Briton Robert Dee, feeling humiliated at being called the "world's worst tennis pro" by London's Daily Telegraph (and other news organizations) sued the newspaper for libel last year. After taking testimony in February 2010, the judge tossed out the lawsuit in April, persuaded by Dee's having lost 54 consecutive international tour matches (all in straight sets). Fearful of an opposite result, 30 other news organizations had already apologized to Dee for disparaging him, and some even paid him money in repentance, but the Telegraph had stood its ground (and was, of course, humble in victory, titling its story on the outcome, "'World's Worst' Tennis Player Loses Again").

-- Mexican police, raiding a suspected hideout of drug kingpin Oscar Nava Valencia in the city of Zapopan in December, found the expected items (weapons, drugs, cash) but also 38 gold- or silver-plated guns emblazoned with ornate designs and studded with diamonds, which it placed on public display in May. Included were seven bejeweled assault weapons.

-- In war-torn Gaza, with little relief from the tedium of destruction and poverty, the Mediterranean Sea offers some relief, especially for about 40 people who belong to the Gaza Surf Club, riding waves on secondhand, beaten-down boards. While the waves might not be as challenging as those in Huntington Beach, Calif., the surfers nonetheless must be skilled enough to avoid the estimated 60 million liters of raw sewage that Gaza city, with no practical alternative, has routinely emptied into the sea.

-- An April ABC News TV report featured a Westford, Mass., couple as the face of the "radical unschooling" philosophy, which challenges both the formal classroom system and home schooling. Typically, home-schooling parents believe they can organize their kids' educations better than schools can, but "unschoolers" simply put kids on their own, free to decide by themselves what, or whether, to learn any of the traditional school subjects. There is no punishment, no judgment, no discipline. The key, said parent Christine Yablonski, "is that you've got to trust your kids." For example, "If they (decide that they) need formal algebra understanding ... they'll find that information."

-- Bolinas, Calif., north of San Francisco, is famously reclusive, even to the point of residents' removing state highway signs pointing to the town, hoping that outsiders will get lost enroute and give up the quest. It limits its population to about 1,500 by officially fixing the number of municipal water hookups at 580, but in April, one of the meters became available when the city purchased a residential lot to convert to a park. The meter was to be sold at a May auction, with a minimum bid of $300,000.

-- A recent French documentary in the form of a TV show called "Game of Death" mimics the notorious 1950s human-torture experiments of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who would coax test subjects to administer increasingly painful jolts of electricity to strangers to assess their obedience to an "authority figure," even if contrary to their own moral codes. As in Milgram's experiments, the Game of Death "victims" were actors, unharmed but paid to scream louder with each successive "shock." According to a BBC News report, 82 percent of the game's players were willing torturers, a higher percentage than Milgram found, but the TV show's subjects had greater encouragement, cheered on by a raucous studio audience and a glamorous hostess.

-- According to an April lawsuit filed by an employee of the five-star Ritz-Carlton resort in Naples, Fla., the hotel complied with a February request by a wealthy British traveler that, during their stay, his family not be served by "people of colour" or anyone who spoke with a "foreign accent." The hotel has apologized to the employee, but denied that it had complied with the traveler's request. (Lawyers for the employee told the Associated Press that nine witnesses and a copy of a computer entry prove their claim.)

-- Good News/Bad News: Based on April federal indictments of organized crime members in New York and New Jersey, it appears that any "glass ceiling" to management in the exclusively male Gambino family has been cracked in that at least one woman, Suzanne Porcelli, 43, was indicted among the 14 family members and associates. However, the Gambino "farm system" is apparently weak, in that with the imprisonment of John Gotti and other experienced capos, the organization appears headed in historically unfamiliar directions, most notably in child prostitution. Until now, even the most vicious of Mafiosi historically, heroically, protected women and children from the families' "business."

Spectacular Errors: (1) Milton High School beat Westlake, 56-46, for the Georgia 5A boys' basketball championship in March. Westlake's chances evaporated during the pre-game warm-ups, when their Georgia-player-of-the-year candidate Marcus Thornton was forced to sit after spraining his ankle leaping to ceremonially hip-bump a teammate. (2) Two North Carolina surgeons were issued official "letters of concern" in January for a 2008 incident in which they performed a C-section on a woman who was not pregnant. (They relied on an intern's confused diagnosis and followed an ultrasound with no heartbeat and several obviously failed attempts to induce labor.)

Frustrated customers frequently challenge bills, and occasionally, "rescission" of the original deal is a suitable remedy. However, it's not suitable for some services. Deborah Dillow was late with the $150 she allegedly owed to The Bomb Squad dog waste pick-up service in Bend, Ore., in April, and appeared to be avoiding calls at her home. The Bomb Squad owner, frustrated by the delays, simply returned all the work done to that point on Dillow's property in one big pile, in her front yard.

