21st-Century American Exports? In strife-torn Sudan (land of the Darfur murder and rape atrocities and a per-capita annual income of $2,200), an epic, year-long Ponzi scheme engineered by a lowly former police officer has enticed nearly 50,000 victims to invest an estimated $180 million (according to a March dispatch on Slate.com). At the height of the hysteria, even militia fighters in Darfur rushed to invest. (As Bernard Madoff was initially, perpetrator Adam Ismael is lounging comfortably under house arrest.) And in February, NPR reported that the United States government will soon be asked to bail out yet another bank that dramatically overextended itself with bad loans -- and is now $900 million short: the Bank of Kabul in Afghanistan.

-- The essential uniform of super-ambitious Chinese businessmen nowadays includes a leather designer purse, reported the Los Angeles Times in a February dispatch from Beijing, and high-end sellers "can't believe their luck," now that "(b)oth sexes in the world's most populous country adore purses." The Coach company will have 53 stores in China by mid-year, and Hermes and Louis Vuitton are so optimistic that they built stores in less-obviously prosperous reaches of the country. (Apparently, only authentic designer items lend businessmen credibility. For the export market, China remains a world leader in trademark-pirating knock-offs.)

-- The lower house of Russia's parliament approved legislation in February to classify beer, for the very first time, as an alcoholic beverage. Traditionally, because of the dominance of the vodka industry, beer has been regarded as closer to a soft drink.

-- Ewwww! (1) The government of Malawi's proposed environmental control legislation, introduced in January, was thought by some advocates to be broad enough to criminalize flatulence. The justice minister said the section about "fouling the air" should cover extreme flatus, but the country's solicitor general insisted that only commercial air pollution was punishable. (2) Only 20 percent of Cambodians have access to toilets (half as many as have mobile phones), and missions such as International Development Enterprises blanket the countryside to urge more toilet usage. In one promotion campaign in Kandal province, according to a February BBC News dispatch, an investigating team called a public meeting and singled out ("amid much laughter") one particular farmer whom it had calculated as producing the most excrement of anyone in the village.

"I thought, 'Man, is this what Jesus would do?'" said Akron, Ohio, repo man Ken Falzini, after surviving a short, harrowing ride clinging to the hood of the Lexus he was trying to repossess from Bishop Marc Neal of Akron's Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church in January. Neal, later charged with felony assault, told a reporter he thought it "disrespectful" for Falzini to try to repossess a preacher's car during Sunday services. Falzini said Neal was "laughing" during parts of the drive, which included sharp zig-zagging at speeds around 50 mph to dislodge Falzini from the hood.

-- In Britain's Coleraine Crown Court in February, Colin Howell, convicted last year of a double murder (of his wife and his girlfriend's husband), testified at the girlfriend's trial for the same crimes that he frequently drugged her during their sex sessions. She had requested to be unconscious during sex, according to Howell, so that she would not be bothered by "Christian guilt" over the extramarital affair they were having. (The trial was ongoing at press time.)

(1) In January, Czech Television reported on a recent, joyous, but confusing, family reunion featuring a woman (Ilona Tomeckova) who had become a man (Dominik Sejda), and who had finally found love (in the person of Andrea Kajzarova, who was, before her own sex change, a bodybuilder named Tomas Kajzar). Dominik, motivated to reconnect with his original family, learned that the son he had given birth to (Radim) was himself undergoing a sex change (to become Viki). (2) Rachel Brock, 21, was arrested in Phoenix in December for an alleged sexual relationship with an underage boy -- the same boy that her mother, Susan Brock, had already been arrested for sexually abusing. (Neither Rachel nor Susan knew about the other's affair.)

-- Just How Bad Was Mom? In Brooklyn, N.Y., Judge Bernard Graham recently awarded custody of an estranged couple's teenage boy to the father even though the father was at the time homeless and living from night to night in shelters and storefronts. The mother, Jeannette Traylor, who earns $90,000 a year as a courthouse employee, was even denied visitation rights. (Judge Graham insisted the arrangement was in the boy's best interest, but Graham was later transferred to non-divorce cases.)

