Rights of women are severely restricted in Pakistan's tribal areas and among Muslim fundamentalists, but the rights of the country's estimated 50,000 "transgenders" blossomed in April when the country's Supreme Court ordered the government to accept a "third sex" designation on official documents (instead of forcing a choice of "male" or "female"). The court further recommended that transgenders be awarded government job quotas and suggested "tax collector" as one task for which they are particularly suited, since their presence at homes and businesses still tends to embarrass debtors into paying up quickly (especially since many transgenders outfit themselves, and behave, flamboyantly).

-- Imprisoned rapist Troy Fears, 55, had another four years tacked onto his sentence in April by a federal judge in Phoenix after he was convicted of swindling the IRS out of $119,000 by filing 117 fake tax returns from 2005 to 2009. According to prosecutors, IRS routinely dispatched direct-deposit refunds while indifferent to matching the payment recipient with the person whose Social Security number was on the return. (In fact, Fears was caught not by the IRS but by a prison guard who happened upon his paperwork.)

-- Apparently, the federal government failed to foresee that fighting two wars simultaneously, with historically high wound-survival rates, might produce surges of disability claims. Just in the last year, according to an April USA Today report, claims are up over 50 percent, and those taking longer than two months to resolve have more than doubled. (Tragically, Marine Clay Hunt, who was a national spokesman for disability rights and who suffered from post-traumatic stress, killed himself on March 31, ultimately frustrated that the Department of Veterans Affairs had lost his paperwork. "I can track my pizza from Pizza Hut on my BlackBerry," he once said, "but the VA can't find my claim for four months.")

-- Close Enough for Government Work: (1) A contract security guard at Detroit's McNamara Building (which houses the FBI and other vital federal offices) was found in March to have casually laid aside, for three weeks, a suspicious package that turned out to be a real bomb. (It was, eventually, safely detonated.) (2) The Census Bureau got it right this time around for Lost Springs, Wyo. In 2000, it had missed 80 percent of the population (counting 1 instead of 5). The new total (4) is correct, since two people subsequently died, and one moved in.

Great Art!

Occasionally (as News of the Weird has reported), patrons of art galleries mistake ordinary objects as the actual art (for example, solemnly "contemplating" a broom inadvertently left behind by a janitor), and sometimes the opposite mistake occurs. At the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam in May, a wandering patron absent-mindedly traipsed through a re-creation of Wim T. Schippers' floor-level Peanut Butter Platform (a 40-square-foot installation of creamy spread). (The museum manager had declined to fence in the exhibit, which he said would spoil its beauty.)

(1) Homeless Charles Mader, a convicted sex offender in Albuquerque, was arrested in May for failure to report his change of address, as required by law. Mader had moved out of his registered address, which was a Dumpster, into a community shelter. (2) Robert Norton Kennedy, 51, was arrested in Horry County, S.C., in May and charged with assault and battery, despite the humble tattoo on his forehead referencing a Bible verse and reading, "Please forgive me if I say or do anything stupid."

(1) Sharon Newling, 58, was arrested in Salisbury, N.C., in April and charged with shooting at her stepson with a .22-caliber rifle. She denied shooting "at" him, but said she was just shooting toward him "to make him stop working on his truck." (2) In April in Greensboro, N.C., Stephanie Preston and Bobby Duncan were married in front of family and friends at the local Jiffy Lube. (3) A 25-year-old man in Okaloosa County, Fla., was arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing after he entered the Club 51 Gentlemen's Club, from which he had been banned after a February incident. The man told police that he knew he had been banned from a strip club but couldn't remember which one.

-- A college senior in Colorado complained long-distance in March to the Better Business Bureau in Minnesota's Twin Cities because EssayWritingCompany.com, headquartered in Farmington, Minn., failed to deliver the class paper she ordered (at $23 per page). (The meaning of "academic dishonesty" is evolving, but it is still a sometimes-expellable offense to submit someone else's work as one's own.)

-- Filipino Henson Chua, working in the U.S., was indicted in March for illegally bringing back into the country an American-made military spy plane and openly offering it for sale for $13,000 on eBay. Sophisticated equipment such as the RQ-11B "Raven" Unmanned Aerial Vehicle requires high-level government approval to prevent acquisition by U.S. enemies.

(1) Lisa Osborn was one of only two candidates who qualified to run for the two vacant seats on the Bentley (Mich.) Board of Education in May, yet she did not win. One vote would have put her on the board, but she got none (having been too busy even to vote for herself that day because of her son's baseball game). (2) Monika Strub began campaigning for a state parliament seat in Germany in March as a member of the Left Party. Until 2002, Strub, then "Horst Strub," was with the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, but then decided he was really a female, underwent surgery and became Monika, a socialist. Not surprisingly, she has been harassed by some of her former colleagues.

