More than a half-million children in the U.S. take antipsychotic medicines and (reported The New York Times in September) "(e)ven the most reluctant (doctors) encounter a marketing juggernaut that has made antipsychotics the nation's top-selling class of drugs by revenue, $14.6 billion last year, with prominent promotions aimed at treating children." In one psychiatrist's waiting room, observed the Times reporter, "(C)hildren played with Legos stamped with the word Risperdal" (an antipsychotic made by Johnson & Johnson). (The company, which recently lost its patent on the drug, said it has stopped handing out the toys -- which it insisted were not toys at all but advertising reminders for doctors.)

-- Three self-described bisexual men filed a federal lawsuit in April against the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance for disqualifying them from the Gay Softball World Series in Seattle in 2008 because they were not sufficiently gay. Teams were limited to two heterosexuals, and when the men's team won second place, questions were raised about the three until organizers took them aside and asked "intrusive" questions about their sexual attractions and desires. Ultimately, they were disqualified as being too straight. (The alliance acknowledged that it has no standards for judging gayness level, but explained, as a private organization, that it is not subject to federal law.)

-- Justine Winter, 17, who was badly injured in a car crash in Flathead County, Mont., in March 2009, filed a lawsuit in July 2010 against the pregnant driver whom she had hit and killed (along with the woman's 13-year-old son). However, the local prosecutor has already charged Winter with two counts of homicide, based on text messages she had sent her estranged boyfriend minutes before the crash. "If I won (you)," she texted, "I would have you ... and I wouldn't crash my car." Also, "That's why I'm going to wreck my car. Because all I can do is f--- up. Because I am a terrible person, and I know it." Also, "Good bye ... my last words." That was then; nowadays, Winter says the woman she hit was driving negligently and that construction companies failed to maintain the roadway properly.

-- Craig Smallwood of Hawaii filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year against the makers of the online virtual-world game "Lineage II" for failing to warn him that he would become so addicted to playing it that he would be "unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends." (He claims to have spent 20,000 hours over five years playing.) In August, Judge Alan Kay declined to dismiss the lawsuit and set it for trial.

-- Between suicide, murder, assault, drunken driving and drug use, the soldiers of the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division, at Fort Bliss, Texas, have been statistically in greater peril while stateside than while deployed in Iraq. "Being back (home) is what we don't do well," Lt. Col. David Wilson told The New York Times in July. During the last year in Iraq, the brigade lost only one soldier to combat, but in the previous year stateside, seven were killed and four people died in crimes committed by brigade personnel.

-- Challenging Times for Labor Unions: (1) At a rally in Washington, D.C., in July denouncing employers who hire nonunion carpenters, many of the chanting protesters were nonunion day workers hired by the carpenters' union to make the demonstration look bigger, according to a Wall Street Journal report. (2) In August, Jim Callaghan, a long-time writer on the headquarters staff of the United Federation of Teachers, was fired after trying to organize his colleagues into their own union local. Callaghan said that UFT staff deserve the same protections as the teachers they represent. (A UFT spokesman said most UFT employees are already unionized.)

-- The Republican candidate for governor of Colorado, Dan Maes, explained in August that he began the campaign supporting "green" programs, such as Denver's innovative "bike-sharing" project, but that he has rethought his position. Now, he told reporters, environmental programs are, in reality, plots. "(I)f you do your homework and research, you realize that (encouraging people to park their cars and ride bikes in the city) is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty."

-- The New South Wales (Australia) anti-corruption commission, at a hearing in August, got engineer Don Gamage to admit that he "exaggerated" his credentials to get a series of government contracts. Nonetheless, Gamage was defiant: "If I didn't exaggerate," he explained, "the people of NSW ... would have missed (out on) the service and the benefit that I delivered."

