The Kibera neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Dahravi section of Mumbai, India, are two of the planet's most appalling slums, but residents have recently discovered well-off international visitors roaming their toxic, fetid urban hells as voyeurs on travel agency-arranged tours. "(T)hey want to come and take pictures ... tell their friends they've been to the worst slum in Africa," lamented one resident of Kibera (which has one toilet for every 1,440 people), speaking to a Reuters reporter in February, but a March Smithsonian magazine piece quoted a Dahravi tour entrepreneur as promising to show "the positive side of (the) slum" (for instance, the community spirit that discourages street beggars, in a nation otherwise teeming with them).

-- Among traditional rituals still celebrated: (1) Tinku, in Bolivia's high plains, pits two tribes in Sacaca each February in day-long drinking and all-out fist-fighting. Despite the bloodshed, Tinku survives, helped by President Evo Morales' support for indigenous cultures. The mayor of Sacaca called Tinku "a sublime, beautiful act," in a February New York Times dispatch. (2) And at the Historic Carnival of Ivrea, Italy, in February, nine "teams" battled in commemoration of the centuries-old rebellion against noblemen, who enjoyed deflowering commoners' brides on their wedding eves. Today, that battle is waged by people pelting one another with oranges (this year, more than a million).

-- The U.S. Border Patrol has for three decades worked with a small group of Native Americans (Navajos, Kiowa and Sioux, among others) who call themselves the Shadow Wolves and who proudly use ancestral techniques to help track down drug smugglers and human traffickers along the Arizona and California borders with Mexico. According to a February Reuters dispatch, the Wolves can detect "barely visible scuff marks" on the ground and know how to follow trails of tiny fibers.

-- The University of Texas-Arlington fired two employees last year after they had prayed at the cubicle of a co-worker and anointed it with prayer oil, and in December the two filed a lawsuit over the termination. The school said that "praying, shouting and/or chanting over a co-worker's ... belongings without her knowledge and consent constitutes harassment," and that rubbing down the cubicle frame with oil showed "disregard for university property." Evelyne Shatkin and Linda Shifflett said that the co-worker was on vacation at the time, but they declined to say why they thought she needed the benefit of prayer.

-- Britain's Home Office decided recently, in the course of remodeling at the Brixton prison in London, that, because of Muslim inmates, all the toilets should be re-positioned so that users would be respectfully facing perpendicular to Mecca as they answered nature's calls. In China, meanwhile, several multinational corporations, along with the government's television network, said they are de-emphasizing pigs in advertising and promotion even though this is the Year of the Pig in the Chinese zodiac. The Han Chinese majority regard pork as their premier meat and the pig as a symbol of happiness, honesty and fertility, according to a January Wall Street Journal dispatch.

-- TV evangelist Darlene Bishop (Monroe, Ohio) had a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against her in late 2006 by the family of her brother, who died after a battle with throat cancer, which the family says Bishop convinced him (on his deathbed) that he had defeated through her ministry of prayer. Before her brother was stricken, Bishop's main healing example was herself, in that she touted prayer as having enabled her to beat her own breast cancer, but she later conceded that she merely believed herself stricken and that no formal diagnosis had been made. (Bishop's brother was a prominent country and western songwriter, and the family members are contesting his considerable estate.)

-- Two solutions to "bullying": (1) In November, a mother (with her two daughters and a family friend in tow) rushed to a school in Charlotte, N.C., to defend her 15-year-old son, who had been complaining of bullying. (Logically, a defense by one's mother might not put an end to bullying.) (2) The South Korean government commenced a pilot program in March to supply to-and-from-school bodyguards for kids who complain about bullying (to be funded by private donations). However, the bodyguards would not actually sit with kids in class.

-- Seattle parents of 9-year-old "Ashley" announced they have decided to give her intensive hormone therapy, which will likely cause her not to grow beyond her current stature (4-foot-5, 75 pounds), in that she has a likely permanent brain impairment that prevents her from almost all of life's activities (walking, talking, eating, keeping upright). The parents decided that, since she requires constant care, their incentive to take her places and engage her would be increased if she were of a manageable size rather than a full-grown adult.

(1) "Feral Shih Tzus Roam Georgia Condo Complex" (Science Daily); (2) "Son Gets Six Months, Probation, for Dismembering Mother" (WINS Radio, New York City); (3) "Judge Rules Government Supply of Marijuana Is Inadequate" (San Jose Mercury News). (The dogs romped through the Covered Bridge complex in Marietta; the 16-year-old son was found to be emotionally under the spell of a sadistic adult molester; and the federal government's marijuana farm was not producing enough for medical research.)

