The U.S. Army has modified a digital war game in its exhibit at Wisconsin’s Summerfest, after complaints from peace activists. In its original form, the game Virtual Army Experience let festivalgoers as young as 13 jump into a Humvee simulator and mow down life-sized virtual people with a machine gun. The group Peace Action Wisconsin complained, saying that a family-oriented summer fair should not provide “opportunities to practice shooting people.” Army technicians tweaked the game to replace the “terrorists” with inanimate targets.
Officials in Grand Junction, Colo., are reporting a huge spike in pregnancy rates every year after the annual Country Jam country-and-western festival. New pregnancies typically quadruple in the weeks following the festival, Wanda Scott of the Mesa County Nurse-Family Partnership told the county commission last week, and “we could literally use eight more nurses.” Commissioner Janet Rowland replied, “I don’t know what else we could do at this point short of putting birth control in the water at Country Jam.”
