Terrorism Gets Pizzazz: A physical fitness video, purportedly made in April by a U.S.-based al-Qaida operative, gives workout tips to jihadists, urging that they "train as hard as possible" to inflict maximum damage on "the enemies of Allah," according to an ABC News report. Exercises such as crawling long distances on hands and knees are demonstrated by people in flowing robes. The narrator discourages using gyms and fitness centers because of the "un-Islamic" music and "semi-naked" women. And a video released in May, purportedly from al-Qaida in Somalia, features an English-speaking rap singer making a recruitment pitch to U.S. and European youth, including such verses as: "Mortar by mortar / Shell by shell / Only going to stop / When I send them to hell."

-- When a son, angry that his father had ordered him to clean up his room, screamed at Dad and threw a plate of food across the dinner table, Dad called 911. The son is 28-year-old Andrew Mizsak, who lives rent-free with his parents in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford, Ohio, and is a member of the Bedford School Board (and whose mom is a city councilwoman). After police arrived, the habitually untidy son apologized and, according to their report, "was sent to his room to clean it. He was crying uncontrollably." Subsequently, the school board punished Andrew by removing two of his duties.

-- When courts in Nashville, Tenn., get too backed up, a local tradition allows judges to appoint well-known local attorneys to act as "special judges" to help clear dockets. According to a months-long investigation by WTVF-TV, broadcast in April, it appears that at least some of the "special judges" used their power largely to dismiss speeding tickets, including at least one instance of a lawyer's dismissing his own client's ticket. The station found that of almost 1,800 speeding tickets dismissed by courts during the time investigated, 1,300 were by the "special judges."

-- The U.S. Air Force has spent an estimated $25 million training combat pilot Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach but is about to discharge him involuntarily because he is gay. Born of military-officer parents, Fehrenbach has earned 30 awards and decorations, with tours flying F-15Es in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and was one of the elite fighters called on to patrol the air space over Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001. Also about to be discharged solely for being gay is Army infantry officer Daniel Choi, a West Point graduate and Arabic speaker, who would be (based on a 2005 Government Accounting Office report) at least the 56th gay Arabic linguist to be dismissed from the U.S. military since the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

-- In September 2003, Lisa Strong was hospitalized for a kidney stone, which was not treated properly, and by the time the resultant, massive, life-threatening infections had been dealt with, both her arms and both her legs had been amputated. She filed a lawsuit against the doctors in 2005, but in May 2009, a jury in Broward County, Fla., somehow could not find any fault at all by doctors. (An incredulous Judge Charles Greene reversed the verdict, dismissed the jury and ordered a new trial.)

London's celebrated high-end restaurant Nobu still serves a bluefin tuna entree for the equivalent of about $51 but is apparently ashamed that it has a fresh inventory ready to carve, according to a May report in the Daily Telegraph. Printed on the menu is this advisory: "Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species -- please ask your server for an alternative."

-- They're Studying What? Where? (1) Doctors and specialists from the New York Psychiatric Institute are in the middle of a two-year investigation, on a $400,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), on why gay men have risky sex in Argentina. Researchers visit gay bars nightly in Buenos Aires and question men about their behavior and substance abuse. (2) Wayne State University (Detroit) researchers, operating on a $2.6 million NIH grant, are now "training" prostitutes to drink alcohol responsibly, to reduce the women's willingness to engage in risky sex. However, the training is taking place in Guangxi province, China.

-- Challenges of Geography: (1) In March, China's Minister of Railways, Liu Zhijun, acknowledged that the government has plans for a rail line connecting Beijing and Taipei, Taiwan (which would involve traversing the Taiwan Strait, which is 108 miles across at its narrowest point). (2) The Czech Republic newspaper Lidove Noviny reported in May that, as late as 1975, the communist government of Czechoslovakia was actively planning to dig a tunnel from that landlocked country underneath Austria and the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia, to give it rail access to the Adriatic Sea, 250 miles away. It is not known what the Austrians and the Yugoslavs thought of the idea.

Kerry Fenton's pub, The Cutting Edge, in Worsbrough, England, initially complied with the 2007 Smoking Act, which prohibits lighting up inside. However, since smoking research is generally carried on indoors, "research" was exempt from the law. Fenton ultimately renamed part of the bar the Smoking Research Centre and allows patrons to smoke provided they fill out questionnaires about their habit. So far, according to a May BBC News report, neither Britain's Home Office nor the local Barnsley council has intervened.

(1) Timothy Martin, 44, was arrested in Federal Way, Wash., in May for felony indecent exposure after he was spotted standing partially nude with a string attached to his penis and, according to police, apparently "manipulating it with the string like a puppet." (2) Two workers at Yellowstone National Park were fired in May after being caught on surveillance video urinating into the Old Faithful geyser.

