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Donald Hinton, a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine and a board-certified psychiatrist, reported last month that over the past five years he’s treated Elvis Presley for migraine headaches, among other things. Hinton said he has several items containing Presley’s DNA; an official at Elvis Presley Enterprises was unfazed, insisting that Elvis is still “in the garden [at Graceland].”

Last summer Hindu nationalists in India began marketing bovine urine, said to cure human ailments that range from obesity to cancer….The office of energy policy in Thailand announced in January that, after its great success turning pig dung into gas, it would also begin using human excrement from the country’s prison population….In December researchers told Toronto’s National Post that a substance in mucus appears to block the body’s mechanism to fight a type of cancer cell, and if this mucin can be eliminated, the cancer might be cured….And last month a professor at Newcastle University in England proposed that polluted water running from contaminated tin and silver mines in Bolivia be treated in a compost bed of llama droppings.

In January police arrested a heavily armed man wearing body armor and combat fatigues inside Bohemian Grove, a retreat center north of Santa Rosa, California, that has hosted such luminaries as former president George Bush and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. The man, 37-year-old Richard McCaslin, said he’d heard on a radio show from Austin, Texas, that guests at the retreat engaged in child abuse and human sacrifice; authorities reported no evidence of any such abuses at Bohemian Grove but noted that McCaslin had spent a year scoping out the area and amassing weapons, and that he’d painted the words Phantom Patriot on his chest.

Last September state representative Dorothy Pelote of Savannah, Georgia, told the legislature during its opening prayer ceremony that through her psychic powers she’d caught a glimpse of Chandra Levy’s dead body in a ditch. More recently, in January, Pelote said she would introduce legislation to protect pizza delivery people by making it illegal to answer the front door naked.