-- Apathy is a problem with many homeowners' associations, but at the annual meeting of the Hillbrook-Tall Oaks Civic Association of Annandale, Va., in June, 50 people sleepily voted for Ms. Beatha Lee as president, thus electing (in a legitimate, by-the-book process) a Wheaten terrier belonging to former association officer Mark Crawford. Crawford said that Beatha, as a manager, "delegates a lot."

(1) An unnamed man was taken to St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla., in February with a gash on his face and a bullet (later removed) in his sinus cavity. KOKI-TV reported that police think "he might have been chewing on a firecracker or a bullet" when it exploded. (2) A 50-year-old woman was arrested in February in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after managers at a Family Dollar store accused her of walking out without paying for packages of baking soda and dishwashing detergent and a pair of thong panties (total value, according to Family Dollar, $7.50).

(1) To conceal an arrest warrant for auto theft, Amos Ashley, 62, told traffic-stop officers in Lawrenceburg, Ind., in February that he was (as he wrote on a paper for them) "Rorth Taylor." ("Pronounce it," ordered a trooper.) "Robert Taylor." ("Spell it once more, please.") "R-e-r-e-r-t," wrote Ashley. ("And 'Taylor'?") "T-a-y-l-o-e-r." Several more attempts followed, until Ashley finally admitted his name and was arrested. (2) Police in Princess Anne, Md., arrested George Ballard, 25, inside a PNC Bank at 11 p.m. on Jan. 25 after a motion detector sounded. Officers said the "cash" Ballard was in the process of taking was in fact a stack of fake bills the bank uses for training.

World's Greatest Lawyer: Christopher Soon won an acquittal in February for his client Alan Patton, who had been charged with violating a law that had been passed primarily to stop Alan Patton. That law makes it illegal to collect urine from public restrooms. Patton, of Dublin, Ohio, was convicted in 1993 and 2008, and charged again in October 2010, with waiting in restrooms and, when young boys finished using the urinal (after Patton had obstructed the flushing mechanism), rushing to gather the contents, which he admitted sexually excited him. After Patton's 2008 conviction, the Ohio legislature made that specific act a felony, and Patton's arrest in October was supposed to lead to a premiere conviction. (The judge did find Patton guilty of "criminal mischief," a misdemeanor.)

Doug Guetzloe, one of central Florida's most prominent political operatives (and a subject of investigations by the Florida Elections Commission and an expressway commission in Orlando), had long infuriated prosecutors with his slippery denials of knowledge of unethical campaigns that they were certain he was deeply involved in. However, late (in 2006), Guetzloe missed a payment on his rental storage locker, and 50 boxes of his professional and personal records were seized and auctioned for $10 to a curious citizen, who then gave them to Orlando's WKMG-TV, which had several earlier investigations of Guetzloe still open. Based on early readings of the storage-locker papers, Guetzloe was quickly indicted for felony perjury.

New York University arts professor Wafaa Bilal had his camera surgically removed in February -- the one that was implanted in the back of his skull in November to record, at 60-second intervals, the places he had left behind (beamed to and archived by a museum in Qatar). The camera had been mounted under his skin, braced by three titanium posts, but his body very painfully rejected one of the posts, and his temporary solution is to merely tie the camera to the back of his neck (even though that work-around is unsatisfactory to him because it represents a less-personal "commitment" to the art). In the future, he said, communication devices like his will routinely be part of our bodies.

-- Till Krautkraemer's New York City beverage company MeatWater creates dozens of flavors of water for the upscale market of hearty gourmets who would like their daily salads, or shellfish, or goulash from a bottle instead of from a plate. Among his new flavors introduced in January, according to an AOL News report, were poached salmon salad water and a Caribbean shrimp salad water that can double as a vodka mixer. Old standbys include Peking duck water, tandoori chicken water, bangers 'n' mash water, and Krautkraemer's favorite, German sauerbraten water.

