Jaws actor becomes police chief on island where movie was filmed

An actor who played a child in Jaws has become a police chief on the same island where the 1970s movie was filmed. Jonathan Searle had a small role as one of the jokers who placed a fake shark fin in the waters off Amity Island. Now, 47 years later, he has been named police chief of Martha’s Vineyard, an island in Massachusetts where most of Jaws was filmed, reported Sky News. In 2008, Searle charged a man for doing the very thing he had acted out in the film: lying to beachgoers about seeing a pair of sharks off the island.

Horses and pigs can read human emotions

Horses and pigs can tell when a human voice is expressing anger and will become upset, according to a new study in The Times. Experts already knew that dogs and cats could read emotion in a human voice and tell the difference between positive and negative tones, but wanted to find out whether horses and pigs shared this ability. “Our results show that these animals are affected by the emotions we charge our voices with when we speak to or are around them,” said Elodie Briefer, a behavioural biologist at the University of Copenhagen.

Stag party leads to disaster 

A stag party on a Worcestershire canal went all kinds of wrong when the revellers sank a barge, abandoned a second barge, got stuck in a lock and then flooded local roads during a chaotic trip along the waterway. Amanda Huxtable, who was on a boat that was struck by the partygoers, told The Telegraph: “These guys were incapable of being in charge of a narrowboat.” A spokesperson for the boat hire company pointed out that “no one has been hurt”.