Between June and August, high school dropout Jonathan Harris, 34, acted as his own lawyer in three Philadelphia felony cases and won them all, including a murder trial that could have sent him to death row. At press time, he had scheduled two more for himself, on a 2001 gun charge and at a new trial on several lesser charges related to the murder (although he had taunted a prosecutor in court about taking him on again). The prosecutor blamed the murder verdict on unreliable and no-show witnesses.

Zachary G. Holloway, 20, and a pal were arrested in Springfield, Ill., in September and charged with breaking into one car (and stealing, among other things, a motorcycle helmet) and attempting to break into another. To try to get into the second car, Holloway put on the helmet, stood back from the car, and charged into it, head-butting a window, unsuccessfully, twice. The two were arrested shortly afterward.

Ms. Jamila Glauber filed a lawsuit against the transit system in Juneau, Alaska, because a driver's attempt to enforce the well-known no-eating rule on a bus (it was a Snickers bar) caused her, she says, at least $50,000 worth of emotional distress (July). And Kenneth Williams, in jail near San Diego, awaiting trial for raping an underage girl, filed a lawsuit against the facility because of the mental stress and anguish and weight-loss caused by finding a fly in his mashed potatoes (June). And the post office in Fulton, Mo., removed a tape dispenser that had long been available for customers to seal packages, because a customer had hurt himself using it and had filed a claim against the Postal Service (June).

A 46-year-old woman was hospitalized in critical condition when she dropped a coin while at a drive-thru window at a McDonald's, then opened her minivan door to retrieve it, taking her foot off the brake, allowing the van to inch forward, trapping her head in the open door, which lodged against a post (Burke, Va., August). And the CEO of Diebold Inc., a leading manufacturer of voting machines that register votes through the company's unique technology, committed to support President Bush's re-election and wrote a fund-raising letter for Ohio Republicans (August).

-- The police department in Madera, Calif., and its officer Marcy Noriega filed a lawsuit in July against the manufacturer of Taser guns (nonlethal guns that fire incapacitating electrical charges), claiming it was the company's fault that Noriega, reaching for her Taser, inadvertently drew her real gun and fatally shot a man resisting arrest. According to Noriega, the Taser looks so much like a real gun that she couldn't help it, and Taser International Inc., should have provided better warnings and training.

-- Fund manager Scott R. Sacane of Norwalk, Conn., defending himself in July against charges that he ignored Securities and Exchange Commission rules requiring investors to give notice when they buy large percentages of a publicly traded stock, said the mistakes were not his fault. In a filing with the commission, he said he had no idea that he had acquired 33 percent of one company (far exceeding the reporting threshold) and 78.5 percent of another, blaming the problem on a software failure over a three-week period.

-- In August, Tom Jennings filed an appeal to his earlier dismissal as public affairs manager for Mobile (Ala.) Area Water and Sewer System, which was caused by his having had pornography on his office computer. In the appeal, Jennings blamed most of the downloading on other people, but took responsibility for a file labeled "buttshot" (an image of his own buttocks), claiming that it was photographed accidentally when he was changing clothes and that the only reason he loaded it onto his computer was "because I wanted to talk to some of my friends about deleting it."

-- There was a conflict reported in August in an aggravated assault in Skowhegan, Maine, as to who had stabbed Paul Vienaire, according to police. Jean Lampron, 46, was charged with the stabbing, but she said Vienaire's ex-wife did it. Vienaire, however, said that the ex-wife "ordered" the stabbing but that Lampron actually carried it out. Police attributed both explanations to alcohol, since Vienaire's ex-wife died long before the incident occurred.

According to a June police report in the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, W.Va., a 19-year-old man drove from Greenwich, N.Y., to Huntington to meet for the first time a 17-year-old girl he had been "chatting" with over the Internet, to persuade her to return to New York with him. Her mother refused to let her go. The man walked away, "intentionally banged his head on the door frame of his car and fell to the ground, unconscious." He was taken to Cabell Huntington Hospital.