-- Bruce Tuck, who confessed in December to a series of rapes in Martin, Tenn., and was sentenced to 60 years in prison (and who faces still more charges), tried to withdraw his confession in June, complaining that he was not of sound mind at the time because, though weighing 275 pounds, he was being held in jail on a "lettuce-only" diet. Thus, he said, he was unusually vulnerable when a detective offered him a bag of chips to admit to the charges.

After an historic site along the lower Jordan River was closed for a day in July for public health reasons, an environmental group, EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth (Middle East), called for a permanent suspension until the governments of Israel and Jordan (on either side of the river) assure that it is safe from agricultural discharge and untreated sewage. Facing sites on the river both claim to be where John the Baptist baptized Jesus, and pilgrims flock to the sites to be baptized, as well.

Lame: (1) Gerald Maxwell, 39, a convicted burglar who was caught in August breaking into the same Sarasota, Fla., home he had broken into last year, quickly tried to explain his innocence to officers. "I was going back in there to leave a thank-you note, because I'm the guy who burglarized this place last year (and) I just got out of jail." (2) Terrance Mitchell was arrested in Waterloo, Iowa, in July, identified from video as the man who tried to shoplift surveillance equipment from a store. Mitchell was thus apparently unaware that stores that sell surveillance equipment might operate surveillance cameras.

Michael Peterson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife, Kathleen, and sentenced to life in prison in North Carolina, but T. Lawrence Pollard, who was one of Peterson's lawyers, has relentlessly offered the alternative theory (though not during Peterson's trial) that Mrs. Peterson was instead killed by a rogue owl one night in her home. Earlier this year, Raleigh's News & Observer wrote a series on deficiencies in the state's original investigation (though not about owls), and Pollard filed affidavits in August -- one by an owl expert that Mrs. Peterson's injuries were consistent with an attack by "a large bird of prey" and the other by scientists who offered to DNA-test what investigators say might be a faint microscopic "feather" from the crime scene.

The lawyer for a former Fort Lauderdale, Fla., phone-sex worker announced to reporters in November (1999) that he had won a workers' compensation settlement for his client based on her claim of carpal tunnel syndrome due to being encouraged to masturbate on the job as much as seven times a day. Steven Slootsky said his client (who declined to be publicly identified) accepted the settlement to avoid the embarrassment of testifying, even though the money is not enough to reimburse her for the surgery she required on both hands.

Professional Training Required: The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced in August that it had contract work for up to 2,100 language specialists to transcribe wiretaps, with immediate needs in the Atlanta field office for 144 Spanish experts, along with 12 for Vietnamese, and nine each for Korean, Farsi and "Ebonics." Ebonics is recognized by some linguists as the "nonstandard" form of English spoken by African-Americans. (In one example cited by the Associated Press, offered by Stanford professor John Rickford, "th" endings are pronounced as "f," e.g., "both" as "boaf.")

-- Texas State Rep. Joe Driver, an 18-year House veteran whose website notes his opposition to "big spending habits of liberals in government," was revealed in August to have been routinely double-billing the government for travel expenses and to have been genuinely surprised to learn that voters and colleagues might find that improper. Wrote the Associated Press: "Driver insists he thought the double-billing was perfectly appropriate -- until talking about it with the AP," at which point he appeared to change his mind. "Well, it doesn't sound (appropriate) now (if) you bring it up that way," he admitted. "(To learn that) pretty well screws my week." For at least five years, Driver had been collecting from the government for expenses already reimbursed by his re-election campaign.

-- Every weekend for the last four years, parishioners from the New Beginnings Ministries church in Warsaw, Ohio, have gathered in front of The Fox Hole strip club in nearby Newcastle and tried to shame customers by photographing them and posting their license plate numbers on the Internet, and brandishing hellfire-threatening signs. Recently, however, Fox Hole's strippers joined the duel, congregating on Sundays in front of New Beginnings, wearing bikinis and "see-through" shorts, dancing scandalously, squirting each other with jumbo water guns, and wielding their own Bible-quoting signs to greet the day's worshippers.