-- Police in Indianapolis charged Fifth Third Bank manager Dwayne Roberts, 31, with arson and theft after the failure of his scheme to cover up embezzlement. Police said that Roberts elaborately staged a fire inside a locked vault so that an undeterminable amount of money would burn up, thus perhaps covering his cash shortage. However, after Roberts had set the fire and locked the vault, he realized he had left his keys inside and could not re-open the vault or lock the bank's doors or drive home.

-- Donny Guy, 31, was arrested in Hickory, N.C., in May and charged with burglary of the Captain's Galley Seafood restaurant in a caper caught on surveillance video. Guy was immediately a suspect because he lives in an apartment about 50 yards from the restaurant, and there were two paper trails from the restaurant almost to his front door. The video revealed that, in carrying away the two cash registers in the dark, the burglar failed to notice that the spools of paper in each machine had snagged on something in the restaurant and were unraveling with each step he took.

Most Helpful Bureaucrat: When Hermilo Mendez, 28, found himself behind bars on a minor charge in early 2002 in Dilley, Texas, he realized that he finally had time to work on his long-desired divorce and wrote the county clerk in San Antonio to start the paperwork. First, though, he needed the clerk's help, in that he could not remember his wife's name. The couple had married in 1992 after a one-week courtship, and she cleared out shortly afterward. The clerk researched it and informed Mendez that he had been joined in holy matrimony with "Violeta Sanchez Juarez" and that she had apparently long ago returned to Mexico.

As Denver's newsweekly Westword asked in a May 2009 story, "Where would you take a $100,000 check that is also a suicide note, to the cops or to the bank?" In July 2008, John Francis Beech, a retired executive in Denver, sent a check for $100,000 to a local charity, postdated to Aug. 1, accompanied by a sealed envelope reading "wait until you hear from coroner" and "everything is OK." The charity's director, Annie Green, opened the envelope anyway on July 21, to find Beech's Last Will and Testament, leaving his entire estate to Green's organization for children with developmental disabilities. Green's choice: Put everything into the school's safe and await Aug. 1 (but she claimed to have left two voice-mail messages for Beech). On July 29, based on longstanding plans, Beech committed suicide.

-- Over a 10-week period this summer, nearly 200 young Saudi women are auditioning for a beauty pageant, but one called "Miss Beautiful Morals," in which physical attractiveness is irrelevant, replaced by judging of the ladies' observance of traditional Saudi values, especially the honoring of their mothers. Saudi Arabia does have pageants devoted to physical beauty, as reported in News of the Weird in 2007 and 2008, but those are contests for camels and goats, based on such criteria as (according to one camel breeder) "big eyes, long lashes and a long neck."

-- Kailash Singh, 63, who lives in a village near the holy city of Varanasi, India, told reporters in May that he had not bathed in the last 35 years, but for a good reason: remaining water-free would improve his chances of fathering a male instead of a female. (It hasn't worked, and he has moved on to a new cause, shunning baths until India's social problems are resolved.) Singh previously owned a shop, but became a farmer because customers increasingly declined to approach him.

-- Recurring Theme: According to a March dispatch in London's Observer, activists in Mauritania have protested the new military government's support for an African tribal tradition of forcibly fattening up adolescent girls to make them appear "healthier" for early marriage (traditional in, among other countries, Nigeria, mentioned in News of the Weird in 1998). In the custom of "leblouh," the size of the female indicates "the size of her place in her man's heart."

Ms. Nour Hadad, 26, was arrested in Orland Park, Ill., in April and charged with (and, according to police, confessed to) beating her 2-year-old niece to death while baby-sitting, and, as usual, police publicly released her booking photograph. However, Hadad's husband, Alaeddin, immediately complained that her photo, without her head scarf, was an "insult" to Islam. Said a Muslim activist, "They should respect the modesty of the accused."

(1) Entomologists in San Antonio said in May that the "Raspberry ant" (whose colonies produce billions and cover everything in sight) had migrated north to within 75 miles of the city and would arrive by year's end, posing, said one, a "potential ecological disaster." (2) A University of Florida researcher found, for a recent journal article, that mockingbirds, among all animals, are skilled at identifying particular humans who have displeased them and whom they wish to attack.

Defense attorney John Garcia convinced a jury in Merced, Calif., in May that his client was not guilty of the "forcible rape with great bodily injury" of an 18-year-old woman in 2004, despite the fact that only his client's DNA-identified semen was present, mixed with the victim's blood, on the shorts she wore at the crime scene. Client Daniel Saldana's story was that he had previously had sex with his own girlfriend in the house where the rape occurred and that the girlfriend might have left her shorts on the floor and that the rape victim might have mistakenly put them on after the "other" man raped her.

