The Outer Frontiers of U.S. Immigration Policy: The $125 million Jay Peak ski resort in Vermont, with 120-room hotel, ice arena, golf course and the Northeast's largest water park, is just months away from completion, thanks to half-million-dollar investments from each of 250 foreign nationals from 43 countries who, as part of the deal, were given conditional U.S. "green cards" (for permanent residency). At the other end of America's immigration conundrum, prosecutors in Snohomish County, Wash., dropped the rape charge in July against illegal immigrant Jose Madrigal-Lopez, 46, for lack of evidence and released him back onto the street. Madrigal-Lopez has been deported from the U.S. 10 times already but keeps returning. [ABC News-AP, 7-8-10] [Seattle Times, 7-9-10]

-- Two-year-old Ardi Rizal of Banyuasin, Indonesia, has developed a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, according to several news organizations that splashed his story around the world in May, with video of Ardi casually puffing away as he frolics on his tricycle. Said Ardi's mother, "If he doesn't get cigarettes, he gets angry and screams and batters his head against the wall." Ardi's father, noting the kid's pudginess, seems not to sense the problem: "He looks pretty healthy to me." An additional concern is financial: Ardi will smoke only one particular premium brand, at a cost of the equivalent of about $5.50 a day. [New York Daily News, 5-26-10, Daily Mail (London), 5-27-10]

-- With heroin too expensive for many African addicts, some ask an addicted friend for a temporary fix -- withdrawing a teaspoonful of the friend's heroin-tinged blood and injecting it into their own bloodstream. Evidence of this practice (called "flashblood") comes from anecdotes from health officials in Tanzania, Zanzibar and Kenya, reported in The New York Times in July. Doctors said they question the euphoria-producing quality of such tiny amounts of heroin, but are certain that flashblood will potently deliver any HIV present in the donor's blood. [New York Times, 7-13-10]

-- Motherly Love: (1) Ranay Collins, 49, was arrested in Las Vegas in June and charged with beating her 16-year-old daughter with a cane. The arresting officer quoted Collins' explanation: "That (expletive) owes me $50 for rent." (2) Police arrested Christina Muniz, 29, in Surprise, Ariz., in June, after being summoned to the home by Muniz's son, 11. Muniz had just informed the boy and his brother, 6, that she was abandoning them to move to California with her boyfriend to fulfill her dream of becoming a stripper. With police watching, the older boy approached Muniz for a hug, but Muniz slugged him in the stomach. [KTNV-TV (Las Vegas), 6-25-10] [ABC News, 6-15-10]

-- Colin Hall, Lord Mayor of Leicester, England, visiting the Southfields library for its Summer Showcase on global understanding in June, apparently at some point experienced his pants falling down. His spokesman later said, "He was not wearing a belt, and the trousers came loose and fell." (Reports in The Guardian and other newspapers emphasized that nothing indecent occurred.) [Sydney Morning Herald-Press Association (London), 7-1-10]

-- Jammie Harms, 34, who had been executive assistant to CEO John Smith of the developer Hearthstone Homes, filed a lawsuit against the Omaha, Neb., company in June for wrongful firing. According to the lawsuit, Smith told Harms that, after consulting with psychics, he was troubled by her pregnancy. He said he was feeling "negative energy" from her fetus, sensing that it was "hostile" toward him and causing him to be reminded of his own unpleasant experience as a fetus. [KFAB Radio (Omaha)-AP, 7-1-10]

(1) An internal police inquiry concluded in April that it was an accident that an officer in the Utica, N.Y., courtroom of Judge Randal Caldwell shot Caldwell in the leg with his Taser gun. Investigators concluded that the officer was merely trying to re-holster the weapon to make it less uncomfortable, and it slipped. (2) Youth worker Cherie Beekman, 33, took a group of her kids to a bowling alley in Didsbury, England, in April for a diversion but got her thumb stuck in her bowling ball. She was taken to a fire station, where, for over two hours, rescuers used an electric saw, hacksaw and chisel to free her. [Utica Observer-Dispatch, 4-9-10] [Daily Mail, 4-20-10]

