World-Class Adolescent Endeavors: Japanese engineer Takuo Toda's paper airplane was certified in May as the Guinness Book record-holder for the longest flight from a single folded sheet of paper: 27.9 seconds. And in Witcham, England, in July, Jim Collins won the World Peashooting Championship, using a "traditional" instrument blowing at a target 12 yards away, but noncompeting ex-champion George Hollis once again drew the most attention with his homemade, gyroscopic-balancing, laser-guided peashooter, with which he won three previous championships.

-- When motorist Timothy Pereira, 19, rammed Christine Speliotis' car head-on in Salem, Mass., in March, there was no doubt in police officers' minds what the cause was: Pereira was driving 85 mph in a 35 mph zone and had swerved into Speliotis' lane. However, in July, Brandon Pereira, 17, an injured passenger in his cousin's car, filed a lawsuit against Speliotis for negligence, claiming that if she had been quicker to get out of the way, the collision would not have occurred.

-- Failed Defenses: (1) A woman in Kansas City, Mo., told police in June that the reason she had stabbed her sleepwalking 24-year-old boyfriend in the face was that she feared he would hurt her if she didn't wake him up. (She said the man had also just finished urinating in her closet.) (2) In Britain's Chelmsford Crown Court in July, Sultan Al-Sayed, 40, was convicted of peeping under the next stall in a department-store changing room despite his claim that the only reason he placed his face on the floor was to relieve pain from a toothache.

-- When the tenant failed to pay $87,000 in rent in April and May on two townhouses and a retail property at Trump Plaza in New York City, the landlord did what Donald Trump would surely do: It began eviction proceedings. However, the tenant in this case is Donald Trump's Trump Corp., which leases the space from the current landlord, the Trump Plaza Owners co-op. Said the co-op president: "If you don't pay the rent when Donald Trump is your landlord, he comes down on you like a hammer. Well, lo and behold...."

-- In July, Mexican authorities accused one of the country's newer drug cartels, La Familia, of murdering 12 federal agents following a 2007 debut in which it rolled five severed heads into a dance hall in a show of intimidation. According to an April Reuters report, captured documents indicate that La Familia gang members are strictly required to attend regular prayer meetings, to never drink alcohol or take drugs, and to attend classes in "ethics" and "personal improvement."

-- Relatives of two British convicted murderers, claiming a breach of "privacy" under the European Convention on Human Rights, filed lawsuits recently against the Greater Manchester Police over a crime-prevention campaign. High-profile gangbangers Colin Joyce, 29, and Lee Amos, 32, had been sentenced to long prison terms, and the GMP, trying to turn youths away from gangs, created computer images on billboards of the two men as they might look when they are released, sometime after the year 2040. Their families were outraged. (GMP reported that gang-related shootings are down 92 percent since Joyce and Amos were caught.)

-- Schoolteacher Charlene Schmitz, convicted in February 2008 of using electronic messaging to seduce a 14-year-old student in Leroy, Ala., was fired and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence. However, under Alabama law, she is still entitled to draw her $51,000 salary until all legal issues are concluded, and Schmitz is both appealing her conviction and suing the school board for firing her. Another aspect of state law requires the settlement of all criminal issues before the lawsuit can even be addressed. The school board, with an already limited budget, must thus pay Schmitz and her replacement during the process.

-- A Canadian public employees' union local had been on strike in Toronto for weeks, causing an otherwise popular public park to fall into disuse because of high grass and lack of maintenance. Fed-up neighbors brought their own mowers to the park and cleaned it up, making it once again a valuable community resource for dog-walking, ball-playing and picnics. Said the local union's president, in July, of the neighbors' effort: "You could use the word 'scab.'"