Egyptian law scholar Nabel Hilmi told a weekly newspaper in Cairo in August that he and other Switzerland-based expatriates are preparing a lawsuit against "all the Jews in the world" for the "trillions of tons" of gold and jewelry that Jews swiped during their exodus from Egypt in the time of the Pharoahs. Also in August, a 14th-generation descendant of Montezuma asked the Mexican government to reinstate the long-dormant pensions the king of Spain agreed in 1550 to pay the descendants for the appropriation of Aztecs' land.

Police in Avon Park, Fla., charged April Marie Brown, 28, with criminal mischief after she allegedly, at the direction of her son, 12, drove him and a pal around town on a Saturday night as the kids vandalized 11 stop signs, doing more than $1,000 damage. And in September, according to Wichita Falls, Texas, police, Joann Rubio, 31, drove her pickup truck alongside a truck driven by a 19-year-old man, so that her 16-year-old son in the passenger seat could shoot the man; he was hit once, and mother and son were later arrested.

Arizona law treats selling, downloading, trading or buying child pornography as the equivalent of actually molesting a child, with a penalty of 10 to 24 years per count, with multiple counts to run consecutively, and two high school teachers (convicted of photos-only, no child interaction) are now serving 200 and 408 years (the latter for having 17 photos) in prison, respectively. Critics point out, according to a May report in The Arizona Republic, that there are cold-blooded murderers serving less time in the state, and that a life sentence without possibility of parole could be obtained by as few as 12 computer-mouse clicks at a pornography Web site.

Latest Street Price for a Child: $250 (Judith Ann Garland, 20, was convicted in Baltimore in September of offering a 2-year-old boy because she needed $250 for bail on drug charges.). Latest Cat to Inherit an Estate: Tinker, a black stray taken in by Margaret Layne, who died in May at age 89 in London, England (inherited a house worth about US$600,000 and a trust fund worth about US$175,000).

Police decided not to charge Lula Brown for 911 abuse even though she had called the emergency number just to report that a McDonald's tried to charge her for extra barbecue sauce (Avon, Ohio). A fisherman had to be rushed to a hospital by helicopter after the bull shark he had just caught and was posing for photos with bit his arm (Freeport, Texas). With United Nations funding, the pygmy musical group Ndima released a 10-track CD of songs backed by music made by animal horns, rawhide drums and bamboo pipes (Republic of the Congo).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Females in tribes in Kenya and other African nations are finally rebelling at the ancient custom of requiring a newly widowed woman to pay to have sex with the village's "cleanser" to purify her soul sufficiently to be allowed to attend her husband's funeral, according to an August Washington Post dispatch. Said one particularly vulgar, besotted cleanser in Gangre, "It's not bad for me since I get to be with the beautiful ladies. The women like it because who else would be with them. They can't stay alone with the spirits. They need me." Cleansers are believed to be major HIV conveyers since a condom would not allow the spirits to pass.

In Charleston, S.C., in August, graduate student Mohammed Talha Shekhani, 23, was charged with assault and lewd conduct for what he told police was a sincere, though inept, strategy for meeting women. After a friend told him to just walk up to a woman and start touching her, Shekhani said he initiated four public hugging incidents (with two adults and, almost directly in front of their mothers, two teenage girls). His lawyer said Shekhani's poor judgment was caused by the stress of an academic program that will earn him both a Ph.D. and an M.D. at Medical University of South Carolina.

In June, British Airways came to the rescue of Billy, the homing pigeon belonging to John and Maria Warren of Bootle, England, and flew him home; he was supposed to have flown home on his own from Fougeres, France, but he got sidetracked (probably on a ship) and wound up in New York City. And in August, the Shanghai (China) Zoo shipped two dwindling-population Chinese tiger cubs to a preserve in South Africa so that experts can teach them how to survive; the zoo-bred tigers instinctively chase prey but do not know how to kill it.

