Low Fashion Meets Islam on Turkish TV: Five self-proclaimed devout, conservative Muslim women host the TV series "Building Bridges" on channel A9, presenting the seemingly contradictory case against both the female headscarf and Turkey's turn to secularism. A report on Slate.com in May noted that the five are "mostly bottle blonds ... (with) neon lipstick" wearing "brightly colored satin pantsuits and T-shirts with designer brand names that stretched over their chests." "Building Bridges" in principle supports interfaith dialogue, but guests (noted Slate) "often appear ... with their eyebrows arched in the manner of a serious person certain he is the victim of a practical joke." [Slate.com, 5-2-2013]

-- Creative Smuggling: Abdullah Riyaz, 50, was arrested at the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, India, in April after he appeared to be uncomfortable sitting in the waiting area. Officials found four "biscuits" of solid gold in his socks but obviously thought there might be more, and after nature took its course, found Riyaz to be one of those rare humans with the ability to brag that he once excreted gold (eight more "biscuits"). [Khaleej Times (Dubai), 4-19-2013]

-- A report circulated in April that an apparently Orthodox Jewish man (likely a "Kohen") had tied himself up, head to toe, in a plastic bag while seated on an airline flight -- likely because his teachings told him that flying over a cemetery would yield "impurities." News of the Weird mentioned a similar report in 2001. Airlines have made accommodations in the past, even in the face of criticism that a man in a plastic bag is a safety hazard. (Exceptions to the Kohen belief: Accidental tears in the bag are excused, but pre-punched air holes not; Kohenim unaware of the cemetery overflight in advance do not need protection; and deceased family members yield no impurities.) [Daily Mail (London), 4-11-2013; Jewish Press, 4-12-2013]

-- Accountability: The chairman of the National Showcaves Center in a Welsh national park, aiming to halt a recent downturn in tourism business, threatened in April to sue the U.K. National Weather Service for its "all too (frequent) ... gloom and doom reports." The NWS had called for snow and cold weather over Easter weekend, but no snow fell, and the cold weather was tempered by sun and blue skies. (He also suggested adding "health"-type warnings to forecasts, e.g., beware that weather reports might be wrong.) [Daily Mail (London), 4-17-2013]

-- In New Haven, Conn., in March, police had trapped two car-theft suspects in a multifamily building whose occupants were hiding from the suspects, thus necessitating urgency in ending the siege. Officers ordered a K-9 unit but were told it would be delayed. In a tactic departments occasionally employ, officers still threatened to release the dogs immediately, and to make the threat credible, available officers began barking. The suspects quickly surrendered rather than face the vicious canines. [WFSB-TV (Hartford), 4-1-2013]

-- Herbert and Catherine Schaible, members of the First Century Gospel Church in Philadelphia and believers in faith-healing rather than medical care, were convicted in 2011 in the bacterial-pneumonia death of their 2-year-old son, Kent. As a condition of probation, they promised medical care for their remaining eight children, but in April 2013, their youngest son, Brandon, died after severe diarrhea and pneumonia, again treated only by prayer, and they were arrested -- and the other children removed from the home. The medical examiner called Brandon's death a homicide, and the couple also face five to 10 years in prison for violating probation. [Philadelphia Daily News, 4-23-2013; Philadelphia Inquirer, 5-22-2013]

-- Detectives' New Best Friend (Facebook): Christopher Robinson, 23, became just one of many recent suspects whose addiction to Facebook did him in. Robinson had never made a single child support payment in the three years since a court order was issued in Milwaukee, Wis., and the case had languished over how to prove that he was hiding money. Using other evidence for probable cause, the prosecutor got a warrant to search Robinson's private Facebook information and discovered a candid photograph of him, laughing over a pile of cash. [ABC News, 3-23-2012]

-- The annual Chinese "tomb sweeping" celebration has been mentioned several times in News of the Weird, but has experienced a resurgence since 2008 when the government reinstated it as an official holiday. The theory is that people bring valuable items (such as jewelry) to ancestors' gravesites and bury them with the body, which will upgrade the relative's afterlife. Now, however, practitioners seem convinced that paper images of items are sufficient (and, of course, less expensive). Many simply leave signed (and generous!) checks for the dead, according to an April New York Times dispatch, and others bury representations of "mistresses" to accompany presumably frisky corpses. [New York Times, 4-5-2013]

