News of the Weird

LEAD STORY Britain’s National Health Service acknowledged in November that, because of a shortage of healthy lungs and other organs available for transplant, it was...

Lead story The collapse of the economy in 2008 might have reached the far corners of Earth, but evidently not to Planet Calypso, the make-believe...

LEAD STORY • Librarian Graham Barker, 45, of Perth, Australia, casually revealed to a reporter in October that his hobby of 26 years — harvesting...

LEAD STORY Surreal Estate: Sixty-two percent of the 12 million people of Mumbai, India, live in slums, but the city is also home to Mukesh...

LEAD STORY About 20 percent of Japan’s adult-video market is now “elder porn” with each production featuring one or more studly seniors and Shigeo Tokuda,...

LEAD STORY Belt-Tightening Greeks: In October, Greece’s largest health insurance provider announced, in a letter to a diabetes foundation, that it would no longer pay...

LEAD STORY Modern Mummies: New York City artist Sally Davies offered in October the latest evidence of how unattractive today’s fast foods are to bacteria...

LEAD STORY — David Winkelman, 48, was arrested in Davenport, Iowa, in September on a misdemeanor warrant, still sporting “The Tattoo.” In late 2000, Winkelman,...

LEAD STORY Edible “dirt” has recently appeared on the menus of several of the world’s most renowned restaurants (e.g., the top-rated Noma in Copenhagen, Shakuf...

LEAD STORY Americans’ Special Relationship with “Taxes”: It is not just that the secretary of the Treasury owed back taxes for years, or that two...

Freud de Melo, 73, operates a quirky tourist park in central Brazil that features stone models of Noah’s Ark and other sculptures, but he also...

LEAD STORY The Brazilian designer Lucia Lorio introduced women’s lingerie in October containing a global positioning device to enable the wearer to be tracked by...