Professional training required: The US Drug Enforcement Administration announced in August that it had contract work for up to 2,100 language specialists to transcribe wiretaps

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.

A recent surge of neo-Nazism in several countries including, improbably, Israel and Mongolia (where some darkskinned natives are rabidly anti-Chinese)

The Yaohnanen tribe on the South Pacific island of Tanna believe their true ancestral god is Britains Prince Philip (based on photographs of him with the queen during a 1974 visit to Tannas mother nation of Vanuatu) and believe he promised he would return for good on his 89 th birthday

• 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

• The outer frontiers of US immigration policy: The $125 million Jay Peak ski resort in Vermont, with 120room hotel, ice arena, golf course and the Northeast's largest water park, is just months away from completion

• Among the promotions offered by New York City's upscale Marmara Manhattan hotel is a "birth tourism" package exploiting the US 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) – and assure her baby automatic US citizenship.

• 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.

"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.

• At a June concert in Australia's Sydney Opera House, American musicians Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed performed Anderson's 20-minute, very-high-pitched composition, "Music for Dogs," an arrangement likely to have been largely unmelodious to humans, who generally cannot hear such high pitches, but of more interest to dogs, who can.

• 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 eightteam polo tournament with players not by Chuck Shepherd on horses but Segways.

• According to a May report by Seattle's KOMO-TV, former Oregon National Guardsman Gary Pfleider II is awaiting the results of his latest appeal to end the garnishment of his disability checks to cover $3,175 for gear he supposedly "lost" when he was shot in Iraq.

Kman's Our Lady of Lourdes church team in East Pennsboro Township, Pa. According to police, Kman sent multiple text messages to referees Jay and Jon Leader, offering them as much as $2,500 if certain games reached the "right outcome." The Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg has suspended Kman from coaching.

The recidivist rate for Norwegian prisoners in general is only 20 percent (versus 50 percent to 60 percent in the United States), but it is still early to tell whether Halden's prisoners will find life behind bars so pleasant that they don't mind risking another stretch there by returning to crime.

• 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. However, according to records revealed by the New York Post.

• American families from certain Asian and African cultures continue to ritually "circumcise" their young daughters, though the practice is illegal in the US and most of the world.

• Mexican police, raiding a suspected hideout of drug kingpin Oscar Nava Valencia in the city of Zapopan in December, found the expected items (weapons, drugs, cash) but also 38 gold- or silver-plated guns emblazoned with ornate designs and studded with diamonds, which it placed on public display in May.

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."

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.

• Recycled components: (1) Swiss clockmaker Artya announced in March the creation of a wristwatch set in fossilized dinosaur feces (with a strap made with skin from an American cane toad). Designer Yvan Arpa told the Associated Press the watch would sell for about $12,000.