Some of you might have caught Jared Diamond's recent report in the New Yorker about the Handa clan of Papua New Guinea highlands and their penchant for revenge killing. The story profiled tribesman Daniel Wemp and his six-year quest to avenge the death of his uncle.

Well, the Handa tribe is pissed: They say the story unfairly portrays them as bloodthirsty animals bent on rape and murder.

Wemp is now availing himself of the great American pastime: Taking the New Yorker to court.

He is suing the magazine for $10 million, having filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court earlier this week.

How does a New Guinea tribesman come to sue in New York court? I'm a little unclear of that too (though clearly the Handa clan has a bit more contact with the outside world compared to, say, some tribes in Irian Jaya). It appears he has help in the form of the New York City-based Art Science Research Lab, which recently sent a team to New Guinea to closely fact check every one of Diamond's assertions in the story. They claim Diamond was duped by many of the people he interviewed.

The group is preparing a 40,000 word report -- 40,000 words! -- refuting the New Yorker story (which strikes me as overkill given how little Americans likely care about this story).

Right now, the New Yorker is standing behind Diamond.

I'd personally like to know how the Handa tribe figures it was wronged to the tune of $10 million. I mean, the tribespeople live in New Guinea's highlands, for heaven's sake.

Well, we knew this day would arrive eventually.

Delta Airlines today announced that it would begin charging $50 for a second checked bag on its international routes.

That makes it the first US legacy carrier to implement a baggage fee for international travel.

American Airlines and United are reportedly studying Delta's move, which means they're weighing the same fee but want to see first whether it is really worth it.

Passengers with elite status on Delta, and active military personnel, are exempt from the new baggage fee.

The first checked bag remains free on Delta's international routes.

Delta, the world's largest airline, reported a $794 million first-quarter loss today, which it blames on both the bad economy and bad hedging on fuel prices.

The airline plans to reduce its international capacity by roughly 10 percent starting this fall.

President Obama is pushing for a new national network of high-speed trains as an answer to growing traffic congestion nationwide.

That sounds like good news for train fans out there -- if it ever happens. I've been looking into trains from New York to Chicago recently and am surprised that the Lake Shore Limited still takes more than 18 hours to reach Union Station in C-Town.

Anyway, Obama's plan singles out 10 "high-speed corridors," according to CNN, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.

Obama is also calling for improvements to one of the nation's most-traveled rail corridors, the Boston-Washington line.

How will he pay for all this? Through both the recently passed $787 billion stimulus and a separate $5 billion investment over five years.

Obama envisions some trains traveling at top speeds of 150 mph.

The Miami Herald this weekend turns its travel section over to a celebration of Jane Woodward, travel editor, who is looking back on a lifetime on the road. The impetus for this nostalgia piece is that she is right on the verge of visiting her 100th country, no small feat. Sure, there's a lot of "look where I've been" in this package, but I sorta liked this lead essay as a summing up of a traveler's life (so far). As travelers, we're visited as much by memories of where we've been as we are by dreams of where we'll go next.

At Gadling, we're always happy when people read and respond to our posts. It's just not everyday that someone writes a full-fledged rap song out of them.

But YouTube rapper "JournalRhythm" has taken a couple of recent news events that we've posted on and turned them in to a 1:11 rap song. It looks like this guy writes a different rap song based on news events nearly every day. Don't know why he needs goggles, though (or are they sunglasses?)

Anyway, the subjects of this rap are the snakes on a plane I posted about yesterday, and a man who whipped out his own snake on a Hawaiian airlines flight recently -- which Scott blogged about yesterday as well.

We all know that we could find quite a bit of "extra money" to put toward traveling if we readjusted our daily budgets and started to save a little bit here and there.

Still, some of us might need a tool to help make this happen.

There's a Web site out there ostensibly designed to help show people the types of spending they can cut, and how much saved money that's likely to yield them.

The people over at TravelMuse have come up with what they call their "Yaycations Calculator" -- Yaycation being a term I thought our very own Brenda Yun had coined -- which is meant to prove that we all have the money for that special getaway, even if we don't know it.