Christopher Bjerkness, 31, was arrested in Duluth, Minn., in July and charged with another episode of breaking into a gym facility and slashing numerous large rubber exercise balls. He had acknowledged a sexual urge to slash that type of ball following a conviction in 2006 for cutting up 70 balls in three incidents at the University of Minnesota Duluth. This time, 40 balls were damaged at a St. Mary's/Duluth Clinic West building. Police were told by a psychologist last year, after Bjerkness abandoned court-ordered therapy, that he "continues to be a risk to society."

Recurring Themes: (1) Lonnie Meckwood, 29, and Phillip Weeks, 51, were arrested in Kirkwood, N.Y., in June after allegedly robbing the Quickway Convenience Store. Their getaway ended about a mile from the crime scene as their car ran out of gas, even though the Quickway is also a gas station. (2) Hatim Gulamhusein, 48, was arrested at Toronto International Airport in April, suspected of bringing 76 swallowed packets of cocaine into the country as a drug mule, despite a mighty effort to avoid being charged. Gulamhusein managed to control his bowels so well that it took three weeks for all the packets to pass.

It should be well-known by now to News of the Weird readers that a DNA test disproving fatherhood will not necessarily relieve a man of child-support obligations. Frank Hatley's case is especially alarming. He was finally released in July in Cook County, Ga., but only after having spent 13 months in jail because he had missed a few payments for another man's child. Hatley had paid conscientiously, albeit incompletely, from 1987-2000, out of meager wages, and continued (even during periods of unemployment and homelessness) for several years after he learned he was not the father. In 2001, a court absolved him of the duty to make future payments, but the state interpreted that ruling as not affecting the overdue amounts from the past, and in 2008 jailed him.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Jerry Wayne Damron, Taylorsville, N.C. (July); Edward Wayne Edwards, Louisville, Ky. (August); Anthony Wayne Thomas, Orlando, Fla., (June); Travis Wayne Baczewski, Austin, Texas (July). Indicted recently for murder: Heath Wayne Overstreet, Roanoke, Va. (July); John Wayne Boyer, Nashville, Tenn. (August); David Wayne Hoshaw, Norfolk, Va. (August); Kenneth Wayne Baker, Churchville, Va. (July). Federal appeal of murder conviction denied: Mark Wayne Wiles, Ravenna, Ohio (August). Sentenced for murder: Carl Wayne Bowen, Swansea, Wales (July). And, alas, comes word from Caroline County, Va., that John Wayne Peck, who made this list upon his arrest in 2007 for murder, was found not guilty by a jury (July).

Writing in the February 1995 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, two Wisconsin researchers concluded that nose-picking does not create problems for most people, but that for some the habit "may meet criteria for a disorder -- rhinotillexomania." Among their survey findings: 66.4 percent of pickers did it "to relieve discomfort or itchiness" (versus 2.1 percent for "enjoyment" and 0.4 percent for "sexual stimulation"); 65.1 percent used the index finger (versus 20.2 percent little finger and 16.4 percent thumb); and "Once removed, the nasal debris was examined, at least some of the time, by most respondents."

A Whiff of Injustice: William Dillon was released in November after 26 years in prison when a DNA test ruled him out as the murderer. He was the second Florida man recently freed by DNA after being positively identified at trial by a star police dog, Harass II, whose trainer Bill Preston had sworn could amazingly track scents through water and after months of site contamination. In June, the Innocence Project of Florida said as many as 60 other convicts might have been "identified" by Harass II. According to an Orlando Sentinel report, only one judge (who's now retired) thought to actually test Harass II's ability in a courtroom, and he wrote that the dog failed badly.

-- "If I had portrayed Hitler in his underpants," explained Belgian artist Jan Bucquoy at the opening of his museum in July in Brussels, "there would not have been a war." Bucquoy has displayed, in glass cases, the drawers of prominent Belgians, but also exhibits "Warhol-type" drawings of underwear-clad celebrities as he imagines them (like Margaret Thatcher). As Bucquoy told Reuters: "If you are scared of someone, just imagine them in their underpants. The hierarchy will fall." Whose knickers does the artist most covet? France's First Lady Carla Bruni's would be nice, he said, but even better, the pope's.

