If aiming at the goal of human rights violations, the US scores once again!

Gulf News writes: "The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged."

Before you call the Gulf News biased, you should know that the story was actually reported by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service. Apparently, the government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

Federal officials portray sedation as rare and "an act of last resort." (Not the all-inclusive, family-friendly kind of resort mind you.)

Tomorrow, I leave for Russia. I have never been before and I am psyched. However, I can't believe I chose this particular week to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Of course, I picked the dates before knowing that some 50,000 English fans are expected to descend on Moscow to watch the Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea on May 21. Why the match between two British teams s happening in Moscow, I frankly don't get. I am sure they have a perfectly good reason for it. I know nothing about soccer and I wouldn't mind keeping it that way.

Stay tuned for a dispatch or two from Russia.

In case you are sick of what art museums have to offer (I am with you; there is only so much Monet one can take in a lifetime,) you should try one of the truly bizarre museum options out there.

Here are a few tips from the site Atypical Events:

• Mütter Museum aka "Random body parts", Philadelphia: museum of historical pathology containing about 20,000 fluid-preserved anatomical and pathological specimens, models, medical instruments, and memorabilia of famous scientists and physicians (the secret tumor of Grover Cleveland, the thorax of John Wilkes Booth and a really big 9-foot colon, for example)
• Museum Vrolik aka "Dead babies in a jar", Amsterdam: It contains more than 5,000 specimens of congenital anomalies, human and animal anatomy, embryology and pathology.
• Phallological Museum aka "Penisland", Húsavík, Iceland: museum completely devoted to the field of phallology, the supposed ancient study of the penis and its role in society and history. Home to 200 penises and penile parts.
• Meguro Parasitological Museum aka "Parasites, warms and leeches", Tokyo. Glass jars filled with formaldehyde preserve these pesky parasites, while terrifying photographs like that of a Japanese dude with elephantiasis of the scrotum depict the damage that they are capable of (see photo)
• Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health, Maryland. The museum walls were covered in tampon and pad advertisements, while female mannequin torsos dressed in rubberized panties and menstrual belts hung from the ceiling or sat on tables in a similar fashion.

Menstruation? Maybe Monet is not so bad, after all.

[via Eventective.com]

I never really fell in love with the Sound of Music. But other people did, and I am sure that those people will be excited to know that the original von Trapp family house is being turned into a hotel.

If you're having trouble remembering the true story that the movie was based off of, there was an aspiring nun (played by Julie Andrews) who did a whole lot of singing and somewhere between "do" and "fa," won the hearts of Baron von Trapp and his seven children.

The von Trapp family lived in the house from 1923 to 1938 when they fled Austria during the Nazi takeover; eventually they made their way to the US where the youngest of the children operates a Vermont lodge. Now Salzburg will get the von Trapp touch, and starting this sumer, visitors to Villa Trapp visitors will be able to sleep in family members' former bedrooms or even choose to exchange vows in the chapel. Located just outside of Salzburg, Austria, the hotel will open sometime in July.

Building a hotel that capitalizes on the fame of a movie really isn't that crazy and sometimes hotels even star in movies themselves. Salzburg tourism officials say that actually 40% of overnight stays are made by fans of the Sound of Music. So if you are one of those fans, now you too -- for only 100 euros a night -- can practice your singing skills right in the von Trapp household.

I recently found out that Leuven, Belgium has trumped Cincinnati, Ohio. In 2007, Epybird, the two guys that orchestrate mentos geysers, turned Fountain Square into more than 500 bottles of simultaneously shooting Diet Coke.

On April 23, 2008, a group of Belgian students donned blue raincoats, and, with the help of Epybird, turned Ladeuzeplein Square in Leuven into a mentos Diet Coke mess. It's reported that 1,360 people participated in this latest Guiness World Record-breaking endeavor.

I generally find Spain very laid back and relatively lagging in the world of technology -- it's what I often enjoy about being here.

