We Don't Want Your Kind 'Round Here
Think of how we regard the old lady with seventy cats or the man in the park who spends all day feeding pigeons, and you may get an idea of how other chimps in the Antwerp Zoo perceive Cheetah. Cheetah, a male chimpanzee, was raised by a human family and now responds better to human contact than normal social interaction with his peers. In response to Cheetah's social difficulties, the Antwerp Zoo is urging visitors not to bond with the chimp and not to spend too much time staring at him, hoping that isolation from people will force Cheetah to relate to the seven other apes. The zoo has posted a sign on Cheetah's enclosure asking patrons to "Look away when an animal seeks to make contact with you, or take a step back. Some individuals are more interested with visitors than their own kind." While the visitors may enjoy Cheetah's affection, sometimes when we love someone, we have to set them free.
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We Sold Our Soul For Rock
When it comes to illegal stones, diamonds are so last decade. When a man of the 21st century really wants to impress his friends with an ethically questionable rock, he goes for a meteorite smuggled from North Africa. Apparently, these hot hunks of space rock are fetching sky-high prices from collectors eager to own a piece of 4.5 billion-year-old history. But scientists are most displeased with this new black market: "The commercial value of meteorites has now been realized," Caroline Smith, curator of the meteorite collection in London's Natural History Museum told the BBC. "It has affected our work because we are now competing against private collectors to obtain material for our research." Museums and other research institutions are now turning down meteorites with questionable histories for fear that they may have been illegally purchased, and some places are banning North African meteorites altogether. Nouadhibou, a city in Mauritania, has become the epicenter of the black meteorite market; shipping companies have learned to look the other way as meteorites make their way to America, reports first-time smuggler John Thorne. And when the rocks arrive, they may be sold at a handsome price to a wealthy collector...or they might get hawked for ten bucks on eBay.
Head Case
Girls at the Children's Village School in Mexico City: Be very glad they're not burning witches any more. If they were, surely a present-day Goody Proctor would have been held culpable for the seemingly inexplicable epidemic of fever and nausea that plagued the school for several months earlier this year. None of the tests performed on the 600 affected students pointed to a physical cause, and doctors now believe that the girls are suffering from a mass psychogenic disorder, i.e., collective hysteria. Initially, Sisters at the Roman Catholic boarding school believed that the children were lying to get attention, but doctors say there have been 80 documented cases of mass hysteria around the world. They tend to occur in isolated communities, such as this school, where children are not allowed to call their parents and only see their families 35 days out of the year. The school also enforces strict discipline, but the Sisters pride themselves on forming character and giving students confidence. Still some parents suggest that if the students could talk to their parents, say, once a month, they might not be as prone to crippling psychosomatic illness.