Bedbugs are infesting New York, prompting a crisis for the city as it wonders how to deal with creatures unseen for decades. Officials are under pressure from politicians to set up a bedbug task force. There is more at stake than itchy skins: angry hotel guests are starting to sue. Smug? Don’t be. The US National Pest Management Association says that the resilient critters are being exported around the world in the clothes of visitors.
Young people in Wiltshire can vote for representatives to the National Youth Parliament all this week by text. It’s an innovation intended to engage youth more in democracy. No ringtone is standing and the Whatever Party seems unrepresented, but organisers still hope for a big teen turnout.
Miss Nevada, Crystal Wosik, might have hoped for questions about world peace at the Miss America pageant in Las Vegas. Instead, she was asked, cruelly, how she would respond if a planned nuclear-waste dump in her state killed people. “We just have to take one for the team,” she replied chirpily, promptly losing to Miss Oklahoma. Lena Wosik, her mother, has cried foul. “They should have been asking about education,” she says.
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Hollywood has woken up to a new issue: sleep. The cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a sprightly 83 and with five Oscar nominations, thinks that we all work too hard. “This 24/7 culture must stop,” he said before a screening of his documentary Who Needs Sleep?, which opened at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. “Who is going to have time to read a book or talk to their wife?”
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Diane Keaton has dated Warren Beatty and Woody Allen, but has been talking about how happy she is, at 60, to feel liberated from sex with guys. “A lot of women are set free from the anxiety and the mortification and the humiliation of intimate relationships with men,” says the Oscar-winning actress, quoting approvingly Simone de Beauvoir’s observations about turning 50. “And thank God for that.” What can Warren and Woody have got up to?
Sources: MSNBC.com, The Bath Chronicle, AP, LAtimes.com, Huffingtonpost.com, Daily News (New York)