-- "Hundreds" of young Chinese women and men have recently endured the painful-for-months "Ilizarov procedure" to gain a few inches in height to supposedly improve their social and professional status. According to a May New York Times dispatch, the $6,000 procedure involves breaking bones in the shins or thighs, then manually adjusting special leg braces four times a day that pull the bones slightly apart, then waiting until the bones grow back and fuse together (which usually takes about six months, plus a three-month recovery). Said one 33-year-old, 5-foot-tall woman (aiming for 5-4): "I'll have a better job, a better boyfriend, and eventually a better husband. It's a long-term investment."

-- In May, Great Britain's Home Office, deciding on the proper compensation for a man who served 11 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, ruled that he was entitled to about $1.1 million, but said he would have to reimburse the prison about $63,000 for 11 years' room and board. Said the outraged Michael O'Brien, 34, who had been freed by a Court of Appeal in 1999: "They don't charge guilty people for bed and board. They only charge innocent people."

Germany's lower house of parliament voted in May to add "and animals" to its constitution's guarantee of protection for the dignity of humans. On the other hand, the director of Washington, D.C.,'s National Zoo denied The Washington Post a look at its animals' medical records in May in part to protect the animals' right of "privacy," a claim which stunned at least one animal-rights advocate. And a British ad agency came under fire in May for a cutesy commercial featuring a dog engaging (via trick photography) in X-rated undulations (supposedly imitating what he observed at a certain randy-young-singles' resort); critics said the dog in the ad was being held up to "ridicule and indignity."

-- What was described in a January Times of London story as an obscure panel of European Union bureaucrats (the Nomenclature sub-group of the Customs Code Committee) has been meeting in Brussels off and on for months now for the purpose of deciding the thorny question of how many lumps (20 percent to 30 percent) are permissible in a can of mushroom (or pasta) sauce before those foods are classified as "vegetables," which would be subject to much higher import taxes than "sauces." As of late May, there has been no announcement from the sub-group.

-- Among the most notable "pork barrel" projects in the FY 2002 federal budget, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, were: $273,000 for Blue Springs, Mo., to fight the incursion of "goth" culture among its young; $50,000 for San Luis Obispo, Calif., to remove gang members' tattoos; $450,000 to restore chimneys on Cumberland Island, Ga.; $240,000 for pecan research; $260,000 to explore asparagus technology; $200,000 to upgrade a kayak river course in Wausau, Wis.; and $600,000 to research the sex life of the South African ground squirrel.

-- According to a January report of the Department of Energy's inspector general, federal facilities in Tennessee and Ohio actually tested in all seriousness a procedure that was no more than a fancy dowsing device ("passive magnetic resonance anomaly mapping") worn on the wrist of an operator, who senses underground water, faults, buried objects and chemicals, via supposed changes in "magnetic fields." Apparently, no one at the facilities was skeptical even though the contractor said only one person in the world was "qualified" to operate the PMRAM, and he lives in the Ukraine.

-- Rodney Jones of Mendocino, Calif., was the victim of "identity theft" in 1999, facilitated by the Department of Motor Vehicles' issuing a duplicate license to the thief (who is black; Jones is white). Eventually, his records were restored, but his attempt to get DMV to pay for the inconvenience to him failed when a state appeals court ruled in April 2002 that DMV could not be held liable for issuing the bogus license. According to Jones, DMV has throughout refused to give him the name of the identity thief, citing applicants' "privacy" rights.

-- In November, the District of Columbia Department of Corrections carelessly failed to release a homeless man after charges against him were dropped because, according to The Washington Post, computer records were not updated. (He stayed in jail for five months.) And the same department, also according to the Post, mistakenly released a bank robber in March, then tracked him down at his mother's home by telephone and told him to report back to jail, but the department did not bother to send anyone to the home to get him. (He eventually returned on his own.)

James O. Riccardi III, 42, was charged with five misdemeanor counts by Higginsville, Mo., police in May in connection with bizarre phone calls to high school athletes in which the caller pretends to be a University of Missouri coach offering scholarships but then turns the conversation to the students' spanking their bare buttocks to show their dedication to college sports. The university said it has received 86 complaints about similar calls to student athletes throughout Kansas and Missouri. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch-AP, 5-26-02]

Justin Aragon, 19, was arrested in March in Albuquerque, N.M., and charged with roughing up his girlfriend and threatening to kill members of her family. According to police, his reign of terror came to an end in the incident when he collapsed and hit his head on a coffee table after informing the victim that he had laced her drink with a toxic substance but then had accidentally drunk it himself.

