The Matthew Talbot Hostel, a shelter for homeless men in
downtown Sydney, Australia, has a problem. According to a Reuters report,
up to 50 foreign backpackers a day are arriving on the soup kitchen’s
doorstep looking for dirt-cheap meals that are meant for the city’s needy.

The hostel offers A$1 meals (U.S. 59 cents), rooms for the night and
showers. But word of the shelter, which does not require identification,
spread fast among backpackers bent on stretching their vacation dollars as
far as possible. According to the report, it has even appeared in the “Cheap
Eats” sections of several travel guides.

Colin Robinson, homeless coordinator for the St. Vincent de Paul Society,
which runs the hostel, told Reuters that some backpackers have also been
found doing their laundry at the facility, which serves between 1,200 and
1,300 homeless men each day.

With the 2000 Olympics looming on the horizon this summer, Robinson and
his staff are worried that the backpackers’ untoward frugality will simply
exhaust the shelter’s resources. Staffers are now considering issuing
identity cards to the homeless, in hopes of screening out stingy travelers.

“We don’t like the idea,” said Robinson, “but at this stage we have to look at
a few options, particularly given the Olympics period, just to protect the
people who are genuinely homeless.”

When traveling in the USA, the land of the automobile, one must be wary of road rage. Down Under, in the land of surfing, one must be careful of wave rage. According to a recent BBC report, several of Australia’s most popular surfing breaks have become battlegrounds between locals and tourists. And the locals are winning.

Here’s the scoop: Young travelers, usually male, show up, take one look at those long, beautiful breaks and, before you can say “Don’t forget your rash guard,” they’re in the water, paddling to catch the wave of their dreams.

It all started with a pencil. On Monday, a 9-year-old student of the James Gichuru School in Dandora, a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, dropped his pencil on the road near his school. When he bent down to pick it up, the speeding driver of a matatu — a public minibus — hit and killed the boy.

The child’s classmates, incensed by their friend’s death and the lack of speed bumps in the area, banded together with kids from other area schools and went on a “drunken rampage,” according to a Reuters report.

In the United Arab Emirates, a teacher and former housewife is spending four months in jail for putting a bad mojo on her former husband and his sister, according to a recent Reuters report.

The woman, angry with her ex-spouse for divorcing her, went to the country next door, Oman, where she hired a magician to conjure up a nasty spell for her former beloved and his sibling.

Apparently, the spell worked. At least psychologically. The man and his sister soon came down with a number of undiagnosed illnesses, which they attributed to the ex-wife’s black magic. Believing they were possessed by demons, they sought retribution in court — and won. The ex-wife was promptly whisked off to jail.

Recently, however, she was granted an appeal from a court in Sharjah, which informed the Gulf News that the “physical and psychological ailments” of the man and his sibling had no correlation with the ex-wife’s visit to the magician.

The newspaper also said that it is common for Arab women to visit magicians in times of need — as in “I need that Mercedes” or “I need you to come down with a rare and unsightly skin disease.” Hey, maybe they’ve got something there.

In two years, the northern Spanish towns of Villabilla de Burgos and Alcala de Gurrea will be running on artichokes. No kidding!

According to a Reuters report, the towns plan to burn giant, 10-foot-high artichokes at their twin power stations to convert the thorny vegetables to electricity.

Ten-foot-high artichokes? Yup. Spanish farmers, with a little financial help from European Union subsidies and the towns’ electricity generator, have been raising genetically modified “monster vegetables” with 23-foot-long roots. These larger-than-life artichokes may be unfit for human consumption, but once burned, they will provide the power to supply Villabilla de Burgos’ and Alcala de Gurrea’s 60,000 residents with electricity.

That money belt tucked under your shirt isn’t going to do much good if you happen to be held up by a certain type of thief in India’s capital.

According to a BBC report, a group of New Delhi muggers have taken up an ingenious new weapon — snakes. Yes, snakes.

The scheme works like this: A criminal approaches an unsuspecting citizen and places a python around her neck. The python begins to squeeze, and voil` — the victim gives up her money in return for breath and life.

In another popular ruse, a man is approached by a “snake charmer” who threatens him with a hissing asp: Give up the jewelry or risk a poisonous snake bite. Guess which wins.

Many of these robberies have occurred in the light of day, prompting Delhi police to warn the public to “stay clear of snake charmers and people carrying serpents.”

Aye, aye.