Heroes and villains

🐶 Kristi Noem | ⛪️ AI priest | 🐝 Bee monster

3 May 2024

Heroes and villains

Kristi Noem. Brandon Bell/Getty

Hero
Kristi Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, who may go down as “one of the most unifying politicians of her generation”, says Chris Truax in The Hill. Until last week, the 52-year-old was a contender to be Donald Trump’s running mate. But in a new memoir, Noem recounts how she once shot dead Cricket, a 14-month-old puppy, because it had misbehaved on a hunting trip and killed some chickens on the way home. “I hated that dog,” she wrote. “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done.” Noem was immediately denounced “across the political spectrum” – proof, at last, that “there are some things that unite us regardless of politics”.

Villain
A “monster” that a little girl in North Carolina claimed she heard lurking in her bedroom cupboard, which turned out to be 50,000 bees. The swarm had been building its hive inside the wall for around eight months. The girl’s mother, Ashley Massis Class, tells The Guardian it was “like a horror movie” when the pest control agent knocked a hole in the plaster. “There were streams of bees, and the wall where he hit was oozing honey. But it looked like blood because it was really, really dark, running down my daughter’s pink walls.”

Hero
Darren Reitz, an amateur angler in Essex who landed a 143lb catfish – thought to be the largest fish ever caught on a rod in freshwater in Britain. The 34-year-old had spent six hours at Chigborough Lakes Nature Reserve without catching a thing. But at 10pm, the alarm on his rod went off, and after a 50-minute struggle he managed to reel the monster in. “It took four of us to get it out,” he tells The Times. “I couldn’t believe it, I told myself, ‘No, this is impossible, look at the flipping size.’ I couldn’t even lift it.”

Villain
Father Justin, a computer-generated priest designed to answer questions about Catholicism, who has been defrocked by his owners for going rogue. Created by the California advocacy group Catholic Answers, the devout droid was found to have simulated a virtual confession – all the way to giving absolution and a penance – and claimed that babies could, in an emergency, be baptised with the sports drink Gatorade rather than water.

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