News of the Weird has reported several times on antisocial, and criminal, behavior in which the perpetrator commemorates his work in meticulous written detail. China News Service reported in May that Li Qingpu, 56, was sentenced to 20 years in prison following a trial in southern Hainan province for visiting prostitutes while he was supposed to be on duty as a government textile official. The evidence against him was from four file cabinets in his house, containing 95 diaries listing his sex partners by name, time and place, including lengthy descriptions of the women and what took place between them, plus fastidiously labeled pubic hair samples from 236 of them.

A "mini-industry" has developed in which pregnant South Korean women plan U.S. vacations, apparently for the sole purpose of gaining automatic American citizenship for the babies, according to the Los Angeles Times (May). An armed Buddhist monk, complaining that he was harassed by police, rushed Thailand's parliament building firing his AK-47 (May). Two British tourists caused a furor among townspeople in Mombasa, Kenya, when they spent about $140 (about half the average monthly wage in Kenya) to save the life of an injured monitor lizard they had come across (May).

An intoxicated 55-year-old man ran his car into a ditch, then climbed back to the highway, where he was accidentally hit by another car, driven by his intoxicated 43-year-old wife (Canaseraga, N.Y.). A 26-year-old college student was diagnosed with repetitive strain injury from a year's worth of hoisting about 25 pints of beer a week at a tavern (Manchester, England). Surgeons reported that a 7-year-old girl who had half of her brain removed in 1998 now speaks Dutch and Turkish fluently (Rotterdam, Netherlands). Minutes after allegedly robbing a bank, a 39-year-old man was captured when police spotted him holding forth at a bar a few blocks away (Winfield, Ind.).

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

-- Two 23-year-old California filmmakers told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that, as of early May, they had sold about 10,000 copies of their "Bumfights" video ($19.95), which entertains viewers with real fistfights and dangerous stunts willingly engaged in by actual homeless people (many of them intoxicated) on Las Vegas's streets. Some participants say the video is a realistic portrayal of their violent, everyday existence, and the two filmmakers, Ray Laticia and Ty Beeson, professed sympathy for their subjects by subtitling the video "Cause for Concern."

-- The Denver Fire Department responded to an emergency call in April from the adjacent city of Montbello when a woman reported being trapped in her home by 3-feet-diameter tumbleweeds that had filled her yard and jammed against her house, to a height of 16 feet. A department lieutenant said there were "thousands" in the yard. (In January, residents of a Kennewick, Wash., neighborhood were deluged with tumbleweeds "as big as Buicks," according to one man, but of particular concern were a small number that appeared to have been blown in from the nearby, highly contaminated Hanford nuclear reservation.)

Recent Punishments: A father pleaded guilty to stuffing so much toilet paper down his 7-month-old daughter's throat that some had to be surgically removed (Fairbanks, Alaska; May). A mother and stepfather were charged with forcing her 12-year-old son into a doghouse and blowing cigarette smoke at him through the door (Newark, Del.; April). A man was sentenced to 90 days in jail for forcing his 7-year-old son to accompany him to a funeral home and to touch a corpse (North Platte, Neb.; January). A 41-year-old woman, jealous to see her boyfriend out with her 16-year-old daughter, was convicted of attempted murder for dousing the girl with gasoline and setting her on fire, "to teach you a lesson you'll never forget" (Miami; March).

-- Police in Georgetown, Ky., charged Georgetown College beauty pageant coordinator Kathy Wallace with assault in February after she allegedly roughed up contestant Keaton Lynch Brown, 18, who had insisted on, as her talent presentation, lassoing a stuffed pig onstage. Said another contestant, "There was some controversy (between Wallace and Brown) over whether her talent was ladylike."

-- In January, South Africa's Constitutional Court voted 5-4 to deny the petition of law graduate (and Rastafarian) Garreth Prince to practice law, citing his admission that he intends to continue smoking marijuana heavily. Said Prince, "(I)t's my mission, man (to be a "dagga"-smoking lawyer). Mandela struggled for 27 years."

-- Hermilo Mendez, 28, behind bars in Dilley, Texas, and finally having the time to work on his long-desired divorce, wrote the county clerk in San Antonio in March to start the paperwork, but admitted that he needed some help, in that he could not remember his wife's name. The couple had married in 1992 after a one-week courtship, and she cleared out eight days after that. After some research, the clerk informed Mendez that his better half was "Violeta Sanchez Juarez" and that she had apparently long ago returned to Mexico.

-- Korean-born artist Hoon Lee licked yellow cake icing off of the entire reach of a 2,500-square-foot Omaha, Neb., art gallery floor in May in order, he said, for "people to look at the icing and feel a certain way (about the color yellow), whether they know what (that feeling) is or not." And Mr. Cang Xin of China, exhibiting at the Biennale show in Sydney, Australia, in May, asked visitors to bring him any objects they want for him to lick; in his "Lick the World" show, he said, he improves the world's spirituality with his tongue.

