Among the promotions offered by New York City's upscale Marmara Manhattan hotel is a "birth tourism" package exploiting the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment. For about $35,000, a foreign expectant mother with a visa can spend her delivery week in luxury accommodations (including medical care) -- and assure her baby automatic U.S. citizenship. (That child could then become an "anchor," subsequently making it easier for the parents to acquire "green cards.") Also, The Washington Post reported in July that three agencies in China, with U.S. affiliates, offer similar packages to their affluent citizens, whose primary concern seems to be providing their children access to a U.S. education as an alternative to China's expensive, competitive system. (Historians agree that the purpose of the "citizenship right" in the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, was to recognize former slaves as citizens.)

(1) A naked, 47-year-old man was taken to an El Paso, Texas, burn center in July after "friends" won a bet and got to set his prosthetic leg on fire, and it spread to his body. The man admitted to police that he had lost fair-and-square, by downing "only" six beers. He was treated for several days and released. (2) In June, two 34-year-old men in Horsham, Australia, underwent surgery as a result of a plan hatched during a drinking bout. They had both wondered if it hurt to get shot and thus obliged each other.

-- Black magic failed to secure the World Cup for Africa this year, but on the other hand, the weak host team, South Africa, managed an opening round draw with Mexico and an upset victory over France. "Sangomas" (traditional "healers") spreading "muti" (powders, potions, animal bones, especially from speedsters like horses and ostriches) had been out in force. World Cup stadium security was tight, but in African league soccer games, it is not uncommon for sangomas, pre-game, to bury animal parts on the field, or to have players urinate on it to improve the karma.

-- British Safety Ninnies: (1) Britain's head constable told a police chiefs' meeting in June that they were being "buried" under a "telephone directory"-sized (6,497 pages) compilation of rules and regulations telling street bobbies in massive detail such things as how to apply handcuffs and ride bicycles. (2) The local government that runs the Ebdon Road Cemetery in Weston-super-Mare, England, ordered the removal of the small cross marking the grave of Rosemary Maggs, who died in May. The local council has prohibited crosses in the cemetery, citing safety.

-- Things You Didn't Think Happened: (1) Although 85 percent of Americans are covered by health insurance, the figure in Rwanda is 92 percent. In that country's 11-year-old system, everyone pays $2 a year -- obviously just for basics. However, Rwandans' main problems are more easily treatable -- infections, malnutrition, malaria, unsafe childbirth -- and not expensive diabetes, obesity, cholesterol-clogged arteries. (2) In Israel's West Bank, Palestinians have a highly competitive race-car season, and one team on the rise this year is the sexism-fighting female squad led by driver Suna Aweida. "Driving is driving," she told BBC News in June.

-- In July, acknowledging pressure from local Asian activists, officials at the Exchange mall in Rochdale, England, said they would remove the toilets from two of the facility's restroom stalls and build "Nile pans," also known as "squat toilets" -- also to Westerners referred to as "holes in the ground." The officials said they were trying to serve the many Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants living in Greater Manchester.

-- One of Britain's 200 or so "consecrated hermits" might soon be homeless as the owner of her cottage in rural Shropshire County has listed it for sale. Karen Markham, 44, lives by rules set down by St. Benedict, the founder of western monasticism, that require her to rise at 4 a.m., pray and chant for three hours, then contemplate in silence. For recreation, she weaves rugs using wool from local sheep, according to a May report in the Daily Telegraph.

-- American "Sangomas": (1) In July, a fifth-grade teacher at Jacox Elementary School in Norfolk, Va., resigned under pressure after administrators discovered she was rubbing "holy oil" on students and their desks during school. (2) Teachers Leslie Rainer and Djuna Robinson were removed from teaching duties at Blanche Ely High School in Pompano Beach, Fla., in March after they were seen sprinkling "holy water" onto a colleague, a self-described atheist. Other witnesses disputed the details, but the two were charged under the school's "anti-bullying" policy for aggressiveness toward the other teacher.

