Two interesting articles found in the on-line edition of the Fortean Times. They're not as scholarly as they claim, but entertaining to read.

The first covers the spiritial aspects of shapeshifting stories with a Carl Jung viewpoint. The second article speculates the Seal people myths (who shed their seal skins to become people) in Scotland may have been modeled after an aboriginal sea kayaking tribe.

The fine folks at MIT surgically merged an Ethernet switch and a teddy bear. The bear now has glowing power/uplink eyes, an ethernet jack in each paw, and a Matrix-style uplink in the back of its neck. It's neat }:>.

Main project page is here.
A cool close-up of the bear is here.

To follow up on an earlier article on Flayrah, the San Francisco Chronicle has an interview with Dennis Hwang, the creator of the cute Google doodles:

During the Olympics, when a speed-skating fox, a bear pushing a curling stone and other cutesy images adorned the "Google" logo on the popular Internet search engine, hundreds of users wrote in to compliment the art department.

That provoked a lot of laughs at Google headquarters, because the "art department" actually is just one guy: Dennis Hwang, a 23-year-old Web programmer who whips up the doodles in his spare time, usually for holidays.

A high school teacher in Wichita, Kansas, had used rats before to demonstrate the eating habits of the classroom snakes, but a similar experement with puppies had to be halted because the pupils became very upset by the idea.
The puppies were destined to be put down by the local pound, but a member of the school board adopted them and gave them to the teacher, Matthew Patton, for snake food because he "hates to see any life wasted".
The school acknowledged that while most people don't mind seeing a rat go, "When you have soft, cuddly puppies there are people who get real concerned."

So, you find a man selling an ocelot in the capital of Bolivia. You confiscate what turns out to be a highly abused animal, alert the Forestry Police, only to find he was let off with no charges because they can't be bothered going through the long and expensive process of bringing him to court.
That's the story, and officals are just throwing up their hands and saying 'we can't be bothered' when it comes to preventing people from removing animals from the wild to keep or sell.
Theoretically Bolivia has been signed on with CITES since the 70's, and outlawed trade in wild animals internally since the 90's, but in practice, there is little indication of these laws. It's usual for people in the country to have pet parrots or monkeys, or to hunt local wildlife, so most people don't see the problem with selling or hunting these endangered animals.