KINGSTON, Wash. (AP) — A woman who found a prosthetic leg on a Washington state beach has returned it to its owner.
Hannah Listle posted information on Facebook about the prosthetic she found while looking for shells Sunday at Point No Point beach.
KOMO reports (http://is.gd/YmGyJc) Megan Smith of Poulsbo gratefully claimed the leg Monday. She said she and her husband had been swimming Saturday night when she realized the leg was gone.
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Information from: KOMO-TV, http://www.komotv.com/
Customers walk outside a Honest Tea booth (Yahoo! News)For the second year in a row, residents of our nation’s capital have proven themselves the most likely to steal a dollar from your pocket. At least, that’s according to one unusual new study, which found Washington, D.C. to be the least honest city or state in the nation.
The makers of Honest Tea conducted the survey, which involved setting up an unmanned booth with bottles of their product on display. Customers were asked to use the honor system and leave $1 for each bottle of tea they took.
In the end, 80 percent of Washingtonians paid for their beverage. But that was still far less than the national average of 92 percent.
“As a company, Honest Tea values transparency,” National Honesty Index spokesman Dan Forman told Yahoo! News. “To touch on this, the company thought creating a light-hearted social experiment that takes a look at honest in America would be a good way to start a conversation about honesty and how society values it. “
And to add to the irony of the experiment, Honest Tea CEO Seth Goldman said he had his bike stolen while traveling to the D.C. booth. He said he had even chained the bike up before leaving it for a few hours.
Now, a tea test is far from the final word on a city or state’s total measurement of honesty. But this is not the only study to find D.C. atop some less than ideal rankings. For example, a 2012 study found that workers in D.C. curse on the job more than of their colleagues around the nation .
This is the fourth year that Honest Tea has conducted their little experiment, during which they visited all 50 states and 61 locations in total.
Alabama and Hawaii tied for the most honest states, where 100 percent of customers paid for their tea.
West Virginia was considered the second least honest state, with 85 percent of people paying for their tea.
Still, as Forman notes, a large majority of Americans paid for their drinks even in those so-called least honest states.
“We were delighted to see that people in the U.S. were so honest,” he said. “There is so much negative rhetoric put out there. It’s encouraging to know that in reality, when faced with a choice to do the right thing or steal, 92 percent of people in the U.S. chose to do the right thing.”
Forman says the company will continue to tweak its honesty tests in future years to better measure how people respond to various scenarios testing their responses.
The full state rankings:
Achieving gender-neutral language is no small task, says a Washington state lawmaker from Seattle. (Thinkstock …In Washington state, the word "freshman" is out. And "first-year student" is in. In total, 40,000 words have been changed as part of an effort to rid state statutes of gender-biased language.
The bill, signed into law earlier in the year by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee, went into effect this week.
And it was no small task. "This was a much larger effort than I had envisioned. Mankind means man and woman," Democratic state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles of Seattle told Reuters.
"Fisherman" is now a "fisher." "Penmanship" is called "handwriting." And "manhole cover" is, well, still "manhole cover." Some words don’t have an easy replacement.
Others do: "His" is now “his and hers.” "Clergyman" is now "clergy." "Journeyman plumber" is now “journey-level plumber,” according to the Daily Mail.
According to Reuters, Washington is the fourth state to officially remove gender-biased language from the law. Others are Florida, North Carolina and Illinois. Nine other states are considering similar gender-neutral laws.
"Words matter," Liz Watson, a National Women's Law Center senior adviser, told Reuters. "This is important in changing hearts and minds."
France recently officially banned the term "mademoiselle" from official documents. The Gallic term means "miss," and French officials contended it forced women to acknowledge their marital status.
The French also bid adieu to "maiden name," which they dismissed as "archaic." They should know: Paris only recently got rid of a law that banned women from wearing pants.
Unlike the Washington snows of yesteryear - "Snowmageddon" and "Snowpocalypse" in 2010 and 2011 - Wednesday's storm failed to bring the heavy snows and high winds forecast. Before its arrival, wags dubbed this storm "Snowquester" after the budget-cutting sequester that went into effect last week.
As the storm damply spun itself out, the National Weather Service's storm warnings were downgraded to watches, then advisories, and ultimately were canceled. With temperatures just above freezing, a soupy slush covered many roadways by evening rush hour, a sparse affair with little traffic.
While most federal offices were closed to the public, with many government workers authorized to telecommute, those who made it to work offered a bit of snark.
"I realize we are under horrendous snow conditions. I think it's up to half an inch now," Senator Patrick Leahy told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. In his home state of Vermont, he said, there was once a weather forecast calling for "a dusting of snow, no more than five or six inches."
Senator John McCain, one of several Republicans joining President Barack Obama for dinner on Wednesday, joked, "I have a dog sled ready to go to be able to get there because of these terrible weather conditions that we're under."
CANCELLING A SNOWBALL FIGHT
It has almost become a tradition to dump on Washington's neurotic response to winter weather. Obama himself did it barely a week after his first inauguration in January 2009, when his daughters' school was canceled due to icy conditions.
"As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never canceled," the new president said, adding that he would have to instill "some flinty Chicago toughness" into Washingtonians: "When it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things."
The decision to declare a snow day for the federal government is made by the Office of Personnel Management in consultation with the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Administration. For this storm, the alert went out at 3:29 a.m., before a flake had fallen in most areas.
A young tradition in the U.S. capital is a snowball fight in the DuPont Circle neighborhood, a few blocks from the White House. There wasn't enough snow to make that possible this time, and organizers were not amused.
"Well, that's all folks," the Washington DC Snowball Fight Association posted at mid-afternoon, after the predicted five to eight inches of snow failed to materialize. "Sadly, the Noquester promised much & delivered nada. So DCSFA is returning to hibernation mode until next winter."
School children in suburban Maryland just outside Washington had slightly better luck with snowballs, though not with sledding.
"It's good packing," said 10-year-old Jason Kaplan after a snowball fight. But sleds and inner tubes didn't work on slushy local hillsides.
"The sledding was just not working. It (the slush) stuck to the bottom of the sled," said Andy Blower, 11.
"There was a lot of mud," said Kaplan.
The Capital Weather Gang blog, billed on the Washington Post website as "the inside scoop on weather in the D.C. area and beyond," got some heavy online criticism. ? "#Snowquester perfect name: Advertised as epic disaster. Verifies as annoying disruptive flop no one can agree on. @capitalweather," Bethany_Usher posted on Twitter.
(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko, additional reporting by Lawrence Hurley, Rachelle Younglai, Timothy Ryan and Diane Bartz; Editing by Karey Van Hall and Phil Berlowitz)
