Lead Story Poetry on the Rise: (1) Twelve local poets jumped into the frigid Green Lake in Seattle in December, just because they thought it would be a good way […]

Lead Story Saudi Arabia is host to several camel beauty pageants each year (condemned as religiously fatuous by Muslim clerics), but the country’s first goat beauty pageant was held in […]

Lead Story They’re either earnestly civic-minded or people with issues, but in several dozen cities across the country, men (and a few women) dress in homemade superhero costumes and patrol […]

Lead Story 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 notoriously suffers from […]

Lead Story Aggressive questioning of a weak-willed suspect can produce an occasional false confession, but experts now believe six men in a single case, and four in another, confessed to […]

Lead Story In several European countries, identifying the “naughty” kids at Christmastime is not Santa’s job but is left to unsavory legendary icons who have endured for centuries (according to […]

Lead Story One of the world’s best-known strategists on the game of checkers passed away in November. Richard Fortman was Illinois state champion six times, and in the 1970s and […]

Lead Story The Christmas Nativity scenes in northeast Spain’s Catalonia region have, for three centuries, featured not only Mary and the Three Wise Men but the ubiquitous “caganer” icon, always […]

Lead Story Change Oregonians Believe In: The voters of Sodaville (pop. 290) elected Thomas Brady Harrington, 33, mayor in November, notwithstanding his criminal rap sheet showing robbery, eluding a police […]

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 satellite. The creator said the […]

Lead Story When a four-bedroom house inhabited by 50 tenants partially collapsed in October in Honolulu, at least 10 of the residents said they had been pressured to let the […]

Lead Story Dutch designer Eric Klarenbeek, 29, has developed jewelry consisting of tiny crystals or flowers that hang directly from the eye via micro-thin medical wire attached to either prescription […]