Perps Making It Easy on the Cops in Joliet, Ill.: (1) Domonique Loggins, 21, was running from two Joliet officers in April (suspected of assaulting his girlfriend) when his escape took him through Bicentennial Park downtown. Obviously unknown to him, dozens of police officers from surrounding jurisdictions were in the park that day on a training session (with 60 squad cars in a parking lot). Loggins was arrested. (2) Police imposters usually drive cars outfitted to resemble cruisers (flashing lights, scanners) and carry impressive, if fake, ID. However, Hector Garcia-Martinez, 35, fooled no one in April as the two Joliet women whose car he stopped immediately called 911. "Officer" Garcia-Martinez had none of the trappings -- except, as he lamely pointed out, a sticker on his front license plate reading "Woodridge Police Junior Officer" (typically given to children at police events).

Anorexia nervosa is widely recognized as a debilitating eating disorder that can be fatal in as many as 10 percent of cases. However, men with masturbation fantasies about super-skinny women have fueled an almost-five-fold increase in "ana-porn" websites, to more than 1,500 since 2006, according to an April report by London's The Guardian. One site's recruiting page limited models to those with a body-mass index of 15 or under, and warned that "(b)ones and ribs must be very visible." However, these recruiters are sometimes anorexics' only flatterers, terming them "superstar(s) of starvation," "much prettier than all those meat mountains." (Unlike child or animal pornography, ana-porn is not illegal.)

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation of voter rolls since 1981 in East St. Louis, Ill., identified 27 specific dead people who voted in various elections, complete through the 1990 primary. Inspiringly, two men who had never cast a single vote while alive apparently decided to begin participating in the democratic process once they had died, and Mr. Willie E. Fox Sr., who has voted six times since his death in 1987, mysteriously switched registration this year (1991) from Republican to Democrat.

Tonya McDowell, 33, an off-and-on homeless person in Bridgeport, Conn., was arrested in April by police in nearby Norwalk and charged with felony theft -- of $15,686 worth of "services" from the city. McDowell's crime was enrolling her 6-year-old son in Norwalk's Brookside Elementary School when she actually "resided" (as much as a sporadically "homeless" person can "reside") in Bridgeport. McDowell has also "resided" at times in a Norwalk shelter, but was crashing at a friend's apartment in Bridgeport when she registered her son. The head of the Norwalk Board of Education acknowledged that the usual consequence for an unqualified student is merely dismissal from school.

-- In March, jurors in New Orleans convicted Isaiah Doyle of a 2005 murder and were listening to evidence in the penalty phase of the trial when Doyle decided to take the witness stand (as defendants sometimes do in a desperate attempt to avoid the death penalty). However, Doyle said to the jurors, "If I had an AK-47, I'd kill every last one of y'all with no remorse." (The jury recommended the needle.)

-- The Montana House of Representatives passed a tough drunk-driving bill in March to combat the state's high DUI rate, but it came over the objection of Rep. Alan Hale (and later, Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy). Hale, who owns a bar in Basin, Mont., complained that tough DUI laws "are destroying small businesses" and "destroying a way of life that has been in Montana for years and years." (Until 2005, drinking while driving was common and legal outside of towns as long as the driver wasn't drunk.) Furthermore, Hale said, people need to drive home after they drink. "(T)hey are not going to hitchhike." Sen. Windy Boy said such laws put the legislature on "the path of criminalizing everyone in Montana."

-- Why Unions Are Unpopular: The police officers' union in Scranton, Pa., filed a state unfair labor practice complaint in April against Chief Dan Duffy because he arrested a man whom he caught violating a warrant and possessing marijuana. According to the union contract, only union members can "apprehend and arrest" lawbreakers, and since the chief is "management," he should have called an officer to make the arrest. The union president suggested that, with layoffs threatened, the chief doesn't need to be taking work away from officers.

-- Conventional academic wisdom is that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to homicide, but according to accused murderer Dmitry Smirnov, it deterred him from killing Ms. Jitka Vesel in Oak Brook, Ill. -- until March, that is, when Illinois' death penalty was repealed. Prosecutors said Smirnov, from Surrey, British Columbia, told them he decided to come to Illinois and kill Vesel (in cold blood, over an online relationship gone bad) only after learning through Internet research that the state no longer had capital punishment.

(1) Shelly Waddell, 36, was cited by police in February in Waterville, Maine, after "a couple of" drivers reported seeing two children riding on the roof of the van she was driving early one morning. Waddell told police she was in fact delivering newspapers to customers, but denied that the kids were on the roof. (2) At the Niceville, Fla., Christmas parade on Dec. 4, a municipal employee was arrested when he stepped up onto a city truck that was part of the parade and challenged the driver (who apparently was a colleague). The employee accused the driver of "taking (my) overtime" hours for the previous two years and ordered him out of the truck so he could "whip your ass." (The employee was charged with disorderly intoxication.)

