* Coming Back: An 11-year-old who suffered...

* Coming Back: An 11-year-old who suffered a near-fatal head injury two weeks ago put two words together for the first time since the accident, thanks to his dog, Rusty. “Bad Rusty,” Donny Tomei said Tuesday as the frisky chow-collie puppy leaped onto him while he sat in a recliner in a New Haven, Conn., hospital. Although Donny doesn’t respond to all words, “he clearly is not in a coma now,” says neurosurgeon Charles Duncan. “This is really a ‘boy and his dog’ story.”

* Does ‘Loch Ness’ Translate?: In the remote Siberian village of Sharipovo, a giant green snake with the head of a sheep is on patrol near a lake, residents say. “Dozens of people have seen this green monster, which has the girth of a large tree trunk and is about six or seven yards long. One of them even managed to take a photograph of it. It swims along with its head high in the air,” Tass, the Soviet press agency reported. Villagers say the creature’s tracks, spotted along the shoreline, resemble the runners of a large sleigh.

* Film at 11?: Italian porn star-turned-politician Ilona Staller is looking for some new allies. Staller, pregnant by her American husband, artist Jeff Koons, has been denied a U.S. visa, so for now her child can’t be born in the United States. “The American authorities have not given the reason for their refusal,” Staller, 39, said in Rome Tuesday. So she is calling on American feminists for aid “so that a woman’s most basic rights are respected in the country which claims to be symbol of liberty.”

* Off Target: People are missing the point of the “Doonesbury” comic strip series focusing on claims of drug use by Vice President Dan Quayle, says the strip’s creator, Garry Trudeau. The point is not Quayle’s alleged drug history, the artist said, but that the charges were kept quiet during the 1988 presidential campaign. “Dan Quayle had been cleared of drug charges the public never knew had been made,” Trudeau said Tuesday in Seattle.