-- In September, driving-school owner Bharat Patel, 49, became the 31st person convicted in a driver's-license bribery scandal at a Chicago examining station. According to testimony, Patel did not even bother to teach and spent all his time with examiners. Some of Patel's students were such bad drivers that examiners, who took $300,000 in bribes in two years, actually gave Patel his money back. Some subsequently licensed drivers did not know how to start a car or engage the transmission; others turned directly into traffic during the test; and sometimes, terrified examiners halted the test mid-trip and hitchhiked back to the station.

-- Federal wildlife officials believe that the voracious and largely indestructible Asian swamp eel has somehow made its way to within a mile of Florida's Everglades National Park and poses an imminent threat to its balance of nature, according to a September Wall Street Journal report. The 3-foot-long eel apparently eats anything in its path, has no known enemies, survives in salt- and fresh water and on land, can change genders in order to facilitate year-round breeding, lays 1,000 eggs at a time, and is so durable that one lived in a wet towel for seven months with no food or water.

Protesting taxes (Actress "Dziewanna" rode, Lady Godiva-style, through Krakow, Poland, in July). Bicycling for charity (Three men and a woman were arrested in Vernal, Utah, wearing only helmets, in July). Burglarizing a house (Dwight Mills, 38, set off by the receipt of divorce papers, took off his clothes and broke into a neighbor's house before being gunned down, Pensacola, Fla., July). Celebrating a soccer "victory" (In August, a nude fan joyously rushed onto the field and around the sidelines in the final moments of a 2-1 game, but he apparently also distracted his own Blackpool, England, team, because Torquay scored two quick goals to win, 3-2).

-- Helene Canuel filed a lawsuit in August against the Rimouski (Quebec) Minor Hockey Association, asking about $700 (U.S.) in damages, because the coach of her 14-year-old son benched him for the playoffs. Canuel said she just wanted "justice for my son," but the coach was apparently more interested in surviving the single-elimination tournament.

-- In June, a school district in Orange County, Calif., was ordered by a jury to pay $1.4 million to Taylor Steiskal, age 10, who three years ago fell off his school's monkey bars and broke his arm, which developed further complications and has required eight surgeries. Steiskal's lawyers argued that monkey bars for children should be no higher than 72 inches off the ground (thus giving a few inches' ground-clearance for a 48-inch-high boy hanging from his hands); the one Steiskal fell from was 79 inches high.

-- Anne and Lucy Abolins filed a $4 million lawsuit in May against the owners of the house they formerly rented in Edmonton, Alberta, from which their 114 cats were confiscated by health inspectors, who ruled in June 1999 that the feces-laden dwelling was uninhabitable. Contrary to neighbors' claims that the Abolinses had lowered their neighborhood's value, the sisters now say that their own lives were ruined by the health inspectors and that notoriety has made it impossible for them to find new living quarters. (In August 2000, a judge fined the sisters about $3,500 (U.S.) for housing code violations, and Lucy Abolins then called the SPCA "the Antichrist" for taking her cats away.)

-- In September, a jury in Tacoma, Wash., ordered the state Department of Corrections to pay $22 million to the family of a woman killed when a convicted felon (domestic assault) on probation ran a red light and hit the woman's car, concluding that the department somehow ought to have supervised the man better. The governor's office said it would appeal the verdict, questioning the state's ability to monitor the driving behavior of its 55,000 probationers 24 hours a day.

-- According to an Associated Press report in August, quoting lawyers close to the case, the Catholic Diocese of Nashville, Tenn., planned to use the defense of "comparative fault" in two lawsuits filed by boys who claimed to have been sexually molested by former priest Edward McKeown. Such a defense would allow the church to reduce its damages by showing that other people had knowledge of McKeown's continued abuse and did not warn authorities of it. Among those other people the church regards as culpable are the 21 other victims who were abused but remained silent.

-- Paralyzed inmate Torrence Johnson filed a lawsuit in July against the Spartanburg (S.C.) County Jail because guards failed to stop him in 1998 when he was whimsically doing backflips off a desk in his cell, the last one of which resulted in a fall and his subsequent paralysis. Johnson claims guards should have been watching him carefully because he had been diagnosed as depressed, although they said he appeared to be vigorous until he landed on his neck.

Mark Sims, 24, filed a lawsuit in August against Ottawa (Ontario) Civil Hospital, alleging that a misdiagnosis (of cancer) caused a doctor to remove one of his testicles, which at that time was the size of a "baseball." Sims now says it was obvious that the swollen testicle was not cancerous but merely the result of an office-party jaunt to a strip club, a visit during which Sims ultimately found himself onstage with a dancer, who "suddenly, without warning" whacked his scrotum. Sims says that if the doctor had waited until his testicle shrank to its normal size, he would still have both testicles.

