News Features

Thursday September 23, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
More than a half-million children in the U.S. take antipsychotic medicines and (reported the New York Times in September) “even the most reluctant doctors encounter a marketing juggernaut that has made antipsychotics the nation’s top-selling class of drugs by revenue, $14.6 billion last year, with prominent promotions aimed at treating children.” In one psychiatrist’s waiting room, observed the... | more...

News Features

Thursday September 16, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
Professional Training Required: The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced in August that it had contract work for up to 2,100 language specialists to transcribe wiretaps, with immediate needs in the Atlanta field office for 144 Spanish experts, along with 12 for Vietnamese, and nine each for Korean, Farsi and “Ebonics.” Ebonics is recognized by some linguists as the “nonstandard” form... | more...

News Features

Thursday September 9, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
In 2007, News of the Weird highlighted the clothes cults of impoverished Congo: “In the country that has lost an estimated 4 million people in the civil wars of the last decade and where many must get by on about 30 cents a day, ‘gangs’ of designer-clothes-wearing men” have fashion smackdowns in the streets of Kinshasa to prove that Versace and Gucci styles look better on them than on others.... | more...

News Features

Thursday September 2, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
Updates: The Yaohnanen tribe on the South Pacific island of Tanna believe their true ancestral god is Britain’s Prince Philip (based on photographs of him with the queen during a 1974 visit to Tanna’s mother nation of Vanuatu) and believe he promised he would return for good on his 89th birthday (June 10, 2010). Although the prince has kept in touch, he failed to show up for the grand... | more...

News Features

Thursday August 26, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
A recent surge of neo-Nazism in several countries - including, improbably, Israel, and Mongolia (where some dark-skinned natives are rabidly anti-Chinese) - has generally been denounced, but Corinna Burt credited it with rescuing her from a life of acting in pornographic videos. | more...

News Features

Thursday August 19, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
Woody Allen Joke Come to Life: Shirley Anderson, 71, is suing her son Ken, 46, in Vancouver, British Columbia, for parental support - even though she and his father had abandoned him when he was 15 ... | more...

News Features

Thursday August 12, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
The Outer Frontiers of U.S. Immigration Policy: The $125 million Jay Peak ski resort in Vermont, with 120-room hotel, ice arena, golf course and the Northeast’s largest water park, is just months away from completion, | more...

News Features

Thursday August 5, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
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) - ... | more...

News Features

Thursday July 29, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
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. | more...

News Features

Thursday July 22, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
“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. | more...

News Features

Thursday July 15, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
A severe but underappreciated American drug problem (sometimes deadly and often expensive) is patients’ failure to take prescribed medications - even to save their own lives (such as with anti-coagulants or cholesterol-regulating statins). | more...

News Features

Thursday July 8, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
In the midst of World Cup fever, readers might have missed Germany’s win over host Barbados in June for the Woz Challenge Cup, following an eight-team polo tournament with players not on horses but Segways. The sport is said to have been created by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, whose Silicon Valley Aftershocks competed again this year in Barbados (but last won the Cup in 2007). Wozniak told... | more...

News Features

Thursday July 1, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
Lead Story: New York state school officials had promised to crack down on soft test-grading to end the near-automatic grade-advancement by students unprepared for promotion. | more...

News Features

Thursday June 24, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
Catholic Youth Organization coach Michael Kman, 45, was charged in May with various misdemeanors regarding an alleged attempt over a several-month period to fix kids’ basketball games for Kman’s Our Lady of Lourdes church team in East Pennsboro Township, Pa. | more...

News Features

Thursday June 17, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
It’s clear, based on a May Time magazine dispatch, that Norway’s felons and miscreants are of a superior class than America’s. When Norway’s brand-new Halden prison opened in April, the country’s King Harald V headlined a glitzy gala that celebrated what has been called the world’s “most humane” loc... | more...

News Features

Thursday June 10, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: America What a Country! In 2007, after a stay in the United States distinguished mainly by his acquisition of a long police record, illegal immigrant Cecil Harvey, 55, was deported to his native Barbados. | more...

News Features

Wednesday June 2, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: American families from certain Asian and African cultures continue to ritually “circumcise” their young daughters, though the practice is illegal in the U.S. and most of the world. In May, the bioethics committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics changed its policy from absolutely banning such surgery to one which would sanction a minor “pinprick” on girls’ genitals (comparable,... | more...

News Features

Wednesday May 26, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: Briton Robert Dee, feeling humiliated at being called the “world’s worst tennis pro” by London’s Daily Telegraph (and other news organizations) sued the newspaper for libel last year. After taking testimony in February 2010, the judge tossed out the lawsuit in April, persuaded by Dee’s having lost 54 consecutive international tour matches (all in straight sets). Fearful of an... | more...

News Features

Wednesday May 19, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: Our Expanding “Rights”: 1) In April, a high official of the European Union called for member-nations to subsidize “vacations” for seniors, the disabled and those too poor to afford one. Said Commissioner (for enterprise and industry) Antonio Tajani, “Traveling for tourism today is a right.” 2) In April, the town of Olathe, Kan., became the second city in two years to settle lawsuits... | more...

News Features

Wednesday May 12, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: In mid-April, senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi issued a warning that recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and elsewhere were caused by women’s loose sex and immodest dress. Immediately, Jennifer McCreight responded on Facebook by urging women worldwide to dress provocatively on April 26 to create “boobquake” and test the cleric’s theory, and at least 90,000 women... | more...

News Features

Wednesday May 5, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: Blair Fowler, 16, delights her frenzied fans as a “haul queen,” inspirationally “shopping for glory” by smartly tearing through stores and then displaying and expertly describing her purchases on Internet videos. A March Times of London dispatch from Los Angeles noted Fowler’s acclaim “for her ability to deliver a high-pitched 10-minute lecture on the merits of skinny versus... | more...

News Features

Wednesday April 28, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: Computer hardware engineer Toshio Yamamoto, 49, this year celebrates 15 years of work tasting and cataloguing all the Japanese ramen (instant noodles) he can get his hands on (including the full ingredients list, texture, flavor, price and “star” rating for each), for the massive 4,300-ramen database on his website, expanded recently with “hundreds” of video reviews and with... | more...

News Features

Wednesday April 21, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: A new sports center in Mexico City will be devoted to the revival of ancient Aztec- and Mayan-created games that are rarely played in Mexico because they are dangerous, including a field-hockey-like competition played with a fireball. In another game, “pelota mixteca,” players wearing metal-knuckled leather gloves punch a 2-pound, hard rubber ball that could knock opponents... | more...

News Features

Wednesday April 14, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: Lax on Perverts: In February, the Minnesota Board of Chiropractic Examiners relicensed Scott Fredin even though he is still registered as a sex offender following a 2003 conviction for fondling two female patients during “examinations.” Released from jail in 2006, he had reapplied to the board, which then found him “rehabilitated.” He agreed to several restrictions on his office... | more...

News Features

Wednesday April 7, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: More Texas Justice: In March, juries in Smith County and Matagorda County sentenced Henry Wooten and Melvin Johnson III to 35 years and 60 years in prison, respectively, for possessing small amounts of drugs (but enough under Texas law to allow jurors to infer an intent to distribute). Wooten, 54, had 4.6 ounces of marijuana (same penalty as for 5 pounds), and Johnson had 1.3 grams... | more...