After several reports of grizzly bears intimidating people near Alaska’s Russian River, the state Department of Fish and Game recently gave several usual-suspect bears makeovers, using ordinary hair dye in bright colors (yellow, green, orange, blue) to make it easier for people to identify the specific bears that are menacing them. Environmentalists were critical, objecting to turning pristine wilderness into a gaudy, “punk”-colored park. Animal-rights activists, too, suggested that colored bears might find socializing difficult, but a bear researcher quoted by the Anchorage Daily News discounted that fear, based on a previous, similar project.
YIKES!
On one fateful day in 2003 in Sikeston, Mo., according to Holly Adams, she had sex at different times with Raymon and Richard Miller, who are identical twins and who did not know about each other’s encounter. Adams became pregnant, but both Millers deny paternity despite, of course, an identical DNA match for each brother (with both claiming that it must have been the other). Adams has named Raymon the father, and a court must decide paternity and child support just like courts did before DNA testing was developed.
SOUTH DAKOTA SOUNDS LIKE FUN
Police in Rapid City, S.D., stopped a car at about 1 a.m. on June 5 and found the female-looking driver to be intoxicated and, at 18, too young to drink. They also found that the passenger was local alderman Tom Johnson, who called the driver his “helper” at his middle-of-the-night task of personally putting up yard signs for his campaign for mayor. According to the Rapid City Journal, Johnson continually referred to the driver as a woman, but police later learned that the driver was a man dressed as a woman, which Johnson claimed he was shocked to find out.
NATURE CALLING
About 100 people were able to escape the perhaps-fatal effects of a sinkhole that collapsed under their one-story apartment house in eastern Sarawak, Borneo, in April, only because Renjis Empati, 57, had arisen in the middle of the night to go to the communal toilet. He noticed the ground moving and awakened all the residents. Said one woman, “If it were not for him, most of us would be dead by now.”
PEOPLE WITH ISSUES
In April, FBI officials warned of a disturbing series of threats dating from 2004 to college athletic officials and news organizations from someone apparently upset that television coverage of cheerleaders emphasizes those showing the least amount of skin (such as Ohio State’s, who often wear long-sleeved, jacketed outfits). According to an FBI agent interviewed by The Columbus Dispatch, the writer appears to be growing angrier and may have recently included an insecticide-like substance in letters, with the last batch predicting that, unless changes are made, there will be “88” assaults, based on the writer’s arcane formula. MTW
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