News Of The Weird - Jan. 22, 2003

London’s Daily Telegraph reported in December on a recent Peruvian military video that showed a dog being massacred and its innards eaten by troops training to become ruthless killers; a Peruvian official admitted that live dogs had been used in the past, but not since August 2002.

Also, according to a December Reuters report, a surreptitious videotape surfaced of a ritual of elephant domestication in Thailand, in which a young elephant is forced from his mother and beaten for hours, to make him suitable for tourist attractions. (Thai officials defend their domestication program because the country has far more elephants than habitat necessary for them to survive in the wild.)

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation:
– (59) The elderly motorist who takes one wrong turn and then seems powerless to correct the mistake for hours or even days, such as the McLean, Va., woman (age 80) whose planned 10-mile shopping trip in November left her north of Pittsburgh, 250 miles away, 48 hours later.
– (60) The packs of young men on minor-crime sprees who proudly videotape themselves during the acts, thus making prosecutors’ jobs so much easier when the tapes are recovered, as with four men on a vandalism and shoplifting spree in the St. Louis area in November.