-- Another Belgian artist, Jacques Charlier, was rejected by the judges of the Venice Biennale gala when he submitted his poster-sized sketches of other artists' genitals idiosyncratically drawn to suggest whose belong to whom. For example, Charlier's representation of the artist Christo (famous for "wrapping" in cloth panels and ribbons such locations as New York City's Central Park) depicts genitals wrapped up to resemble a parcel. The artists are not named, and guessing their identities from the sketches is part of the show, with prizes for guests who can name 20 of the 100 pieces.

-- British Broadcasting Corp. announced in May that it would "revive an art form" by dispatching a poet to the front lines in Afghanistan to embed with UK troops. BBC selected prominent poet Simon Armitage to mark "a new era in war poetry for the 21st century."

-- Small Town Management: (1) After haggling for a while at its June 16 meeting, the county board in Lincoln, Neb., finally voted, 2-1, to reimburse Shum Darwin for his pants, which went missing at the jail after Darwin was arrested. The city's liability was clear; the debate was about whether the pants were worth $12 or $10. (2) The city council of Brooksville, Fla., by 4-1, adopted an appearance policy in June that requires all municipal employees to wear underwear while on the clock and to make sure it is not visible.

-- Small-Town Politics: In June, the city council of Indian Trail Town, N.C., voted, 4-1, to declare Mayor John Quinn's comments about the council in the town newsletter "whiny" and to ban his remarks from subsequent issues and from the town Web site. The new policy also prohibits Mayor Quinn from talking to any municipal employee unless the town manager is at his side, and requires Quinn to get express permission to enter the town hall except for places open to the general public.

-- An investigation by the U.K. TV channel More4 revealed in June that local U.K. councils spend the equivalent of $80 million a year translating their documents into dozens of languages in the cause of "fairness," even obscure languages that few residents speak, and even given evidence that, in dozens of cases, no one has ever tried to access the documents. Translations were found in Albanian, Bengali, Kurdish, Somali, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sierra Leonean Creole, Karen (eastern Burma) and Ga (Ghana), among others.

In the American version (which actually happened at least once, in Bucks County, Pa., in the 1980s), cynical cops use a photocopier "connected" by a crude wire to the suspect, and a sheet of "He's Lying" paper in the output tray, as a "lie detector" test. In July, the Tel Aviv, Israel, Police Department used a "memory machine" to change the mind of a murder suspect who swore he could not remember anything about the night of the crime. Hooked up to an electrocardiogram machine, the perp was "informed" that certain squiggles on the paper proved that he did indeed remember and must be hiding details. Andrei Polokhin, 47, then confessed and was charged with fatally stabbing his neighbor.

David Shayler, 43, used to be a British MI5 intelligence officer, but apparently went downhill after a controversy with superiors and today lives as Delores Kent, in full female dress, and believes "in (his) heart" that he is the Messiah who will save mankind from its upcoming 2012 doomsday by turning billions of people on to the virtues of hemp, which is "perfectly balanced ... full of omega-3, -6, and -9 to help muscles grow and repair." Shayler/Kent also believes that Americans staged Sept. 11 and that Jesus Christ was, like him, a transvestite.

(1) Least Competent Cops: Officers in Forrest City, Ark., arrested Lawrence Harden Jr. in June for robbing a liquor store. They cuffed him, shackled him, and head-stuffed him into their SUV, but he got out and ran away. Police dogs found Harden an hour later, and he was re-cuffed, re-shackled and re-head-stuffed into a squad car. He got out again and ran away (but was caught again and finally jailed). (2) Least Competent Priest: In a soon-to-be-released memoir, retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, Wis., claims that, at first, he had no idea that priests' sexual abuse of young boys was a crime. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Weakland writes, "We all considered sexual abuse of minors as (only) a moral evil."