The calculator prompts you through 20 categories and asks you what you'd be willing to live without. That coffee-to-go five days a week? Over a year, that could save you $390. That sandwich on the run at work? We're talking $1,820 a year in savings if you brown bag it.

I went through each category and chose the cheapest item in each to cut. My overall savings for the year? $41,016. Woohoo! I'm going on one hell of a vac...er, yay...cation!

OK, so the site is simplistic at best, and perhaps complete BS at worse. Still, it's kinda fun to play around with, and its basic lesson of making small budget cuts to afford travel down the line is a sensible one.

A Qantas Airlines flight from Alice Springs to Melbourne had to be grounded after four baby pythons escaped from their foam box in the plane's cargo hold.

They were among 12 pythons being flown to Melbourne.

Passengers were offloaded and transferred to other aircraft to make connections. The plane itself had to be fumigated. So far the bodies of the four snakes have yet to turn up.

Authorities are at a loss to explain how the snakes managed to escape in the first place, and it is unclear just how the flight crew learned that snakes were loose on the plane.

The plane is back in service, likely with the corpses of four reptiles somewhere in its hold.

Happy Easter everyone. For anyone looking for some respite after a day of brunching and family, there are some good travel stories out there this weekend.

In the Washington Post, Canadian writer Erik Heinrich takes us to Kazakhstan, or more specifically the steppes of Central Asia's largest country, on horseback, where he spends time with the rugged cowboys that work this high country.

The Boston Globe as a dispatch from Joe Ray about an unusual surfing spot -- unusual, that is, against what we normally think about in terms of surfing: He hits the waves of France's Atlantic coast, known as the Côte Sauvage.

Tony Perrottet travels to southern Utah in the New York Times, where he hikes into Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Over at the LA Times, there's a good story from Amanda Jones, who takes the slow boat down the Peruvian Amazon.

Since it's April, why not a story about Paris? The Chicago Tribune's Josh Noel gets into the distinctions between the City of Light's Left Bank and Right Bank.

When a lot of people think of the Spanish island of Majorca, they think nonstop partying and lots of British and German tourists. It is that, of course, but there is a quieter side to the island as well, as Julie Myerson describes in the Financial Times.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal Europe's weekend edition has an interesting story from Stan Sesser about the specialty streets of Hanoi.

If you've headed to Paris for the Easter holidays, chances are you've left the city's most famous tourist attraction rather frustrated.

Workers for the company that runs the Eiffel Tower have been on strike for two days now, complaining over stalled pay increases. As a result, the tower was essentially closed Wednesday and Thursday. Negotiations with union workers was ongoing today, but the tower remained closed Friday morning.

Around 300 workers completely blocked the Eiffel from tourists on Wednesday. Yesterday, after more protests in the morning, one of the tower's four pillars briefly opened to visitors before security workers shut it down again. Tourists were left in line for hours without any indication whether they'd get a chance to go up.

Basically, the workers' beef is that while the price of going up the Eiffel Tower has increased this year (tickets now run roughly $18), their salaries have not gone up. Security workers and ticket takers are demanding pay increases and bonuses.

About 18,000 tourists per day visited the Eiffel Tower last year.

Gallery: France: The Eiffel Tower

Last month I wrote about a controversy in New Zealand in which authorities were trying to figure out whether a Samoan woman who gave birth during a flight to Auckland intentionally abandoned her baby girl on board the airplane when it landed.

There were those that said the woman walked off the plane without the baby on purpose. Others said the woman merely forgot the newborn and attempted to return to the airplane to retrieve her.

Well, there was a key piece of information missing when I made my initial report.

The mother had given birth in the airplane's lavatory...and stuffed the newborn into the lavatory's trash can, which is where flight cleaners found her after arriving in New Zealand.

A Kiwi court has charged the woman, Karolaine Maika, 29, with child abandonment, and she now faces seven years in prison.

The incident happened on a Pacific Blue flight on March 19.

The infant girl is reportedly doing fine and still in the custody of New Zealand social services.