Louis "Shovelhead" Garrett is an artist, a mannequin collector and a quilter in the eastern Missouri town of Louisiana, with a specialty in sewing quilts from women's panties, according to a report in the Hannibal Courier-Post. After showing his latest quilt at a women's luncheon in Hannibal in March, he told the newspaper of his high standards: "No polyester. I don't want those cheap, dollar-store, not-sexy, farm-girl panties. I want classy -- silk or nylon."

-- Arifinito (he goes by one name), a member of the Indonesian parliament, resigned in April after a news photographer in the gallery zoomed in on the tablet computer he was watching to capture him surfing Internet pornography sites. Arifinito's conservative Islamic Prosperous Justice Party campaigned for a tough anti-pornography bill in 2008 (which the photographer's video shows Arifinito likely violating).

-- Wheeee! (1) In March, in Pierce County, Wash., a sewer worker, 37, came loose from a safety line and slid about 3,000 feet through a 6-foot-diameter sewer pipe at the Chambers Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. He "could have drowned," according to one rescuer, but he was taken to a hospital with "minor injuries." (2) Firefighters in Gilbert, Ariz., rescued Eugene Gimzelberg, 32, in March after he had climbed down a 40-foot sewer hole -- naked. Gimzelberg said he had smoked PCP and marijuana and consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms. He was hospitalized in critical condition.

-- Jacob Barnett, 12, an Asperger's-syndrome-fueled math genius who maxed out on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and is now enrolled at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis), told an Indianapolis Star reporter in March that his next project is about proving the Big Bang theory all wrong. But if not the Big Bang, asked the reporter, how do we exist? Said Jacob, "I'm still working on it." "I have an idea, but ... I'm still working out the details." (Hint: Jacob's major point of skepticism is that the Big Bang doesn't account neatly for carbon.) Said his (biological) mother, Kristine Barnett, 36: "I flunked math. I know this did not come from me."

-- Overreaching: (1) In April, Texas state Rep. John Davis of Houston proposed a tax break -- aimed at buyers of yachts valued at more than a quarter-million dollars. Davis promised more yacht sales and, through a ripple effect, more jobs if Texas capped the sales tax on yachts at the amount due on a $250,000 vessel -- a break of almost $16,000 on a $500,000 boat. (2) Adam Yarbrough, 22, ticketed by a female police officer in Indianapolis in March after he was observed swerving in and out of traffic on an Interstate highway, allegedly compounded the problem first by offering the cop "five dollars" to "get rid of this ticket" and then by "(H)ow about I give you a kiss?" Felony bribery charges were filed. (Bonus fact: Yarbrough was riding a moped.)

Marissa Mark, 28, was indicted in March in Allentown, Pa., for hiring a hit man in 2006 via the then-active website HitManForHire.com, agreeing to pay $37,000 to have a California woman killed (though prosecutors have not revealed the motive). Mark allegedly made traceable payments through the PayPal service (which in recent years has righteously refused to process transactions involving online gambling or the WikiLeaks document dumps, but which in 2006 did in fact handle payments for HitManForHire.com). The hit man site was run by an Egyptian immigrant, who told the Las Vegas Sun in 2008 that he would never contract for murder but sought to make money by double-crossing clients and alerting (for a fee) the intended victims.

The local board of health closed down the Wing Wah Chinese restaurant in South Dennis, Mass., briefly in August (1992) for various violations. The most serious, said officials, was the restaurant's practice of draining water from cabbage by putting it in cloth laundry bags, placing the bags between two pieces of plywood in the parking lot, and driving over them with a van. Said Health Director Ted Dumas, "I've seen everything now."

-- Marla Gilson, 59, was fired in April after her employer callously rejected her offer to work from home in Chevy Chase, Md., at reduced salary, while she recovers from chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant for her leukemia. Gilson's job was chief executive of the Association of Jewish Aging Services of North America, which serves 112 facilities that help frail and elderly Jews during their final years. Gilson's termination also made her health care much more expensive and potentially made her uninsurable in the future if her treatment is successful. (Nonetheless, the board of directors thanked her for her service and wished her a "speedy recovery.")

-- Thomas Cavender, 60, of Bessemer City, N.C., pleaded unsuccessfully with a judge in March to remove him from the National Sex Offender Registry, to which he had been assigned as part of his sentence in 2000 for molesting a third-grade girl. Cavender told the judge that he had become a preacher and evangelist and that it "hurts my ministry when you're in the pulpit, and someone goes to the computer, and there you are."

