Saudi Arabian officials have "detained" a vulture on accusations of being a spy for Israel, media reports say.
Speaking of the naive and the feral, one edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn has had the word "nigger" replaced with "slave". That's one editor who needed a thesaurus for Xmas. Slave is not a synonym for Nigger. The Telegraph points out that it isn't the first time Sam Clemens has been whitewashed by nervous revisionists:
In this Twain-targeting censorship, it was not the word “nigger” that was airbrushed from history, but a cigar. In recent years, Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! – a one-man show in which Holbrook dolls himself up to look like Twain and recites his classic texts – has become increasingly difficult to stage, even impossible in some American states. Why? Because Holbrook spends virtually the entire 90 minutes of the play chomping on a cigar, just as Twain did for most of his life, and these days smoking in public is considered even more morally depraved than uttering the N-word.