News of the Weird's favorite animal was called "heroic" by Argentine researchers in a July issue of the journal Paleontology. Had it not been for high-performance South American scarab dung beetles, they wrote, gargantuan prehistoric mammals would have choked vast areas of the continent knee-deep in manure. The researchers found that, by burying tennis-ball-sized "food supplies" for their young, the beetles also improved surface sanitation by leaving less dung available for "disease-carrying flies."

For years, News of the Weird has touted the magnificently dysfunctional municipal government of Washington, D.C., as the "District of Calamity," but improvements have been made, and the nation's capital has been overtaken by the disaster that is Detroit. (1) A Detroit News investigation revealed in June that the police department has routinely downgraded obvious "murder" cases, to make the city seem less unsafe. (2) A Detroit Public Schools auditor reported in June that the system has been issuing regular paychecks to 257 nonexistent employees. (3) City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, the wife of a U.S. congressman, pleaded guilty in June to accepting a cash bribe for a council vote. (4) A May Detroit Free Press survey revealed that the population of three large Detroit jails has mysteriously declined, which it suggested was because police have simply stopped investigating certain crimes.

In early 1995, Chesapeake, Va., inmate Robert Lee Brock filed a $5 million lawsuit against Robert Lee Brock -- accusing himself of violating his own religious beliefs and his own civil rights by getting himself drunk enough to engage in the various crimes that put him behind bars. He wrote: "I want to pay myself five million dollars (for being made to suffer from this breach of rights) but ask the state to pay it in my behalf since I can't work and am a ward of the state." (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.)

Apparently believing that religious competition in the Middle East is not exciting enough already, the television station Kanal T in Istanbul, Turkey, is preparing a reality game show for September release in which 10 certified atheists try to resist conversion by a priest, a rabbi, a Muslim imam and a Buddhist monk. The exact rules have not been disclosed, but the "winning" convert will receive an expense-paid trip to the holy land of the most persuasive religion (the Vatican, Jerusalem, Mecca or Tibet). According to a July Reuters report, Turkey's Islamic Religious Affairs Directorate, not surprisingly, had vowed never to co-operate.

-- By early July, Jonathan Baltesz and his wife and kids were desperate to find their 10-year-old black Labrador mix, Simon, who had run away. They had one more plan, however. The family members urinated into containers and sprinkled the contents at various locales around their town (Bristol, England), laid out so that Simon could follow a trail home. (Results were unavailable at press time.)

-- The British charter airline Thomas Cook announced at the gate in the resort island of Mallorca in June that, regardless of seat assignments on a departing flight, passengers should sit toward the rear of the aircraft in order to balance the load (since it was already front-heavy with cargo and therefore harder on the pilot). Not surprisingly, 71 apprehensive passengers refused to board. (Also, some incoming passengers on that same aircraft, which experienced a similar balance problem, had dramatically dropped to their knees in the terminal, kissing the ground, calling the flight their worst ever.)

The New Age movement might be growing too inclusive, according to a July report in the St. Paul Pioneer Press (published in a city where the concept of "New Age" is already highly nuanced). "(P)agans feel jilted," wrote the reporter. "Chiropractors want out (of consideration)," "channelers wonder if they belong," and "organic farmers don't want to be near pet psychics." Said one St. Paul merchant, "I have customers who completely believe in fairies and will laugh at you if you believe in Bigfoot." But, said one New Age magazine editor, the movement should "encompass anything on a spiritual path -- Bigfoot, Jesus, Buddha. Even worshipping a frog is sort of OK."

-- Some parents of students at the Al-Islah Muslim girls' school in Blackburn, England, discovered that a staff secretary, Shifa Patel, 28, had a Facebook page, featuring innocuous photos of herself but dressed in other than her full-body robe and headscarf, which are her everyday school attire. The photos also reveal that she has close-cropped hair. One assumption led to another, and soon Patel was accused of being a man who dresses as a woman in order to mingle with females. Patel went to the trouble of getting a doctor's certificate of her gender, but the parents refused to accept it, and in June, Patel (and the school's headmistress) resigned in despair.

