"Consensual Living" parenting, which was developed in 2006 and now has many hundreds of followers, supposes that every family member's needs are equally valid and respectworthy. Even pre-adolescents are assumed able to understand their own needs and respect those of others. When little Kiernen, 3, of Langley, British Columbia, hits another child, his mom told Toronto's Globe & Mail in March, she does not invoke authority but instead asks about his feelings and whether he'd like to express himself differently. If Kahlan, 18 months old, of Nanaimo, British Columbia, is grumpy at a time when her mother has made plans, Mom says she is obligated to consider other plans. And when Savannah, 6, insisted on wearing her Halloween cat costume every single day for several months, her mom in Burlington, Ontario, just shrugged, since she recalled how contentious the morning dressing rituals were, pre-Consensual Living.

Safety First in Britain: (1) Recently, 118 local government councils conducted formal tests on their cemeteries' gravestones to see how susceptible they are to toppling over and hurting people, according to an April Daily Telegraph report. (2) In April, a circus clown performing in Liverpool was ordered not to wear his classic oversized shoes because he could trip and injure someone. (3) BBC producers, wielding a "telephone-book-size" set of safety precautions while making a recent adventure documentary, ordered Sir Robin Knox-Johnston (the first person to sail single-handedly and nonstop around the world) not to light a portable stove unless a "safety advisor" supervised.

For 15 years, police in southern Germany have been futilely tracking a female "serial killer" whose DNA (but little other matching physical evidence) was found at 40 crime scenes, including six murders. Only in 2007 did they begin to consider alternative theories, and in March 2009, a state justice minister announced that the case had been solved: The DNA matched up in the tests because the cotton swabs used to collect it had been contaminated at the factory (but authorities still have not determined which female factory worker inadvertently supplied the DNA).

-- Be Wary of Discount Funeral Services: (1) A 2004 burial in Allendale, S.C., is just now being investigated after relatives learned that the deceased, a 6-foot-7 man, was somehow laid to rest in a 6-foot-long coffin that was part of his prepaid plan. (2) Authorities in Houston are investigating a funeral home that handles burial of paupers on contract from the county after, somehow, a 91-year-old male (who was supposed to be preserved for viewing) was cremated instead of the female who was scheduled.

-- Lobbying Pays: University of Kansas researchers, reporting in April, disclosed that a single tax provision in a 2004 law (allowing U.S. multinational corporations to avoid federal tax on foreign profits) gained a typical company $220 for every $1 the company had spent lobbying Congress to enact that provision. Among the big winners was the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, which disclosed spending $8.5 million to lobby for the law and gaining a tax break of more than $2 billion. (The lobbying emphasized that the lower tax would enable the companies to create more jobs, but the Congressional Research Service found that most of the tax savings went to pay dividends or buy back company stock.)

-- In a study of the last six years' admissions at hospital emergency rooms in the Austin, Texas, area (reported in April), 900 people were identified as using ERs six or more times in the previous three months, and nine specific patients had made a total of 2,678 visits in the six-year period.

-- Mixed Signs From the Middle East: (1) In March, at a soccer match in Hilla, Iraq, between two local teams, as a player with the ball approached the goal to attempt a tying kick late in the game, an overenthusiastic spectator drew his gun and shot him dead. (2) In more hopeful news, authorities in Ramallah said that the March 24 bank robbery by armed gunmen who snatched the equivalent of $30,000 was pulled off by five Palestinians and an Israeli Jew, working together.

(1) A 44-year-old intoxicated man was arrested in Ann Arbor, Mich., in March, blocking traffic by approaching an officer and requesting a big hug (and then cursing the officer when he declined). (2) A 22-year-old tipsy soccer fan celebrating on a chartered bus after a match in West Bromwich, England, in January, was run over by a motorist after he fell out the back door of the bus, believing it led to the restroom.

Not "Consensual Living": (1) An Oregon, Wis., man was arrested in February after his 9-year-old son wrote a school essay about the time his dad shot him in the buttocks with a BB gun because he was blocking his view of the TV set. (2) A 58-year-old man was arrested in Baltimore in February for allegedly stabbing his 19-year-old son after an argument over the son's refusal to remove his hat during church service.