The Wonder Drug: (1) Donald Wolfe, 55, was charged with public drunkenness in March in Brookville, Pa., after neighbors spotted him giving, as he described it, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a roadkill possum along Route 36. (2) A 62-year-old man suffered second-degree burns after launching himself on a makeshift, rocket-powered sled in Independence Township, Mich., in January. Witnesses said he put on a helmet, then strapped a contraption consisting of a motorcycle muffler, a pipe, gunpowder, match heads and gasoline on his back, and had someone light the wick to send him blasting through the snow.

Overconfident "Artists": (1) Clair Arthur Smith, 42, of Cape Coral, Fla., was charged with forgery in May after he allegedly tried to doctor the amount of a check he had received from Bank of America. Converting the "$10.00" check to $100, or even $100,000, would seem plausible, but Smith tried to deposit the check into his account after he had marked it up to "$269,951.00." (2) A 17-year-old was arrested in College Station, Texas, in January and charged with trying to pass a homemade $5 bill at a restaurant. Police said the bill's front and back had been computer-scanned and then pasted together but that the front of the bill was longer than the back.

Among the ill-fated public relations moves by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company to counteract the industry's cascading legal problems in the year 2000 were these automated telephone announcements for 800-number callers (according to an April 2000 New York Times story): (1) a male chorus serenading callers with, "Oooh, the tobacco plant is a lovely plant / Its leaves so broad and green / But you shouldn't think about the tobacco plant / If you're still a teen," and (2) an earlier message featuring a sexy male voice intoning, "Brown & Williamson Tobacco is in love. We're a giant corporation, and you make us feel like a little kitten." "Thank you, lover."

-- Our Expanding "Rights": (1) In April, a high official of the European Union called for member-nations to subsidize "vacations" for seniors, the disabled and those too poor to afford one. Said Commissioner (for enterprise and industry) Antonio Tajani, "Traveling for tourism today is a right." (2) In April, the town of Olathe, Kan., became the second city in two years to settle lawsuits filed by citizens who were arrested for flashing their middle fingers at police officers, thus appearing to acknowledge that flipping the bird contemptuously at a cop is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. (Philadelphia paid out $50,000; Olathe, one-sixteenth the size, paid out $5,000.)

-- The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., famously pickets targets around the country with explicit anti-homosexuality signs and recently chose as venues the funerals of deceased U.S. soldiers and Marines (calling such deaths God's punishment for America's acceptance of gays and lesbians). One grieving Marine family in York, Pa., filed a lawsuit accusing Westboro of "intentional infliction of emotional distress" by picketing their son's 2006 funeral, but a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in March that such protests are protected by the First Amendment. Piling on, the Court added that the grieving family must also pay Westboro $16,510 to cover its costs in having to defend the lawsuit.

-- Michelle Taylor, 34, was sentenced in Elko, Nev., in April to life in prison, solely for the crime of forcing a 13-year-old boy to touch her breasts, twice. The sentence was mandatory under a certain state law, but, said her lawyer, "She is getting a greater penalty ... than if she killed (the boy)." (She could be eligible for parole after 10 years.)

-- Baltimore County (Md.) Judge Darrell Russell Jr., presiding over a March domestic violence case in which the woman obviously had changed her mind about blaming the boyfriend, performed the couple's marriage ceremony in his chambers after temporarily halting the boyfriend's trial. Earlier, Judge Russell had informed the woman that she could not refuse to testify based on "marital privilege" because she and the boyfriend were not married. Consequently, as the trial started, she asked the judge to marry them. After the ceremony, she was then granted the "marital privilege," and the judge dismissed the charge for lack of evidence. (Russell has now been reassigned to less important cases.)

-- When Joseph Velardo, 28, was arrested in Port St. Lucie, Fla., in April after shoplifting items from a Staples store, he for some reason expressed relief that the charges would prevent him from being accepted by law schools. He explained that, since the value of the goods was over the $300 line that separates a mere misdemeanor from a 3rd-degree felony, law schools, thankfully, could no longer accept him. While officers were busy being puzzled about all that, the Staples manager told the police that the actual value of Velardo's take was $276.88.

-- Justin Massler, 27, charged with criminal stalking of 28-year-old businesswoman-heiress Ivanka Trump, was released on bail in New York City in April but explained to a New York Daily News reporter that he intended to alter his approach. Instead of imposing himself on Trump, he said he would "become like a big-time millionaire, real estate mogul, so that she's the one who contacts me."

-- At press time, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal is considering declaring veteran comedian Guy Earle guilty of discrimination against two uncloseted lesbians who were heckling him in a night club. According to Earle, the women were loud, rude to the waitress and contemptuous of Earle, and thus opened the door to combat-type comedy of insult-exchange, except that some of his insults referred to the women's sexual orientation and frisky behavior at the table. Earle said his job requires him to be "offensive" and that the traditional verbal jousts between comedians and hecklers are not the same as illegal "hate speech."