-- Fine Point of Florida Law: David Lowe, 47, was convicted in Brooksville, Fla., last year of "lewd or lascivious exhibition" after he sat in his car, masturbating, outside a convenience store while ostentatiously holding a large dildo to his mouth in front of a woman and her child. In July 2010, a Florida appeals court reversed the conviction and freed Lowe, pointing out that conviction under that particular statute requires "sexual activity," which is defined as occurring between two or more persons. [WKMG-TV (Orlando), 7-7-10]

-- Vietnam's Version of an "Innocence Project": "Traditional medicine" practitioner Pham Thi Hong is credited with freeing three men who had been convicted of a rape in 2000 and were serving 16-year prison sentences. According to Hong, men with certain small spots on their ears are virgins, and since the men still have their spots, they could not have committed rape. (Although Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet was reportedly impressed with Hong's work and thus ordered the case re-opened, discovery of additional errors by police and prosecutors contributed to the recent decision to release the men.) [Yahoo News-AP, 7-2-10]

-- Mark Seamands, 39, went to trial in May in Port Angeles, Wash., accused of second-degree assault and two lesser charges for the hot-iron "branding" of his three children, aged 13, 15 and 18. Each of the kids bore the mark "SK," for "Seamands' Kids." At trial, however, the kids testified that they not only consented to the branding but thought it was cool (despite the second-degree burns), and as a result, the jury dismissed the assault charge and deadlocked on the two lesser ones. [KIRO-TV (Seattle)-AP, 5-14-10]

(1) In July, Mike Morateck, 46, a self-described "man of science," won the Jefferson (Wis.) County Fair's annual cricket-spitting contest with a hock of 21 feet, 2 inches. His two main "scientific" secrets (he told Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel): "pick a big cricket" and "feet first on its back with the head pointing out because you don't want the legs dragging on the way out." (2) Juliana Bryant, 33, was arrested in Florala, Ala., in July after police were called to her home on a disturbing-the-peace complaint and discovered several open gasoline containers throughout the house. Bryant explained to the officers that she "like(s) the smell." [Journal Sentinel, 7-7-10] [Mobile Press-Register, 7-22-10]

Crime Scene Escapades: (1) Allen Dawes, 28, and Jimmy Lee, 43, were charged as burglars in, respectively, York, Pa. (June), and Blackburn, England (July), after having inexplicably left clues behind. For reasons unreported, Dawes had left his birth certificate at the scene and Lee his DNA-laden false teeth. (2) Officials at the Synergy Credit Union in Lashburn, Saskatchewan, have the surveillance video but not the perp. On April 13, a man in black with a curved sword jabbed at the ATM, then smashed his way through the glass front door, then roamed around, leaping over counters and jabbing at more things with the sword before departing empty-handed (and bleeding). [Yahoo News-AP, 6-23-10] [Blackburn Citizen, 7-19-10] [CNews (Toronto), 4-22-10]

Denise and Jeffrey Lagrimas, who were hosting a neighborhood watch meeting in their Oroville, Calif., home in December (1989) to discuss rising concerns about local crime, were arrested during the meeting after a neighbor spotted her recently stolen TV set in the house and then realized that Denise was wearing her stolen dress. Police officers were already on hand at the meeting to give a presentation and subsequently found $9,000 worth of stolen goods. [San Jose Mercury News, 12-12-1989]

Thanks This Week to Chris Paone, Steve Dunn, Jon LaFalce, and Michael Greer, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

Among the promotions offered by New York City's upscale Marmara Manhattan hotel is a "birth tourism" package exploiting the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment. For about $35,000, a foreign expectant mother with a visa can spend her delivery week in luxury accommodations (including medical care) -- and assure her baby automatic U.S. citizenship. (That child could then become an "anchor," subsequently making it easier for the parents to acquire "green cards.") Also, The Washington Post reported in July that three agencies in China, with U.S. affiliates, offer similar packages to their affluent citizens, whose primary concern seems to be providing their children access to a U.S. education as an alternative to China's expensive, competitive system. (Historians agree that the purpose of the "citizenship right" in the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, was to recognize former slaves as citizens.)

