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

In August, two cities debated plans to reduce the amount of dog poop in municipal parks and on sidewalks.  The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was contemplating installing a series of anonymous "poopcams" around town to catch dog owners who neglect their scooping duty.  And Tel Aviv, Israel, announced that squads of plainclothes police officers armed with cameras and night-vision equipment were on duty around the clock photographing violators of its ordinance.

In September, a federal judge in West Palm Beach, FL, dismissed the disability lawsuit filed by police Lt.  Ed Wagner against the department, ruling that Wagner was not really penalized for having the disability in that he was merely denied a special assignment.  Wagner was removed from the SWAT team for having a sensitive neck, a condition which came to light when he complained that an old neck injury flared up after a colleague got him in a headlock and gave him "noogies."

Hours before the December 5th inaugural address of Mexico City's new mayor, who was expected to announce stern measures to deal with rampant crime and police corruption, the mayor's top assistant was mugged in a taxicab, giving up his wallet and briefcase, which contained the mayor's speech.  And in June, an armed robber took the purse of the executive director of Crimestoppers of New Orleans outside her office.

In September, workers delivering crates to the Museon museum in The Hague, Netherlands, accidentally dropped one containing a 75-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton made from bones recovered in Montana, breaking it into188 pieces.  And in January during a break-in at the Yammonoki Museum in Ito, Japan, a thief being chased by a guard dropped a 600-year-old Ming Dynasty platter worth about $400,000, shattering it.

Robert Kong, 13, was arrested and charged with manufacturing a destructive device, namely a 5-1/2-inch pipe bomb that he had made, gift-wrapped, and presented to a female classmate in Corvallis, OR, for her birthday.  He said he followed the instructions he had seen on an Internet site.

According to a police report in Colerain Township, OH, in June, a restaurant manager trying to rid his property of drug paraphernalia turned over a home-made bong pipe that he found in a rear corridor of his building.  The bong was actually a hollowed-out potato rigged with masking tape and aluminum foil, with marijuana residue inside, and had to be destroyed by the police, rather than kept as evidence, in that it was perishable food.

Police in Edmond, OK, issued an arrest warrant in July for Edward M. Jennings, 37, as the man who toured flea markets, pawn shops, and swap meets over the last two years attempting to sell his homemade box, rigged with computer parts, as an "atomic bomb" for $1 million.  Because Jennings was on the lam, he was unavailable to tell why he thought someone at a flea market might have $1 million to spend on an atomic bomb.

In November, John Michael Harris, 17, escaped from a Wetherby, England, correctional institution, and police warned he might be dangerous, though his mother June called him a "good boy" and blamed "the system [for letting] him down." Harris is known in the press as "Blip Boy," because his 17-page criminal record, with 103 convictions since age 9, has by itself noticeably increased the juvenile crime rate.