The continuing crisis

• Widower Charlie Bonn Kemp, 77, of Vero Beach, took especially hard the loss of his wife, Lee, in 2006 because she was unquestionably the love of his life even though the couple stopped having sex even before they got married in 1978, according to a June St. Petersburg Times profile. Lee had been Charlie's gay lover for 26 years, until revealing in 1978 that he could no longer resist the urge to become a woman, and especially a housewife. Such was their attachment that, following Lee's full sex change, she and Charlie decided to take advantage of Lee's new status and legally marry and continue their devotion, even though Charlie remained sexually attracted only to men. • Kenya, in addition to the usual problems of a developing African nation (poverty, tribal frictions), has recently endured the rise in power of the Mungiki, which is a secret society that is (according to a June New York Times dispatch) "part Sicilian Mafia, part Chicago street gang, with a little of the occult sprinkled in." Police say the members aim to destabilize the country in the midst of the current political campaign by devil-worshipping acts of violence (skinning heads, drinking human blood). A district commissioner in Nairobi said the Mungiki had threatened her with genital mutilation. The gang originated in the 1990s much as organized crime in the U.S. did, by taking over such urban enterprises as bus transit and garbage collection. • Latest in brain science: (1) French neurologists writing recently in the journal The Lancet described their surprise in finding, via brain scans, that a normally functioning 44-year-old man had a brain "more than 50 percent to 75 percent" smaller than average, consisting of little more than a thin sheet of brain material surrounding a large fluid buildup. (The man is employed as a French government bureaucrat.) (2) Researchers at the University of Calgary said in July that female mice in their study were not only sexually aroused by whiffs of male mouse pheromones but that the scent apparently made the females' brains grow larger. ¦