Word: deading
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What is killing the octopus of Vila Nova de Gaia? That question has obsessed the Portuguese city - located just across the Douro River from Porto - since Jan. 2, when 1,100 lb. (500 kg) of dead octopus were found on a 1.8-mile (3 km) stretch of local beach. The following day, another 110 lb. (50 kg) appeared; later there was just one expired creature. "It's very strange that so many should be killed, and in such a confined area," says Nuno Oliveira, director of the Gaia Biological Park, a nature refuge on the outskirts of Vila Nova...
...Twelve hundred pounds is a lot of dead cephalopod, especially when no one seems to know for sure what killed them. Local biologists have ruled out pollution or contamination because no other species were affected. And although some suggest that perhaps a boat, illegally fishing the multilegged creatures, threw them overboard in a panicked attempt to avoid detection, that possibility also seems unlikely. "The sea has been very rough," says Oliveira. "No one has been out fishing for days." (See pictures of 10 animal species nearing extinction...
...After issuing multiple warnings that no townspeople should take the carcasses home for dinner (boiled octopus - perhaps sprinkled with a touch of paprika - is a Portuguese delicacy), Vila Nova de Gaia's municipal government had firefighters gather up the dead animals; many will be sent to Lisbon's veterinary lab for testing, a process that is expected to take up to two weeks...
...this for Avatar: it has passion and ambition and a daffy, almost heroic, dead seriousness. Which is to say it's one megabudget Hollywood epic that feels as if it was made by a human, not assembled by cyborgs. Maybe some of the folks paying inflated prices for the 3-D IMAXed Avatar are doing so out of social obligation to see what they've heard the rest of the world is seeing. But what they're getting is a personal vision. Not a religious experience; rather a mass hallucination - an elevated, persuasive fiction, a thing that...
...better, Maalim says she risked her life to reach Yemen several months after her husband fled Somalia using the same route. Now squatting in the home of a Somali community leader in Bassatine - an African slum outside Yemen's southern port of Aden - she says her husband is probably dead, most likely never having made it to shore. She was nearing the end of her pregnancy when a Somali community leader took her in off the street a few weeks ago and she delivered the baby in a local clinic. She has eight other children who remain in Somalia with...