Vallejo, Calif. – Two wayward whales passed under a bridge and entered San Francisco Bay on Tuesday evening after being lost in inland waterways.
The humpback and her calf, who have sojourned for more than two weeks in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, passed under the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge on Tuesday afternoon, the next-to-last bridge along the pair’s route.
If the humpbacks can navigate south around a peninsula and an island, few obstacles would remain on their route past Al catraz Island to the Golden Gate, the strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean.
Lesions that had formed on the humpbacks’ skin over the weekend appeared to be sloughing off, apparently due to the saltier water, biologists said.
Additional nation/world news briefs:
PETERSBURG, Ky.
Creation Museum draws thousands
A museum that tells the Bible’s version of Earth’s history – that the planet was created in a single week just a few thousand years ago – attracted thousands to its opening as protesters rallied outside.
The dozens of demonstrators argued Monday that the Creation Museum’s central tenets conflict with scientific evidence that Earth is several billion years old. Overhead, an airplane pulled a banner with the message: “Thou Shalt Not Lie.”
The privately funded museum had more than 4,000 guests on opening day, said Mark Looy, a co-founder of the $27 million facility 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati. The parking lot was filled with vehicles from dozens of states.
The museum features high- tech exhibits designed by a theme-park artist, including animatronic dinosaurs and a wooden ark, plus a special-effects theater and planetarium.
Some exhibits show dinosaurs aboard Noah’s Ark and assert that all animals were vegetarians until Adam committed the first sin in the Garden of Eden.
MELBOURNE, Australia
Gay bar can turn away lesbians, heterosexuals
A gay bar has won the right to turn away heterosexuals and lesbians to provide a nonthreatening atmosphere for the men partying inside.
A tribunal in Australia’s southern Victoria state granted Melbourne’s Peel Hotel an exemption to equal-rights laws, saying it was needed to prevent “sexually based insults and violence” aimed at the pub’s patrons.
The tribunal’s deputy president, Cate McKenzie, said Monday that to allow large numbers of straight men and women and lesbians into the bar could “undermine or destroy” the convivial atmosphere that the Peel Hotel sought to create for gay men.
DAMASCUS, Syria
Assad wins another 7 years as president
President Bashar Assad won another seven years in office, getting 97 percent of the vote in a referendum on his leadership in which he was the only candidate, according to results announced Tuesday.
The United States sarcastically noted Assad’s “ability to have defeated exactly zero other candidates.”