-- The Los Angeles Unified School District has laid off nearly 3,000 teachers in the last two years, faces a $640 million annual shortfall, and runs some of the country's worst-performing classrooms. However, in the last three years, it has opened three luxurious "Taj Mahal" schools costing $1.1 billion, including the $578 million, amenity-rich, architecturally grand Robert F. Kennedy school, opening in September. "New buildings are nice," said one California Board of Education member, but not "when they're run by the same people who've given us a 50 percent dropout rate." Included in these elegant palaces are a state-of-the-art swimming pool, manicured public park, a restaurant-quality kitchen, modernistic towers, a cushioned dance floor -- and of course lavish offices for teachers and administrators.

-- An Indian in the western Brazilian state of Rondonia lives completely isolated from humans -- the last survivor of his never-contacted tribe. However, the government has taken the unprecedented step of protecting 31 square miles of his habitat, monitored against trespass by technology including heat-sensitive flyovers -- even though developers point out that 31 square miles of farming could produce food for many more Brazilians than "one." The man was spotted 15 years ago, appearing to be about 30 years old (and leaving one of the spotters with an arrow in the chest), but has left only clues since then, and three years ago, the government stopped looking for him.

-- Wisconsin law permits independent candidates five-word statements to accompany their names on the ballot, to signal voters just as the words "Republican" and "Democrat" are signals, but Milwaukee Assembly candidate Ieshuh Griffin was ruled in July to have gone too far with her statement ("NOT the 'whiteman's bitch'") (her capitalization and punctuation). Griffin said the decision baffled her since "everyone" she spoke with understood exactly what she meant.

-- Mark Reckless, elected to the British House of Commons only two months earlier, apologized in July for failing to vote on a budget bill that required a late-night session to pass. He explained that he had had a drink or two while waiting for the session to begin and barely remembered what happened (except for "someone asking me to vote").

Joseph Wheeler filed a $12 million lawsuit in August against Prince George's Hospital in Upper Marlboro, Md., over its treatment following a June 23 car accident. He was admitted with serious injuries, but hospital staff mistakenly marked him for next-day cancer surgery, and when he protested and tried to leave, two muscular staff "security" men restrained him, dishing out even more pain. Yelled one, according to the lawsuit, "Get off the floor, bitch!" "I don't care who you think you are. This is my camp." (The next day Wheeler talked his way out and over to St. Mary's Hospital, where he was treated for four broken ribs, a sprained shoulder, a ruptured spleen and a concussion.)

John Theodore Anderson (also known, in his court filings, as "John-Theodore:Anderson) filed a lawsuit in August against an Alpine, Utah, attorney who had acquired land from a man who Anderson said owed him $4,000 for "consulting" work. The attorney, and the previous owner, denied Anderson's claim, provoking Anderson to file a lien on the land -- for $918 billion (a mark-up only quixotically related to the $4,000). However, by the time Anderson got around to filing the lawsuit to defend the lien, his $4,000 claim had become $38 quadrillion (38 thousand trillion dollars).

Unclear on the Concept: (1) In Maine Township, Ill., Mr. Janusz Owca was arrested in August for choking his wife and was booked into jail and given his traditional phone call. With police listening, Owca called his wife and threatened to kill her. (2) Veteran criminal Nathan Pugh, 49, walked in to a Wells Fargo bank in Dallas on July 26 and presented his holdup note to a teller (claiming to have a "bom"). The teller told Pugh that she could not release large amounts of money without proper ID and convinced Pugh to turn over both a Texas state ID card and his Wells Fargo debit card, both in his own name. Police arrived just as Pugh was leaving and after an attempt to grab a hostage, he was arrested. (He even failed with the hostage -- a woman carrying a child -- who still managed to take Pugh to the floor.)