-- More Fuzzy Thinking: (1) Schools' conventional "zero tolerance" policies prohibiting guns or weapons on campus not only apply (as they have recently) to drawings of guns and to a 2-inch-long toy charm in the shape of a gun, but, at an Ionia, Mich., school, to making the familiar, thumb-up hand representation of a gun, for which Mason Jammer, 6, was suspended in March. (2) Carly Houston, 29, was arrested in Naperville, Ill., in March after a rowdy early-morning dispute with a taxi driver, and, given her customary "one phone call" to ask a friend to post bond for her, she chose instead to call 9-1-1 and report that she was "trapped inside a detention facility" (thus causing police to add "abuse of 9-1-1" to the charges).

-- Erlyndon Joseph Lo, 27 and a graduate of Southern Methodist University law school, was arrested in April after threats against a Dallas women's clinic that performs abortions. Police were tipped the day before when Lo appeared at the federal courthouse in Plano, Texas, and sought a formal judicial ruling that would protect him from harm, even if he were to use deadly force "to defend the innocent life of another human being."

-- (1) In April, outdoing the recent partisan spats in the U.S. Congress, several dozen members of the Ukrainian parliament squared off over a cooperation-with-Russia bill that eventually involved headlocks, punching, a smoke bomb, glue (in the voting machines) and cartons of eggs tossed at the speaker's platform. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev called it the chamber's "traditional elegance." (2) Sweden's Metro newspaper reported in March that a 21-year-old inmate at Kirseberg prison in Malmo faces discipline for continuing his protests against jail conditions by aiming his gas-passing directly at guards.

-- Federal agents in April uncovered an elaborate bestiality ring (involving horses) in Washington state. Facility operator Douglas Spink is suspected of using the site to make pornographic videos for perverts, and a visitor from England was arrested as a suspected paying customer. This farm is near Bellingham, Wash., and the operation is completely separate from the 2005 raid on a similar facility near Enumclaw, Wash. (about 110 miles away), in which one man died of a perforated colon following penetrative sex by a horse. The state had no specific anti-bestiality law in 2005, but one was enacted after the Enumclaw episode.

-- (1) Albert Bailey, 27, and a 16-year-old buddy were charged with robbery of a People's United Bank in Fairfield, Conn., in March, after they made it much too easy for police by calling the bank beforehand and demanding that money be set aside for them to pick up at a certain time. Police were waiting in the parking lot. (2) Megan Barnes, 37, was arrested in March after being spotted driving erratically in Cudjoe Key, near Key West, Fla. After several implausible explanations, Barnes admitted she had a razor and was giving herself a "bikini shave" as she drove. Several traffic charges were filed against her.

-- Robert Jordan filed a lawsuit in May 1997 against the New London, Conn., police department for illegal discrimination, claiming he was rejected as an officer solely because he scored too high on an intelligence test. The department admitted the discrimination, offering the defense that a person of such intelligence would quickly get bored with police work. U.S. District Judge Peter Dorsey agreed with the department and dismissed the lawsuit.

In mid-April, senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi issued a warning that recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and elsewhere were caused by women's loose sex and immodest dress. Immediately, Jennifer McCreight responded on Facebook by urging women worldwide to dress provocatively on April 26 to create "boobquake" and test the cleric's theory, and at least 90,000 women promised they would reveal serious cleavage on that date. On April 26, following a several-day drought of earthquakes, a Richter-scale-measuring 6.5 quake hit just south of Taiwan. (Slight advantage to the ayatollah, since a Purdue University seismologist observed that a 6.5 quake was not uncommon for that region.)

One of the world's longest-running TV comedy shows (according to an April Reuters dispatch from South Korea) is the weekly North Korean production "It's So Funny," with its undynamic format of a man and a woman in military uniforms talking to each other (though they sometimes sing and dance). The latest episode "extolled the virtue of beans," wrote the Reuters stringer, "while avoiding any flatulence humor." "If we soldiers see beans, we become happy," said the man, leading both hosts to laugh. According to Reuters, "The two talk about how bean-fed North Korean soldiers were able to fight off U.S. imperialist troops during the Korean war."

-- John Ridgeway, 45, filed a federal false-imprisonment lawsuit in March based on his 2005 trial over a traffic charge. According to a report in Michigan's Bay City Times, just before the jury returned with a verdict, Ridgeway opened a vial of oil, rubbed some on his fingers and then around the defense table, and he later shook hands with court personnel. Ridgeway was arrested when the prosecutor, a bailiff and the ticketing police officer became ill. Ridgeway explained that the virgin olive oil had been blessed by a Colorado pastor, specifically to "cast evil" from government facilities.

