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The AP locates this report just down the road in Pensacola: Man Accused of Poaching Alligator.

A man charged with illegally hunting an alligator said he shot into the water to protect his daughter.

Michael Vann, 45, has been ordered to appear in court June 10 to face a felony charge. But he said a 4- to 5-foot gator charged his 9-year-old daughter while she was fishing about 400 feet from their home, and it sank after he fired.

If you read that and know nothing about alligators his story sounds reasonable. Now ask yourself: Florida just passed a law approving gunfights in the Wal-Mart parking lot, so why are they arresting this guy?

The alligator has been around two weeks, according to the story, and Mr. Vann claims he has been unable to contact Fish & Wildlife, so why was he letting his daughter fish near it? Why did he go back to the house and get a gun, instead of pitching something at the alligator to scare it off?

For that alligator to hang around, it had to have a food supply, was he or his daughter feeding it [an illegal action in Florida]? Why wasn’t this alligator “cruising singles bars” like all of the other ‘gators this time of year?

What ever was going on, it isn’t likely to be what Mr. Vann reported. The story doesn’t make sense based an alligator’s normal behavior, and that’s why he was charged.

[Note: There is a licensed alligator trapper in the area and he has captured and relocated several much larger animals.]

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The new director of the BBC decided to treat the broadcaster like a business, so the first thing he did was to cuts jobs. Australian Broadcasting reports that : BBC staff strike over job cuts.

There’s a report on the BBC site, but given that instead of listening to the news on the BBC World Service, I’m currently hearing “world music” being played by an unfamiliar female voice who needs a bit more time in the minors before making to the World Service, I wouldn’t bet that the website will be stable today.

Apparently there will a series of 24-hour strikes in the near future, by the employees of the BBC protesting the cut of approximately 3,700 jobs.

The “plan” would appear to be replacing people with “new technology” to make the service “more efficient and competitive”. There’s no clear statement as to who exactly is competing with the BBC, as the other media outlets in the UK are commercial and dependent on advertising revenue.

It’s not clear exactly what changes in technology are going to be purchased with the savings, or how they are going to get the information to put on this new technology.

To the best of my knowledge HDTV is the only major recent change in broadcast technology and that’s been in hand for some time. The whole thing sounds like a rote repetition from some business school class project. An almost 15% cut in staff upon taking over a new job is not a reasonable thing to do. You really should spend some time investigating an organization before you start stressing it like this.

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