Weird - Businesses being able to know information about people before family members

A couple of years back, there was a story about how a researcher had a challenge; how to identify a person based on their search patterns. After all, what a person searches for reveals to some extent clues to a person, and putting together all the details for a person in terms of their search helped the researcher get details of the person, to the extent that the actual person was identified by the researcher.
There is a lot of hoopla about privacy details, with the amount of details being recorded by search engines, social networks such as Facebook, and online stores that are integrated with these search engines; but the normal citizen is not so worried about such details. Read the details of this story, which worried the giant store Target so much that they tried to stop the details of this story from emerging (link to article):

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

One can be sure that it sounds creepy.

Online Privacy (Issues in the Digital Age)	Online Privacy: A Reference Handbook	Privacy Lost: How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy

Weird news - Door to door magazine salesman exhibits shocking behavior

There is an increasing air of insecurity that shows up in today's world. Parents are more scared for their children, for the safety of the children, and so on. Gated communities keep on popping up in more cities, people are warned against strangers. Some of the common stories relate to not letting strangers into the house for any reason, with the fear that once they come into the house, some trouble could happen.
Consider the following weird story, where a door to door magazine seller came into the house and made a sales pitch which was astounding, and liable to get the seller a jail term; you would never think that a normal person would make such demands as the person was making (link to article):

The man, Jerad Michael (pictured at left), who was peddling magazine subscriptions, allegedly forced his way into a woman's home, and refused to leave unless the woman either "submitted to drug use and sexual activity" or bought what he was selling, reports TV Station WCYB in Bristol, Va.
The woman said that she bought the magazines and promptly called the police. Arnold was charged with common law robbery, and was booked under a $20,000 bond.

Weird news - The high price for 2 beers leaves a family shocked

It is a standard refrain that you should ensure that you are responsible for your own finances. Sometimes when we are in a great hurry, we can quickly close financial transactions, doing a cursory look and then proceeding. In most cases, this can be fine, but then comes the case where you need to repent later for the fast work you did in your financial transaction. Consider the following case where a family quickly did a transaction for 2 beers (or maybe 2 beer cases), and then moved on, and later got a bill for an amount they would never have expected (link to article):

The family from Indiana - who asked not to be named - were shocked when their credit card statement displayed the charge for two alcoholic beverages, which were supposed to cost $14 each but ended up being nearly $1,500 a piece.
The credit card owner explained: "We just went up there and grabbed two beers signed it, got our drinks and went on."

Weird news - woman credits her breasts with saving her life in a crash

While driving a car, there are numerous safety measures, such as the use of seat belts, as well as seat bags. The main purpose of all these safety measures is to ensure that the person in the car is not rocked when the accident happens, and stays away from deadly stuff inside the car such as the steering wheel, or the windshield.
But what happens when the air bags don't deploy ? In such cases, the chance of injury is much higher; so can you believe it when the enhanced breasts of a woman apparently saved her by keeping her ribs away from the steering wheel; after all, if you have a record-setting 38KKK bosom, then these can extend for some distance away from the body and save the ribs in the body from getting fractured (link to article):

A woman is crediting her record-setting 38KKK bosom for saving her life after she wrapped her car around a tree. Sheyla Hershey, of Houston, Tx., told Radar Online that she was driving to pick up her husband after a Super Bowl party when she lost control of her car and slammed into a tree.
She said the airbags in her Ford Mustang didn't go off — which could have meant serious injury for most people. But Hershey, who, according to her website, was named as having the largest augmented breasts by her native Brazil's equivalent of the Guiness Book of World Records, says she was saved by her silicone.

Weird news - Prisoners in Kyrgyz stitch up their mouths in jail in a protest

Protest can take many novel forms. The most common form of protest that people in jail employ is the hunger strike, whereby people start indefinite hunger strikes or a group of prisoners go on a relay hunger strikes, with the expectation that such a step would force the authorities to agree to some of their demands. In some cases, this works, and in other cases, people have died with hunger strikes in jail.
In some other cases, the protest by prisoners takes a more violent form, with prisoners going to the extent of a riot in jail, sometimes causing riot police or the army to step in to stop such riots. However, in recent times, protests are taking on more unusual forms, such as this case where the prisoners sewed their mouths shut (link to article):

Over 400 Kyrgyz prisoners stitched up their mouths Tuesday as part of a nationwide hunger strike that has spread throughout the country's pre-trial detention facilities, Kyrgyz human rights ombudsman Tursunbek Akun said.
The protest follows a riot in mid-January during a routine cell check in one of Bishkek's pre-trial detention centres, when inmates started a fire and some slashed their wrists, protesting violence from the prison staff and visitor restrictions.

Weird news - Father kills his own child for making too much noise

When you read news like this one, you wonder as to how somebody could do things like this. The bond between a parent and their children is extremely strong, where a parent could do anything to ensure the safety of the child. If somebody else says anything to the child, the parent can and in most cases, does react against such utterances by other people. Given all this, it seems impossible to believe as to how a parent could be so barbaric to their own children (link to article):

Enraged by the continuous bawling of his infant daughter, a man allegedly flung the two-month-old baby down a drain resulting in her death in West Bengal's Murshidabad district, police said on Monday.
"Mujibur Sheikh, a mason, was at his home and got irritated by the continuous crying of his baby. He asked the mother to calm the baby, but she failed. Enraged, he threw the baby into a drain which killed her instantly," said Jagannath Das, officer of Ragunathgunj police station.

Weird news - 16 kg of cocaine mailed to UN headquarters, now stored there

One hears of all kind of measures that people use for smuggling drugs. There are small submarines that are used, people eat the drugs (put into small plastic vials) - some of which burst inside the person and can kill the courier, there are low flying planes that are used for the same, and numerous other such measures that are used for trying to smuggle drugs. After all, drug smuggling is extremely lucrative, to the extent that if some are caught, and others get through, the amount of money involved still makes the entire deal profitable.
But this method was interesting, trying to use the UN diplomatic route to try and get some cocaine through without inspection (link to article)

The UN is home to its fair share of diplomatic tussles and international scandals, but this was a very different kind of intrigue: more than 35 pounds of cocaine wound up in the mailroom of the United Nations headquarters in New York, authorities say, sent probably by someone who figured the drug would elude detection because of how it was packaged.
New York Police spokesman Paul Browne said the powder, discovered January 16, was in two white bags meant to look like diplomatic pouches, stamped with a bogus U.N. logo and sent from Mexico City through a DHL shipping center in Cincinnati. But a real U.N. diplomatic pouch is blue, has a lock and features the authentic seal of the organization. By international law, those pouches are not normally inspected or opened.

So, the UN finds itself in the position of holding 16 kn of cocaine, which would have an extremely high value if it was ever sold.