THE ivory-billed woodpecker is not large, as birds go: It is about the size of a crow, but flashier, its claim to fame is that, though it had been thought extinct since 1944, a lone kayaker spotted it about two years ago, flying around among the cypress trees in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. And that sighting may prove the death-blow to a $319m irrigation project in the Arkansas corner of the Delta.
AMERICA's churches are nothing if not nimble. You might think that they would be up in arms about “The Da Vinci Code”. Dan Brown's novel has sold well over 40m copies in 44 languages; the film version of the novel, which is being released around the world on May 19th, will reach millions more; and yet Mr Brown's message is about as heretical as you can get.
“The Da Vinci Code” holds that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a daughter; that the Bible was put together by a fourth-century Roman emperor with a thing against women; that the Catholic Church is a criminal conspiracy.
"THE United States is a damned country that deserves only to be cursed. It declares its own occupation of our lands legitimate, but brands our resistance as terrorists.”.This was not the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, speaking 20 years ago, when his country was a pariah and he was the butt of international scorn.
The words were spoken only last month, by the Libyan parliament's deputy speaker, Ahmed Ibrahim, at a gathering in Tripoli, Libya's capital, to commemorate its bombing by American aircraft in 1986.
EVERY time Germany wins football's World Cup, some pundits assert, the country takes a turn for the better. Thus 1954 saw the start of the economic miracle, 1974 the birth of modern Germany and 1990 unification.
The causality seems implausible, although some economists are talking up the 2006 tournament, which starts this weekend, and is being staged (like 1974's) in Germany. A clearer link exists between the country and its football association (DFB), since they display similar strengths and weaknesses.
Saharan desert ants of the genus Cataglyphis have to travel long distances to discover food in their impoverished, sandy environment. How they find their way home once they have done so is a mystery.
Ants in more temperate climates often lay down chemical trails, but Cataglyphis, apparently, does not. Like honeybees and ancient mariners, they can navigate by the sun, so they know the general direction in which to travel. But, also like ancient mariners (who knew their latitude, but not their longitude), such solar reckoning cannot tell them when to stop.
UNLIKE many recent political documentaries, “An Inconvenient Truth” does not aim its fiercest fire at George Bush. Surprising this, especially as the film stars Al Gore, the man whom President Bush narrowly beat to the White House in 2000.
Instead, Davis Guggenheim, the film's director, tries to rise above American politics, addressing his film, which is to be shown at the Cannes film festival later this month, to the whole of the human race.
THE words “probate exception” do not titillate. And yet a saucy, decade-long legal battle over a fortune of nearly half a billion dollars hinges on this clause, which deals with the boundaries between state and federal courts in estate disputes.
At issue is whether Vickie Lynn Marshall, a former Playboy pin-up and exotic dancer better known as Anna Nicole Smith, will get anything from the estate of her late husband, J. Howard Marshall, an oil tycoon with assets estimated at $1.6 billion.
On May 1st, Ms Smith won an important victory. Although her inheritance remains uncertain, the United States Supreme Court (no less) unanimously ruled that she could pursue her case in federal court. One suspects the justices were enjoying themselves, for once.
SILVIO BERLUSCONI says it was a rigged contest that his side won. Not Italy's election: its football championship. His team, AC Milan, finished second in both the past two seasons to Juventus.
