Free Republic

A pair of orcas killing great white sharks by ripping open their torsos for their livers — and as a result scaring away great whites from a South African region — has raised questions about whether that could happen along Cape Cod. But it’s “really too early to say” if killer whales will descend upon the Massachusetts coast and drive away the growing great white shark population, a local shark expert tells the Herald. “When there have been orca sightings here through the years, they’ve never really seemed to impact the white sharks in the area,” said John Chisholm, who...

More than 50,000 people have signed a petition accusing Disney of “colonialism and robbery” after it trademarked the Swahili phrase “hakuna matata”. The expression means “no problem” in Swahili, which is spoken across east Africa and is a national language of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The petition, which calls on Disney to drop its trademark, precedes the release of the company’s motion capture remake of The Lion King next summer, which will be voiced by Beyoncé, Donald Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The phrase was popularised in 1982 by the Kenyan band Them Mushrooms, whose...

The United Nations Says We Should All Be Eating Insects The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a part of the United Nations, has released a report saying that we should all get ready to start eating insects. There’s a certain amount of truth in the report but not all that much: “ World population is slated to top nine billion by 2050, and seeing as how arable land is being rapidly swallowed by towns and cities, oceans are increasingly overfished, and climate change is disrupting traditional farming, a new United Nations study proposes a twist on Marie Antoinette’s dietary advice:...