ODDLY ENOUGH

ODDLY ENOUGH

German town stops playing kids’ song after complaint

BERLIN

A town in Germany has stopped playing a popular children’s song about a fox who steals a goose after a complaint from a vegan.

Limburg’s town spokesman Johannes Laubach told the dpa news agency Thursday a local woman had asked the mayor to remove the tune from the town hall’s mechanical carillon.

Laubach said the mayor had temporarily granted her request. The carillon – a series of bells – has a repertoire of 33 tunes, including 15 German children’s songs, that are played several times a day.

The Frankfurter Neue Presse newspaper reports the woman was upset by being reminded of the song’s words – “the hunter’s going to get you with his gun,” rather than by the fox’s theft of the goose.

Army drone that vanished is found in Colorado

DENVER

An Army drone that disappeared on a training flight in southern Arizona has been found about 600 miles away in Colorado, and the military is trying to figure out how it got there.

Officials at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., say a hiker found the $1.5 million Shadow drone stuck in a tree in the mountains west of Denver on Thursday. It was missing a wing.

Soldiers lost contact with the drone at Fort Huachuca nine days earlier. A search failed to find it, and the Army concluded it probably crashed and disintegrated in the area.

Officials say the 450-pound drone has a 20-foot wingspan and can fly for eight or nine hours.

Soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state had gone to the Arizona post to train with the aircraft.

Too much self-tanner? Orange gator puzzles some

HANAHAN, S.C.

No one seems to know why there’s an orange alligator in a pond near Charleston.

Residents joke the gator used too much self-tanning lotion. Or maybe it’s a fan of the Clemson Tigers, who are known for their orange colors.

Residents living near the pond in Hanahan say they’ve seen the orange or rust-colored alligator a number of times. Photos show the 4- to 5-foot-long alligator on the banks of a retention pond at the Tanner Plantation neighborhood.

Jay Butfiloski with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources says the color may come from where the animal spent the winter, perhaps in a rusty steel culvert pipe.

Experts say the alligator will shed its skin and probably return to a normal shade soon.

Associated Press