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India’s Health and Family Welfare Minister has a creative way to control overpopulation in his country:

“If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won’t get a chance to produce children,” [Ghulam Nabi Azad] said. “When there is no electricity there is nothing else to do but produce babies.” He added: “Don’t think that I am saying this in a lighter vein. I am serious. TV will have a great impact. It’s a great medium to tackle the problem . . .
80 per cent of population growth can be reduced through TV.”

Netflix and a DVR will do the rest.

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A rural Indian witchdoctor beheaded a five-year-old girl as part of a bizarre ritual to help a villager produce healthy male heirs, police have said.

Vandana Kumari was murdered on Tuesday (local time) in Lakhimpur Kheri district, 200 kilometres from the Uttar Pradesh state capital Lucknow, police officer Ravi Srivastava said Thursday.

Occult practitioner Mewalal Chauhan recommended the “human sacrifice” when the child’s neighbour Ram Niwas came to him for help, Mr Srivastava said.

“Ram Niwas had sons but none of them survived infancy. His brother too was ailing. The ‘tantrik’ Chauhan said a human sacrifice was necessary to get rid of these problems,” he said.

May I suggest another human sacrifice? The witch doctor? That should improve humanity throughout the region quite a bit…

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Citigroup Inc., one of the biggest recipients of government bailout money, gave employees $5.33 billion in bonuses for 2008, New York’s attorney general said Thursday in a report detailing the payouts by nine big banks.

The report from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office focused on 2008 bonuses paid to the initial nine banks that received loans under the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall. Cuomo has joined other government officials in criticizing the banks for paying out big bonuses while accepting taxpayer money.

Citigroup, which gave 738 of its employees bonuses of at least $1 million, is now one-third owned by government as a result of its bailout. It paid bonuses of at least $3 million to 124 of those employees, even after it lost $18.7 billion during the year, Cuomo’s office said.

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A girl who I will call Jessica had been playing at her friend’s house when she fell down with a seizure. The friend’s family, of course, took her to the hospital, where they discovered she had an operable brain tumor. Without the operation she was given a prognosis of about six months to live, but they could get her the surgery within the week. Great news, right? Wrong. Jessica’s family were all devout, fundamentalist Christian Scientists.

Jessica’s family came to visit her in the hospital once they found out, but before asking her if she was alright or reassuring a scared 15 year old girl, they began by chastising her for going to a hospital in the first place. Though not representative of all Christian Scientists, this family believed that faith and prayer are all one needs to cure ailments. Obviously, Jessica wasn’t praying hard enough, or her faith had faltered, causing this tumor. They expressly forbade her from getting the surgery, trying to get her to leave the hospital and go to their pastor for extensive prayer.

To make a long story short, Jessica sided with the doctors. I met her about a week after her surgery, which was a complete success. Despite all this, Jessica was horribly depressed. I discovered this was because her family completely disowned her for getting this surgery. She had gained the rest of her life, but lost the life she knew.