Strange BUT TRUE

• It was world-renowned American photographer Ansel Adams who made the following sage observation: “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

• You might be surprised to learn that the blood of a grasshopper is white.

• Tacumbu prison in Asuncion, Paraguay, is notorious for its overcrowded conditions: 3,500 inmates are crowded into a space designed for half that number, and many of them sleep on cardboard directly on the floor. One inmate, however, until recently enjoyed amenities that many outside the prison walls would love to have. Drug trafficker Chimenes Pavao bribed officials to look the other way, then set up a fully furnished, tastefully decorated three-room suite, complete with air conditioning, a refrigerator, a library, a flat-screen TV, a DVD player and a treadmill. The luxury cell was discovered when a bomb threat caused police to search the entire prison.

• If you’ve ever been the victim of a purse-snatching, here’s a discouraging bit of information: Those who study such things say that four out of five perpetrators get away.

• In 1804 our planet hit a milestone: a population of 1 billion people. It took 123 years to add another billion, then only 33 more to get to 3 billion, in 1960. We crossed the 4 billion mark in 1974, hit 5 billion in 1987, and got to 6 billion in 1999. In 2011 (or early 2012, depending on who’s doing the estimating, the earth’s population passed 7 billion, and those who study such things expect us to get to 8 billion sometime in the mid- to late 2020s.

••• Thought for the Day: “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

— Benjamin Franklin