Local

Hundreds of residents from Caddo and Rapides parishes may read the same book this fall. Several Louisiana library systems are sharing in a $15,000 Big Read grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In Caddo parish, public dialogues and workshops are planned around the Tim O'Brien book, "The Things They Carried," set to begin Oct. 6 at the Shreveport Memorial Library Broadmoor Resource Center.

The president of Chimp Haven, the national chimpanzee sanctuary in Keithville, La., says federal initiatives are moving ahead to retire large numbers of chimps from biomedical research. Linda Brent says Chimp Haven is in contact with the National Institutes of Health on news that the agency will transfer 10 research chimps to the Keithville sanctuary. She says many more could follow as the NIH send nearly one-fifth of its research chimps into retirement.