Last year, News of the Weird reported that a Bombay, India, collection agency had hired six eunuchs to hang around the homes and offices of obstinate debtors to embarrass them into paying up. According to a July 2000 report in London's The Guardian, the Tsaisheng credit agency in Taiwan has begun hiring AIDS patients at about $100 (U.S.) a day for the same purpose. According to the agency owner, many people in Taiwan still believe that AIDS is transmitted through mere social contact.

Sherman Lee Parks, 50, escaped from the Dallas County Jail in Fordyce, Ark., in August, oblivious of the fact that a judge had just ordered his release because he had been locked up too long; he was rearrested the next day, charged with escaping, and jailed. And in September, according to police in Shawnee, Kan., a 19-year-old clerk at a Texaco Starmart reported he had been robbed, but actually he had just looted his own cash register, and to conceal the crime, he had put tape over the store's surveillance cameras. However, he had used transparent tape; said a police lieutenant, "(I)t looks a little fuzzy, but I don't see any robbery in there."

Water and health officials were mystified at the continued appearance of half-inch-long red worms in the tap of a Deltona, Fla., woman but after tests, declared the water safe. A mayoral candidate in Vlore, Albania, promised that, if elected, he would re-open the city's long-shuttered brothels. Officials in Cairo, Egypt, began implementing a 20-year program to relocate 21 cemeteries (with 109,000 graves) to the suburbs. When an arrested stripper on pre-trial release argued that wearing an ankle monitor on stage would hamper her act, the judge relented and dropped that condition (Cleveland).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- A New York appeals court ruled in July that a 53-year-old, serial-plastic-surgery patient, who became dissatisfied with her tucked-and-tightened body after 12 operations over a seven-year-period, could sue her doctor for malpractice, despite her consent to all surgeries, because she might suffer from the disorder that causes a person to think his body is ugly. (Doctors contacted by the New York Observer wondered which, if any, of their patients are totally free of the disorder.) The complaining patient has had work done on her nose, eyelids, chin, eyebrows, flanks, thighs, knees, breasts and tummy.

-- Central Illinois farmer Dan Aeschleman recently converted his land to a more lucrative use: attracting foxes and then selling their urine in pump-spray containers ($11.95 for 16 oz.) to landowners to keep nuisance animals away with the "presence" of a predator. According to a September report in The Pantagraph newspaper of Bloomington, Ill., Aeschleman says the tricky part -- getting the non-domestic foxes to urinate in an orderly fashion and then collecting it all (10,000 gallons a year) -- is a "trade secret."

According to Martinsville, Ind., prosecutors, Judy Kirby, 31, mother of 10, intentionally killed four of them in March after she drove into oncoming traffic for more than two miles and struck a minivan (also killing three of its occupants); her doctors say they will testify at her upcoming trial that she suffered from postpartum depression and should not be punished. And Jeane Newmaker, 46, was charged in Golden, Colo., in September with child abuse for going along with a "therapy" in which four practitioners squashed her 10-year-old adopted daughter to death; the "therapists" were "rebirthing" the child (supposedly to compensate for an abusive biological mother) by getting her to simulate escaping the womb, but they accidentally suffocated her despite her more than 50 pleas for help over a 70-minute session.

-- A highlight of the East Finley Summer Festival in Claysville, Pa., in July was the return of the popular "chicken-flying contest" after a 10-year hiatus. As explained by the Observer-Reporter newspaper of Washington, Pa., chickens are placed in ordinary mailboxes, which are then abruptly opened with a toilet plunger, which somehow sends them flying hundreds of feet, with the longest flight winning first prize. During chicken-flying's hiatus, said Festival sponsors, cow-patty bingo was featured but was not nearly as exciting.

-- The Al Salam Mosque Foundation filed a $6.2 million federal lawsuit in August against Palos Heights, Ill., which had reneged on a promise to pay the Muslim group $200,000 to change its mind about buying a local building and converting it to a place of worship. The city council had made the cash offer, reportedly, because some council members preferred not to have such a prominent Muslim presence in the town. Then, when the Foundation accepted the cash offer, the Palos Heights mayor vetoed it, complaining that the offer was an "insult" to the Muslims.

-- Relieving the Doctor Shortage: According to an April Los Angeles Times report, imposter "Dr." Adam Litwin roamed UCLA Medical Center with impunity for six months last year, chatting it up with "colleagues" and keeping himself busy, being discovered only when a pharmacist reported an irregularity with a prescription. And "physician's assistant" imposter Gary Lee Stearley received excellent reviews from several doctors at Mercy Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pa., in June before being detected; he had previously "worked" hospitals in Seattle, Richmond and Washington, D.C.

