Lead Story A tank and several armored vehicles with dozens of SWAT officers and a bomb robot rolled into a generally quiet Phoenix neighborhood on March 21, startling the residents.

Compelling Explanations Record companies have enjoyed recent successes in court by suing individuals who have shared music by trading files through specialized websites that avoid paying copyright licensing fees, including Lime Wire (which shut down last year).

Lead Story A 200-exhibit installation on the history of dirt and filth and their importance in our lives opened in a London gallery in March, featuring the ordinary (dust), the educational (a video tribute to New York’s Fresh Kills landfill, at one time the world’s largest), the medical (vials of historic, nasty-looking secretions from cholera victims), and the artistic (bricks fashioned from feces gathered by India’s Dalits, who handclean latrines).

Lead Story Gen. Than Shwe of Myanmar, leader of Asia’s most authoritarian regime, made a rare public appearance in February but dressed in a women’s sarong.

Lead Story The Feral Professor: Tihomir Petrov, 43, a mathematics professor at California State University Northridge, was charged in January with misdemeanors for allegedly urinating twice on the office door of a colleague with whom he had been feuding.

Lead Story 21st-Century American Exports? In strife-torn Sudan (land of the Darfur murder and rape atrocities and a per-capita annual income of $2,200), an epic, year-long Ponzi scheme engineered by a lowly former police officer has enticed nearly 50,000 victims to invest an estimated $180 million (according to a March dispatch on Slate.com).

Lead Story New York University arts professor Wafaa Bilal had his camera surgically removed in February—the one that was implanted in the back of his skull in November to record, at 60-second intervals, the places he had left behind (beamed to and archived by a museum in Qatar).

Lead Story Tombstone, Ariz., which was the site of the legendary 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (made into a 1957 movie), is about 70 miles from the Tucson shopping center where a U.S. congresswoman, a federal judge and others were shot in January.

Lead Story Getting Old, Young: (1) Jack Smeltzer broke a record in the tractor pull championships in Columbus, Ohio, in January— doing a “full (track-length) pull” of 692 pounds. Jack is 7 years old.

Lead Story The ear has a “G-spot,” explained the Santa Clara, Calif., ear-nose-and-throat surgeon, and thus the moans of ecstasy that Vietnamese “ear pickers” reportedly elicit from their clients might well be justified.