-- Sell What You Know: In December, a company in eastern Ukraine (a country known for hard drinking) announced a "drinking buddy" service in which, for the equivalent of about $18, it would supply a barroom companion for the evening, "qualified" to discuss politics, sports, women, etc., and even to offer psychological counseling if appropriate.

-- Not Your Father's Scotch: (1) The Panamanian company Scottish Spirits recently introduced a straight Scotch whisky in 12-ounce cans, for a market of mobile drinkers who prefer not to invest in a whole bottle. The international Scotch whisky trade association expressed alarm. (2) At Clive's, of Victoria, British Columbia, Glenfiddich Scotch whisky is only one ingredient in the signature cocktail "Cold Night In," which, according to a January New York Times review, combines "molecular mixology" and comfort food. An especially buttery grilled-cheese sandwich is soaked overnight in the Scotch, along with Mt. Gay rum and Lillet Blanc wine. Following a brief freeze to congeal any remaining fat, and double-straining, it is ready to serve -- with a celery stick and other garnishments.

-- "Vulva Original," from a German company, VivaEros, is the "scent of a beautiful woman," reported in Harper's magazine in August 2010, and selling as a fragrance concentrate for the equivalent of about $35 for a small roll-on container. (Its promotional video is of a lavishly photographed gym scene, with a handsome male, observing a beautiful female working out on a stationary bike, followed afterward by the male's gently sniffing the seat.) "The female smell of intimacy," promised VivaEros, "triggers sexual attraction and desire," which men can address "more intensely during self-stimulation."

-- "You're not going to like this," warned NPR's Robert Krulwich, about to deliver a February story about visionary robotics developers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, who created a carnivorous clock, supposedly able to power itself for 12 days merely on the carcasses of 12 dead houseflies (which the clock traps with fly paper and then mechanically razors in two). The pair also showed a prototype of a coffee table that catches mice by luring them up the table legs with cheese into a hole in the center, where they are guillotined. Auger and Loizeau said their creations are just extensions of TV nature programs showing animals hunting in the wild, but Krulwich fretted about the dangers inherent in "giving robots a taste for (meat)."

-- Scientists have long observed male capuchin monkeys urinating on their hands and then rubbing down their bodies, but researchers were unclear about the purpose (whether for identification, or threat-prevention, or mating) -- until a recent issue of the American Journal of Primatology. Dr. Kimberly Phillips and colleagues found that the practice helps clarify mating priorities, in that, first, males rub down promptly after being solicited by females in heat, and second, based on MRI scans of capuchins' brains, female mating activity is triggered only by adults' urine.

In May 2008, classroom disrupter Alex Barton, 5, was finally made by his teacher at Morningside Elementary kindergarten in St. Lucie County, Fla., to sit down and listen to the accumulated complaints of his classmates, who then were asked to vote on asking Alex to leave the class. (He lost, 14-2.) Shortly afterward, Alex was diagnosed with a form of autism, and his mother filed a federal disability discrimination lawsuit, citing Alex's "humiliation" by the voting incident. A settlement was reached in February 2011 when the school district agreed to pay Alex $350,000 (which included legal expenses). Said Ms. Barton, "Money can't take care of what (the school district) did to my family."

Lawyer Terry Watkins admitted to a judge in Faribault, Minn., in February that his client William Melchert-Dinkel did things that were "abhorrent," "sick" and "creepy," but that doesn't make him a criminal. Melchert-Dinkel has been charged with two felonies for counseling depressed people online on the techniques and virtues of suicide (for example, recommending positioning for a noose to a Briton who hanged himself three days later). (A judge's decision was pending at press time.)

Mental health practitioners, writing in the January issue of the journal Substance Abuse, described two patients who had recently arrived at a clinic in Ranchi, India, after allowing themselves to be bitten by cobras for recreational highs. Both men had decades-long substance-abuse issues, especially involving opiates, and decided to try what they had heard about on the street. One, age 44, bitten on the foot, experienced "a blackout associated with a sense of well-being, lethargy and sleepiness." The other, 52, reported "dizziness and blurred vision followed by a heightened arousal and a sense of well-being," and apparently was so impressed that he returned to the snake charmer two weeks later for a second bite.

