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News Of The Weird
TOURIST TRAPS
March 29, 2007
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. "[Tourists] want to come and take pictures... tell their friends they've been to the worst slum in Africa," lamented one resident of Kibera, speaking to a Reuters reporter in February. But a March Smithsonian magazine piece quoted a Dahravi tour entrepreneur as promising to show the slum's "positive side"—for instance, the community spirit that discourages street beggars in a nation otherwise teeming with them.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY
The U.S. Border Patrol has for three decades worked with a small group of Native Americans 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.
LATEST RELIGIOUS MESSAGES
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
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. And 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. But the bodyguards would not actually sit with kids in class.
PEOPLE DIFFERENT FROM US
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 to be having a seizure, but police found that that was just his reaction to an illegal inhalant, which was not identified.
LEAST COMPETENT PEOPLE
In January David Eddings, 75, who has written 27 novels, accidentally destroyed his garage and part of his next-door office 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 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." MTW