-- In April, two police constables in North London, England, threatened Louise Willows with arrest for criminal damage and forced her to clean her artwork from a city sidewalk. Willows had cleared off 25 deposits of droppings that dog-walkers had failed to remove and in their place drawn pink cupcakes in chalk (with a nearby message, "Dog owners, Please clear up your dog's mess. Children walk here").

-- The notorious U.S. military contractor KBR, prominent for having earned several billion dollars from no-bid contracts during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and which has been accused of numerous employee sexual harassment cover-ups (including nine pending lawsuits filed by female employees), has apparently been voted by readers of Woman Engineer magazine as one of the top 50 places for women to work. (KBR and other companies on the list made announcements in April, but at press time, Woman Engineer's issue containing the list had not been published.)

-- Nursery school teacher Elizabeth Davies, 48, was fired in February from Hafod Primary School in Swansea, Wales, after accusations that she had sprayed pine-scented room-freshener on kids who passed gas and on Bangladeshis who had come to class reeking of curry and onions. Of the latter, she reportedly said, "There is a waft coming in from paradise."

Recently, public school students were expelled in Spotsylvania, Va. (possession of homemade tubing for launching plastic "spitballs" in lunchroom horseplay) (December); arrested in Hammonton, N.J. (a 7-year-old, for bringing to class a Nerf-type "gun" that fired soft balls) (January); and arrested in Arvada, Colo. (for drawing violent stick figures, which was recommended by his therapist as a way to tamp down harmful thoughts) (February). Meanwhile, in March, at the other end of "zero tolerance," a judge allowed Ryan Ricco, 18, to play for his school in a big basketball tournament despite being on modified house arrest after being charged with threatening to blow up two other high schools in the Chicago suburbs.

(1) In April, Robert Hohenberger, 64, was arrested in Clayton County, Ga., for shooting a neighbor's dog with a BB gun after complaining that he was tired of the Chihuahua "pooping" in his yard. The neighbor, Leticia Mendoza, told police that her dog was innocent, in that Casey had actually relieved himself inside right before she let him out. (2) Jonathan Avery, 31, was arrested in Benson, N.C., in February for hitting his son, 6, on the head with a spoon, drawing blood with a cut that became infected. Hospital personnel treating the kid called police, as Avery had apparently attempted to suture the wound with fishing line.

-- Fine Point of Iowa Law: Thanks to a loophole recently sanctioned by the Iowa Court of Appeals, Matt Danielson and his wife, Jamie, now own their home in Ankeny, Iowa, outright (value: $278,000) after making just one monthly mortgage payment. Iowa law regards a home mortgage by a married couple as automatically void if only one spouse has signed it, and a thusly voided mortgage is treated as fully satisfied. (The purpose was to prevent one estranged spouse from exploiting the other, but the voiding is automatic regardless of the circumstances.) Legislators are currently trying to change the law to leave the discretion of voiding up to judges.

-- Explicable Only as Metaphor: On April 13, a customer who had been watching videos in a booth at the Golden Gate Adult Superstore in downtown San Francisco (and whose name was not released) ran from the store into the street engulfed in flames. No explanation for the fire was given, but the man was taken to St. Francis Memorial Hospital suffering from third-degree, life-threatening burns.

Not Ready for Prime Time: Harold Luken, 45, was arrested on April 8 in New York City near a Bank of America after his attempt to rob it failed badly. According to police, Luken walked in at 1:50 p.m. and announced that he had a gun and intended to rob the place -- but then merely got in a line and said he would wait for a teller. When he finally got to the window (with police apparently on their way), Luken restated his intention and, as if narrating, announced the handing over of the robbery note. When the teller refused to respond, Luken asked to check the balance in his own account, but the teller again declined, provoking Luken to walk away and shout, "OK, I will go to Citibank (and) rob them instead!" He was arrested minutes later.

(1) "(G)o ahead and shoot me," said Rodney Gilbert, 57, who was embroiled in a domestic tiff with his girlfriend Kimberly Gustafson in Ocala, Fla., in February. According to police, Gustafson, after cocking the gun in a room with several witnesses, then turned to walk away without firing until Gilbert trailed after her, shouting his final words several more times. (2) "You're going to shoot? Right here," said now-deceased Roberto Corona, pointing to his chest. Corona was refusing to reveal the whereabouts of his sister to her husband, David Sanchez-Dominguez, who had asked Corona several times before pointing his handgun at him.

A Tulsa, Okla., physician, writing in a 1992 issue of the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, reported on a 32-year-old woman whose neighbors had just had a large satellite dish installed in their yard. The woman became convinced that she was being wooed by Donald Duck and that the dish had been placed there to facilitate his communicating with her. She spent lots of time "hovering" around the dish and eventually undressed and climbed into it, where she said later that she had consummated marriage to Mr. Duck.