Brian Ward, 29, was arrested in St. Clairsville, W.Va., in February after a student's parent saw him acting strange while parked across the street from St. Clairsville High School. The parent reported that Ward appeared maybe to be having a seizure, in that his arms were "thrashing around," but police found that that was just his reaction to an illegal inhalant, which was not identified.

Novelist (27 books) David Eddings, 75, accidentally destroyed his Carson City, Nev., garage and part of his next-door office in January while he was flushing out the gas tank of his idle sports car. He said later that his intention was to remove the gasoline from the car to reduce the fire risk, but then he saw that some fluid had leaked onto the garage floor. For some reason, Eddings' curiosity about the leak (water or gasoline?) caused him to light a piece of paper and toss it onto the puddle, just to find out. "One word comes to mind," he later told the Nevada Appeal. "Dumb."

News of the Weird has formally retired the category of household-hoarding stories, but apparently Ann Biglin of West Yarmouth, Mass., has an additional problem: hoarding in her automobile. Police issued her a citation in February after her car jumped a curb and knocked over a light post, which Biglin explained was due to "several old coffee cups" and "assorted pieces of trash" that might have accidently fallen and hit the accelerator. However, police found the seats filled at least chest-high with trash. A Boston Herald photo showed the driver's seat uninhabitable, and its story described the mess as "mountains of trash" that came down as an "avalanche" on her accelerator.

Though much of Pakistan remains devoutly Islamic and sometimes even intensely tribal in nature, 28-year-old Mr. Ali Saleem enjoys modest success on television each week as a cross-dressing diva named Begum Nawazish Ali, whose flamboyant character alternates between coquettish and outrageous. According to a January New York Times dispatch from Karachi, Ali and his fans believe no biological female could do what he does, either because of religious norms or sensitive family "honor" (which sometimes leads relatives to punish or even kill female family members who bring them shame in their community).

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

Mount Diablo High School (Concord, Calif.) students met in racial groups in February to prepare for upcoming statewide tests, to motivate them to improve their race's "team" score from the year before. Principal Bev Hansen defended the strategy of dividing whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians, pointing out both its previous successes (increases of from 46 points for whites to 80 points for Hispanics) and its ability to motivate by positive ethnicity (rather than allowing intergroup taunting over scores to fester).

-- The Money Drop: Germany saw a birth boom during the first days of the new year, attributed mainly to the government's child-bearing incentives (bonuses of up to the equivalent of $33,000, leading mothers to attempt to delay December delivery until the law kicked in on Jan. 1). Meanwhile, in the United States, according to a December New York Times feature, an estimated 6 percent of the annual 70,000 babies scheduled to be born the first week of January were once again induced early, for late December delivery, to take advantage of tax breaks worth at least $4,000 per child.

-- On Feb. 10, at the luxurious Lebua hotel in Bangkok, organizers brought in six master chefs from around the world to prepare the most exquisite dinner they could imagine for the 40 specially invited international gourmets, who dropped in to dine for $25,000 a person. Among the fare: Perigord truffles, "tartare of Kobe beef with imperial Beluga caviar and Belon oysters," creme brulee of foie gras and 10 of the best wines of the 20th century, including 1961 Chateau Palmer.

-- Zimbabwe's almost comically sad hyperinflation rate reached 1,593 percent in January (the dollars that bought a brick house with pool and tennis court in 1990 would today buy a single brick), but that did not stop President Robert Mugabe from ostentatiously celebrating his 83rd birthday on Feb. 24 at a party estimated to cost the equivalent of about $1.2 million. In early February, the government attempted to halt inflation by passing a law declaring it illegal.

-- An international team of biblical scholars learned recently that the sect thought to have been responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Essenes) became extinct because they were too modest about their toilet habits. According to a November report in London's Independent, the researchers found evidence of heavy fecal bacteria in a secluded area (which was also a graveyard) and deduced from the scrolls that the Essenes rejected defecating in the open (which would have allowed sunlight to kill the bacteria).

-- A January National Geographic TV special revisited an underreported Cold War struggle between Soviet and U.S. scientists rushing to perform head transplants. Russian Vladimir Demikhov, working in secret in the 1950s, grafted the head and upper body of a puppy onto the neck of a large mastiff (and both reportedly bemusedly tolerated the other for the four days that the "puppy" lived). American Robert White of Cleveland, Ohio, reportedly transplanted a dog's brain into another dog's neck and noted which characteristics transferred with the brain (until the dog died days afterward). (When even limited word got out about White's 1970 rhesus monkey head transplant, the public outcry forced his lab to close.)

-- The Royal Bank of Scotland, like other banks in the U.K., is widely criticized for charging onerous fees to customers who make mistakes on their account, such as overdrafts or late payments (levying charges of many times the actual costs of handling the mistakes). Customer Declan Purcell of East London sued the bank over the excessive fees and won a default judgment when the bank failed to respond. Armed with a court order entitling him to the equivalent of $6,600, Purcell led bailiffs into a Royal Bank branch lobby in January to seize four computers, two fax machines and cash.