(1) A naked, 47-year-old man was taken to an El Paso, Texas, burn center in July after "friends" won a bet and got to set his prosthetic leg on fire, and it spread to his body. The man admitted to police that he had lost fair-and-square, by downing "only" six beers. He was treated for several days and released. (2) In June, two 34-year-old men in Horsham, Australia, underwent surgery as a result of a plan hatched during a drinking bout. They had both wondered if it hurt to get shot and thus obliged each other.

-- Black magic failed to secure the World Cup for Africa this year, but on the other hand, the weak host team, South Africa, managed an opening round draw with Mexico and an upset victory over France. "Sangomas" (traditional "healers") spreading "muti" (powders, potions, animal bones, especially from speedsters like horses and ostriches) had been out in force. World Cup stadium security was tight, but in African league soccer games, it is not uncommon for sangomas, pre-game, to bury animal parts on the field, or to have players urinate on it to improve the karma.

-- British Safety Ninnies: (1) Britain's head constable told a police chiefs' meeting in June that they were being "buried" under a "telephone directory"-sized (6,497 pages) compilation of rules and regulations telling street bobbies in massive detail such things as how to apply handcuffs and ride bicycles. (2) The local government that runs the Ebdon Road Cemetery in Weston-super-Mare, England, ordered the removal of the small cross marking the grave of Rosemary Maggs, who died in May. The local council has prohibited crosses in the cemetery, citing safety.

-- Things You Didn't Think Happened: (1) Although 85 percent of Americans are covered by health insurance, the figure in Rwanda is 92 percent. In that country's 11-year-old system, everyone pays $2 a year -- obviously just for basics. However, Rwandans' main problems are more easily treatable -- infections, malnutrition, malaria, unsafe childbirth -- and not expensive diabetes, obesity, cholesterol-clogged arteries. (2) In Israel's West Bank, Palestinians have a highly competitive race-car season, and one team on the rise this year is the sexism-fighting female squad led by driver Suna Aweida. "Driving is driving," she told BBC News in June.

-- In July, acknowledging pressure from local Asian activists, officials at the Exchange mall in Rochdale, England, said they would remove the toilets from two of the facility's restroom stalls and build "Nile pans," also known as "squat toilets" -- also to Westerners referred to as "holes in the ground." The officials said they were trying to serve the many Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants living in Greater Manchester.

-- One of Britain's 200 or so "consecrated hermits" might soon be homeless as the owner of her cottage in rural Shropshire County has listed it for sale. Karen Markham, 44, lives by rules set down by St. Benedict, the founder of western monasticism, that require her to rise at 4 a.m., pray and chant for three hours, then contemplate in silence. For recreation, she weaves rugs using wool from local sheep, according to a May report in the Daily Telegraph.

-- American "Sangomas": (1) In July, a fifth-grade teacher at Jacox Elementary School in Norfolk, Va., resigned under pressure after administrators discovered she was rubbing "holy oil" on students and their desks during school. (2) Teachers Leslie Rainer and Djuna Robinson were removed from teaching duties at Blanche Ely High School in Pompano Beach, Fla., in March after they were seen sprinkling "holy water" onto a colleague, a self-described atheist. Other witnesses disputed the details, but the two were charged under the school's "anti-bullying" policy for aggressiveness toward the other teacher.

-- At press time, the city council of Barre, Vt., continues to debate extending its pet "leash" law to cats, following a woman's complaint that a neighbor's cat continues to foul her yard with droppings. In the few towns that try to enforce leash laws on cats, a main rationale has been to protect friendly birds. (The late U.S. statesman Adlai Stevenson, when he was governor of Illinois, once rejected such a law, terming leashing "against the nature of the cat.")

-- Hard Time, Hard Luck: Harry Jackson, 26, was in jail in Woodbine, Ga., in March, on several minor charges such as driving on a suspended license. However, acceding to pressure from fellow inmates, brought on by the jail's non-smoking policy, Jackson agreed to break out, steal cigarettes at a nearby convenience store, and break back in, undetected. "(D)on't come back empty-handed," one inmate supposedly warned him. Jackson was apprehended climbing back in over a fence. In May, a judge sentenced him, for the earlier charges plus the escape and subsequent burglary, to 20 years.

