Lead Stories
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Kriss Worthington, a member of the city council of Berkeley, California, announced in April that he would propose a reparations package to heal wounds from social and political unrest dating back to the 1960s. Included were proposals for official apologies to Vietnam war protesters and to Patricia Hearst Shaw. Worthington also suggested that the city erect a statue of Shaw carrying a gun and declare the house in Worthington’s district from which she was abducted a historic site.
In February a 52-year-old woman in Hong Kong turned her husband’s body over to authorities after he had been dead for a week; she said she had hoped that he would revive. And in January authorities in Thunder Bay, Ontario, recovered the body of an 85-year-old man who died four years ago. It was discovered in a house that one officer called “a tremendous biological soup of garbage and debris.” Neighbors had noticed a smell but did not think it was bad enough to report.
A February Science News article profiled University of South Florida pollution microbiologist Joan B. Rose, who flushes bacteriophages down toilets and sends crews into local waterways to track where they end up. She has found that some germs can seep into nearby canals within 11 hours.
News of the Weird reported in 1993 that a cafe in Santa Monica was selling coffee produced from choice beans that had been through the digestive tract of a Sumatran marsupial for $130 a pound. A March Wall Street Journal story from Vietnam described a coffee made from beans harvested from the feces of the civet cat, whose skill in finding the finest coffee beans in a field is said to be uncanny. The coffee is getting harder to find because Vietnamese diners have developed a taste for the civet cat.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Shawn Belschwender.
