Chuck Shepherd

Lead Stories *In the course of a June report decrying the Canadian economy's discrimination against people who do unpaid work (mostly housework), the feminist group Mothers Are Women called on the government to pay wages to women for breast-feeding to bring that activity in line with the production of other...

Lead Stories *An evangelical Christian organization in Hereford, England, announced in May that it had set up a 24-hour-a-day camera on Jerusalem's eastern gate to capture Jesus' millennial return (www.messiahcam.org). Also in May the firm Triumph International Japan announced it would market the Armageddon Bra, with a sensor in the...

Lead Stories *In April the Unique Recoveries collection agency in Bombay, India, hired six eunuchs to go to the homes or offices of obstinate debtors to embarrass them into paying up by dancing around and threatening to lift their saris to expose their "genitallessness." Unique's director said he expects his...

Lead Stories *Latest Diaper Research: Jill Furlough, age 31, of Lakenheath, England, told the London Daily Telegraph in April that she had been frightened by green sparks flying out of her one-year-old son Joshua's disposable diaper. Scientists contacted by the newspaper said it was triboluminescence, a buildup of energy similar...

Lead Stories *Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading (England) University told the Times of London in May that "several" firms had approached him about surgically implanting transponder microchips into their workers as a way of tracking their hours and whereabouts. Cybernetics expert Warwick last year put a chip into his own...