Indian vultures making a comeback

Almost-extinct vultures may be making a comeback within the Parsi community of Mumbai, India, after a pain reliever (diclofenac) nearly wiped it out. Parsis' Zoroastrian religion requires "natural" body disposals (no cremation or burial) of humans and cattle, and bodies have always been ritually laid out for the hungry birds, but the community has also come to rely on diclopfenac in hospitals and for cattle. When News of the Weird last mentioned the problems (in 2001), vultures were dying out from kidney damage caused by the drug, and bodies were piling up. (Parsis were exploring using solar panels to burn the corpses.) However, according to a November New York Times dispatch, clerics are reporting modest success in weaning Parsis off of diclofenac, and the vultures appear more plentiful.

Peter Welsh, 32, and Dwayne Doolan, 31, weren't the first burglars to try breaking into a building by smashing through the adjoining basement wall, but they might be the clumsiest. Their target, on New Year's Eve, was Wrights Jewellers in Beaudesert, Australia, but trying to smash the front window failed, as did smashing the rear doors, which were actually those of another store. They finally settled on the basement option, but absentmindedly broke through the opposite-side wall and wound up in a KFC restaurant. (Undaunted, according to police, they robbed the KFC of about $2,600.)

Drunk drivers often try to avoid hit-and-run charges by claiming that they did not realize they hit anything, but their odds drop if there is a dead pedestrian lodged in the windshield, as with Sherri Wilkins, 51, who was arrested in Torrance, Calif., in November, 2.3 miles from the crash scene, after other drivers finally persuaded her to stop. (Wilkins, it turned out, is a "rehabilitated" drug user who worked as a counselor at a Torrance drug treatment center and who claimed to have been sober for 11 years.)

Women's love-hate affairs with their shoes is the stuff of legends, but a Memphis, Tenn., podiatrist told Fox News in November of a recent increase in women deciding on what might be called the nuclear option - "stiletto surgery" - for horribly uncomfortable, yet irresistible, shoes. Either the shoe must go or the foot, and more are choosing the latter (or at least the pinky), to be removed or reduced by surgery. The Memphis doctor said he sees as many as 30 patients a month interested in the procedure.

- Once again, a familiar, vexing legal question was tackled in New York City in December when Dr. Diana Williamson was sentenced to three years in prison after a conviction for defrauding Medicaid of $300,000 by writing bogus prescriptions.

She had vigorously asserted "her" innocence, in that, she said, only one of her multiple personalities (uncontrollable by the others) had committed the crime.