Oh, Those Wacky Foreigners

I found on Reuters, this piece, about a Chinese man who is accused, with the aid of two assistants, of murdering young women to provide "Ghost Brides" for deceased men. It's an interesting story that speaks to a custom that I hadn't realized was still practiced anywhere. You'll find it in the section named "Oddly Enough." Where there are some stories in the Oddly Enough section that do strike one as being odd, it also seems to have become a dumping ground for items that the people at Reuters, for some reason, just don't know what to do with. While a number of these are foreign stories that would likely be taken quite seriously, had they happened in the United States, like Beijing moving to close restarants that don't meet basic sanitation standards or Columbian drug traffickers threatening to poison sniffer dogs, there are also a good number of items that just don't seem to have the sideshow quality that the idea of an "Oddly Enough" section conjures up, such as the fact that Nicole Kidman and some movie crew were injured on the set. Or the fact that 10 staff members from radio station KDND-FM were fired after a contestant in their "Hold your wee for a Wii" promotion died of water intoxication. What's so odd about that? Or the fact that a lawyer for some Guantanamo Bay detainees is alledging that conditions there have worsened for some men, as part of a U.S. government attempt to extract intelligence. Scan the headlines in the U.S., International and Political sections for yesterday, and you won't find this seemingly important story about the War on Terror in any of them. Interestingly enough, I can't be sure of this, because the article doesn't come back in the site search engine. I tried using the name of the attorney bringing the case, Zachary Katznelson. Nothing. Even when I copied and pasted the title of the article into the search field, the search engine could not find the article. Wow. No wonder people think that the media is in cahoots with the federal government. And when you consider the fact that soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful" is filming in Austrailia, which doesn't seem to merit inclusion in the "Entertainment" section, was considered important enough to warrant a headline in Friday's U.S. news (and can be accessed from the search engine), the tinfoil hat crowd doesn't seem so looney all of a sudden.

You have GOT to be kidding me.