A car traveling on Interstate 77 just north of Charlotte, N.C., was hit by a flying speedboat at 2:20 a.m. on Aug. 21; the boat was dashing across adjacent Lake Norman, became airborne, clipped the car, and landed in the median, but the only casualties were the boaters. And a 13-year-old girl was expelled from school in Beaver, Pa., in July for performing oral sex on a boy during a school bus ride home in May; her mother had challenged the expulsion, unsuccessfully arguing that the school had never specified which activities were unacceptable.

-- Outside auditors concluded in May that 16 Houston schools with much-publicized "zero" dropout totals actually had at least 3,000. A whistleblower-principal told The New York Times that principals had been pressured to record their dropouts in some other, benign way. According to him, no one within the school district's culture (created by former superintendent Rod Paige, who is now U.S. secretary of education) realized that people would be suspicious if these schools reported "zero" when every other urban school district in America is plagued by dropouts.

-- Apparently, there are few problems in the schools of Longmeadow, Mass., because Mary Ryan-Kusiak, chair of the School Committee, abruptly adjourned the Aug. 25 meeting solely because committee member Laura J. Bertelli refused to sit in her assigned seat. Bertelli said she was tired of Ryan-Kusiak moving her nameplate around, but Ryan-Kusiak said she'd cancel the next meeting, too, if Bertelli didn't sit where she was told.

-- On the ballot in Denver in November will be a referendum calling on the city council to research various proposals on how to reduce residents' stress and to prove scientifically which methods might work. "The buildup of society-wide stress is like a new pollution in the environment," said activist Jeff Peckman, who collected the signatures to qualify the issue for the ballot. Said council member Charlie Brown, "What are we supposed to do, hand out incense sticks at Denver International Airport? Is that the image we want for our city?"

-- The problem of housing for paroled sex offenders is severe in some states, according to an August report in the Los Angeles Times. Parolee Bruce Scott Erbs, unable to find anyplace to live in Oregon, stays in a government-supplied tent behind the Linn County jail. In Polk County, Ore., five parolees live in a parking garage with the blessing of county commissioners, who like the idea that they can easily monitor the offenders. Wisconsin law requires the government to furnish quarters for released sexual predators if placement service fails, and it is about to purchase a $100,000 home in West Allis to house predator Billy Lee Morford.

In August at Scotland's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Sweet Productions company staged "Sweet FA," a "play" in which the audience take their seats, but then absolutely nothing happens on stage for the next hour, and then the house lights come back on, and any remaining patrons leave. (News of the Weird has previously mentioned the "musical" piece by the late American composer John Cage, whose "4'33" consists of exactly 273 seconds of silence, which "Sweet FA" beats by 55 minutes, 27 seconds.)

Jason Glen Humphrey, 29, was charged with taking indecent liberties for what prosecutors said was a year-long spree of leering at mothers as they changed infants' diapers in semi-public places, or questioning women about their toddlers' bowel movements (Hillsborough, N.C., July). And Jeffrey Bernard Fuller, 35, a medical technician working for insurance companies, was arrested after allegedly exceeding the scope of his work at least nine times by giving men gratuitous prostate and pelvic exams (Decatur, Ga., March).

Julio Cesar Cu, 42, and his three diving partners work exclusively by touch because their full-time job is in water so dark that flashlights are useless: to unclog and repair the antiquated Mexico City sewers ("a sea of human waste and industrial chemicals," according to an April Los Angeles Times dispatch). The city itself is in a valley surrounded by mountains, with frequent flooding and poor drainage in its combined storm water-sewage system. Said one environmentalist, "You walk the streets, smell the stench of raw sewage, and can only imagine what's happening underground."

(1) Ben Mann (apparently a very good meditator) fell out of a tree while meditating, down a 30-foot ravine, and had to be rescued (Berkeley, Calif., June). (2) Rural Ottawa County, Mich., trying to stem the migration to the area by prissy urbanites, started handing out brochures that earthily describe the atmosphere of farm communities and which contain a scratch-and-sniff section of the odor of manure (August).