-- At press time, the city council of Barre, Vt., continues to debate extending its pet "leash" law to cats, following a woman's complaint that a neighbor's cat continues to foul her yard with droppings. In the few towns that try to enforce leash laws on cats, a main rationale has been to protect friendly birds. (The late U.S. statesman Adlai Stevenson, when he was governor of Illinois, once rejected such a law, terming leashing "against the nature of the cat.")

-- Hard Time, Hard Luck: Harry Jackson, 26, was in jail in Woodbine, Ga., in March, on several minor charges such as driving on a suspended license. However, acceding to pressure from fellow inmates, brought on by the jail's non-smoking policy, Jackson agreed to break out, steal cigarettes at a nearby convenience store, and break back in, undetected. "(D)on't come back empty-handed," one inmate supposedly warned him. Jackson was apprehended climbing back in over a fence. In May, a judge sentenced him, for the earlier charges plus the escape and subsequent burglary, to 20 years.

John Mark Karr burst onto the national scene in 2006 when he famously, falsely, confessed to murdering little JonBenet Ramsey 10 years earlier, but since then, his life has been even more bizarre. He has spun through a series of romances with JonBenet-like youngsters, the latest with Samantha Spiegel, who was 9 when they met and is now 19 and recently got a restraining order against him. Karr is currently known as "Alexis Reich" in preparation for his gender-reassignment surgery, which Spiegel says Karr wants only in order to make it easier to befriend, and seduce, younger and younger girls. According to another ex-girlfriend, Karr asked her to solicit little girls to join a cult he was starting called "The Immaculates," to fulfill fantasies including taking baths with young girls.

From Florida's Panhandle Region: (1) A 24-year-old man was arrested in Crestview, Fla., in April after he allegedly removed a window air-conditioner and crawled into a house in which his wife was staying. They had recently separated, and he told police that he had not "gotten any" in three weeks and was going to "get some." (2) In June in Okaloosa County, passenger Courtnea Bradley, 21, roughed up the driver while the car was moving, making it swerve wildly, thus allegedly endangering her baby in the back seat. At the subsequent traffic stop, a defiant Bradley allegedly told officers, "My (expletive) family is one of the richest around, and we will have y'all's (expletive) jobs."

In May (1991), 19 members of the Michigan House of Representatives (led by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee) introduced a resolution designed to deal with obnoxious social problems, but without creating expensive regulatory programs. The resolution would establish, at the State Archives, a "Registry of Bothersome Practices," on which people could contribute to an official list of complaints about such things as elevator music and magazine blow-in subscription cards.

While the morbidly obese struggle with their health (and society's scorn), those who eroticize massive weight gain are capturing increased attention, according to a July ABC News report. Commercial and personal websites give full-bellied "gainers," such as New Jerseyan Donna Simpson, and their admiring "feeders" the opportunity to express themselves. Simpson became a 602-pound media sensation in March, when she began offering pay-per-view video of herself to an audience of horny feeders. Wrote another gainer-blogger, "Lately, I've been infatuated with the physics of my belly ... how it moves with me." When he leans to one side, he wrote, "I feel a roll form around my love handle." One sex researcher called it a "metaphor of arousal." In the end, though, as a medical school professor put it, "The fetish may be in our heads, but the plaque is going to be in (their) arteries."

-- The dating website BeautifulPeople.com, supposedly limiting its reach only to the attractive (though claiming 600,000 members worldwide), announced recently that it would sponsor a companion egg and sperm bank for its members to sell their essences for a fee. However, as managing director Greg Hodge told Newsweek in June, homely customers were welcome. "Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone -- including ugly people -- would like to bring good-looking children into the world, and we can't be selfish ...."

-- The video company EA Sports sells sports games based on real-life professional leagues, with its biggest moneymaker "Madden NFL 11," which allows joystick-using "coaches" to compete with each other based on actual pro football players' abilities. In June, EA Sports announced a new touch of realism: Just as football teams "scout" opposing players, EA Sports will sell joystickers complex "scouting reports" on the talents and tendencies of their fellow joystickers.

