“They cut my beard and forced me to eat it,” and more

“They cut my beard and forced me to eat it”

Two Kentucky men have pled guilty to forcing a man to eat his own beard. Victim Harvey Westmoreland says former friends James Hill and Troy Holt started a drunken argument with him, and that “before I knowed [sic] it, there were knives and guns, and everything just went haywire.” In a rage, he says, “they cut my beard and forced me to eat it.” The beard has since partially grown back, says Westmoreland, but “it’s not as long as it was.”

Porpoises save Dick Van Dyke from drowning

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Dick Van Dyke says a pod of porpoises saved him from drowning. The 84-year-old actor says that on a beach vacation in Virginia, he dozed off on his surfboard and “woke up out of sight of land.” When a number of fins broke the surface of the water around him, Van Dyke says he thought, “‘I’m dead,’” but “they turned out to be porpoises, and they pushed me all the way to shore.”

Zoo officials separate gay male vultures

Officials at a German zoo are defending their decision to separate a pair of gay male vultures so that one of them can be mated with a female. The vultures, both 14, have been nesting together for the past few months, say keepers at the Allwetter Zoo, and gay-rights groups say the pair should be allowed to continue their relationship. But curator Dirk Wewers says the zoo is in dire need of baby vultures, and that the two males “weren’t happy as a gay couple anyway. The other vultures picked on them and stole their nest materials.”