Time to brainstorm! Japan’s newest panda needs a name.
Officials in Tokyo, Japan’s capital, say they will start collecting suggestions this week for the name of their not-so-giant giant panda cub. The cub was born on June 12. It lives in Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo.
About 420 giant pandas live in captivity. About 1,860 live in the wild. All of them belong to China—even the cub in Tokyo. The cub will have to move to China eventually. It will receive its name when it is about 100 days old.
(AP Photo: The cub gets a checkup on July 22 at Ueno Zoo.)
An Alaskan village is saying a sad goodbye to its purrfect mayor—a yellow cat named Stubbs.
Only about 900 people live in Talkeetna, Alaska. They elected Stubbs mayor in1998. Stubbs’s name wasn’t on the ballot. People wrote it in. In fact, Talkeetna isn't big enough to have a human mayor. Stubbs's position was honorary. Stubbs’s owners say the friendly, 20-year-old cat died Thursday night. Stubbs’s old job may go to a kitten named Denali. (AP Photo: Stubbs, the honorary feline mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, walks out of the West Rib Bar and Grill in town.)
It’s hot out. Don’t you just want to roll out of bed, walk to your closet, and put on a suit and tie?
No? French lawmakers probably don’t want to either.
France’s parliament is kind of like the U.S. Congress. It has two parts—the Senate and the National Assembly. In 2008, the Assembly started requiring men to wear jackets and ties to work. Good thing for them, parliamentary authorities just changed the rules. Now legislators can leave their fancy (and hot) clothes at home.
(AP Photo: French politician Jean-Luc Melenchon, center with no tie, attends the opening session the National Assembly in Paris.)
You never know what you might find in your grandma’s attic. Some great-grandchildren near Boston found this—a sword from the Civil War! It belonged to their distant relative, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.
People have been looking for this particular sword for a long time. Colonel Shaw was the commanding officer of the Civil War’s first all-black, Northern regiment. After Colonel Shaw was killed in battle, Confederate soldiers took his clothes and belongings. That explains why this sword’s handle looks like it has been used. Mr. Shaw used it just twice. But a Confederate probably fought with it for the rest of the war. Swords as nice as this one didn’t exist in the Confederacy back then. To a soldier from the South, this would have been quite a treasure!
(AP Photo: The sword belonging to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was stolen after Shaw was killed. That was during the 54th Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry's attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863. Like all officers in all-black regiments, Colonel Shaw was white.)