-- Life Imitates a Drew Barrymore Movie: Michelle Philpotts of Spalding, England, and her husband, Ian, and their two children have adjusted, since a car crash 20 years ago, to her anterograde amnesia, which, every day, robs her of short-term memory, forcing her to constantly re-learn her life. According to a June profile in London's Daily Mail, that includes Ian's convincing her that the stranger in her bed every morning is her husband, which he does by showing her their wedding photographs.

-- An April National Geographic TV special tracked "Silvano," an Italian man for whom sleep is almost impossible. He has "fatal familial insomnia," making him constantly exhausted, and doctors believe he will eventually fall into a fatal dementia. Only 40 families in the world are believed to carry the FFI gene.

-- Cleverest Non-Humans: (1) Wild elephants recently rampaged through parts of Bangladesh, and according to the head of the country's Wildlife Trust, those super-intelligent animals "are quick to learn human strategies." For example, he pointed to reports that elephants (protecting their migration corridors) routinely swipe torches from hunters and hurl them not randomly but directly at the hunters' homes. (2) Recent research on the "cat virus" (toxoplasma gondii) acknowledges that, to be viable, the virus must be passed in rodent feces but can only be hosted in a cat's stomach -- and thus that the "toxo" somehow tricks the rodents to overcome their natural fear of cats and instead, amazingly, to entice cats to eat them. Scientists are now studying whether, when human dopamine goes haywire, such as with schizophrenia, a toxoplasma-gondii-type phenomenon is at work.

-- The Trials of the Cricket-Sex Researcher: Biologists from Britain's Exeter University who set out to study the sexual behavior of field crickets in a meadow in northern Spain reported in June that they set up 96 cameras and microphones to cover a population of 152 crickets that they individually identified with tiny, numbered placards on their backs (after DNA-swabbing each one). Publishing in the journal Science, they claimed the study is important in helping us understand how "climate change" will affect habitats.

(1) In May, Jim Janson, a 20-year veteran "carny" (who ran the games of chance at Canada's traveling Bill Lynch Shows), graduated from the law school at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has set out on his new calling. (2) Downgrade Cut Short: Eduardo Arrocha, whom News of the Weird mentioned in 2008 when he was "Eak the Geek," the "Pain-Proof Man" at New York's Coney Island Sideshow (eating light bulbs, putting his tongue in a mousetrap), completed his first-year studies at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan but decided not to return and said he would concentrate on publishing his poetry.

Things looked grim for Carlos Simon-Timmerman, arrested by U.S. border agents in Puerto Rico while bringing an "underage-sex" video home from a holiday in Mexico. The star of "Little Lupe the Innocent" looked very young, and federal prosecutors in April called an "expert witness" pediatrician, who assured the jury, based on the girl's underdevelopment, that she was a minor. However, Simon-Timmerman's lawyer had located "Lupe" via her website, and she cheerfully agreed to fly in from her home in Spain with her passport and other documents to prove, at a dramatic point in the trial, that she was 19 when the video was made. Simon-Timmerman was acquitted.

Questionable Judgments: (1) Austin, Texas, police issued an arrest warrant in June for Jose Romero, who they say robbed a Speedy Stop clerk after demanding money and menacingly pointing to his waistband, which held a caulking gun. (2) Steven Kyle took about $75,000 worth of merchandise from Cline Custom Jewelers in Edmonds, Wash., in June, but as he left the store, employees shouted to passers-by, several of whom began to chase Kyle. Almost immediately, Kyle dropped his gun and the jewelry and fell to the ground exhausted. (Kyle later revealed that he had only one lung.)

(1) Police in Houston said the man killed when he drove his 18-wheeler into a freeway pillar on July 6 was part of a two-man scheme to defraud an auto insurance company. Police said it was the other man who was originally scheduled to drive but that, citing the "danger," he (wisely) backed out. (2) Inmate Carlos Medina-Bailon, 30, who was awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges in El Paso, Texas, escaped in July by hiding in the jail's garbage-collection system. Medina-Bailon's body was found later the same day under mounds of trash in a landfill.