Recurring Theme: Another "negative cash-flow" robbery occurred in February, in Kansas City, Mo., as an unidentified man tried to distract the clerk at a gun store by laying $40 on the counter to buy a box of bullets, then pulling a gun and demanding all the store's money. The clerk thwarted the robbery by pulling his own gun (not surprisingly, since it was a gun store) and scaring the robber off -- while the $40 remained on the counter.

From time to time a woman appears in the news proudly displaying her years-long cultivation of fingernail growth. This time it was Ms. Jazz Ison Sinkfield, a grandmother from Atlanta, who showed off her hands for WXIA-TV in February. She admits some handicaps from her 20- to 24-inch long nails that skew and curl in seemingly random directions (e.g., no bowling, shoe-tying or computer work, and the expense of a five-hour, $250 salon session each month), but claims to be unfazed if people she meets find the sight of her nails repulsive. Said Sinkfield, "Some people are jealous."

Bangkok economics student Panupol Sujjayakorn interrupted his studies in November (2005) to defend his World Scrabble Championship in London, one of many non-English-speaking competitors who achieved top-of-the-line ranking by memorizing up to 100,000 words in English without ever knowing their meanings. Like the others, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Panupol learned first those premium words that overuse the prominent Scrabble letter tiles (such as "aureolae"). (Alas, this time around, a native English speaker, Dr. Adam Logan, a number theory researcher, won the title, building actual words like "qanat" and "euripi.")

Tombstone, Ariz., which was the site of the legendary 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (made into a 1957 movie), is about 70 miles from the Tucson shopping center where a U.S. congresswoman, a federal judge and others were shot in January. A Los Angeles Times dispatch later that month noted that the "Wild West" of 1881 Tombstone had far stricter gun control than present-day Arizona. The historic gunfight occurred when the marshal (Virgil Earp, brother of Wyatt) tried to enforce the town's no-carry law against local thugs. Today, however, with few restrictions and no licenses required, virtually any Arizonan 18 or older can carry a handgun openly, and those 21 or older can carry one concealed.

The government of Romania, attempting both to make amends for historical persecution of fortune-telling "witches" and to collect more tax revenue, amended its labor law recently to legalize the profession. However, "queen witch" Bratara Buzea, apparently speaking for many in the soothsaying business, told the Associated Press in February that official recognition might make witches legally responsible for future events that are beyond their control. Already, witches are said to be fighting back against the government with curses -- hurling poisonous mandrake plants into the Danube River and casting a special spell involving cat dung and a dead dog.

-- British loyalist Michael Stone still claims it was all a misunderstanding -- that he did not intend to assassinate Irish Republican Army political leaders in 2006, despite being arrested at the Northern Ireland legislature carrying knives, an ax, a garotte, and a bag of explosives that included flammable liquids, gas canisters and fuses. He was later convicted, based on his having detonated one explosive in the foyer and then carrying the other devices into the hall to confront the leaders, but he continued to insist that he was merely engaged in "performance art." (In January 2011, the Northern Ireland court of appeal rejected his claim.)

-- Phyllis Stevens, 59, said she had no idea she had embezzled nearly $6 million until her employer, Aviva USA, of Des Moines, Iowa, showed her the evidence. She said it must have been done by the "hundreds" of personalities created by her dissociative identity disorder (including "Robin," who was caught trying to spend Stevens' remaining money in Las Vegas just hours after the showdown with Aviva). Stevens and her spouse had been spending lavishly, buying properties, and contributing generously to political causes. As the "core person," Stevens said she will accept responsibility but asked a federal judge for leniency. (The prosecutor said Stevens is simply a thief.)

-- Thomas Walkley, a lawyer from Norton, Ohio, was charged in January with indecent exposure for pulling his pants down in front of two 19-year-old males, but Walkley said he was merely "mentoring" at-risk boys. He said it is a technique he had used with other troubled youths, especially the most difficult cases, by getting them "to think differently." Said Walkley, "Radical times call for radical measures."

