Monday, April 28, 2014
ODDLY ENOUGH
Half-eaten cinnamon roll leads police to car thief
MADISON, Wis.
A half-eaten cinnamon roll helped Madison police track down a suspected car thief.
The car was stolen last Monday about 4:30 a.m. The driver parked at a hotel with the key in the ignition, and when he walked inside, he heard his car start up. Surveillance video got a glimpse of the suspect, who was seen eating something.
A police officer found a half-eaten cinnamon roll in the parking lot. He went to a nearby restaurant that sells similar pastries, and a staffer there described the customer.
The staffer also noted that the man had been dropped off by a Sun Prairie police officer, after the friend who’d been driving him was arrested on a charge of drunken driving. Sun Prairie police helped the Madison officer locate the 26-year-old suspect.
Former Iron Curtain still a barrier for red deer
PRAGUE
The Iron Curtain was traced by an electrified barbed-wire fence that isolated the communist world from the West.
It was an impenetrable Cold War barrier — and for some inhabitants of the Czech Republic, it still is.
Deer still balk at crossing the border with Germany, even though the physical fence came down a quarter century ago, new studies show.
Czechoslovakia, where the communists took power in 1948, had three parallel electrified fences, patrolled by heavily armed guards. Nearly 500 people were killed when they attempted to escape communism.
Deer also were victims of the barrier. A seven-year study in the Czech Republic’s Sumava National Park showed that the original Iron Curtain line still deters one species, red deer, from crossing.
“It was fascinating to realize for the first time that anything like that is possible,” said Pavel Sustr, a biologist who led the Czech project. Scientists conducting research on German territory reached similar conclusions.
The average life expectancy for deer is 15 years, and none living now would have encountered the barrier.
“But the border still plays a role for them and separates the two populations,” Sustr said. He said the research showed the animals stick to traditional life patterns, returning every year to the same places. “Fawns follow mothers for the first year of their life and learn from them where to go.”
Wildlife officials recorded the movement of some 300 Czech and German deer with GPS-equipped collars which sent data to computers.
“I don’t think it’s a surprising result,” said professor Ludek Bartos of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. “These animals are really conservative.”
Associated Press