Bears Burn Forest
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Smokey Bear might have stern words for some of his Alaskan cousins. Brown bears pawing through debris at a land fill on Alaska’s Afognak Island, about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage, touched off a four-acre wildfire earlier this week, officials reported.
“I haven’t actually heard of bears doing anything like this,”
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/05/31/bears.fire.reut/index.html
Teller Talks About Jackasses
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When I first heard the story, it went like this: One winter night a thirteen-year-old boy was watching TV with his friends. No adults were in the house. On came a show in which a handsome hipster doused himself with gasoline, set himself afire, and danced around. The hipster was dressed in a protective fireproof suit, but the innocent boy didn’t know that. To him it looked as though soaking oneself in gasoline and setting oneself afire were safe and fun. The boy took some gasoline and a lighter into his snowy back yard and tried the stunt himself. He was gruesomely burned from head to toeβa victim of parental neglect, or irresponsible media manipulation, or maybe both.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/06/teller.htm
74 Immigrants Held for Ransom in Home
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Police found 74 suspected illegal immigrants being held for ransom in a South Los Angeles house Wednesday evening; a third of them were crammed in a small attic.
http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20010531/t000045482.html
I’m Calling My Mom!
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Pupils are using their mobile phones to call their parents during lessons to complain about their teachers, heads say. Unaware of the situation, head teachers were then finding themselves face to face with angry parents, general secretary of the National Association of Heads Teachers, David Hart, told delegates at the union’s annual conference in Harrogate.
“There are too many ‘parents from hell’ who delight in making the lives of heads and their staffs as difficult as possible.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/education/newsid_1362000/1362196.stm
Attention Spans Shorten So Much, People Forget AIDS Will Kill Them
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Young gay and bisexual men, especially in the black community, are becoming infected with HIV at rates similar to those seen when the AIDS epidemic peaked in the mid-1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. In a study released to mark the 20th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, U.S. health experts warned that the disease might be poised to make a strong comeback, particularly among gay and bisexual males between the ages of 23 and 29.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010531/ts/health_aids_dc_2.html
Republicans Get Threatening Over Defection
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In the wake of his announced defection from the Republican Party last week, soon-to-be Independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont has received a number of death threats, his spokesman said Thursday.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/05/31/jeffords.threats/index.html
Dead Thrift Store Find
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Fran Osborn considered the box carefully. It certainly wasn’t anything she’d display in her home β a modest box sealed in faux-black-marble shelf paper, with the initials M.P.G. written in rhinestones. But it intrigued her. She shook it. It rattled. Probably rocks, her husband said. “Jewelry,” she thought, and she decided to gamble. So Ms. Osborn carried it to the counter at the Genesis Thrift Store on Oak Lawn Avenue, paid a dollar plus sales tax and carted the mystery package to the car…Inside the box, Ms. Osborn found a second box with a tag on top. On the tag was a name: Millard P. Griffin, and the words Metrocrest Funeral Home, Carrollton. And in that second box lay the cremated remains of Mr. Griffin, a Dallas resident who died on July 10, 1996, at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
http://www.dallasnews.com/metro/stories/380416_newashes_30met.html