Around the Globe

The hazards of a warm winter

Moscow has had an unusually mild winter and its emergency response teams are on full alert. Temperatures in February averaged 10M-!F above normal. Already, at least 10 Muscovites have been stranded on breakaway ice flows while fishing on rivers and ponds. Andrei Molozin, fire department spokesman said, "It's spring. Ice melts. It's a simple principle." According to Molozin, "Sometimes people get very involved in their sport."

South Korean trash bag laws liberalized

Years of South Koreans' complaints about regulations mandating transparent trash bags have paid off. Starting in May, citizens will be able to opt for opaque trash bags that will conceal its contents, therefore guarding the privacy of their garbage, according to an environment ministry spokesman.

Polish boomerang returns after 20,000 years

A 20,000-year-old ivory boomerang was recently found in Poland. According to Nature magazine, "Its ingenious form points to a long tradition of making weapons of this kind; the carver was clearly drawing on long-accumulated knowledge in the working of this difficult material." The boomerang could travel up to 200 feet, and flew best into the wind.

Weirdness down two percent

According to London's Fortean Times, a journal of odd phenomena, 1994 "was officially two percent less strange than 1993." The magazine's strangeness index quantifies the weird into 34 different categories. Bob Rikard, the journal's founder, said that there were no recorded examples of spontaneous human combustion in 1994, although this weirdness decline was balanced out by the rainstorm which dumped thousands of small fish on the Australian outback.

Horoscope readers take note

The night skies now contain 13 instead of 12 constellations, Jacqueline Mitton, public relations officer for Britain's Royal Astronomical Society, announced. The new constellation is a result of changes in the tilt of the earth. People born between Nov. 30 and Dec. 17 will be in the new zodiac group, Ophiuchus (the serpent). Other groups have shifted dates. "The whole thing is a farce. Astrologers for hundreds of years haven't used the constellations. That's the first thing astronomers don't seem to know," Lloyd Cope, financial columnist for Dell Horoscope Magazine, said.

-- Compilied by Michael Rubin from The Philadelphia Enquirer and Insight magazine.

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