-- Found in Illinois: Two men doing minor roofing work at Fox Valley Blueprint in downtown Aurora, Ill., in May found a bucket filled with rain water, but when they poured off the water, they realized it was filled with approximately 1,000 human teeth. (At press time, police were still investigating.) And in April in a wooded area near Countryside, Ill., a passerby found an abandoned 55-gallon container with hazardous-material labels that was later revealed to contain either goat semen or pig semen, originally shipped by the Iowa firm Swine Genetics.

-- At the April trial of Anthony Lanza for driving the getaway car in a 1998 murder near St. Petersburg, Fla., the jury was deadlocked, 11-1, and Lanza, certain that it was 11-1 for acquittal, waived his right (against the advice of his lawyer) to a unanimous decision, which, if he had read the jury correctly, would have meant that he would go free. The judge accepted Lanza's waiver, but the verdict happened to be 11-1 for conviction. Lanza (the son of a former, alleged Genovese family "capo") was sentenced to life in prison and immediately challenged the outcome as unfair.

-- Albuquerque, N.M., police arrested Amadeo Salguero, 21, in May and charged him with carjacking three people at gunpoint and making off with their Acura, which, according to a detective, contained one of the best stereo systems in town. Salguero was busted after he later called one of the victims and asked (according to police), "I don't want there to be hard feelings, but, hey, how do you hook up your amp?" The call was traced to the cell phone of Salguero, who happens to live across the street from the scene of the carjacking.

Earlier this year, Plainfield Memorial School (Norwich, Conn.) decided that it was so concerned about elementary school pupils' privacy that it would not publish the last names of students making the honor roll (thus denying them traditional recognition in local newspapers). But in April, KPRC-TV (Houston) revealed that several school districts around Houston routinely make publicly available the full name, address, phone number and photograph of every student in school under an exception to federal privacy law that allows "directory"-type information to be released without parental authorization.

The restaurant of the brand-new Ritz Carlton hotel in downtown New York City employs what it believes is the world's first water steward, to recommend which bottled waters from its collection go best with which fancy dishes (February). The California Assembly's education committee, concerned about kids' sore backs, voted to require school textbooks to be smaller (April). Executed child-killer Daniel Lee Zirkle's last request, as his idea of contrition, was that his ashes be spread over the graves of his two victims (one of which was his own daughter) (but the girls' horrified mother got a judge to stop it) (Richmond, Va., April).

Twenty-seven men with outstanding arrest warrants turned themselves in to police specifically so they could serve their relatively short sentences right away and not have to worry about being in TV-less jail during the World Cup matches (Hertfordshire, England). The Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, city council repealed a sloppily written, 20-year-old law that made it illegal for an animal to answer nature's call within the city limits. A California state program on medical marijuana was criticized by several participants because of the low quality of the government's dope (allegedly full of sticks and stems) (San Jose). Police found $8 million worth of cocaine hidden in a discarded sofa that crack addicts were lounging on on a side street, consuming their hard-to-come-by nickel bags, completely unaware of the treasure trove below (South Bronx, N.Y.).

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

-- High school baseball pitcher Daniel Hannant, after being hit in the head by a line drive, filed a lawsuit in Chicago in April against the makers of Louisville Sluggers, claiming that the company's aluminum bats are "unreasonably dangerous" to pitchers because they are designed to hit baseballs very, very hard.

-- Kinder, Gentler Revolutionaries: In May, leaders of a Colombian right-wing paramilitary, the AUC, publicized an e-mail address for reporting complaints about their forces' mistreating of civilians; senior leader Carlos Castano admitted that he has killed many people himself, but that he is concerned about his organization's "excesses." And in Nepal in April, American Raymond Coughron told reporters that his mountain-climbing party had been robbed by revolutionaries devoted to the philosophies of Mao Tse-tung; the rebels first negotiated with the victims about what property they would take (finally settling on money only) and then wrote out a crude receipt for the amount taken.

Four women bared their chests in downtown Eugene, Ore., in December, protesting society's use of child-unfriendly pesticides (and in favor of legalized hemp). And "hundreds" of women bared their chests in Lusaka, Zambia, in January, protesting the allegedly fraudulent election victory of president Levy Mwanawasa. And in a protest in Helsinki, Finland, in April, "hundreds" of women publicly vowed to refrain from bearing children for four years unless parliament stops authorizing nuclear power plants.

-- Inmate Charles H. Hankerd, 39, was arrested on contraband charges in Valparaiso, Ind., in April after authorities discovered he was selling cigarettes (a prohibited item) at $2 each to cellmates. To produce his inventory, Hankerd allegedly had swallowed several plastic bags of tobacco just before turning himself in at the jail and, once inside, patiently waited for nature to take its course.