-- Nelson Blewett, 22, was treated for serious burns in Port Angeles, Wash., on May 18 after playing a game of TAG-tag with pals. They were spritzing each other with TAG body spray and then striking matches, creating mostly lower-risk flames. Then, perhaps inspired by too much beer, one friend added lighter fluid to the game. Blewett was afire for 30 to 45 seconds until he leaped from a second-story porch and rolled on the ground. (He survived but with "excruciating" second- and third-degree burns.)

The Aristocrats! (1) Charles Williams, 37, and his wife, Gretchen, 33, were arrested in Greenville, S.C., in April after a domestic dispute, culminating in a gunfight in which they shot each other. (2) Two fathers (Enrique Gonzalez, 26, in Fresno, Calif., in April and Eugene Ashley, 24, in Floyd County, Ga., in May) were charged with forcibly tattooing their young sons. Gonzalez allegedly held down his 7-year-old while a tattooist inked a gang symbol, and Ashley allegedly inked "DB" (for Daddy's Boy) personally on his 3-year-old's shoulder.

The Right to Remain Silent: Timothy Williams' lawyer had a good defense worked out in Williams' May murder trial in Pittsburgh: When Williams fatally shot the "other" man in the love triangle with Williams' girlfriend, it was a "crime of passion," said the lawyer, befitting manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. But Williams insisted on taking the stand, and by the time he was done, he had openly bragged that he was a "swinger" with many girlfriends, that this particular woman meant "nothing" to him, and that, though he killed the man, police had somehow "sabotaged" the surveillance video of the shooting. Verdict: first-degree murder.

The long-running battle between Alan Davis, 53, and officials in Altamonte Springs, Fla., began anew in May, upon Davis' release from prison after serving a year for his latest defiance of court orders to clear the "junk" out of his yard ("felony littering"). It was his third prison stretch in five years, and he said he is not done yet. Just before his latest stretch, he had placed a giant sculpted derriere in front of the Seminole County Courthouse. In May, he told reporters that he would rejoin the battle by ringing his yard with 42 smaller, similar sculptures.

(1) When retired NYPD officer John Comparetto was approached at gunpoint in a men's room of a Holiday Inn near Harrisburg, Pa., in March, he quietly handed over his wallet, but when the robber left, Comparetto pulled his own gun and gave chase. He also summoned some of the other 300 narcotics officers attending a convention in the hotel and quickly captured the man, who, said Comparetto, is "probably the dumbest criminal in Pennsylvania." (2) A 27-year-old woman in Lexington Park, Md., was injured in March during apparently consensual sex play. Her partner placed a "sex toy" over a saber saw blade, apparently to act as a souped-up vibrator, but the blade cut through the toy and caused serious lacerations, requiring her to be med-evac'ed to Prince George's Hospital Center.

In 1993 India Scott dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon Ventimeglia when she lived in Detroit and moved in with Fletcher in 1994 when she was about to give birth. Neither knew about the other, and she had told each man he was the father. For two difficult years, Scott somehow managed to juggle the men's visitations, but in March 1997 when she announced she was leaving the area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of "his" son. Only then did Ventimeglia and Fletcher find out about each other. They took blood tests to determine which was the real father of the boy they had cared for for more than two years, and in May 1997 the blood test revealed that neither was.

In a nondescript building next to a mosque in downtown Karachi, Pakistan, the Qadeer brothers discreetly make and market a million dollars' worth of fetish and bondage products a year for Americans and Europeans (through sales to stores and on eBay). In fact, if the radical Islamic office down the street knew about the Qadeers' work, they might be in trouble, according to an April New York Times dispatch, but fortunately, the gag balls, corsets and whips such as the "Mistress Flogger" are so odd for Pakistan that even the veiled women who sew them for the Qadeers do not understand that Americans use them for sex play. Customs officials, for example, were puzzled about how to categorize the items for tax purposes. "If our mom knew (the nature of our business)," said brother Adnan, "she would disown us."

-- Physician Geoffrey Hart, working with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, recently developed the Pedi-Sedate headgear to trick waiting-room kids into inhaling nitrous oxide while playing video games, thus knocking themselves out and, according to Hart's company, "dramatically improv(ing) the hospital or dental experience for the child, parents and healthcare providers." The helmet contains sophisticated sensors to monitor the dosages and effects on the child.

-- Manliness: (1) The Redneck Yacht Club opened in February near Naples, Fla., consisting of an 800-acre carefully designed mud pit that drivers pay $30 to frolic in with their own customized off-road vehicles. One mechanic told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in April that he had spent $15,000 fixing up his rig, with 6-foot-high tires and a skull ornament. His review: "This place is kick-butt." (2) For Germany's fathers' day in May, the Panzer Fun Driving School in Germany's Brandenburg state suggested sending men off to drive one of its 13 Soviet armored vehicles (following a short class on the controls), and for an extra fee, patrons can ram their tanks over an old car.

