news from this strange world

As reported in the latest Harper’s Weekly Review:

A woman in Tel Aviv was searching through the city dump after she bought her mother a new mattress as a gift and threw out the old one, which was stuffed with $1 million in cash.

The parents of young “trustafarians” who live in fashionable Williamsburg, New York, could no longer afford to pay rent for their adult children.

A bakery in the Spanish city of Valencia was sued when the arm of an undocumented Bolivian worker was severed by a kneading machine and put out with the garbage, and French prosecutors commenced the trial of a woman accused of killing her babies and storing their bodies in the freezer.

Johanna Ganthaler, a woman who missed the May 31 Air France flight that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean and killed all aboard, died in a car accident.

Farmers in the Netherlands were using pig excrement to generate electricity, and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu suggested that painting roofs white might reflect sufficient sunlight to stave off global warming.

A Nebraska doctor said that he would offer third-term abortions.

Nurses in the Czech Republic were receiving free breast implants and liposuction as signing bonuses. “It helps to improve the morale,” explained a clinic manager, “of both our employees and our patients.”

Young girls in Zimbabwe were trading sex for food, three boys in Dorset, England, stomped a baby deer to death, a 16-year-old boy in California was running for city council, and a 14-year-old boy in Germany was hit by a meteorite.

California scientists studying guppies found that evolution can take place in as little as eight years, and scientists conducting research in Africa announced the discovery of a penis-shaped mushroom that they christened Phallus drewesii, after herpetologist Robert Drewes. “I’m utterly delighted,” said Drewes of the new species of stinkhorn fungus, which is two inches long. “The funny thing is that it is the second-smallest known mushroom in this genus and it grows sideways, almost limp.”

Citations for these and other equally disturbing news tidbits can be found on the Harper’s Weekly Review page.

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