Lead Story
La Fromagerie Boivin, a cheese company in Quebec City, announced in October that it was abandoning efforts to find about 1,700 pounds of missing cheese in a fjord about 125 miles away. Boivin had submerged the cheese, worth more than $40,000, last year in hopes of giving it a unique flavor, but diving teams and sophisticated tracking gear had proved unable to locate it again. (Canadian authorities had already questioned whether the immersion method was in accordance with food safety laws, raising the possibility that the cheese couldn’t be sold anyway.)
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In the September issue of the magazine of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, scientists from the Institute of Marine Research in Vigo, Spain, speculated on the mating practices of the giant squid, the rarely observed deep-sea mollusk that regularly reaches lengths of 40 feet (including its eight arms and feeding tentacles) and weights of 1,000 pounds. After examining the corpses of squids found washed up on Spain’s Atlantic coast, they hypothesized that the male’s disproportionately long penis (“like a high-pressure fire hose”) enabled it to inject sperm packages into the arms of the usually larger female while remaining out of range of her sharp beak. Noting, however, the presence of sperm in one male corpse’s arm, the authors suggested that the unwieldiness of the penis introduced the possibility of a male’s accidentally inseminating itself.
In New Braunfels, Texas, in November 34-year-old Robert Villarreal was sentenced to 50 years in prison after he sold drugs to the same undercover officer for the third time in a 17-year period.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Shawn Belschwender.