-- News of the Weird first learned of kopi luwak in 1993 -- coffee beans sold as gourmet because they had been swallowed by certain Asian civet cats and recovered from feces and washed. Since then, as Internet news of kopi luwak has spread, it has become no longer obscure, and in April, the environmental-activist website MongaBay.com warned that, based on increased demand, civet "farms" had sprung up in Indonesia and that civets were being caged for their entire lives solely for access to their poop. While none of the main kopi luwak civet species is formally "endangered," activists warned that populations are dwindling for, said one, "the most ridiculous threat ... to any wildlife I have seen yet." [MongaBay.com (San Francisco), 4-16-2013]

-- In one of the more prominent recent "that's my story, and I'm sticking to it" cases, Vicky Pryce, 60, finally gave up in March and admitted to a judge that her husband, not she, was driving their speeding car in 2003. She was married at the time to high-ranking British government official Chris Huhne, whose license would have been suspended had he been driving -- and thus, she volunteered. The couple's 10-year ruse had inspired two trials ending without decision. (Huhne "rewarded" Pryce for her loyalty in 2010 by having an affair. The couple are divorced and will be imprisoned separately for perverting justice.) [New York Times, 3-8-2013]

-- "Recovered memory" was a popular psychotherapy diagnosis in the 1980s, ultimately responsible for jail sentences for priests, parents and school officials after patients suddenly somehow "remembered" long-suppressed bizarre and vicious (and sometimes "satanic") sex crimes that never actually happened. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California, Irvine, and other skeptics have since proven that false memories can be created and are now concentrating on fashioning them for beneficial purposes -- to lose weight, to stop smoking, to curb drinking. An April report in Time magazine noted that "up to 40 percent" of people could be convinced that they had had bad experiences with a certain behavior and that, properly identified, those people could be taught to avoid it. Said Dr. Loftus, "We do have a malleable memory." [Time, 4-12-2013]

-- Briton James McCormick caused the deaths of hundreds of Iraqis after convincing a Baghdad police official that his "electronic" wands could detect bombs at 400 security checkpoints (in spite of U.S. officials' many warnings that they were useless). (In October 2009, for example, suicide bombers walked past two wand-equipped checkpoints into a neighborhood and killed 155.) McCormick, who sold 6,000 of the devices to Iraq and the country of Georgia at prices of up to $40,000 each, was convicted of fraud in April. According to London prosecutors, he also claimed that his wands were programmable to ferret out drugs and paper money and to detect them from high above or up to a kilometer underground. [BBC News, 4-23-2013]

-- Catholic nun Megan Rice, 83, and two other peace activists were convicted in May of breaking into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., last year -- with "intent to harm national security." Sympathizers lauded the activists' motives and asked whether national security was actually "harmed," but somehow the intruders' stealth "attack" was treated seriously. That is, three amateurs cut through numerous fences undetected, then bypassed several sensors and alarms (either malfunctioning or unmonitored) before being stopped by a lone guard. (While Israel currently frets over Iran's accumulation of up to 500 pounds of highly enriched uranium for building one bomb, Y-12 houses an estimated 400 tons.) [Washington Post, 5-8-2013]

Thanks This Week to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.

The Department of Agriculture reported recently that in four of America's largest cities -- New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Denver -- nearly one home out of 100 keeps chickens either for a fresh egg supply or as pets, giving rise to chicken services such as Backyard Poultry magazine, MyPetChicken.com and Julie Baker's Pampered Poultry store. Among the most popular products are strap-on cloth diapers for the occasions when owners bring their darlings indoors, i.e., cuddle their "lap chickens." Also popular are "saddles" for roosters, to spare hens mating injuries -- owing to roosters' brutal horniness, sometimes costing hens most or all of their back feathers from a single encounter. [NPR, 5-1-2013]

-- "Consider all the ways we're taxed," wrote Maryland's community Gazette in April -- when we're born, die, earn income, spend it, own property, sell it, attend entertainment venues, operate vehicles and pass wealth along after death, among others. Maryland has now added a tax on rain. To reduce stormwater runoff into the Chesapeake Bay, the Environmental Protection Agency assessed the state $14.8 billion, which the state will collect starting in July by taxing "impervious surfaces" -- any land area in its 10 largest counties that cannot directly absorb rainwater, such as roofs, driveways, patios and sidewalks. [Gazette.net (Gaithersburg, Md.), 4-5-2013]

-- The Washington Post reported in April that the federal government is due to spend $890,000 this year to safeguard ... nothing. The amount is the total fees for maintaining more than 13,000 short-term bank accounts the government owns but which have no money in them and never again will. Closing the accounts is easier said than done, according to the watchdog Citizens Against Government Waste, because the accounts each housed separate government grants, and Congress has required that, before the accounts are closed, the grants must be formally audited -- something bureaucrats are rarely motivated to do, at least within the 180 days set by law (though there is no penalty for missing the deadline). [Washington Post, 4-24-2013]