Men Who Accidentally Shot Themselves Recently: Robert Stewart, 55, a police academy instructor, during class (Liberty Township, Ohio, April). Lazaro Flores, 50, practicing quick-draw at his girlfriend's house (Cape Coral, Fla., January). Michael Webb, 22, showing friends how to disarm a gunman (Camp Lejeune, N.C., February). Michael Randall Jr., 19, outside a convenience store, preparing to rob it (Athens, Ga., December). Vincent Medina, 19, waistband-as-holster mismanagement (hit in the groin) (Fontana, Calif., June). Brandon Boyce, 24, waistband-as-holster mismanagement (hit in the groin) (Omaha, Neb., July).

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in June (1992) on the local "Silent Meeting Club," consisting of people who gather at various spots around town and make it a point not to speak to each other. Founder John Hudak said his inspiration was his observation that people often feel obligated to talk when they really have nothing to say, such as at parties, and wondered how nice it would be "to have a group of people where you wouldn't have to talk." Hudak was interviewed at lunchtime in a downtown park, with several of his fellow members nearby, not talking.

"Why are you still alive?" is the question doctors ask Ozzy Osbourne, the hard-rock singer and reality-TV star, who says he is now clean and sober after a lifetime of almost unimaginably bad habits. In June, he started two new ventures: undergoing the three-month process of genetic mapping (to help doctors learn why, indeed) and becoming a "health advice" columnist for London's Sunday Times. At various points in his life, the now-cholesterol-conscious, vegetarian Osbourne said he drank four bottles of cognac a day, smoked cigars like they were cigarettes, took 42 prescribed medications and many more "backstage" drugs that he could not even identify. Osbourne also has a Parkinson's-like genetic tremor, was once in a medically induced coma after an accident, and endured anti-rabies shots after famously biting into a bat on stage ("I thought it was a rubber toy").

-- An intense lightning storm on June 14 around Monroe, Ohio, destroyed the iconic 62-foot-high statue of Jesus (the "King of Kings" structure of the Solid Rock Church) alongside Interstate 75. While townspeople mourned, it was also noteworthy what the lightning bolts completely missed: the large billboard, on the other side of the road, advertising the nearby Hustler Hollywood pornography store.

-- Despite a scary moment in May, Massachusetts state Rep. Mike Moran said he still supports "comprehensive" immigration reform (taken to mean that restrictions on illegal immigrants be tempered with a special "path to citizenship" for those already here). Rep. Moran's car was rear-ended (though he was not seriously hurt) by illegal immigrant Isaias Naranjo, who was charged with DUI and speeding. According to police, Naranjo, 27, who was dressed in a Mexican party costume, laughed when told of the charges, informing officers that they could do nothing to him since he had already made plans to return to Mexico. (Furthermore, Massachusetts is forbidden by state law from even notifying U.S. Immigration officials of Naranjo's case.)

-- Over the years, according to a June Chicago Sun-Times report, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois has freely used "swagger and braggadocio in talking about his 21 years of military service" as qualification for office. When one contrary fact after another about his record was pointed out by reporters, Kirk explained, "I simply misremembered it wrong." He admitted that, contrary to his numerous public statements, he was not actually "in" the Iraq Desert Storm war; did not actually "command the Pentagon War Room" when he was assigned there as a Navy Reservist; and was not actually once Naval "Intelligence Officer of the Year." He is now vying for the U.S. Senate seat once held by Barack Obama.

-- In May, Douglas Ballard and Joseph Foster were indicted for allegedly selling fraudulent loans in exchange for bribes, while they were vice presidents of the Atlanta-area "faith-based" Integrity Bank. The bank opened in 2000, touting Christian principles, giving Bibles to new customers, and encouraging prayer at employee gatherings. (The bank closed in 2008, thought then merely to be the victim of sour real-estate loans, and in fact the bank's more-spiritual founder, Steven Skow, had left the bank by 2007.)