-- More British Local Council Wisdom: (1) Nottinghamshire County Council recently refused, for the third time, to issue a disabled-parking permit to British Army Cpl. Johno Lee, whose right leg was amputated below the knee following an explosion in Iraq. Lee said a staff member told him he was "young" and that his situation "might get better." (2) The Romford council's housing administrator ruled in July that, notwithstanding sweltering temperatures and kids' summer vacations, vinyl wading pools were prohibited -- as safety hazards, in that firefighters could possibly trip over them if responding to emergencies.

-- More Poor Multitaskers: (1) A 47-year-old woman accidentally drove off a boat ramp in Sacramento County, Calif., in August and drowned, as she had become distracted on a cell phone call with her daughter. (2) In Cincinnati in August, Colondra Hamilton, 32, was arrested after a routine traffic stop. Officers said they found Hamilton with her pants unbuttoned, a sex toy in her lap, and a computer playing a video in the passenger seat.

Police in Bonita Springs, Fla., charged Randall James Baker, 45, with aggravated battery in August (1998) for shooting his friend Robert Callahan in the head -- sending him to the hospital. A sheriff's spokesman said Baker and Callahan had a playful tradition between them -- that any time either of them acquired a new baseball-type cap, the other would try to shoot the little button off the top. This time, according to the sheriff, alcohol played a bigger role than usual.

-- In 2007 News of the Weird highlighted the clothes cults of impoverished Congo: "In (the country that) has lost an estimated 4 million people in the civil wars of the last decade and where many must get by on about 30 cents a day, 'gangs' of designer-clothes-wearing men" have fashion smackdowns in the streets of Kinshasa to prove that Versace and Gucci styles look better on them than on others. These "sapeurs" (from the French slang for clothes) continue to strut their genuine Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana, according to a March Washington Post dispatch. One sapeur, "Luzolo," who lives in a one-room shack with no bed, no water and no electricity (but a closetful of designer outfits) describes the feeling as "like a spirit that comes in me." When he wears "the labels," he said, "I feel there is no one above me."

-- Again this year, in April, the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo hosted the possibly-400-year-old Naki Sumo ("crying baby contest"), in which infants are blessed to good health by having sumo wrestlers hoist them into the air, hold them at arm's length, and coax them (no squeezing!) to cry, thus signaling that the offering has been heard. This year, 80 babies were glorified, with special spiritual favors afforded those who cried the loudest and the longest.

-- In 2007, News of the Weird mentioned the nightly ceremony on the India-Pakistan border at Wagah Crossing as part pomp, part macho posturing and part Monty Python ("Ministry of Silly Walks"), in which troops from both sides wearing hard-to-describe headgear perform complicated boot-stomping maneuvers to assure their countrymen that they are protecting their nation from the other one. Lately, however, according to a July Agence France-Presse dispatch, the high-kicking show has become subdued because so many of the soldiers have reported knee injuries from the exaggerated prancing.

-- Cosmetic surgery-obsessive Sheyla Hershey of Houston has endured more than 30 operations, including breast augmentations in increasingly large sizes (in her quest to have the world's largest pair). As News of the Weird reported, her luck started to go south in 2008 when licensed Texas surgeons declined to implant the M cups she wanted, and she was forced to use a clinic in Brazil. Last year, for the birth of her first child, she had the Brazilian implants removed -- and later replaced with a smaller pair -- but in June 2010, she was diagnosed with a staph infection. At press time she was still being treated with radical antibiotic therapy in Houston and might lose one or both breasts.

-- Notorious Boston criminal gang leader Whitey Bulger, who has been on the run since 1995, made News of the Weird before that because of some unusual dietary (and hence, excretory) habits. Bulger would now be 80 years old, but law enforcement officials have no idea where he is, or what he now looks like, or even if he is alive, but they believe he likes to browse books. In April 2010, FBI agents blanketed bookstores in Victoria, British Columbia, having gotten word that he might be in the area, but nothing turned up. (Bulger was the model for the Jack Nicholson character in the movie "The Departed.")