-- Denver International Airport was reputed to be an "all-weather" facility that would operate seamlessly in a blizzard, but when it failed during the January snowstorms (closed for 45 hours), an embarrassed airport spokesman, Chuck Cannon, admitted he'd like "to choke the person who came up with (the 'all-weather') term." The Associated Press then discovered a 1992 interview with Chuck Cannon, bragging to reporters about his new "all-weather" airport.

Tennessee's death-row-execution procedures came under attack in February when critics realized they were a hodgepodge of lethal-injection rules intermingled with old electric-chair protocol. (Lethal injection thus now requires shaving an inmate's head and having a fire extinguisher ready.) Also in February, at a hearing investigating Florida's botched December execution of Angel Diaz, a special commission concluded that the executioner should have re-checked whether the IV line was in the vein, instead of (as he did) merely continuing to push the resisting chemicals into the arm. (The only formal qualification to be appointed a Florida executioner is to be at least 18 years old.)

Dr. Hugh Tilson, 67, an award-winning public-health researcher at the University of North Carolina, was arrested in January in a men's room at the Atlanta airport and charged with public indecency. Also in January, Lord Justice Richards, 56 (and one of Britain's most senior judges), was arrested for allegedly exposing himself to a woman on a train. And in February, William French Anderson, a world-renowned geneticist, 70 (and runner-up as Time magazine Man of the Year in 1995), was sentenced in Los Angeles to 14 years in prison for molesting an employee's daughter for four years beginning at age 10. Said Anderson, according to court records, "(S)omething in me was just evil."

(1) Clenzo Thompson, 45, was arrested in New York City in January after allegedly robbing the same Commerce Bank branch twice in three days. The first robbery ended when the chemical dye in the money bag exploded and spooked him, and he apparently failed to learn from that, in that the second robbery's money bag also exploded. (And three years earlier, Thompson had been caught after another bank robbery after having accidentally dropped his ID on the bank floor.) (2) Michael J. DeWitt, 39, was arrested for DUI in Fort Wayne, Ind., in February after he drove erratically into the parking lot of an Indiana State Police station early in the morning and told officers that he was there "to get a room." (A Holiday Inn was next door.) (Police later said they matched DeWitt's Hummer to the vehicle that minutes earlier had collided with a car nearby and left the scene.)

The U.S. Navy announced in February that it is planning to use 30 trained dolphins and sea lions for port security in Puget Sound near Seattle. Dolphins' sonar ability makes them excellent at detecting swimmers, and they are being trained to signal via a beacon when encountering one. According to an Associated Press dispatch, sea lions can carry special cuffs in their mouths and are being trained to clamp the cuff around a swimmer's leg.

(1) A 47-year-old registered sex offender died of a heart attack in Palm Beach County, Fla., in January; his body was found, nude, in front of his home computer on which he had been viewing pornography. (2) Another 47-year-old man was killed late at night, in February in Belle River, Ontario, when his snowmobile collided with a tree stump embedded in Lake St. Clair; the man had been waging a notorious, three-year campaign to have the stump removed from the lake because of the danger it posed to nighttime snowmobilers.

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

About half the students who attend the Jewish primary school King David, in Birmingham, England, are Muslims, and in fact, their parents work hard to get them in because they so respect the school's ethos and its halal-like diet. All students learn Hebrew, recite Jewish prayers, and celebrate Israeli independence, but there is a Muslim prayer room, also, and Muslim teachers are hired for Ramadan. However, confided one parent, the school tries to keep a low profile so as not to inflame the religious rabble-rousers.

Robert "Drew" Stephenson, on trial in Fort Worth, Texas, in January for "torturing" an ex-girlfriend, acknowledged her severe burns but said it wasn't his fault. He said the two were having sex in a house that had no heat, and to warm himself, he ran the flames of a lantern up and down his arm. According to him, his girlfriend said she wanted to be warmed up with flames, too. (He was convicted, and in February, after four other women testified that he had beaten them, was sentenced to life in prison.)

-- In February, two anti-whaling activists (one from Australia, one from Los Angeles), intending to attack a Japanese whaling ship near Antarctica with a bottle of acid and a smoke bomb, got lost in the fog in their small dinghy and were rescued with the help of several boats, including the whaler. However, as soon as the activists were safe, one thanked the Japanese crew but said, "I guess we're back on schedule, and we'll be pursuing you again." Shortly after that, the activists approached the whaler and tossed the acid onto the deck, injuring two crew members.