-- It's good to be the county administrator of Alameda County, Calif. (on San Francisco Bay, south of Oakland). The San Francisco Chronicle revealed in March that somehow, Susan Muranishi negotiated a contract that pays her $301,000 a year, plus "equity pay" of $24,000 a year so that she makes at least 10 percent more than the next highest paid official, plus "longevity" pay of $54,000 a year, plus a car allowance -- and that she will be paid that total amount per year as her pension for life (in addition to a private pension of $46,000 a year that the county purchased for her). [San Francisco Chronicle, 3-25-2013]

-- The Way Washington Works: (1) Congress established a National Helium Reserve in 1925 in the era of "zeppelin" balloons, but most consider it no longer useful (most, that is, ranging from President Reagan to the Democratic congressman who in 1996 called it one program that, if we cannot undo it, "we cannot undo anything"). The House of Representatives recently voted 394-1 to continue funding it because of "fears" of a shortage that might affect MRI machines and, of course, party balloons. (2) In rare (these days) bipartisan action, congressional military "experts" of both parties are about to force the Army to continue building Abrams tanks -- when the Army said it doesn't want them and can't use them. The tank manufacturers, of course, have convinced Congress that it needs the contracts, no matter what the Army says (according to an April Associated Press analysis). [Washington Post, 4-26-2013] [Associated Press via Yahoo News, 4-29-2013]

-- The Jewish Museum in Berlin is currently staging what has become popularly known as the "Jew in the Box" exhibit to teach visitors about Judaism -- simply featuring one knowledgeable Jewish person who sits in a chair in a glass box for two hours a day and answers questions from the curious. Both supporters ("We Germans have many insecurities when it comes to Jews") and critics ("Why don't they give him a banana and a glass of water (and) turn up the heat?") are plentiful. [Daily Mail (London), 3-29-2013]

-- The weather in Hong Kong on April 25 wreaked havoc on American artist Paul McCarthy's outdoor, 50-foot-tall piece of "inflatable art" in the West Kowloon Cultural District. "Complex Pile" (a model of an arrangement of excrement) got punctured, which mostly pleased McCarthy's critics since his recent work, reported the South China Morning Post, has often centered around bodily functions. [South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 4-26-2013]

-- News of the Weird has reported several times on the astonishing control that inmates have at certain prisons in Latin American countries, with drug cartel leaders often enjoying lives nearly as pleasurable as their lives on the outside. However, according to an April federal indictment, similar problems have plagued the City Detention Center in Baltimore, where members of the "Black Guerrilla Family" operated with impunity. Between 2010 and 2012, corruption was such that 13 female guards have now been charged, including four women who bore the children of the gang's imprisoned leader, Tavon White. Cellphones, drugs and Grey Goose vodka were among the smuggled-in contraband, and the indictment charges that murders were ordered from inside. (Baltimore City Paper had reported 14 stories in 2009 and 2010 on the gang-related corruption at the center, but apparently state and federal officials had failed to be alarmed.) [DailyBeast.com, 4-26-2013; Washington Post, 5-6-2013]

-- Frequent Flyers: (1) Chicago police have arrested Ms. Shermain Miles, 51, at least 396 times since 1978, under 83 different aliases, for crimes ranging from theft (92 times) to prostitution and robbery. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, she is a virtuoso at playing "the system" to delay her proceedings and avoid jail time. (2) Alvin Cote, 59, passed away in February of poor health in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, following a "career" of 843 public-intoxication arrests. [Chicago Sun-Times, 4-20-2013] [Star Phoenix (Saskatoon), 2-13-2013]

-- Somewhat Backwards DUI: Danielle Parker was hospitalized and awaiting DUI charges after a crash near Gaston, N.C., in March, even though she had been in the passenger seat of the car. She had handled the wheel momentarily because Brittany Reinhardt, 19, in the driver's seat, was busy texting. (Reinhardt, apparently sober, was charged with "aiding and abetting" a DUI.) [Gaston Gazette, 3-29-2013]

The biggest news out of Newtown, Conn., recently -- not involving the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School -- came when local environmental officials announced on April 29 that they were investigating the finding of "200 to 300 one-gallon plastic jugs" filled with urine in a home "in a state of disrepair." No charges were filed against the homeowner, but officials sought to assure neighbors and users of the property that no health hazard was present. (The average person, reported the Connecticut Post, produces about six cups of urine a day.) [Danbury News Times, 4-30-2013]

