-- Two professors recently quit West Virginia University in protest of its new-agey Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health, an anxiety-reduction study organization named after a welder whose epiphan... more

-- The man appointed by the governor of Texas as the state's director of homeland security in the U.S. war on terrorism, David Dewhurst, is also a candidate for lieutenant governor, and his recent pat... more

-- Ultra-Orthodox Jewish authorities ruled in October that their priests could not ride on airliners taking off from Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv without getting into hermetically sealed body bags... more

-- A 33-year-old man was taken to Via Christi Regional Medical Center in Wichita, Kan., on Nov. 13 with a coat hanger stuck in his throat, but there was a logical explanation, he told the hospital sta... more

-- Among the diversionary shipboard classes serving U.S. Marine combat-expeditionary units on the USS Peleliu warship in the Arabian Sea are an anger-management class taught by a chaplain and an Engli... more

-- A couple of days after the problem was highlighted in a Reuters news story (but several weeks after it had been going on), the Pentagon decided to change the color of the food packages it was dropp... more

-- In September, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution profiled desolate Echols County, Georgia (between Valdosta and the Okeefenokee Swamp), well-known to the state's judges because that is where they enc... more

-- Those dreading the legal morass of casualty claims emanating from the Sept. 11 attacks will be even more disturbed knowing the current status of claims emanating from the 1993 World Trade Center ba... more

-- Both the U.S. and Afghanistan might seem to be heeding President Bush's call to act normal during these times of strife: Just a few miles up the road from the anthrax-shuttered National Enquirer of... more

-- Dr. Rogerio Lobo, chairman of the ob-gyn department at Columbia Medical School, told reporters in October that he almost withheld publishing his findings (in a current issue of the prestigious Jour... more

-- An October issue of Moscow Times profiled Ms. Galine Sinitsyna, 40, who is unemployed (formerly, a firing-range instructor), supports a teen-age son, and feels her job prospects are dim. She is a f... more

-- Two former faculty members at the University of South Florida medical school settled religious discrimination lawsuits with the school in August, lawsuits based on acts by their department's former... more

-- In September, Tokyo's Mainichi Daily News reported that a 25-year-old bulimic woman from Toyoda, Japan (near Nagoya), was arrested for massive violations of the country's Waste Disposal Act after b... more

-- In Halberstadt, Germany, in September, an organist kicked off a performance of the late, radical composer John Cage's "Organ 2/ASLSP" (an acronym somehow derived from "as slow as possible"), which ... more

-- Prosecutors and six Tampa-area juries have found Oscar Ray Bolin to be a vicious murderer, but in August, the state Supreme Court ruled, for the sixth time, that he's entitled to a new trial, that ... more

-- Life Imitates the Three Stooges: According to a complaint filed with police, at a Lincoln, R.I., School Committee meeting in August concerning the hiring of two assistant principals, member Lucille... more

-- Istanbul's leading circumciser, Kemal Ozkan (106,000 lifetime procedures), predicted in August that because of the economic downturn, he will perform only half of the 3,000 he performed last year. ... more

-- Curt Storey, 62, who lives near Pittsburgh, Pa., filed a wrongful-discharge lawsuit in August against Burns International Security Services, claiming he was fired from his job because he refused su... more

-- A ruling last year by the Oregon Supreme Court is finally having a major negative impact on police, according to a July Los Angeles Times dispatch. The court had ruled that all lawyers, including p... more

-- July marked the appearance of a glossy, 32-page publication, Mainline Lady, funded by the Health Ministry in the Netherlands and designed to resemble a newsstand fashion magazine, for the purpose o... more

-- On July 21, police arrested a squatter couple who had boldly commandeered an unoccupied (but definitely not abandoned) house in isolated Tunbridge, Vt., and had begun elaborately remodeling it, in ... more

-- News of the Weird has reported before on "smart toilets" that can make daily health-status readings, but in July, the Cheshire, England, company Twyford told a BBC reporter that it had racheted up ... more

-- Military researchers will soon try to combine the two awfullest smells ever engineered, in an attempt to develop the ultimate nonlethal weapon, a magnificent stink bomb. According to a July report ... more

-- According to the annual report on estimated accidents in the home, from Britain's Department of Trade and Industry and detailed in a June issue of New Scientist, three dozen people were sent to the... more

-- Recent Too-Cute Diagnoses: "Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome" (a strong urge to stay out late, followed by an inability to wake up on time, according to Dr. Michael Thorpy, a sleep-disorders specialist... more

-- In recent New York City art auctions, according to a May report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tom Friedman's "Untitled" (a Styrofoam cup of evaporated-coffee stains, pinned to a piece of wood alo... more

-- "Pain is the sensation of weakness leaving the body," Phoenix "artist" Steve Haworth told a Phoenix New Times reporter in May, while he was arranging scenes for associates of his Church of Body Mod... more

-- The Swedish navy announced in May that because of slashes in the military budget, it would cut back from around-the-clock operations to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. The army and air for... more