-- Timothy Grim, 39, was arrested in Shreveport, La., in April after swiping several garments from the rehearsal room of the Shreveport Opera and dashing off. The conductor and three performers took chase and cornered Grim several blocks away, still in possession of one part of a diva's outfit, which he immediately offered to sell back to the opera, and by the time police arrived, Grim had cut his asking price to $1.

-- Not Ready for Prime Time: A 16-year-old boy was arrested in Centerville, Utah, in April as he roamed a neighborhood at night trying to break into several cars. The last one he tried was the private vehicle of a sheriff's deputy, who was still in it, in uniform and finishing a phone call after coming off his shift. After arresting the kid, the deputy reported that the boy had been so stunned when he saw the deputy inside the car that he immediately soiled his pants. Said the deputy, "You could smell him."

In April, the City Council of Vero Beach, Fla., grappling with the question of how much skin can legally be exposed in public, adopted the definitions that at least two other Florida jurisdictions use (and which were reported in News of the Weird). "Buttocks," for example, is "the area of the rear of the body which lies between two imaginary lines running parallel to the ground when a person is standing, the first or top such line drawn at the top of the nates (i.e., the prominence of the muscles running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the second or bottom line drawn at the lowest visible (sic) of this cleavage or the lowest point of the curvature of the fleshy protuberance, whichever is lower."

The New York Times reported in February 2004 on a Washington, D.C., man whose love of music led him, in the 1960s, to meticulously hand-make and hand-paint facsimile record album covers of his fantasized music, complete with imagined lyric sheets and liner notes (with some "albums" even shrink-wrapped in plastic), and, even more incredibly, to hand-make cardboard facsimiles of actual grooved discs to put inside them. "Mingering Mike," whom a reporter and two hobbyists tracked down (but who declined to be identified in print) also made real music, on tapes, using his and friends' voices to simulate instruments. His 38 imagined "albums" were discovered at a flea market after Mike defaulted on storage-locker fees.

In April at a New York City gallery, the Australian performance artist Stelarc starred in a video of his surgery in which an ear is implanted into his left forearm (right now, just a prosthesis, but to which stem cells will be added), which will house an Internet-accessed, Bluetooth-capable microphone. "Post-evolutionary strategies" are required, Stelarc told The New York Times, because the current state of the body is obsolete. Other exhibits at the "Corpus Extremus (LIFE+)" exhibit included a genetically modified goat that produces super-strong spider's silk. In an earlier project, Stelarc wired half his muscles to computers in Paris, Helsinki and Amsterdam, to understand a semi-controllable "split-body experience." Stelarc's self-appraisal: "(I'm) never in (my) comfort zone."

Baltimore prosecutors were stuck in their case against cult leader "Queen Antoinette," 40, whom they had charged in the starvation death of a young boy who was being punished for failing to say "Amen" at meal time. They would need the cooperation of the boy's mother, cult member Ria Ramkissoon, 22, but she was refusing to flip on the Queen, whom she believed would eventually resurrect her son from the dead. Finally in March, the judge announced a breakthrough: Ramkissoon would cooperate, but prosecutors would promise in writing to drop all charges if the Queen eventually brings the boy back.

-- "You use the toilet every day. Imagine if you could start pouring a little gasoline into the toilet bowl and get 50 cents a gallon (as a tax credit from IRS) every time you flushed." According to a hedge fund analyst (quoted by The Nation magazine for an April story), that's the way Congress' 2005 legislation to encourage "alternative" fuels has been exploited by the paper industry. Company representatives have until now been proud that the paper industry supplied most of its own fuel, as a by-product of making paper, but when it discovered the tax credit, it reworked its factories to accept a mixture of the incumbent by-product and ordinary diesel fuel, thus creating an "alternative" fuel and earning the credit, which, for example, was worth $71.6 million to International Paper Co. in March and is not scheduled to expire until December.

-- Italian researchers revealed in March that at least one method of increasing penis size actually works (but that it would take a highly motivated man to take advantage of it). Writing in the British Journal of Urology, a team from the University of Turin had volunteers attach weights of from 1.3 to 2.6 pounds for six hours a day for a six-month period and found that their flaccid-state lengths increased by an average of almost 1 inch.

