• With only 30,000 hotel rooms in Rio de Janeiro, and 50,000 visitors expected for the June United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, officials persuaded owners of many of the city’s short-time “love hotels” (typically renting for four hours at a time) to change business plans for a few days to accommodate the delegates.

Condo developer Larry Hall is already one-quarter sold out of the upscale doomsday units he is building in an abandoned underground Cold War-era Atlas-F missile silo near Salina, Kan.

In April, a research ship will begin surveying the Atlantic Ocean floor off of Nova Scotia as the first step to building, by 2013, a $300 million private fiber-optic line connecting New York and London financial markets so as to speed up current transmission times — by about five milliseconds.

Fast-food culture shock: Since December, the White Castle restaurant in Lafayette, Ind. has provided diners with a stylish experience that includes table service and a wine selection to go with its iconic “slider” hamburgers.

• In assigning a bail of only $20,000, the judge in Ellisville, Miss. seemed torn about whether to believe that Harold Hadley is a terrorist — that is, did Hadley plant a bomb at Jones County Junior College? In February, investigators told WDAM-TV...

Like most states with active trade associations of barbers and beauticians, Iowa strictly regulates those professions, requiring 2,100 hours of training plus continuing education — but also like many other states, Iowa does not regulate body piercers at all (though it forbids minors from getting tattoos).

In a world of advancing technology and declining map-reading skills, some GPS navigator users blindly over-rely on the devices, and News of the Weird has reported enough of their predicaments to mark the category “no longer weird.

Back to the fundamentals: The multicultural Macquarie University in suburban Sydney, Australia said its restroom posters, installed last year, have been successful in instilling toilet etiquette. The lined-through figure of a user squatting on top of a toilet seat was especially helpful, apparently.

In Northern Vietnam, much rides on a man’s phallic aim An annual spring fertility festival in Vietnam’s Phu Tho province is capped by a symbolic X-rated ceremony rendered G-rated by wooden stand-ins.

The royal family of Qatar, apparently striving for art-world credibility, purchased a Paul Cezanne painting (“The Card Players”) last year for the equivalent of about $250 million, which is twice as much as the previous most-expensive painting sold for.

Newspapers in Sweden reported in January that two of the country’s most heinous murderers apparently fell in love with each other behind the locked doors of their psychiatric institution and, following a 26-day internet-chat “courtship,” have decided to marry.

Part-time Devon, England vicar Gavin Tyte, who serves churches in Uplyme and Axmouth, recently produced a rap video of the Nativity, in which he plays a shepherd, an angel and the narrator.

Sri Lanka has, as an “unwritten symbol of pride and culture,” the world’s highest per-capita rate for eye-donation, according to a January Associated Press dispatch from Colombo. Underpinning this national purpose is the country’s Buddhist tradition that celebrates afterlives.

Swiss health officials have authorized construction of an assistedliving “village” of 1950s-style homes and gardens designed to “remind” patients with Alzheimer’s and similar afflictions of surroundings that they might actually recall and with which they might be more comfortable and secure than they are with modern life.

Your government knows best: A 2007 federal energy- independence law required companies that supply motor fuel in the US to blend in a certain cellulose-based ingredient starting in 2011 — even though (as the Environmental Protection Agency well knows) the ingredient simply does not now exist.

Traditional bridge replacement on as prominent a highway as Interstate 15 in Mesquite, Nev. has generally required rerouting traffic for as long as a year, but the new “accelerated” technology in January necessitated detours for less than a week.

Technology has developed a chair frame that authenticates merely by sitting down: a butt-scanner. Professor Shigeomi Koshimizu’s device produces a map of the user’s unique derriere shape, featuring 256 degrees of pressure at 360 different points and...

Don Aslett, 76, recently opened the Museum of Clean in Pocatello, Idaho as the culmination of a lifelong devotion to tidying up. Highlights are several hundred pre-electric vacuum cleaners plus interactive exhibits to encourage kids to clean their rooms.

• Son Theodore Zimmick and two other relatives filed a lawsuit in November against the St. Stanislaus cemetery in Pittsburgh for the unprofessional burial of Theodore’s mother, Agnes, in 2009.

A regional development commission in Michigan, purchasing equipment for 13 counties in May using homeland security grants, bought 13 machines that make snow cones, at a total cost of $11,700 (after rejecting one county’s request for a popcorn machine).