—Woodward and Bernstein meet their match: Six student journalists at Pittsburg High School's Booster Redux newspaper in Kansas detected some discrepancies in their newly hired principal's resume. They launched an investigation into her academic background, and their reporting led to the principal's resignation from her $93,000-a-year job.

It started in early March when the students questioned the post-graduate degrees that principal Amy Robertson claimed to have earned from "Corllins University." They contacted the U.S. Department of Education, which had no accredited university listed by that name. Corllins, it turned out, is a diploma mill.

Multiple other discrepancies arose. The school board initially stood "100 percent" behind Robertson. But more troubling information surged forth. Robertson couldn't even produce a transcript to prove she had earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Tulsa.

Robertson resigned Tuesday night. The adults told them to back off, but these tough, hard-driving student journalists refused to back down.

—Steer clear of this mistake: As the poet Ogden Nash reminds us, "The cow is of the bovine ilk. One end is moo, the other milk."

We recalled this wisdom by the heartening news this week that six bovines who led St. Louis police on a merry chase through a north St. Louis neighborhood on March 30 had been promised homes at an animal shelter in Tennessee. The animals escaped from a packinghouse and quickly became a Twitter sensation, where it became evident that St. Louisans are a long way from the farm.

"Cows," the St. Louis police Twitter account called them, which would mean they are mature females of the bovine ilk. No, said the packinghouse, they were heifers, which indicates immature females who had not yet calved. Photos identifying them as heifers were posted, despite ample anatomical evidence that they were male.

Well, yes. It was finally determined that the animals were steers, castrated males raised for the market because one bull can service dozens, if not hundreds of cows, and having too many bulls around is not safe. This is true about males of other species, too.

—Attention, Steve Stenger: A word to the wise to St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger: It's one thing to frustrate county Councilwoman Rochelle Walton Gray's redevelopment plans for the abandoned Jamestown Mall. It could be quite another to frustrate the plans of the Rev. David E. Taylor.

Taylor's Joshua Media Ministries of Florissant this week sued county government in St. Louis County Circuit Court for allegedly messing up a deal it had reached to buy the abandoned Macy's store in the old mall. In February, Stenger bypassed Walton Gray and the rest of the County Council and put the mall's redevelopment in the hands of the county Port Authority.

Stenger should know that the Rev. Taylor claims to be able to raise the dead, and to get Jesus Christ to make personal appearances at his crusades. He's had some legal troubles before, but squashing a mere politician should be child's play.

—Pile of dough: While the rest of the world calls the restaurant chain Panera, to St. Louisans it will always be Bread Co., pronounced as one word. From its first cafe in 1987 in Kirkwood, St. Louisans have watched the tiny local startup flourish into a national phenomenon that sold Wednesday for $7.5 billion in the biggest-ever U.S. restaurant deal.

Congratulations to Ken Rosenthal, who founded Bread Co. with a $150,000 investment and a Small Business Administration loan for $150,000. He and some partners sold the business to Panera in 1993 for $23 million and Rosenthal then became one of its largest franchisees.

What was a lot of bread in the last century isn't much compared to what JAB, the investment vehicle of Germany's billionaire Reimann family, paid for it this week. Bringing the sale full circle is JAB's CEO, Olivier Goudet. Goudet's other job? Chairman of Anheuser-Busch InBev.

—Wonder Onder: Missouri state Sen. Bob Onder must have taken a page from President Donald Trump's playbook of absurdities this week. The Republican senator from Lake St. Louis threatened to derail a bid to ask voters if they want to boost taxes for the zoo because St. Louis has approved a bill banning employers and landlords from discriminating against women who have had an abortion, use contraceptives or are pregnant.

Just how do those two issues resemble each other? Onder explained that there is little difference between him trying to stop the zoo tax ballot initiative and Democrats trying to block legislation affecting the city's anti-discrimination ordinance. He filed an amendment to the zoo tax proposal saying the zoo should have to change its name to "The Midwest Abortion Sanctuary City Zoological Park."

"It's beautiful," said the presidential-sounding Onder. "Hey, you come to us asking for the tax authorization, we might put some conditions on it, OK?"

No, Senator. This is bigly not okay.

—Abba meets the Terminator: It's creepy enough, when you think about it, that we casually inject microchips into our pets so they can be tracked by a computer scanner. Certainly, we'd never think of treating humans that way. Would we?

In Sweden, employees at Epicenter, a high-tech startup hub, are opting to be injected with microchips so they can avoid the hassle of pulling out their swipe cards whenever they want to enter a facility or use a printer. Now they just wave a hand, and the scanner does the rest. The microchips, the size of grains of rice, can even be used to buy smoothies.

Outrageous, perhaps. But considering how thoroughly millions of humans have handed over their brains to smartphones, humanity already is skiing fast down that slippery cyborg slope.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST LOUIS POST DISPATCH