Latest Suspect to Try to Chew His Fingertips Off to Avoid Identification: Nigerian Olugbemiga Olusajo, who initially failed to cooperate with police but finally pleaded guilty in May to identity theft (Philadelphia). Latest Person to Be Buried in a Pet Cemetery: Jean Birkenstein Washington, in June, who, according to her children, admired animals more than people (Aarrowood Park, Vernon Hills, Ill.). Latest Art Treasure to Be Misunderstood by a Maintenance Man: A US$300,000 art object with a flickering bulb (to create a seedy look), which was "repaired" by an earnest electrician in July (at Brunswick Lane in Glasgow, Scotland).

Ingrid Nicholls, a black woman, was originally told by her hospital in Reading, England, that the only foot prosthesis she was entitled to from the National Health Service was a white one and that she'd have to pay extra for black (but two days later, NHS changed its mind). And the city council in Duluth, Minn., tried to help a local community arts group by selling them the old National Guard armory for $1, but then the group's check bounced. And Canada's foreign ministry announced that, for "security" reasons, it would issue no more passports in which applicants' photos show them smiling.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Tensions are brewing in the family of Zell Kravinsky, 48, and his psychiatrist-wife, Emily, over what she believes is his excessive altruism, according to an August profile in The New York Times. Kravinsky is not just a passionate philanthropist (from his fortune in commercial real estate), but such a strict utilitarian that he says he would sacrifice his one good kidney (he's already donated the other one) if it were needed by someone doing more social good than he. "No one should have two kidneys," he says, "until everyone has one." He said he cannot value his own kids more than anyone else's, a point that has angered his parents and caused Emily to threaten divorce and two friends to abandon him.

A 31-year-old Philadelphia government employee's surgery is just a radical example of how obsessed some women are to wear excruciatingly painful, but fashionable, shoes, according to an August Wall Street Journal report. For about $10,000, the woman had one toe shortened and another straightened so that now she can wear today's ever-pointier, open-toed pumps. Among podiatrists' other remedies: narrowing of the nails; collagen injections to pad the soles of the feet; and a $225 "foot facial" scrub. But when a Moline, Ill., woman told her more traditional podiatrist that she needed corrective toe surgery, the doctor said, "No, you need different shoes."

The New York Times reported that activists working to encourage organ donations deplored the recent shortage of superior young organs for transplant, in large part because murder and traffic fatality rates have come down (August). And Texas public schools raided the budget to buy state flags for every classroom in order to comply with this month's inauguration of required student pledges of allegiance to Texas (August). And one of the apparently most pressing needs in Varallo, Italy, was addressed when the city council began subsidizing half the cost of Viagra tablets for its residents (August).

-- Broward County, which was one of the "ground zeros" during Florida's 2000 presidential vote-counting problems, mistakenly failed 6,559 public middle-school students in June due to what it later called a computer error. A school official called the total count of students affected "a small number."

-- Single-engine pilot Michael Grumbine flew at barely tree-top level over La Serna High School in Whittier, Calif., in May, to drop anti-abortion leaflets to students (containing a hip reference to the then-hot movie "The Matrix: Reloaded"), but in mid-flight he accidentally stuck his hand into the propeller blades, severing two fingers and sending the plane into a fall, where it crash-landed, injuring Grumbine.

-- Authorities in Phoenix decided to hold the city's loudest July 4 fireworks show this year adjacent to the complex that houses a Veterans Administration medical center and the state's military retirement home, even though some residents of the facilities still suffer battlefield-acquired post-traumatic stress disorders. (However, the facilities reported no adverse incidents.)

-- Sewage-treatment officials in Pittsburgh, wanting to lure crowds to a June showing of their new facilities, thought the best way to attract people was to offer them a picnic of free hamburgers and hot dogs to accompany the demonstration of state-of-the-art raw sewage disposal. (About 300 people attended.)

