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Munich's Oktoberfest roars to life as the mayor taps the first keg

MUNICH (AP) — Munich's Oktoberfest kicked off Saturday with the city's mayor tapping the first keg of beer and opening the 191st edition of the world's largest folk festival. Mayor Dominik Krause put the first keg on tap with only two strokes and the traditional cry of "O'zapft is" — or "It's been tapped." Thousands of revelers — the women dressed in Bavarian dirndls, the men in lederhosen — stormed the beer tents on Munich's Theresienwiese fairground in the morning to get a good spot on the benches. To the sounds of brass music and the taste of freshly tapped beer, they soon ...

Day for dogs

Sense of community

Road rally kicks off historic Goose Day festivities

LEWISTOWN — With 48 years under its belt and Goose Day getting bigger and bigger with each passing year, it comes as no surprise that this year’s Goose Road Rally had 118 participants who filled 31 vehicles on Sunday. “The road rally brings the community together, and I was so happy to ...

Museum Day brings Mifflin County’s past into view

LEWISTOWN — At the Hoopes School, Sandy Deadmon has found a way to explain 19th-century classroom technology to children raised on touchscreens. She hands them a slate and tells them, “Here’s your iPad.” Then comes the chalk, which serves as the keyboard. The eraser, she explains, is the delete button. It usually takes only a moment for the comparison to work. Children begin writing. They look around the one-room schoolhouse, built in 1873, and start asking questions about a school with no cafeteria or auditorium, no indoor plumbing, and no bus waiting outside. “They like ...

Meet Earth's newest wild cat species, the first named in over a century

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — A previously unknown cat species has been identified in plain sight: at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia, where the small, spotted feline had been living for years. The discovery, reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology, marks the first time scientists have named and described a new living wild cat species in more than a century. Bolivian biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National Geographic explorer and one of the study's lead authors, said a colleague who thought the cat looked unusual invited her to examine it at the sanctuary in the country's ...