truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

In more hopeful news, authorities in Ramallah said that the March 24 bank robbery by armed gunmen who snatched the equivalent of $30,000 was pulled off by five Palestinians and an Israeli Jew, working together.

A group of an estimated 10,000 believers is attempting to reverse American Christianity's declining birthrate by shunning all contraception, in obedience to Psalm 127, which likens the advantage of big families to having a "quiver" full of "arrows" (and which calls itself the QuiverFull movement). "God opens and closes the womb," explained one advocate, to National Public Radio in March, noting that in her own church in Shelby, Mich., the mothers average 8.5 children. "The womb is such a powerful weapon ... against the enemy," she said. "The more children I have, the more ability I have to impact the world for God."

The Web site InformationAgePrayer.com offers, for people too busy to speak to God themselves, a daily service of invocations (using voice-synthesizing software) for Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Muslims. Starting each day "reciting" the Lord's Prayer (or the Islamic Fajr) is $3.95 a month. Hail Marys are 70 cents a day for 10. A Complete Rosary Package is $49.95 a month. Each prayer is voiced individually, according to a March report on LiveScience.com, with the subscriber's name on the screen, and for Muslim prayers, the computer's speakers point toward Mecca.

Among the lingering sex-based customs in Saudi Arabia is the restriction on women's working outside the home, which forces lingerie shops to be staffed only with males, who must awkwardly make recommendations on women's bra styles and sizes. The campaign for change, led by a Jeddah college lecturer, has enlisted even some clerks, who are just as embarrassed about the confrontation as the customers, according to a February BBC News dispatch.

A 58-year-old man was arrested in Baltimore in February for allegedly stabbing his 19-year-old son after an argument over the son's refusal to remove his hat during church service.

In February, at the 500th annual celebration of the Buddhist Saidaiji Eyo festival (reputed to be one of Japan's three "oddest"), about 9,000 men dressed only in loincloths tussled over two pieces of sacred wood that were thrown into what the Kyodo news service called a "writhing throng" of men at a temple in Okayama. Those who somehow emerged with the 8-inch-long planks will supposedly have good luck this year.