Mr. Datta Phuge perhaps overly personifies India's national obsession with the beauty of gold. For special occasions, he outfits his "knuckles, neck and wrists" with golden "signet rings, chunky bracelets and a medallion," wrote BBC News in April after Phuge had also purchased a crinkly gold tailored shirt made for him for about $250,000. The 7-pound shirt (from Rankar Jewellers in the city of Pune) has a velvet lining to keep it from irritating his skin, and he must, of course, always travel with a bodyguard. [BBC News, 4-14-2013]

(1) Stan Worby, 39, made headlines internationally in February when, dressed as Batman, he hauled fugitive Daniel Frayne, 27, into a Bradford, England, police station. It turns out he was just helping his friend Daniel turn himself in (on an outstanding arrest warrant). In a separate incident in April, the two "friends" were arrested together and charged with burglarizing a garage in Bradford. (2) In a confessional in the April GQ magazine, the sportswriter Buzz Bissinger (creator of TV's "Friday Night Lights") admitted that his later-in-life fame had enabled a narcissism that caused him to impulsively buy 81 leather jackets in a three-year period, plus 75 pairs of boots, 41 pairs of leather pants, 32 pairs of upscale jeans, 10 evening jackets and 115 pairs of leather gloves, among other extravagances and aberrations. [Daily Telegraph (London), 4-16-2013] [GQ, April 2013]

Thanks This Week to Hal Dunham, Thomas Wyman, David Henshaw, and Thomas Goodey, and to the News of the Weird Senior Advisors (Jenny T. Beatty, Paul Di Filippo, Ginger Katz, Joe Littrell, Matt Mirapaul, Paul Music, Karl Olson, and Jim Sweeney) and Board of Editorial Advisors (Tom Barker, Paul Blumstein, Harry Farkas, Sam Gaines, Herb Jue, Emory Kimbrough, Scott Langill, Steve Miller, Christopher Nalty, Mark Neunder, Bob Pert, Larry Ellis Reed, Rob Snyder, Stephen Taylor, Bruce Townley, and Jerry Whittle).

The beauty pageant each April at the Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, requires traditional skills like interview poise, evening-gown fashion and talent, but also some ability and inclination to milk and skin rattlers. High school senior Kyndra Vaught won this year's Miss Snake Charmer, wearing jeweled boots one night for her country-western ballad, then Kevlar boots and camouflage chaps the next as she took on dozens of rattlers in the wooden snake pit. Vaught expertly held up one serpent, offered its tail-end rattles for a baby to touch, then helped hold, measure, milk and skin a buzzing, slithery serpent. A Los Angeles Times dispatch noted that Vaught hoped to be on her way soon to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. [Los Angeles Times, 4-12-2013]

-- That there are flea "circuses" is bizarre enough, but in March a cold spell in Germany wiped out an entire troupe of "performing" fleas, requiring the flea whisperer to secure replacements (because, of course, the show must go on). Trainer Robert Birk reached out to a university near Mechernich-Kommern for 50 substitutes, which he apparently worked into the act over one weekend. (Fleas, with or without training, can pull up to 160,000 times their own weight and leap to 100 times their own height.) [The Independent (London), 3-31-2013]

-- The owner of a restaurant in southern Sweden told authorities in March that the former owner had assured him that "everything had been approved," apparently including the appliance the restaurant used for mixing salad dressings and sauces -- which was a table-model cement mixer. When health officials told the owner that it certainly was not "approved," he immediately bought another, "rust-free," mixer. (Health authorities had come to the restaurant on a complaint that a screw had turned up in a customer's kabob.) [The Local (Stockholm), 3-30-2013]

-- Chad Pregracke, 38, a Mississippi River legend, spends nine months a year hauling heavy-duty litter out of waterways with his crew of 12. He told CNN in March that he has yanked up 218 washing machines, 19 tractors, four pianos and nearly 1,000 refrigerators -- totaling over 3,500 tons of trash -- and has collected the world's largest array of bottles with messages inside (63). [CNN, 4-18-2013]

-- Eliel Santos fishes the grates of New York City seven days a week, reeling in enough bounty to sustain him for the last eight years, he told the New York Post in April. The "fishing line" Santos, 38, uses is dental floss, with electrician's tape and Blue-Touch mouse glue -- equipment that "he controls with the precision of an archer," the Post reported. His biggest catch ever was a $1,800 (pawned value) gold and diamond bracelet, but the most popular current items are iPhones, which texting-on-the-move pedestrians apparently have trouble hanging onto. [New York Post, 4-28-2013]

-- Tyshekka Collier, 36, was arrested in Spartanburg, S.C., in March after she had rushed to her son's elementary school after a call that he was suspended. As she burst into the office, angry at her son for getting into trouble, she saw a pouting boy with his head down and slapped him, thinking he was hers. He wasn't. (After apologizing, she then managed to locate her son and promptly slapped him around). [WYFF-TV (Greenville), 3-28-2013]