-- It is well-known that Saudi Arabia still prohibits women from driving cars (or riding in them unless accompanied by a male relative), but a December Associated Press dispatch from Riyadh reported on female automobile salespeople (who are successful in selling to females, who can own cars as long as someone else drives). Also, in January, a holding company owned by Saudi Prince Alwaleed ibn Talal hired a female pilot for one of its jets. The woman, Capt. Hanadi Zakariya Hindi, flies with no restrictions but still requires a male relative to get her to and from the airport.

-- In January in Austin, Texas, a 45-minute delay occurred between when a nighttime 911 call was made to report a building on fire and the time firefighters arrived. According to the Austin American-Statesman, the delay could have been due to uncertainty about the seriousness of the "fire," in that the building in question, with smoke spewing from it, was Bert's Bar B-Q (which of course has smoke spewing from it frequently). This time, though, the building was destroyed.

-- William Davis filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the Murfreesboro, Tenn., police in December because, when they raided his home after complaints from neighbors, they seized and destroyed the 114 dead cats and one dead dog that Davis kept in freezers and which he said had "emotional value" for him. In addition, according to the petition filed in Chancery Court for Rutherford County (and uncovered by TheSmokingGun.com), the carcasses were potential business property, in that he was planning to start his own pet cemetery, and also one of the cats, he claimed, was destined for the Guinness Book of World Records because it had been so large at birth.

-- We're Smart, You're Not: A group of so-called "gifted" eighth-grade students filed a lawsuit in 2003 against the Beaubien School in Chicago because officials denied them their "right" to wear a "Gifties" T-shirt. The school, with similar numbers of "gifteds" and regular students (who, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, are referred to as "tards"), works to tamp down divisiveness and controversy between the two groups. However, said one giftie, "There's a certain point when you have to stick up for your rights," and not only was a lawsuit filed, but when it was tossed out by the first judge to hear it, the students appealed, and argument was heard in January at the U.S. Court of Appeals.

(1) Josie Medlock, 59, imprisoned two home improvement contract workers and two supervisors in her home in East Dene, England, in December and refused to let them out until they promised to finish her kitchen remodeling by Christmas. A local government mediator worked out a compromise, according to London's The Sun. (2) Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara, of Portugal, died in 2001 with a 13-year-old will leaving his entire estate (including two residences) to be divided among 70 people he had randomly selected from the Lisbon phone book, with explicit instructions that his relatives would get nothing. (According to a January 2007 Agence France-Presse dispatch, the outraged relatives are still challenging the will.)

-- (1) The Netherlands broadcaster SBS 6 was scheduled to launch a reality TV show in February, "Love at Second Sight," which has been described as a dating show for the "visibly disfigured." An SBS 6 spokesman said the show's goal is to fight prejudice (which is why the producers changed the name from its original, "Monster Love"). (2) Southern California filmmaker Dominic Scott Kay filed a creative-control lawsuit in January against the financial backer of his short film, "Saving Angelo," starring family friend Kevin Bacon, which he wanted to enter in independent festivals but was kept from by the financier. Dominic Scott Kay is 10 years old.

(1) George Dalmas III, 48, a 20-year, mid-level CIA employee, pleaded guilty in Fairfax, Va., in December to breaking into 10 homes and stealing many items of expensive jewelry, plus 1,074 pairs of women's underpants, all of which Dalmas carefully maintained, in that, said the prosecutor, he was most of all a pack rat. (2) In December, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals petitioned to have convicted Chicago-area bestialist Dwayne Page, 27, banned from further contact with animals (even though Page might already have moved on to a substitute fetish five months earlier, according to a probation officer, by browsing Web sites "relating to diapers for sexual arousal").

Joshlynn Leigh, 30, was arrested in December at a Pennsylvania state police barracks as she arrived for fingerprinting in preparation for being hired by the agency. Leigh was discovered to have driven to the barracks in a stolen car (the same one that was the subject of a warrant against her in Georgia for auto theft).

Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise made News of the Weird in 1997 and 2001 as he struggled to create an impervious grizzly bear-fighting suit, to mixed success. Over the last two years, he has invested $15,000 to create what he calls the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armor" to protect Canadian soldiers in combat. He told the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator in January that he was ready to put the suit on and face high-powered rifle fire. In addition to the armor, the outfit contains a knife, a transponder, a recording device and emergency morphine.

Ms. Pan Alying, a schoolteacher in China's Shandong province, had her purse snatched in January (containing her mobile phone, bank cards and cash) and decided to try pleading with the thief by sending text messages to her stolen phone. According to Xinhua news agency, she patiently sent 21 sympathetic notes to the man, with no answer, but the day after the last one, she found a package at her door containing her purse and all its contents intact, with a note, "I'm sorry. ... I'll correct my ways and be an upright person."

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)