-- No Substitute for a Loyal Dog: Sevier County (Tenn.) sheriff's dog Kysor was praised in a July Knoxville News-Sentinel report as so faithful that he withstood a stab wound to the head from a fleeing suspect, hard enough that the blade broke off, in order to maintain his grip. However, after the man plunged the knife in, he tried to sic his own dog on the weakened Kysor, but, according to a deputy, "He whistled for him, but his dog wouldn't come."

-- Forget About Asking Him to Consider a Trigger Lock for His Gun: In June, a federal grand jury in Springfield, Mo., indicted Todd Morman Murray, 27, on charges that he stole 45 pounds of explosives from a chemical plant and "hid" them in his children's playhouse.

A young man suffered a broken arm when he was walking so close to railroad tracks that a passing train violently knocked his surfboard out of his hands (San Clemente, Calif., June). And a 25-year-old woman lost the toes on her right foot when she crawled under a slow-moving train as a shortcut to the correct platform (Mount Prospect, Ill., July). And an inebriated man's life was saved by his wife, who pulled him just in time from the path of a speeding train after he had lingered on the tracks to make an obscene gesture at the conductor (Trevor, Wis., June).

According to news reports in July and August, Mack W. Metcalf, 42, of Florence, Ky., has led a dismal life that included frequent drinking binges, some DUI and other traffic charges, drug selling, eviction for failure to pay rent, and a debt of $31,000 in back child support. However, in July, he won a $34 million lump-sum jackpot in the Kentucky Lottery. (His haplessness continues: Shortly after he was paid, he handed a woman $500,000 as a gift, but later realized he was drunk and has now sued to get the money back.)

The Classic Middle Name (all-new): Arrested for killing his roommate (San Diego, Calif., August): Aryan Wayne Duntley. Arrested for killing a young neighbor girl (Oilton, Okla., August): Robert Wayne Rotramel. Sentenced for murdering and beheading a 20-year-old woman (Orange, Texas, July): Christopher Wayne Gregory. Application for DNA testing rejected in a murder case against him (Illinois, August): Randall Wayne Stevens. Convicted in the murders of five people at a car wash (Irving, Texas, September): Robert Wayne Harris.

Killed over Access to Mating: Edward William Heckman, 58, was charged in July near Jonesboro, Ga., with killing his wife after she refused to have sex with him. Baby sitter Robert Cooper, 22, was convicted in June in Calgary, Alberta, of killing two young boys because they hindered his attempted seduction of their mother. A man in his 20s allegedly killed 11 people with an Uzi at a Bogota, Colombia, nightclub in June after rejection by a woman.

An off-duty police officer reporting for an MRI while armed had the superpowerful magnet suck his gun away and slam it against the machine, causing one round to fire into a wall (Rochester, N.Y.). Singapore's leading newspaper published a how-to guide to having sex in cars, in support of the government's campaign to raise the birth rate. The mayor of a French resort town, which has no cemetery vacancies and a restrictive land-use law, prohibited dying except by people with burial space (Le Levandou). The Supreme Court of New Hampshire ruled that a candidate for office had the right to parade on the street dressed as a penis, because he was commenting on the political system.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- The Wishes of the Fetus: On Sept. 6, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit by a 7-year-old girl with spina bifida, who had sued her parents' doctors because she wanted to have been aborted (since the doctors knew she would have birth defects). On the same day, in Attleboro, Mass., Judge Kenneth Nasif ordered a pregnant woman held in custody until she gives birth because he feared that she, because of her religion, might decline medical attention if she experienced complications; Nasif said he could "sense" the unborn child saying to him, "I want to live. I don't want to die like my brother (a previous victim of the woman's religion-based medical neglect) did."

-- In August, Elsie Holdren, 68, a security officer working on contract at a courthouse in Viera, Fla., was transferred by her company to a courthouse in nearby Melbourne because her superiors thought she was too courteous. "Due to your caring and giving nature," wrote Holdren's supervisor (with Weiser Security Services in Orlando), "you are compromising your position as a security officer. (Being caring and giving) is not a job requirement, nor is it what you are paid to do."

The mentally retarded Felipe Rodriguez spent 13 months in jail in Swisher County, Texas (near Amarillo), after being accused of a minor theft, largely because his court-appointed defense attorney forgot about him until a Dallas Morning News reporter pestered her about the status of the case. (Rodriguez was released in August.) And a June New York Times report on veteran court-appointed defense lawyer Ronald G. Mock chronicled his career-long, mediocre representation of a series of now-executed men, including June executee Gary Graham, who was convicted based on one fleeting, nighttime eyewitness identification, which Mock neither challenged nor seriously investigated.

