People behaving badly...

...or, as the bumper sticker says, "Mean People Suck."

New Scientist tells us that declaring a species to be endangered can be hazardous to its health:

Merely declaring that a species is endangered could be enough to sign its death warrant, thanks to the human penchant for collecting rarities.

[...]

This is just the incentive unscrupulous hunters need to track down the last few individuals, say Franck Courchamp and colleagues at the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France.

 

And this one's been all over the Internet as well as on the traditional news, so everyone's surely seen it by now. A homeowners' association in Colorado has backed off, resigned, and gone into hiding after initially demanding a $25/day fine for display of a peace-symbol–shaped wreath. From the New York Times:

The fines have been dropped, and the three-member board of the association has resigned, according to an e-mail message sent to residents on Monday. Two board members have disconnected their telephones, apparently to escape the waves of callers asking what the board could have been thinking, residents said. The third board member, with a working phone, did not return a call for comment.

In its original letter to the couple, Lisa Jensen and Bill Trimarco, the association said some neighbors had found the peace symbol politically "divisive." A board member later told a newspaper that he thought the familiar circle with angled lines was also, perhaps, a sign of the devil.

Whenever I think I couldn't be more amazed by stupid or vile behaviour, something happens to jar me back to reality.