-- U.S. News & World Report magazine, and the National Council on Teacher Quality, announced plans recently to issue grades (A, B, C, D and F) on how well each of the U.S.'s 1,000-plus teachers' colleges develop future educators, but the teachers of teachers appear to be sharply opposed to the very idea of being issued "grades." The project's supporters cited school principals' complaints about the quality of teachers applying for jobs, but the teachers' college representatives criticized the project's measurement criteria as overly simplistic.

-- Police were out in force in September as schools opened in Toronto, writing 25 school-zone speeding tickets in the first two hours. One of the 25 was issued to the driver of a school bus, caught speeding through a school zone trying to avoid being late at a pickup point farther down the road.

Paul Mason, 50, an ex-letter-carrier in Ipswich, England, told reporters in January he would file a lawsuit against Britain's National Health Service for negligence -- because it allowed him to "grow" in recent years to a weight of nearly 900 pounds. Mason said he "begged" for NHS's help in 1996 when he weighed 420, but was merely told to "ride your bike more." Last year, he was finally allowed gastric surgery, which reduced him to his current 518. At his heaviest, Mason estimates he was consuming 20,000 calories a day.

Life is improving for some Burmese Kayan women who, fleeing regular assaults by soldiers of the military government of Myanmar, become valuable exhibits at tourist attractions in neighboring Thailand -- because of their tribal custom of wearing heavy metal rings around their necks from an early age. The metal stacks weigh 11 pounds or more and depress girls' clavicles, giving them the appearance of elongated necks, which the tribe (and many tourists) regard as exotic. While human rights activists heap scorn on these Thai "human zoos" of ring-necked women, a Nacogdoches, Texas, poultry plant recently began offering some of the women a more attractive choice -- lose the rings and come work in Texas, de-boning chickens.

Although police in Mount Vernon, Ohio, aren't sure of the motive, they know (according to records made public in February) that the murderer-kidnapper Matthew Hoffman was arrested in November in a living room piled 3 feet high with leaves and a bathroom containing 110 bags of leaves attached to the walls. Hoffman, an unemployed tree-trimmer, later confessed to the kidnap and rape of a 13-year-old girl (whom he kept in a basement on a pallet of leaves) and had stuffed the bodies of his three murder victims in a hollow tree. An expert on serial killers told ABC News that trees might have given Hoffman comfort, but police haven't discounted that the leaves were there merely to help him later torch the house.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Jose Demartinez, 35, was hospitalized in Manchester, N.H., in January. With police in pursuit, he had climbed out a hotel window using tied-together bed sheets, but they came undone, and he fell four stories. (2) Detected burglarizing a house in Summerfield, Fla., in January, Laird Butler fled through a window but not from police. The homeowner's dog had frightened Butler, who crashed through the glass, cut himself badly, and bled to death in a neighbor's yard. (3) Kevin Funderburk, 25, was charged with sexual assault of a 71-year-old woman in her Hutchinson, Kan., home in December. By the time his mug shot was taken, he was in a neck brace -- from the victim's frying-pan-swinging defense.

(1) During an early-January freeze, an 8-year-old boy, standing across the street from Woodward (Okla.) Middle School, apparently fell for the traditional dare from his brother and licked a metal pole. He had to wait on his tiptoes for emergency responders to come unstick him. (2) In January, John Finch, 44, of Wilmington, Del., became the latest alleged burglar to break in (through a window) and be unable either to climb back out or figure out the automatic locks on the doors (and thus be forced to call 911 on himself to be rescued).

The Wall Street Journal reported in March (1996) that New York City photographer (and former Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman) Eugene Calamari Jr. is a part-time artist who lies on the floor and lets people vacuum him with an upright cleaner, after which he asks the vacuumers to please write down their feelings. According to Calamari, "A lot of people use each other and step on each other's rights." The theme he intends to convey, he said, is "I won't let anyone do this to me."