-- Britons Sam Bompas and Harry Parr are revered chef-artists whose medium is the gelatin mold, with which they have created jelly models of, for example, London's St. Paul's Cathedral and a Madrid airport terminal, and who, for a New York customer, recently created orange-juice jelly inside some Compari jelly to produce a Compari-and-soda jelly. In April, the pair also opened a London bar, Alcoholic Architecture, in which vaporized gin and tonic saturate the air in equivalent strength of one gin-and-tonic drink for every 40 minutes of exposure.

-- Confusing Business Model: Patrick Ellison and Frank Mack, along with Edie Wells, were arrested in Dalton, Ga., in April after what police said was a joint venture in which alleged prostitute Wells knocked on a man's door and offered him sex, and when the man declined, Ellison and Mack arrived and forced the man to accept Wells' services. Following the sex, the three departed with the man's money and credit cards.

-- Good to Know: A case report in a recent issue of the journal Emergency Medicine Australasia described the successful removal of a leech from an eyeball. A 66-year-old woman, gardening in her back yard in Sydney, had accidentally flicked some soil into her eye. By the time a surgeon could extract the leech, it had roughly tripled its body size by feeding on the eyeball's blood vessels. (The key, by the way: a few drops of saline solution).

-- In a recent journal article, researchers from the University of Whitwatersrand (South Africa) and the University of Sydney (Australia) reported that young male Augrabies lizards avoid older predatory males by, basically, cross-dressing (pretending to be female by suppressing their extravagant male coloration until they are fully developed and able to defend themselves). Thus, they avoid being attacked and, at the same time, increase their own freedom to hit on females. (They must still be careful, say the researchers, because the older males might whiff their male scent, which cannot be suppressed.)

In April, a manager at a Dean Health System clinic in Madison, Wis., received corporate instructions to "immediately" lay off 50 listed employees, and the manager (a 30-year nursing veteran) decided that that included pulling one RN out of a room in which she was assisting with surgery, leaving just a physician and lower-level staff members present. A clinic executive later called the manager's timing an error, but said there were no adverse consequences to the patient.

Ms. Indra Ningsih, a 26-year-old maid, was detained by a court in Hong Kong in April after her employer accused her of spiking her vegetable soup with menstrual blood. According to a report of the case in Hong Kong's The Standard, the maid was employing a belief in some Southeast Asian cultures that menstrual blood has special powers and would improve an otherwise-contentious relationship between the maid and the employer.

First-time bank robber (according to police) Jason Durant, 32, reported to the hospital in New Milford, Conn., shortly after knocking off the National Iron Bank in April. As he fled the crime scene, he accidentally tumbled down a steep hill behind the bank, losing control of his stash, and his gun, during the fall. He broke his leg in several places (saying later that he heard snapping sounds). At the bottom of the hill, he crashed into a plow blade, slashing himself before dragging his bleeding, broken body to his getaway car (with only $2 left from the robbery). Suspicious hospital staff members notified police.

Russia's long-running Moscow Cat Circus/Theater, reported in News of the Weird in 1998, is still in service, astonishing all who ever tried to train a cat. In the United States, Samantha Martin runs her own similar show (at such venues as Chicago's Gorilla Tango Theatre in March) featuring the Rock Cats trio on guitar, piano and drums, as well as a tightrope-walker, barrel-roller and skateboarder, among other daring performers. Martin admitted to a Chicago Tribune reporter that the cats' music "sucks," in that "when they're playing, they're not even playing the same thing," and anyway she has two backup drummers because her regular is prone to "walking off in a huff," sort of "like diva actresses." "This is why you don't see trained cat acts. Because ... the managers can't take the humiliation."

Difficult Times for Funeral Eulogists: (1) A 54-year-old man was found dead of a heart attack in a pornography video booth at the Beate Uhse sex shop in Cologne, Germany, in December. (2) A 42-year-old comedian (and owner of a comedy club in Blackburn, England) was accidentally asphyxiated in April inhaling laughing gas while viewing computer pornography.

In an October 2001 incident that started out resembling a comedy movie scene, Alan Martin, 49, decided to petulantly protest police officers' decision to confiscate his RV after a minor accident, and deliberately lay down in the middle of a busy street in Daly City, Calif., refusing to budge. As officers tried for a while to talk him out of his obstinacy, they shielded his body by blocking a lane of traffic with their cruiser. A few minutes later, one of those notorious California hot-pursuit police chases just happened to head down the same street, and the car driven by fleeing suspect Kevin Domino, 37, accidentally rammed the stopped cruiser, then drove over Martin, and then while trying to straighten out his car, Domino ran over Martin again. (Police caught Domino a few blocks later when his car stalled out, and Martin was hospitalized in fair condition.)