-- In March, leaders of the St. John's Lutheran Church in Baraboo, Wis., voted to fire the principal of its elementary and middle school because of his "question(ing) the church's teachings." The church had held a contentious meeting of members on March 21, but few spoke out for the principal, largely because female members were banned from speaking at all. (According to the Baraboo News Republic, women cannot vote on the church's business but generally are allowed to talk at meetings until now.)

-- Under Britain's Department of Health guidelines, prisoners about to be released, and who had previously taken drugs but cured their addiction while incarcerated, are being purposely re-addicted by wardens, using methadone. According to researchers, the former addicts will then be less likely to overdose when they get back on the street. Reportedly, more than 460 prisoners have thus been "retoxified" in the last five years.

-- In March, the European Union's Trade Marks and Designs Registration Office granted a trademark to two German entrepreneurs to market a beer called Fucking Hell. Under the office's reasoning, "hell" is simply German slang for "light ale," and the other word is the official name of a town in neighboring Austria. However, according to a March report in Der Spiegel, the applicants for the trademark have no connection to the town, and there is no brewery there, or even plans for a brewery.

-- Judge Robert Benjamin of the Hobart branch of Australia's Family Courts ruled in a March custody case that sisters, aged 10 and 8, must spend weekends with their father, even though he is a convicted sex offender with a child-porn habit. The judge attached some restrictions that Dad must install a lock on the girls' bedroom door that he cannot control and, if the girls stay overnight, the father must have "an adult friend" spend the night, too, so that Dad will be less likely to offend.

-- In March, an employment tribunal in Sydney, Australia, awarded pilot Bryan Griffin damages of $160,000 (Aus.) (U.S. equivalent, $208,000) because Qantas, for which he worked from 1966 to 1982, had allowed him to continue flying from 1979 to 1982 with depression and anxiety attacks that caused him nearly to deliberately crash his aircraft. As a result of continuing to work, he had several more episodes which exacerbated his condition (and, obviously, placed his passengers in jeopardy).

(1) In January, the principal of D. Roy Kennedy Public School in Ottawa, Ontario, banned "ball-playing" anywhere on school grounds, declaring that it is too dangerous. (2) Ricardo West, 22, who performs as a Michael Jackson impersonator, was arrested in April in Allen Park, Mich., on 12 counts of sexual misconduct with an 11-year-old boy.

(1) Delmer Doss, 19, and his girlfriend, Amber Burgess, 19, were arrested in Stanley, N.C., in February on child abuse charges after police found a video made by the couple of their 11-month-old son. The toddler was blindfolded, and the parents were shown laughing at him, over and over, as he bumped into walls and fell down. (2) In March in Dallas, Krystal Gardner, 28, confronting a repo man driving off with her SUV, tossed her 1-year-old baby through an open window to stop the moving vehicle. (At that point, the repo man stopped and got out, but moments later, a teenager emerged from Gardner's house and began firing a 12-gauge shotgun.

A 27-year-old man reported to Oklahoma City police in April that he was sexually assaulted by a man who had perhaps misunderstood the first man's intentions. According to a story in The Oklahoman, the first man had fully disclosed his "fetish for flatulence," but when the two met, the hijinks were interrupted by the second man's tying up and sexually assaulting the first man. The first man said he wanted only for the second man to "fart for me." The first man's name was not disclosed because he claimed to be the victim of a sex crime.

(1) Macdonald Portal Golf and Spa Hotel (Cheshire, England) declined to provide a toothpick to a dinner guest on New Year's Day (to dislodge a piece of meat between his teeth) because the facility's manager said she believes that toothpicks are safety hazards. (2) Citing restrictions of Scotland's Strathclyde Fire and Rescue force, a supervisor ordered firefighters on the scene not to attempt to rescue the 44-year-old woman who had accidentally fallen into a well. The restrictions require that only certified "mountain rescuers" are authorized to climb into wells. The nearest squad did not arrive for six hours, and the woman died. (3) Mirko Fischer, 33, filed a lawsuit against British Airways in January for separating him from his wife, even though they had valid tickets for adjacent seats. BA regulations forbid seating an adult next to an unaccompanied minor, and thus Fischer, with wife on one side and 12-year-old boy on the other, was removed to the only open seat, far away from his wife.

About once a month, the owners of the Marina del Rey (Calif.) Sportfishing bait shop reap a windfall. According to a January 2004 Los Angeles Times story, a Tibetan Buddhist study group drops by in a convoy after meditating on the "liberation of beings" and plunks down $1,000-$2,000 cash to buy as much live bait as they can, after which they go to Marina del Rey Harbor and, in their terms, "free" the bait (whereupon, of course, much of it is promptly eaten by fish).