John Mark Karr burst onto the national scene in 2006 when he famously, falsely, confessed to murdering little JonBenet Ramsey 10 years earlier, but since then, his life has been even more bizarre. He has spun through a series of romances with JonBenet-like youngsters, the latest with Samantha Spiegel, who was 9 when they met and is now 19 and recently got a restraining order against him. Karr is currently known as "Alexis Reich" in preparation for his gender-reassignment surgery, which Spiegel says Karr wants only in order to make it easier to befriend, and seduce, younger and younger girls. According to another ex-girlfriend, Karr asked her to solicit little girls to join a cult he was starting called "The Immaculates," to fulfill fantasies including taking baths with young girls.

From Florida's Panhandle Region: (1) A 24-year-old man was arrested in Crestview, Fla., in April after he allegedly removed a window air-conditioner and crawled into a house in which his wife was staying. They had recently separated, and he told police that he had not "gotten any" in three weeks and was going to "get some." (2) In June in Okaloosa County, passenger Courtnea Bradley, 21, roughed up the driver while the car was moving, making it swerve wildly, thus allegedly endangering her baby in the back seat. At the subsequent traffic stop, a defiant Bradley allegedly told officers, "My (expletive) family is one of the richest around, and we will have y'all's (expletive) jobs."

In May (1991), 19 members of the Michigan House of Representatives (led by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee) introduced a resolution designed to deal with obnoxious social problems, but without creating expensive regulatory programs. The resolution would establish, at the State Archives, a "Registry of Bothersome Practices," on which people could contribute to an official list of complaints about such things as elevator music and magazine blow-in subscription cards.

While the morbidly obese struggle with their health (and society's scorn), those who eroticize massive weight gain are capturing increased attention, according to a July ABC News report. Commercial and personal websites give full-bellied "gainers," such as New Jerseyan Donna Simpson, and their admiring "feeders" the opportunity to express themselves. Simpson became a 602-pound media sensation in March, when she began offering pay-per-view video of herself to an audience of horny feeders. Wrote another gainer-blogger, "Lately, I've been infatuated with the physics of my belly ... how it moves with me." When he leans to one side, he wrote, "I feel a roll form around my love handle." One sex researcher called it a "metaphor of arousal." In the end, though, as a medical school professor put it, "The fetish may be in our heads, but the plaque is going to be in (their) arteries."

-- The dating website BeautifulPeople.com, supposedly limiting its reach only to the attractive (though claiming 600,000 members worldwide), announced recently that it would sponsor a companion egg and sperm bank for its members to sell their essences for a fee. However, as managing director Greg Hodge told Newsweek in June, homely customers were welcome. "Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone -- including ugly people -- would like to bring good-looking children into the world, and we can't be selfish ...."

-- The video company EA Sports sells sports games based on real-life professional leagues, with its biggest moneymaker "Madden NFL 11," which allows joystick-using "coaches" to compete with each other based on actual pro football players' abilities. In June, EA Sports announced a new touch of realism: Just as football teams "scout" opposing players, EA Sports will sell joystickers complex "scouting reports" on the talents and tendencies of their fellow joystickers.

-- Life Imitates a Drew Barrymore Movie: Michelle Philpotts of Spalding, England, and her husband, Ian, and their two children have adjusted, since a car crash 20 years ago, to her anterograde amnesia, which, every day, robs her of short-term memory, forcing her to constantly re-learn her life. According to a June profile in London's Daily Mail, that includes Ian's convincing her that the stranger in her bed every morning is her husband, which he does by showing her their wedding photographs.

-- An April National Geographic TV special tracked "Silvano," an Italian man for whom sleep is almost impossible. He has "fatal familial insomnia," making him constantly exhausted, and doctors believe he will eventually fall into a fatal dementia. Only 40 families in the world are believed to carry the FFI gene.

