She Will Be Left Holding the Bag

--Somewhere on the streets of the nation’s capital there goes a bag lady who is not what she appears to be. Beulah Lund, 50, who usually lives with her husband and several children on a 180-acre farm near Spokane, Wash., is spending at least three weeks among the homeless in Washington, D.C. For her foray, Lund will look for space in shelters but will sleep on heating grates or in cardboard boxes if necessary. At first her children and her husband, Dave, a contractor, weren’t sold. “She talked about it in a conversation and I really didn’t think she was serious,” said Lund’s daughter, Donna Persons, 17. What’s possessed Lund to take her chances on the streets? “I’m doing this for me,” she said. “I need to find out how to help these people.” Her actions were applauded by activist Mitch Snyder, who has staged hunger strikes to draw attention to the homeless, but he expressed some concern for her safety. Lund “has some misconceptions about living on the streets here, a myth that people coming from somewhere else might have,” Snyder said.

--Officials in the Corrientes province of Argentina never doubted the 23-year-old man who said he was the son of U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar. After all, he seemed to know intimately the workings of the United Nations and to be familiar with many foreign countries. So they wined and dined him and lodged him in the area’s finest hotel for more than a month. He even promised to marry a local woman. Then his real parents turned him in. Police were contacted by a couple in Buenos Aires after they saw photographs of Perez de Cuellar’s “son” in newspapers and recognized him as their own. Corrientes authorities arrested the imposter, whose true identity was not released.

--A high school teacher in Colorado is hoping that young people are sweet enough on dinosaurs to join a candy-selling drive to raise money for a $45,000 reproduction of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton for the Denver Museum of Natural History. Public school students across the state are being asked to join in the project, started by Rick McClellan, who teaches earth and physical science at Smoky Hill High School in Aurora. McClellan got the idea from an advertisement by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, which is selling exact casts of the dinosaur fossil it has on exhibit. If “Operation T-rex” succeeds, McClellan plans to spend his spring break driving the fossil replica back from New York, saving as much as $50,000 in shipping costs.