-- A young copperhead snake trespassed into a building near Poolesville, Md., in June and delivered several venomous nips to the hand of Sam Pettengill. Often snakes do not survive such encounters because the victim's first impulse is to kill the attacker. Fortunately for this snake, it had wandered into a Buddhist temple, and Pettengill had an obligation, according to a Washington Post report. Before he set out for the hospital for treatment (which turned out to be four antivenin cycles), Pettengill took the snake in his throbbing, increasingly pain-wracked hand, circled a prayer room three times to bless it, and released it back into the woods.

-- World's Toughest Job: Farah Ahmed Omar was appointed recently as chief of Somalia's navy, which ordinarily would be on the front lines against the throng of pirates operating off the country's coast. Omar's job is difficult, though, because the Somalian navy has not a single boat nor a single sailor, and Omar himself has not been to sea in 23 years. However, he told a reporter he was optimistic that the piracy could be stopped.

-- An 18-year-old, severely mentally challenged, Paris, Texas, man was sentenced in February to 100 years in prison for a single act of what might amount to the childhood sex game of "doctor" with a 6-year-old neighbor. The man has an IQ of 47, and no coercion or violence was involved, but the jury was not given the option to send the man to a care facility in lieu of prison. In fact, his original lawyer failed even to argue his client's incompetency as a defense because, he said, he thought the man obviously would get probation. In a final touch, Lamar County judge Eric Clifford, able to punish the man on just one count with four other counts running concurrently, instead chose to stack the five counts to total 100 years, and in April, after listening to a parade of witnesses beg him to reconsider the sentence, he refused.

-- It's the Shoes: Palm Beach County, Fla., defense lawyer Michael Robb resisted a courtroom motion in June to force him to discard his well-worn Cole Haan loafers and go buy a new pair. The plaintiff's lawyer Bill Bone had complained that jurors would see the holes in the bottoms of Robb's shoes and be unfairly sympathetic to Robb's clients as humble and frugal and therefore more deserving to win. The motion was denied. According to a Palm Beach Post story, Robb said later that he has a renewed enthusiasm for the shoes.

(1) Todd Hall, 36, was sentenced to a year in prison after his conviction in Bentonville, Ark., in June for habitually biting the toes of his son, which Hall said he did up to age 6 as routine discipline. (He had earlier been on probation for the disciplinary biting of his 10-month-old daughter.) (2) In June in Muncie, Ind., in his second such conviction in seven months, Robert Stahl, 64, was found guilty of resolving disputes with men in their 50s by reaching into their mouths and yanking out their dentures.

(1) A Polynesian man in his 20s was being sought as the robber of the Black Diamond Equipment store in Salt Lake City in June. He made off with some gear from the ski and climbing accessory store, but had originally demanded jewelry, as he apparently thought he was knocking off a "diamond" store. (2) Motorist Zackary Johnson was arrested in Athens, Ga., in June after pulling over a passing police car to inquire whether he had any warrants outstanding against him. No, answered the officer after a computer check, but he noted that Johnson's driver's license is under suspension, and he was arrested.

Rarely has a city experienced a "better" year of weird news than Akron, Ohio, in 2000. A father was indicted for constantly roughing up his gifted teenage daughters to encourage even higher achievement (including threatening to kill one for misspelling "cappelletti" in the National Spelling Bee). A man was found living with his father's corpse for 11 years, discovered only when his mother died, and he failed to bury her, also. A 69-year-old man sued a woman for tricking him into marrying her when he had intended to marry her mother. A woman defended a charge of sexually molesting her 7-year-old son, by claiming that the family dog had raped him. A 10-year-old boy, trying to avoid leaf-raking chores by hiding underneath them, was hospitalized when his mother accidentally drove over the leaves. A high school coach got caught cheating when he sneaked in to run the second leg of his school's 4x100 relay at a track meet.