-- Patience Owens, 17, whose 2-year-old son had just accidentally drowned in a filthy backyard swimming pool, was arrested in the February incident despite two separate warnings by the Tampa, Fla., 911 operator that Owens should not jump into the pool after the kid because it was too dangerous for her. And in Montreal, Quebec, Keri Wilson, 17, who seconds before had saved the life of an elderly man on subway tracks by jumping down to pull him up, was publicly chastised by transit police, who recited company policy to first notify authorities to cut power to the tracks (but which in this case probably would not have stopped the next train in time to save the man's life).

-- In two April speeches in Iowa, New York environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said major hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and its democracy than are Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network. Current law allows all hog waste to be applied to cropland, which Kennedy said is OK for small farmers, but for a farm of 100,000 hogs (each of which produces the waste of 10 humans), the resulting air and water pollution is disastrous.

-- Voters in laid-back Sausalito (Marin County), Calif., turned down construction of a $7.8 million police station in March, in part on the advice of a consultant on the ancient Chinese art feng shui who said the proposed building was not harmoniously designed in that it would block the positive flow of energy to other places in town. Said the consultant, Ms. Sidney Nancy Bennett, the building would "cut off the mouth of chi" and compromise "the arrows of sha." (In April, 400 villagers in Vinh Phuc province, Vietnam, held three farmers captive for several days, having blamed them for putting a curse on the village that disturbed its "geomantic flow," according to an Associated Press dispatch, which resulted in several traffic accidents.)

-- Reminiscent of Classic Scenes from "I Love Lucy": Graham Wright, 51, who was sentenced to eight years in jail in January for several bank robberies in Southport, England, told the court that his girlfriend never knew he was a wanted man because, when he sensed a crime report with his picture about to come on television, he started dancing in front of the TV set to distract her. And in May in Uniondale, N.Y., a gold Mercedes-Benz sports sedan was delivered by mistake to Ruth Shepard's driveway, causing her to believe it was a surprise Mother's Day present; a short time later, she was arrested for resisting police officers' attempts to get the car back for its rightful owner.

In May, Trenton Veches, 31, resigned from his job with the Newport Beach, Calif., after-school recreation program when he was arrested on multiple counts of sucking the toes of boys age 6 to 10. Police said as many as 45 kids may have been involved, with several appearing on videotapes recovered from Veches' home. There was no evidence of anything beyond toe-sucking, but any touching of a child for sexual gratification is a crime in California.

Police in Slidell, La., were looking for Henderson Stephen Palmer, 23, and Brian Parker, 24, suspected of a drive-by shooting in March that badly missed the target house, with half of the bullets hitting only the interior of their car and one shattering the kneecap of Palmer's sister, who was in the back seat. Police said the suspects fired as Parker sped down the street (perhaps not realizing that when professionals do a "drive-by," they actually stop the car in front of the target so they can aim better).

Still more information on beneficiaries came out on the federal farm subsidy program mentioned in News of the Weird four months ago (and which Congress voted to expand substantially in April). It has already been widely reported that generous subsidies go to non-needy "family farmers" such as Enron's Kenneth Lay, newsman Sam Donaldson, basketball's Scottie Pippin, and the nonstruggling Ted Turner and David Rockefeller. In March, the Associated Press reported that major league baseball player Kevin Appier has received several thousand dollars in subsidies for his farm in Kansas, which he bought because as a kid, he always dreamed of playing baseball and being a farmer. "I have no idea why I wanted to have a farm," he said. "I wasn't raised on a farm or anything. I just always thought it would be neat."

According to a Los Angeles Times story, a handful of school districts in six states have banned dodgeball, intending to save kids from the violence and hurt feelings that result from humans throwing objects at other humans (March). People who watch TV and relate to the characters tend to believe they have more friends and a more lively social life than they really do, according to a study by a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (May). A 20-year-old suspected holdup man, fleeing police in Baton Rouge, La., while holding his 18-month-old son, tossed the kid at a police dog in an effort to buy a few more seconds in his escape (May).

Eight British tourists were sentenced to three years in jail after being caught practicing their hobby of "plane-spotting" (similar to bird-watching) in Greece because authorities would not budge from their belief that anyone writing down airplane numbers must be a spy (Kalamata, Greece). Police sought a man who was making offers to women to clean out their septic tanks in exchange for sex or guns (Camden, Ark.). The director of the New Brunswick (Canada) Symphony was refused airline boarding until he baggage-checked his $120 (U.S.) conductor's baton (a blunt-ended, flexible wooden instrument with a cork handle) (St. John, New Brunswick). A 46-year-old man, under orders to clean the junk off his property, instead created a giant sculpture of a bare human torso, bent over, with the back end aimed at the street, but was then arrested for disorderly conduct (Altamonte Springs, Fla.).

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