It's somehow possible to stay away from the high-tech hysteria everywhere else, be it use of technology in your personal life (I don't know anyone here who cares about the iPhone), or in the professional sector (when I went to pick up my resident card in Madrid, my appointment had been noted on 3 different hand-written(!) lists.

So when I read that a group of tourists who were robbed in Barcelona about a year ago are finally going to get justice by testifying via webcam(!) from their respective country, I almost fell off my chair!

According to the Guardian, 24 British, Belgian, German, Danish, Portuguese, American and Australian alleged victims of a Romanian gang who posed as police to rob tourists in Barcelona last year, will see the culprits punished, assuming the case is revolved. Time differences between the countries are being coordinated, webcam identification of the criminals, and stories of the victims, are being heard. Apparently, all this "tech-justice" process was devised to quicken clearing the backlog of nearly 270,000 such pending cases in the country.

Tourists often get robbed when traveling and can never do much about it because they are leaving the country shortly, this webcam justice initiative by Barcelona has taken things to a new level -- I would never have expected such a thing to come out of Spain. Bravo!

Venice has been ultra-progressive lately, especially when it comes to quality of life issues. Not only did they finally prohibit pigeon-feeding, but they have also just caught the mysterious serial female butt snapper, who has been walking behind women in Venice in a hooded shirt, taking photos through a small hole in the side of the bag.

He doesn't seem like your typical bottom snapper, mind you. This man has been doing this for two years and has accomplished to take more than 3,000 pictures of the various bottoms of female tourists in Venice.

The man was stopped after police became suspicious of a large bag he was carrying as he followed women through St Mark's Square. He has been charged with infringement of privacy, BBC reports. It is a cheeky crime, which could earn this 38-year-old Italian (married, with two kids, by the way) from six months to four years in jail.

This guy should have really gotten together with the serial bottom-pincher, who is currently on the run in the UK. What a team of superheroes those two could form!

I was surprised Parisians have accepted the new smoking ban as willingly as they have.

There is, however, one resistance movement: Hookah bars. Some of them have continued to break the law by continuing to offer customers tobacco in water pipes, IHT reports.

Hookah or shisha bars, which began springing up in France more than a decade ago, became increasingly popular across Europe, both among immigrants from Islamic countries and among the hip student crowd. France had 800 hookah bars before the smoking ban, half of them in Paris or its suburbs, but perhaps one-third have closed since the ban took effect.

So far, Sarkozy's government shows no inclination to negotiate since declaring in December that there would be no exceptions to the smoking ban. Apparently, "it's a matter of public health."

That seems harsh. These are, after all, as close to private smoking clubs as you can get.

What would we do without The Economist and its great sidebars? This one shows just how much certain countries smoke. According to ERC, a market research company, the heaviest smokers come from Greece, with an average of 3,000 cigarettes per person in 2007. At 20 cigarettes per pack, that makes 150 packs in a year; a lot of puffing.

Despite recent smoking bans in many places, European countries still manage to hold 18 of the top 20 spots. The most surprising statistic? That France smokes less than the U.S. Whatever happened to the stereotypical image of the French, dressed in all black, a serious look on their face and a Gauloises glued to their fingers? It could have something to do with the price of cigarettes; a pack runs about 5 euros in France, equaling just a little under $8.

Click here to see how these results changed from 2006.

The luxury restaurant market in the Czech Republic is apparently looking for new, creative ways to cater to their clients and be "distinguishable from others."

The strategy? Putting insects as an item on luxury restaurants menus, the Prague Daily Monitor reports. The Brno restaurant manager Martin Kobylka says: "We want to shock people. A lobster, a crab or a crawfish are offered everywhere, but a cricket in caramel or a chocolate cake with a cockroach are unavailable in this country for now." (I love that the name Kobylka actually means grasshopper in Czech. It is about the coolest name for a guy who wants to market mainstream insect-eating.)

Chocolate cake with a cockroach sounds like a delightful way to end a first date. Especially if you are really not that into her.