-- Cleverest Non-Humans: (1) Wild elephants recently rampaged through parts of Bangladesh, and according to the head of the country's Wildlife Trust, those super-intelligent animals "are quick to learn human strategies." For example, he pointed to reports that elephants (protecting their migration corridors) routinely swipe torches from hunters and hurl them not randomly but directly at the hunters' homes. (2) Recent research on the "cat virus" (toxoplasma gondii) acknowledges that, to be viable, the virus must be passed in rodent feces but can only be hosted in a cat's stomach -- and thus that the "toxo" somehow tricks the rodents to overcome their natural fear of cats and instead, amazingly, to entice cats to eat them. Scientists are now studying whether, when human dopamine goes haywire, such as with schizophrenia, a toxoplasma-gondii-type phenomenon is at work.

-- The Trials of the Cricket-Sex Researcher: Biologists from Britain's Exeter University who set out to study the sexual behavior of field crickets in a meadow in northern Spain reported in June that they set up 96 cameras and microphones to cover a population of 152 crickets that they individually identified with tiny, numbered placards on their backs (after DNA-swabbing each one). Publishing in the journal Science, they claimed the study is important in helping us understand how "climate change" will affect habitats.

(1) In May, Jim Janson, a 20-year veteran "carny" (who ran the games of chance at Canada's traveling Bill Lynch Shows), graduated from the law school at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has set out on his new calling. (2) Downgrade Cut Short: Eduardo Arrocha, whom News of the Weird mentioned in 2008 when he was "Eak the Geek," the "Pain-Proof Man" at New York's Coney Island Sideshow (eating light bulbs, putting his tongue in a mousetrap), completed his first-year studies at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan but decided not to return and said he would concentrate on publishing his poetry.

Things looked grim for Carlos Simon-Timmerman, arrested by U.S. border agents in Puerto Rico while bringing an "underage-sex" video home from a holiday in Mexico. The star of "Little Lupe the Innocent" looked very young, and federal prosecutors in April called an "expert witness" pediatrician, who assured the jury, based on the girl's underdevelopment, that she was a minor. However, Simon-Timmerman's lawyer had located "Lupe" via her website, and she cheerfully agreed to fly in from her home in Spain with her passport and other documents to prove, at a dramatic point in the trial, that she was 19 when the video was made. Simon-Timmerman was acquitted.

Questionable Judgments: (1) Austin, Texas, police issued an arrest warrant in June for Jose Romero, who they say robbed a Speedy Stop clerk after demanding money and menacingly pointing to his waistband, which held a caulking gun. (2) Steven Kyle took about $75,000 worth of merchandise from Cline Custom Jewelers in Edmonds, Wash., in June, but as he left the store, employees shouted to passers-by, several of whom began to chase Kyle. Almost immediately, Kyle dropped his gun and the jewelry and fell to the ground exhausted. (Kyle later revealed that he had only one lung.)

(1) Police in Houston said the man killed when he drove his 18-wheeler into a freeway pillar on July 6 was part of a two-man scheme to defraud an auto insurance company. Police said it was the other man who was originally scheduled to drive but that, citing the "danger," he (wisely) backed out. (2) Inmate Carlos Medina-Bailon, 30, who was awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges in El Paso, Texas, escaped in July by hiding in the jail's garbage-collection system. Medina-Bailon's body was found later the same day under mounds of trash in a landfill.

Men Who Accidentally Shot Themselves Recently: Robert Stewart, 55, a police academy instructor, during class (Liberty Township, Ohio, April). Lazaro Flores, 50, practicing quick-draw at his girlfriend's house (Cape Coral, Fla., January). Michael Webb, 22, showing friends how to disarm a gunman (Camp Lejeune, N.C., February). Michael Randall Jr., 19, outside a convenience store, preparing to rob it (Athens, Ga., December). Vincent Medina, 19, waistband-as-holster mismanagement (hit in the groin) (Fontana, Calif., June). Brandon Boyce, 24, waistband-as-holster mismanagement (hit in the groin) (Omaha, Neb., July).

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in June (1992) on the local "Silent Meeting Club," consisting of people who gather at various spots around town and make it a point not to speak to each other. Founder John Hudak said his inspiration was his observation that people often feel obligated to talk when they really have nothing to say, such as at parties, and wondered how nice it would be "to have a group of people where you wouldn't have to talk." Hudak was interviewed at lunchtime in a downtown park, with several of his fellow members nearby, not talking.