-- In March, the double life of wealthy Tampa construction magnate Douglas Cone, 74, began to surface when, following the death of his socialite wife, Jean Ann (with whom he lived Thursdays through Sundays and had three kids), he quickly married his socialite paramour Hillary Carlson (with whom he lived in a second mansion 20 miles away as Donald Carlson, Mondays through Wednesdays, and had two kids). Cone's money (donated in both his names, though "Mr. Carlson" never appeared in public) and the women's tireless community service made the "four" of them prominent figures in Tampa. (The consensus among families' members is that Hillary knew; Jean Ann might not have; and friends and associates did not.)

-- Wilbur Daniels, 67, faces sentencing in September in Washington, D.C., on his 2002 conviction for defrauding the Dupont Park Seventh-day Adventist Church of $1.3 million, which, as church treasurer, he might have taken in a sincere attempt to invest the church's money in what turned out to be a Nigerian Internet scam. Prosecutors said Daniels' earnestness was demonstrated by the fact that he also lost his own life savings in the deal.

An inmate tried to escape in August from the parking garage of the jail in St. Charles County, Mo., by dashing through a fire exit door; he seemed unaware that immediately beyond the door was a brick wall, and after the collision, he was taken to a hospital with head injuries. And in Tampa, Fla., in August, one man was arrested and several others sought in a labor-intensive burglary of a Sports Authority store; police estimate that the crew spent a week digging an elaborate 40-foot-long tunnel underneath the store, and once they finally surfaced inside, they apparently got only about $3,500 in athletic shoes and Tampa Bay Bucs jerseys before an early-arriving employee called police.

-- The federal government settled with two prestigious Chicago hospitals in July (Northwestern University's, University of Chicago's) and filed a claim against another (University of Illinois'), on charges that the three improperly moved their own patients up the national organ-transplant priority list; one UI official allegedly told a doctor that favoring its own patients was "the Chicago way." And in August, the conviction of a Dallas bookstore manager became final, for selling obscenity in the form of adult science-fiction comic books; the sales were to adults in an adults-only section, but the prosecutor's main argument about the books's alleged "danger" was merely that comic books are an art form of general appeal to children.

In July, a Los Angeles Times reporter, citing "scientists and others who study the problem," wrote that as many as 10,000 auto collisions since 1985 have been caused by "unintended acceleration" (e.g., hitting the gas pedal instead of the brake, accelerating in a mistaken gear). Recent news stories suggest this problem is particularly acute with (and perhaps even largely confined to) senior citizens. In July and August alone, at least nine seniors (aged 71 to 90) caused unintended-acceleration collisions in Florida, Georgia, California, Massachusetts, Illinois and Tennessee, in addition to the July Santa Monica, Calif., farmer's market incident in which an 86-year-old man killed 10 people because he was unable to move his foot to the brake while traveling nearly three blocks.

-- Tony Martin (introduced in News of the Weird in 1999) is one of Britain's most prominent criminals, sentenced to six years in prison for defending his property by shooting one burglar to death and wounding another. He was turned down for early parole in 2002, and also for a trial home visit in July, on the official ground that he continued to pose a threat to burglars. However, he was granted parole by statute in August and now must prepare to defend a civil suit by the surviving, limping burglar, Brendon Fearon, who claims the gunshot permanently disabled him. In August, London's Sun newspaper surreptitiously videotaped Fearon walking without a limp and effortlessly bicycling and climbing stairs.

A judge in North Platte, Neb., willingly accepted the defense of a 45-year-old inmate on work-release that the reason he had alcohol on his breath was that he had eaten a homemade burrito whose ingredients had been dipped in beer. And Jeremy Bamber, convicted years ago of killing five family members, filed a lawsuit against four surviving relatives for conspiring to deprive him of "his share" of the family estate (Wix, Essex, England). And the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board turned down the petition for asylum by a Venezuelan woman, who claimed she needed to stay in Canada because back home, she would be persecuted for being too fat.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)