-- Oklahoma City bomber-helper Terry Nichols, serving a life sentence at the "Super Max" federal prison in Colorado, recently ended what he said was his third hunger strike of 2010 to protest food quality. Lack of fiber in the diet, he said, causes him "chronic constipation, bleeding, (and) hemorrhoids" and thus disrespects "God's holy temple," which is Nichols' name for his body. The prison continues to offer Nichols only limited dietary options.

-- The most recent instance of the cardinal sin of the jailing profession occurred in a Minneapolis lockup in May, when a witness in an active murder case was arrested, probably on an unrelated charge, but placed in the same cell as the murder suspect, Jonathan "Thirsty" Turner, who knew that the witness had already given a statement against him. The witness was badly beaten, but jailers were not certain enough that Turner did it to file charges.

-- The Animal Planet channel, perhaps hard-pressed for new series ideas, has reportedly ordered "The Skunk Whisperer" into production, but there remain multi-use whisperers who claim they can talk to and analyze all critters, with New Zealand's Faye Rogers the latest to draw attention (and she singled out her ability with "worms"). All beings, she said, are "connected by a higher consciousness," allowing, for example, traveling birds to pass on important "international information" to fish. She disputed a notion spread by "horse whisperer" Bill Northern that cats are "wily" -- explaining that cats merely appear wily because they prefer to be asked specific questions rather than generalities. In an August interview with the Christchurch Press, she referred to "clients," indicating that at least some people pay the $65 (N.Z.; $45 U.S.) an hour for her services.

-- Japanese ice-cream makers are famous for expanding the universe of conceivable flavors (as News of the Weird has mentioned several times), but a gathering by the fashion/style website The Gloss in July found several more, suggesting that maybe the world is about to run out of ingredients that can go into ice cream: haggis ice cream (from Morelli's in London), sardines and brandy ice cream (from Helader a de Lares in Venezuela), caviar ice cream (Petrossian in New York City) and foie gras ice cream (Philippe Faur in Toulouse, France, about $150).

-- In several regions of the African nation of Cameroon, parents try to keep maturing daughters off the market by "ironing" their breasts (pressing them with heated stones and leaves to make them flatter and the girls thus less desirable for sex). The practice reached world media (and News of the Weird) in 2006 as part of a condemnation campaign by the United Nations, but apparently it continues unabated, according to new videos circulated this year and described in The Washington Post in March. According to that writer, who interviewed numerous health officials in Cameroon, the practice apparently has little effect, in that the teenage pregnancy rate remains very high.

-- Alcor Life Extension Foundation makes the news regularly, as family dysfunctions occur when someone buys a contract to have his head frozen upon death so that someday, if the science advances, he can be thawed and brought back to life. Typically, survivors with little faith in science prefer a more dignified disposal, as was the case with David Richardson, who had his brother Orville buried in February 2009 despite Orville's $53,500 Alcor contract. Most such disputes are raised and decided pre-death or contemporaneous with death, but Alcor appealed an original Iowa court decision in David's favor, and in May 2010, the Iowa Court of Appeals reversed, ordering Orville dug up. (Alcor promotion materials say that, for best results, the head should be frozen 15 minutes after the heart stops beating.)

-- Reporters (and News of the Weird!) relish playing "gotcha!" with people who convince authorities that they are injured too badly to continue working, setting themselves up for sometimes lucrative lifetime pensions, yet somehow seem to miraculously recover and subsequently engage in vigorous physical endeavors. New York City firefighter John Giuffrida, 42, retired on a disability pension of about $75,000 a year in 2003, based on asthma and other lung ailments from cleaning up the Sept. 11 ground zero, but two years later, he was a regular on the mixed-martial-arts circuit and is continuing to beat people up. (Giuffrida told a New York Post reporter that the two activities are "completely different." Strength and endurance fighting, he said, is not the same as "running into a building that is on fire with a smoke condition and toxins in the air."