-- When Evan Ebel was killed in a roadside shootout in March, it was clear that he was the man who had days earlier gunned down the head of the Colorado prison system (and his wife) at the front door of their home and then fled (and killed another man while on the lam). Ebel should not even have been free at the time, having been accidentally released from prison in January only because a judge's assistant had mistakenly marked Ebel's multiple prison terms to be served "concurrently" instead of one following the other ("consecutively"). (The supervising judge "extend(ed) condolences" to the families of Ebel's victims.) [Reuters, 4-1-2013]

-- Apparently feeling feisty after a successful stint in February hosting the Bassmaster Classic, local officials in Tulsa, Okla., announced in April that they were considering preparing a bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. (The Winter Games sometimes get awarded to small venues, but never the Summer Games.) [Associated Press via ABC News, 4-27-2013]

-- The Discovery Channel announced a new survival show to debut this summer, "Naked and Afraid," dropping off a man and a woman (strangers), without tools or clothes, to fend for themselves on an isolated Maldives island. Among the previews: Ms. Kellie Nightlinger, 38, a self-described "ultimate survivalist," finally thought after two weeks of nearly starving that she could attract fish close enough to be snatched up (as a New York Daily News reporter put it) "us(ing) her ladyparts as bait to catch fish between her legs." Said a Discovery Channel executive: "Survival shows are so common now that it's gotten more and more difficult to convince the audience that what they're watching is something extreme." [New York Daily News, 4-14-2013]

Location, Location, Location: The New Delhi, India, neighborhood of Lutyens' Delhi houses some of the richest people in the country in comparatively modest mansions, with the city's real estate bubble inflating prices into nine figures, though home sales are rare, according to a March New York Times dispatch. In the similarly wealthy city of Hong Kong, in the "gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood" where the laborers serving the rich live, about 100,000 dwell in pitiable housing, including the increasing number who rent what are basically stacks of wire sleep cages, measuring about 16 square feet each (and offering no protection against bedbugs). An Associated Press reporter found one tenant paying the equivalent of about $167 a month for his mesh digs. [New York Times, 3-3-2013] [Associated Press, 2-7-2013]

Finally, Herson Torres was freed. As Bloomberg Business Week reported step-by-step in April, Torres was recruited by a "Defense Intelligence Agency operative" to rob a Virginia bank in order to test first-responder reaction times. If caught, Torres's arrest would be removed, said "Theo," the operative. The skeptical Torres asked advice of various authority figures, including two bemused lawyers, but "Theo" was able to calm them all with a dazzling display of CIA jargon and procedures. Torres was indeed arrested, and "Theo" indeed sprang him (but with a judicial order that was forged). Ultimately, "Theo" was revealed to be frustrated computer-techie Matthew Brady, 26, who lives with his mother and grandmother in Matoaca, Va., and despite his obviously world-class bluffing skill, he pleaded guilty in May and was ordered treated for his paranoid schizophrenia and delusional disorder. [Bloomberg Business Week, 4-18-2013]

Even the editor of News of the Weird gets bored: (1) A man in his 70s in Burnaby, British Columbia, was rescued in January after being pinned for three days under fallen debris inside his seriously cluttered home (with "ceiling-high mounds of garbage," wrote the Canadian Press). (Ho-hum.) (2) In Lianjiang City, China, in January, Peng Xinhua, 101, joined a long line of returns-from-the-dead. Following a fall, she had become stiff and without a heartbeat, her two daughters said, and burial was scheduled. Just before the funeral, as relatives and friends were washing her body, Peng opened her eyes and calmly greeted them. [Canadian Press via Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1-15-2013] [Shanghai Daily, 1-24-2013]

(1) A 5-year-old boy in rural Cumberland County, Ky., accidentally shot and killed his 2-year-old sister in April, firing his own .22-caliber rifle. The weapon (a "Crickett") is marketed as "My First Rifle" by the Keystone Sporting Arms company. (2) Henry Gribbohm, 30, admitted in April that he had blown his $2,600 life savings trying to win an Xbox at a rigged ball-toss game at a Manchester, N.H., carnival, lamenting to WBZ-TV, "For once in my life, I happened to become that sucker." (Gribbohm complained to the operator, but was given only a large stuffed banana as consolation. However, when news broke, an Internet website took up a collection and purchased the banana from him for $2,600.) [Louisville Courier-Journal via USA Today, 5-2-2013] [WBZ-TV (Boston), 5-6-2013]

Thanks This Week to Sandy Pearlman, Susan Fowler-Nice, and Paul Peterson, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.