-- The owners of Karma Farms in Marshall, Texas, came under severe criticism in November for having purposely bred a litter of deformed cats with short, slinky front legs (because part of a vital bone... more

-- A November Associated Press dispatch described the work of commercial leech and maggot suppliers who sell to hospitals for medical treatments. A Welsh firm, Biopharm Ltd., moves about 20,000 3-inch... more

-- In October, a California appeals court reinstated the 1997 jury verdict for Robert Cunningham against his Orange County homeowners' association for meddling. Over a two-year period, the association... more

-- Calgary, Alberta, construction worker Michael Pearse, 22, an admitted hothead, pleaded guilty to making threats in 1996 while trying to find a friend's ex-girlfriend, but at his sentencing hearing ... more

-- Rev. John Wayne "Punkin" Brown Jr., 34, died on Oct. 3 of a rattlesnake bite while ministering at the Rock House Holiness Church in northeast Alabama near Scottsboro. In a landmark book on snake-ha... more

-- Latest Jesus Sightings: Hundreds of people began arriving in the town of Bras D'Or, Nova Scotia, in September, when residents spotted a likeness of Jesus Christ on an outside wall of the Tim Horton... more

-- According to a Chicago Tribune report in September, some parents in Oak Park, Ill., are objecting to what they believe is an implicit anti-Americanism in a "Pledge to the Planet" that some Hatch El... more

-- According to a Reuters wire service report in August, lobbyists in Bonn, Germany, called the Working Group for the Unemployed held a series of rallies to demand six weeks' annual paid vacation for ... more

-- In August, Ukrainian Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko began a crackdown on tax delinquents to collect the $3.5 billion the government is owed. The centerpiece of the campaign is to call the top ... more

-- In Bridgeport, Conn., in July, a 37-year-old man was put on probation and ordered to counseling for breaking into a Fairfield, Conn., home on April 17. According to police, the man's motive was tha... more

-- Rosamaria Machado-Wilson, formerly a manager at BSG, a Panama City, Fla., audio lab doing product development for the gambling industry, filed a lawsuit against the company in July, claiming she wa... more

-- The BBC reported in June that despite recent Pakistani government crackdowns, gangs operating around the shrine of Sha Dola in the city of Gujrat have been deliberately deforming infants handed ove... more

-- According to Pat Rusin and her team of researchers at the University of Arizona, the toilet seat is actually one of the least bacteria-laden surfaces in the home. In results published in a June iss... more

-- In April, the CIA debuted its home page for children, featuring creative games and gimmicks such as allowing kids to put disguises on models' bodies and to maneuver virtual guard dogs to sniff for ... more

-- Jim Gordon, a candidate for South Carolina's elected agriculture commissioner, told a campaign-stop audience in Greenville in May that the two most important issues stifling the family farm are acc... more

-- The Department of Energy announced in May, after reviewing project records from the 1950s, that some inspectors at a uranium processing plant near Cincinnati used the somewhat-unscientific method o... more

-- Clive Winter, 45, third-highest-ranking official at the Lothian, Scotland, provincial health board, was convicted in February of several assaults as part of a secret gang he had formed in order to ... more

-- The New York Times reported in March on the Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to set pollution-discharge limits on livestock farms within seven years. U.S. farm animals produce 130 times t... more

-- In March, Rogers, Ark., software developer Rick Bray introduced his TVGuardian sound monitor, which silences offensive words in television dialogue and prints tamer substitutes as captions on the s... more

-- In March, trial began in Lesli Szabo's $1.7 million lawsuit against a Hamilton, Ontario, hospital for not making her 1993 childbirth pain-free. Physicians said that painless childbirth cannot be ac... more

-- Open Season: Three weeks before a U.S. Marine Corps pilot clipped a ski gondola in the Dolomite mountains in Italy, killing 20 people, a British air force Harrier jet accidentally dropped two half-... more

-- Slam-Dunkers at Risk: Peter Martin Vella, 18, filed a lawsuit against the city of Milford, Conn., in December, claiming that he ripped his nose open during a city playground basketball game. He sai... more

-- The Blessed Family Unit: In December, a judge in Montgomery County, Md., awarded custody of a 2-year-old boy to his biological mother, Latrena D. Pixley, 23, despite the fact that she murdered an i... more

-- Through what a company spokesman later called "human error," the front door of the CoreStates Bank in Robesonia, Pa. (10 miles from Reading), remained unlocked through the Veterans Day weekend, and... more

-- What Goes Around, Comes Around: Since taking control of most of Afghanistan in September 1996, the religious Taliban army has enforced strict, conservative Islamic rule, especially regarding the wo... more

-- The show business newspaper Daily Variety reported in December that John Kricfalusi, creator of TV's "The Ren & Stimpy Show," was threatening legal action against the producers of the Comedy Centra... more

-- In December, nationally known Emory University business school professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, 43, abruptly resigned, and according to several news reports, it was because the school had discovere... more

-- In November, ecology activists in Chile issued an alert that 2-foot-long mutant rats were attacking livestock in Santiago. At about the same time, residents of Brooksville, Fla., were complaining a... more