-- (1) British actor Nicholas Williams, 33, was acquitted of domestic assault in June even though he had, among other things, "waterboarded" his girlfriend by pulling her shirt over her head and holding her under a shower during a two-hour rampage. Williams persuaded the judge that the anti-smoking drug Champix made him unable to control himself or even to remember the events of that evening. (2) Laith Sharma, 49, admitted in June that he had stalked and fixated upon, "for marriage," a 14-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario, but doctors' testimony won him a sentence of mere house arrest. Sharma, they said, suffers from the popularly known "maple syrup urine disease," so-called because the excreted scent is a marker for brain damage that prevents impulse control.

-- Compelling Explanation: Tony Chrum was the one apprehended for allegedly buying $160 worth of cocaine from a man who turned out to be a police informant in Lincoln County, Mo., in May, but his brother, who is Winfield, Mo., police officer Bud Chrum, 39, was the mastermind. According to police and unknown to the informant, Bud had needed to replace 2 grams of cocaine from the police evidence locker because he had accidentally spilled something on it, and Tony agreed to help.

"If Google told you to jump off a cliff, would you?" asked a Fortune magazine columnist, describing the lawsuit filed in May by Lauren Rosenberg, asking for damages of more than $100,000 against Google Maps after she was struck by a car. Rosenberg had queried the map service for a "walking route" between points in Park City, Utah, but a short stretch of the suggested route lacked sidewalks. Rosenberg was hit while walking in the street. Though Google and other map services "warn" users against walking in the street, Rosenberg's route was delivered on her small Blackberry phone screen.

-- Update: News of the Weird reported in 2005 on a Welshman's invention of the "Mosquito," a device that emits an irritating, pulsating, very-high-pitched noise and is marketed to shopkeepers to drive away loitering children and teenagers, since the pitch is audible to them but rarely to anyone older than in the mid-20s (because audio range contracts as we age). In June, following an investigation, the Council of Europe (which oversees the European Court of Human Rights) declared the Mosquito a "human rights violation," in that the sounds it emits constitute "torture."

-- Britain's Crown Prosecution Service announced a proposed anti-social behavior order against Ellis Drummond, 18, to prohibit him from wearing low-slung trousers in public that allow his underwear to show, but Drummond challenged it in Bedford magistrates' court. In May, Judge Nicholas Leigh-Smith ruled that such an underwear-suppressing order would violate Drummond's "human rights."

-- Jihadists: They blow themselves up by mistake (such as Pakistani terrorist Qari Zafar did in June); they botch airline shoe- and underwear-bombing and buy the wrong fertilizer for urban car bombs; they brag too much; and they watch far too much Internet pornography. Evidence amassed by Daniel Byman and Christine Fair, writing in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, has led them to suggest that America and its allies should treat jihadists as "nitwits" rather than as "savvy and sophisticated killers" (the latter being an image that helps them with recruiting). It is possible, the authors conclude, that there has not been a truly competent jihadist terrorist since Mohammad Atta led the Sept. 11, 2001, missions.

-- Matadors: Christian Hernandez, 21, making his big-time bullfighting debut at Plaza Mexico in Mexico City in June, ran from the ring trembling in fear at the first sign of his bull. He was then coaxed to return and man-up, but once again fled and immediately submitted his resignation. Though Hernandez was contrite ("I didn't have the ability. I didn't have the balls."), he was arrested for violating his contract and released only after he paid a small fine.

The West Tennessee Detention Facility (Mason, Tenn.) made a video pitch for California inmates, hoping some would volunteer to be outsourced under that state's program to relieve overcrowding. The hard-timers should come east, the video urged, because of West Tennessee's "larger and cleaner jail cells, 79 TV channels, including ESPN, views of peaceful cow pastures, and ... the 'Dorm of the Week,' (with its inmates) staying up all night, watching a movie and eating cheeseburgers or pizza," according to a March (2007) description in Nashville's Tennessean. "You're not a number here," said one inmate. "You come here, it's personalized." (California's outsourcing program is facing a lawsuit from the prison guards' union, anxious about job loss.)