-- Retired rogue New York City police detectives Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito, who were convicted in 2006 of assisting the Mafia for many years (including with assassinations), were sentenced to life in prison plus 80 to 100 additional years. However, because the men retired from the force before they had been charged with crimes, they are entitled by law to their lifetime pensions of $5,313 a month and $3,896 a month, respectively.

-- Army Sgt. Erik Roberts, 25, was injured in Baghdad in 2006 by a roadside bomb, and his leg required 12 surgeries before supposedly healing, but last year a life-threatening infection was discovered in the leg. Roberts underwent a 13th surgery that was covered by his private health insurance, but a costly, rigorous antibiotics regimen was subject to a $3,000 co-pay, which Roberts asked the Department of Veterans Affairs to take care of, but the agency repeatedly refused, in that Roberts had gone outside the "system" to save his war-ravaged leg. Only when a CNN reporter called the matter to the attention of U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown in March did the agency relent.

-- The Web site InformationAgePrayer.com offers, for people too busy to speak to God themselves, a daily service of invocations (using voice-synthesizing software) for Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Muslims. Starting each day "reciting" the Lord's Prayer (or the Islamic Fajr) is $3.95 a month. Hail Marys are 70 cents a day for 10. A Complete Rosary Package is $49.95 a month. Each prayer is voiced individually, according to a March report on LiveScience.com, with the subscriber's name on the screen, and for Muslim prayers, the computer's speakers point toward Mecca.

-- A 2008 report on crime at U.S. colleges listed the University of California, Davis, as having the fifth-worst rate in the country, and among the University of California system, Davis' rate of sexual assaults was higher than the other schools' rates, combined. Nevertheless, in February, according to Sacramento's KTXL-TV, the school's Student Judicial Affairs organization boasted of the record, claiming that it demonstrates the "openness" of the campus, in that students feel "comfortable" enough to report sex crimes.

Coming Soon to Reality TV: The CMT cable channel has scheduled an August start-up for "Runnin' Wild ... From Ted Nugent," in which the rock singer, hunter and uninhibited gun advocate will spend five episodes training three novices on how to survive in the woods, and then, in the final episodes, Nugent and his 18-year-old son will go hunt them down, with the last one to avoid capture declared the winner.

-- In April, sex offender Barry Whaley was under suspicion for failing to register his new address but made things much worse. Being questioned at a police station in Fairbanks, Alaska, he asked an officer to retrieve a laptop computer from his car so that it would not get stolen, and when the officer brought it to him, Whaley mentioned an "amazing" flight simulator program he had been using, which the officer asked to see. As Whaley powered up the computer, a video of child pornography appeared, and Whaley was arrested.

-- In April, police in Copley Township, Ohio, were called to a restaurant where Erik Salmons, 39, was allegedly intoxicated and annoying customers. Officers declined to arrest him but did insist that he call someone for a ride home, and Salmons complied. However, at home, Salmons decided that he was insulted at being thought of as intoxicated and so drove himself to the police station and demanded a breathalyzer test, which of course he failed, and he was arrested.

People Different From Us: (1) Howard Sheppard, 30, of Deltona, Fla., was sent to Florida Hospital DeLand in January after he found some bullets on the ground and experimented to see what would happen if he struck one with a metal punch. (He got shot in the arm.) (2) Eric Fortune, 19, was sent to the Ashtabula County (Ohio) Medical Center in March after nagging his brother into shooting him in the leg. According to a police report, Fortune had told the brother that he had always wondered what it was like to get shot. (It was so painful that he cried.)

Recidivist unlicensed surgeon John Ronald Brown, 75, was convicted in 1999 in San Diego of causing the death of an 80-year-old man who had consented to have Brown amputate a healthy leg, thus bringing to the attention of many people the mental disorder of "apotemnophilia" ("body identity integrity disorder"), which is a sexual or sexual-like gratification from the removal of a "normal" limb regarded as ugly or superfluous. Very few licensed doctors will perform the surgery, and Brown's license had been revoked 20 years earlier after botched transsexual operations, but he continued to attract patients who had no other option if they felt desperate to improve their look.

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.)