Taken from the NEWS OF THE WEIRD column by Chuck Shepard.© UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

In March, armed with evidence that a drug dealer had been killed with a single gunshot during a robbery by two men, Torrance, Calif, district attomey Todd D. Rubenstein obtained separate jury convictions of both men for firing the fatal shot. Both robbers' guns had fired, but one missed, and a conclusion as to which one could not be drawn from ballistics tests. Rubenstein asserted confidently to one jury that Stephen Edmond Davis, 19, shot the man, and just as confidently to the other jury that it wasn't Davis, but rather John Patrick Winkleman, 19.

In May, the Russian press reported that 76 top aviation officials flying to the U. S. had declined to take the national airline Aeroflot because of safety concerns, instead flying Finnair. And in March, a Stavropol Airlines passenger jet literally fell apart in the air because of rust, and crashed, killing 50 and becoming the latest Russian airline tragedy. And in May, courageous U. S. astronaut Michael Foale took his turn on the aging Russian space station Mir, which has been in orbit for 11 years despite a predicted life of three and which just in 1997 alone has experienced a fire, a breakdown in the main oxygen system, a partial power loss, and the overheating of one of its air purification systems. [We welcome Michael safely home as of October 6, 1997. ed.]

In 1993, India Scott dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon Ventimeglia when she lived in Detroit and moved in with Fletcher in 1994 when she was about to give birth. Neither man knew about the other, and she told each he was the father. For two years, Scott managed to juggle the men's visitation rights, but in March 1997 when she announced she was marrying another man and leaving the area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of "his" son. Only then did Ventimeglia and Fletcher find out about each other. They took blood tests to determine which was the real father of the boy they had been caring for more than two years, and in May the blood test revealed that neither was.

Connecticut Police Academy: Robert Jordan filed a lawsuit in May against the New London, Conn., police department for illegal discrimination, claiming he was rejected as an officer solely because he scored too high on an intelligence test, which the department claims is evidence that Jordan would get bored on the job and be a bad officer. And an Associated Press report from New Haven, 50 miles away, revealed that new-recruit police classes include training in the arts (watercolor drawing, ballet, etc.), which was the brainchild of former police chief Nicholas Pastore, who himself resigned in February after admitting that he had fathered a child with a prostitute.

In December, a man from southern England named Nigel paid about $128,000 at a London auction for the personalized license plate "NIGEL." Eighty other plates brought in about $2.7 million. A month before that in London, the much less wealthy Dave Parker spent about $40 to have a plate matching his name: He paid a filing fee to change his name legally to [Mr.] C 539 FUG, which is his current license plate.

In a brief interview published in Fortune magazine in February, Todd Sloane, a marketing executive with Publishers Clearing House (the $ 10 million sweepstakes people) was asked whether entrants worry that the PCH prize patrol can't find them if they win: "We get thousands of calls from entrants warning us their house is hard to get to [or] they'll be at Uncle Jack's, whatever."

In April, Sir Roger Penrose, a British math professor who has worked with Stephen Hawking on such topics as relativity, black holes, and whether time has a beginning, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, which Penrose said copied a pattern he created (a pattern demonstrating that "a nonrepeating pattern could exist in nature") for its Kleenex quilted toilet paper. Penrose said he doesn't like litigation but, "When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by a multinational to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a Knight of the Realm, then a last stand must be taken".

According to police in Mesa, Ariz., Jean K. Dooley opened fire with a handgun in Valley Lutheran Hospital in 1995, intending to kill her husband, who was a patient there. (She missed but managed to accidentally hit a nurse and a paramedic.) In January 1997, she filed a lawsuit against the hospital for negligently failing to stop her from bringing the gun inside.

The National Labor Relations Board ruled in December that Caterpillar Inc. workers who were on strike from June 1994 to December 1995 were entitled to be compensated for the popcorn, sodas, ice cream, and other snacks that the company provided workers who remained on the job during that time.