truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Religiously strict Saudi Arabia can't have traditional Western-style beauty contests, but there was a pageant in April in remote Guwei'iya, about 75 miles from Riyadh: a beauty contest for camels. More than 250 owners brought more than 1,500 camels to be judged by such standards, said one organizer (according to a Reuters dispatch), as "the nose should be long and droop down" and "the ears should stand back, and the neck should be long" and "the hump should be high, but slightly to the back." Prizes included more than 70 SUVs.

News of the Weird has informed readers several times of the claims by Transcendental Meditation practitioners that crime and war could be stopped cold by the channeling of huge amounts of human psychic energy into productive thought. (The movie director David Lynch led such a project in 2005.) In April 2007, Needham, Mass., psychiatrist Eric Leskowitz told reporters that he and his cousin are making a documentary film, borrowing the TM principle to measure the impact of Fenway Park fans' creating unified fields of brain waves to carry the Boston Red Sox to victory.

In April, rival factions of nuns brawled, along with priests, in an Old Calendarist convent in Avdellero, Cyprus, leaving a church floor covered with blood. One faction said that a recently deceased bishop's will gave them control of the convent, but Mother Superior Markella and her nuns had been living there for decades and feared removal.

Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre most recently made News of the Weird in 2004 because of continued petty territorial fighting among the six Christian denominations that share management of the Church, which is home to some of Christianity's holiest sites, including that of Christ's resurrection. As Easter approached this year, three of the groups that control one 10-stall rest room could not agree how to divide responsibility for repairing it, leading to a pervasive stench in the building. Furthermore, the path of the outflow sewage pipe (which needed enlarging) passes under property of a fourth denomination, which has resisted helping unless it is granted control of one of the 10 stalls.

Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre most recently made News of the Weird in 2004 because of continued petty territorial fighting among the six Christian denominations that share management of the church, which is home to some of Christianity's holiest sites, including that of Christ's resurrection. As Easter approached this year, three of the groups that control one 10-stall restroom could not agree how to divide responsibility for repairing it, leading to a pervasive stench in the building. Furthermore, the path of the outflow sewage pipe (which needed enlarging) passes under property of a fourth denomination, which has resisted helping unless it is granted control of one of the 10 stalls.

As a result of a 2003 traffic stop in Ohio, Catherine Donkers was convicted of a child-seat-restrAin't violation (specifically, holding her baby in her lap for breast-feeding, while driving), but she appealed, and in April 2007, a court ruled in her favor. The story made News of the Weird in 2003 because Donkers's husband Brad Barnhill, who was not in the car, demanded that he be charged, instead, because his First Christian Fellowship for Eternal Sovereignty religion teaches that the husband must take responsibility for all of his wife's public actions (especially when the "public action" involves "the Beast," which is what the religion calls "government").