaking wind) are embroiled in a trademark dispute, according to a March Denver Post report. The developers of Air-O-Matic's "Pull My Finger" claim that InfoMedia's "iFart" application improperly uses "pull my finger" in its own marketing. InfoMedia said that the phrase is generic and not trademarkable.

-- From an advertisement in the News Reporter of Whiteville, N.C., placed by attorney C. Greg Williamson on Jan. 5, 2009, to give legally required pre-adoption notice to the unknown father of a girl (about whom the mother apparently recalled very little): The father "was about 5 feet 7 inches tall, with a light brown complexion and 'funny' shaped eyes," and the "date and place of conception" were during December 2002 "at a house in Bolton, N.C., thought to be the second house on the left after turning left on the street just past Bubba's Club as you head east from Lake Waccamaw." Under state law, that man had 40 days from the placement of the ad to challenge the adoption of the child, now age 5.

Criminals Not Keeping Low Profiles: (1) Motorist Christopher Cadenhead, 39, was stopped in Osceola County, Fla., in January for having an expired tag. Inside his car, police found 200 pounds of marijuana. (2) Jose Melendez, 54, and his wife and daughter were stopped by Douglas County, Neb., deputies in January after their RV was driving on the shoulder of Interstate 80. Cover-story discrepancies among the three occupants as to where they were headed and which "relatives" they were "visiting" aroused a deputy's suspicion, and a search of the vehicle revealed $2.5 million worth of cocaine under a floorboard.

Karma: (1) A 25-year-old man who was a passenger in a car driven by a drunk friend was killed in Houston in February when he was thrown from the car in a crash. That incident came seven months after the victim had, himself, been charged with DUI in a crash that killed two people. (2) Two brothers driving a stolen car and being chased by police on Interstate 70 near St. Louis in November were killed when they accidentally crashed into another car. That car, also, had been stolen.

In March 2003, the double life of wealthy Tampa construction magnate Douglas Cone, 74, surfaced when, following the death of his socialite wife, Jean Ann (with whom he lived Thursdays through Sundays and had three kids), he quickly married his socialite paramour Hillary Carlson (with whom he had lived for years in a second mansion 20 miles away as "Donald Carlson," Mondays through Wednesdays, and had two kids). Cone's philanthropic contributions (donated in both his names, though "Mr. Carlson" never appeared at events), and both women's dedicated community service, made the "four" of them prominent figures in Tampa. (The consensus among the families' members, according to a St. Petersburg Times report, is that Hillary knew; Jean Ann might not have; and others did not.)