-- Robert Jones of Adel, Ga., filed a lawsuit in Atlanta in June against the maker of Liquid Fire drain cleaner after the stuff oozed out of Jones' homemade container all over his legs, causing "extensive, excruciating burns and destruction of flesh." Actually, Liquid Fire comes in a spill-proof container, but Jones was skeptical of its sturdiness and thus poured the contents into his own, "safer" container (from which it eventually spilled). Thus, Jones' legal theory is that Liquid Fire's original package somehow created the impression of flimsiness, which therefore forced Jones to pour the contents into his own container.

-- Two years ago, Javier Polo, 25, filed a lawsuit in Aviles, Spain, demanding that his mother, Maria Delores Ray, 54, be ordered to support him financially while he is out of work. Recently, according to a May London Observer story, a judge ruled for Polo, ordering Ray to pay him 15 percent of her salary (about $192 a month) despite the fact that he does not even live with her. (The parents are divorced; he lives with his father; but she has to pay because she earns more than the father.)

-- In July, Tang Weijiang, 29, filed a lawsuit in Shanghai, China, against Canon Inc. because one of the Japanese company's advertising CD-ROMs left him in mental distress, which he said was deliberate, just one more act in a centuries-long campaign of disrespect by Japanese people and companies against the Chinese. The specific act that caused Tang such anguish was a passage on the CD-ROM text implying that China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were separate countries.

-- Parents in Benicia, Calif., were complaining, according to a June San Francisco Chronicle report, of the public library's policy of denying them access to the names of books their children (regardless of age) have checked out. California law generally provides for confidentiality of government records, but some libraries enforce that more strictly than others. The Benicia library makes an exception only if a book is overdue, so that parents can look for it at home.

-- Australian masseuse Carol Vanderpoel, 52, believing that all she knew how to cure were physical aches and pains, sued her former employer, the Blue Mountains Women's Health Centre in Katoomba, which had required her also to listen to her clients' psychological problems during massages and to counsel them, which she said left her severely depressed. In June, a judge in New South Wales District Court awarded her about $17,000 in damages. (Among the problems that grossed her out were a client's confession of performing euthanasia on her husband and another woman's having been assaulted with a chain saw).

The following people apparently get really set off by the following things: Mark Adam Yazzie, 26 (got into an argument with his brother-in-law about the merits of rap music vs. rock and ran him over with a truck; Santa Rosa, Calif., June). Jane Graham, 77 (pointed a butcher knife at a neighbor man's groin and threatened to "cut it off" because he was playing his stereo too loud; Winnipeg, Manitoba, July). Gerard Corbo, 56 (at his son's wedding, started a fistfight when a guest referred to the groom by the wrong first name; Westlake, Ohio, June).

Grandmother Karren Kinsel, head of the office that regulates content on vanity license plates in Illinois ("WORKSUX" rejected; "BI DAD E" OK), explaining to a Chicago Tribune reporter in July what qualifies her to rule on whether certain applications are in poor taste: "You take some people, they just don't have a dirty mind. Some of my staff doesn't. But I do, kind of."

When News of the Weird first mentioned Summum (in 1988), the Salt Lake City religious organization had just introduced its mummification alternative to burials and cremations, charging $7,000 to preserve a body and an additional $18,000 to create a bronze statue, according to founder Corky Ra. As of June 2000, according to an Associated Press story, Summum is still looking to make its first human mummy (it has done several pets), although 137 people have made deposits toward the current prices of $12,000 to preserve and $36,000 (and up) for statues (plus transportation costs and mausoleum space). Corky Ra's preservation process includes soaking the body in secret fluids, applying lanolin, polyurethane rubber and fiberglass bandages.

A 17-year-old boy was arrested in Loomis, Calif., in July after he was unsuccessful in what might have been an attempt to emulate the notorious "Rooftop Robber," who had burglarized more than 40 businesses in California and other states by entering through roofs (and who was captured in May). Unlike the original, the 17-year-old crashed through a false ceiling in his first job, broke a sink standing on it trying to climb out, then made it to a false ceiling and crawled to an adjacent store, but fell through that ceiling, too, injuring his ankle, and then finally, on his way out, tripped the burglar alarm and had police waiting for him.

An IRS advisory opinion declared that the parents of a still-kidnapped child must stop taking the dependent's exemption while the child is missing. Scientists in India discovered a new chili, whose burn worsens with water and which is 50 percent hotter than the previous world's-hottest chili. A deceased's family sued Forest Lawn cemetery over a bad embalming, though the family admitted that park employees did work diligently to swat flies off of the open casket during the memorial service (Los Angeles). A robber pistol-whipped a pizza deliverer, causing the gun to discharge and fire a fatal shot at the robber's 17-year-old partner (Nashville).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Weird@compuserve.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)