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Social media has dubbed Arturo, a polar bear living in an Argentinian zoo, the "world's saddest animal" and more than 200,000 people have signed an online petition asking that he be moved to a "better life" in Canada.

Photos of Arturo, 29, looking distressed and lying flat out on his stomach that circulated online have prompted the petition. The bear's enclosure mate, Pelusa, died two years ago, the BBC says.

According to The Telegraph, "Arturo is currently being kept in a cramped, concrete enclosure at Argentina's Mendoza Zoo, where temperatures can climb to 104F (40C), with just a 20-inch-deep pool for him to keep cool."

Even former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has gotten into the act, posting a video on his Facebook page urging people to sign the petition. However, as The Washington Post notes wryly, the only thing missing from the Gingrich post "was a link to the actual Change.org petition."

Where would you go, if you had a time machine? Ancient Egypt? Tang Dynasty China? The Globe Theater, in 1599? Or maybe to the 25th century, because who knows, Buck Rogers might actually be there.

Sadly, no one's likely to invent a working time machine any time soon. But that hasn't stopped the legions of writers who've been exploring time travel ever since H. G. Wells described his first Morlock. Slips and drops and nets and projections and paradoxes — writers have thought up a hundred ways to travel backwards and forwards in time. And that's one of the great things about literary time travel: the way every writer seems to invent the mechanism all over again, every time they put pen to paper.

“ You can change history or not change history, you can go as an observer, you can go where you actually become part of the past and help fulfill history, it's pretty limitless."

"I am not a political person by nature," Nadine Gordimer once said. "I don't suppose, if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics."

Gordimer was born in South Africa in the early 1920s, into a society divided and identified by the crime of apartheid. Official racial segregation and suppression was wound into everyday life.

Her mother mostly kept her home from school, so Gordimer began to write for companionship. She published her first short story in The Children's Sunday Express when she was 15 years old, and essentially wrote for a living until her death this week, at the age of 90.

Nadine Gordimer wrote 15 novels, a few of which were banned by the South African government, and when one of her short stories appeared in a British or U.S. magazine that reached South Africa, officials ripped out her pages.

The suppression intended to silence her and millions more only galvanized Nadine Gordimer, who became an anti-apartheid activist in an age when activism didn't just mean liking something on Facebook. She hid wanted anti-apartheid fighters in her home, and helped Nelson Mandela with the famous speech he gave from the defendant's dock in 1964, about the ideals for which he was prepared to die.

Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, and in her Nobel address she said human beings devised writing to explore why we are here.

"Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster," said Gordimer. "The oral story-tellers," she said, "began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life ... to make stories."

"Writers themselves don't analyze what they do," she said, "to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope."

Gordimer noted that, "Some of us have seen our books lie for years unread in our own countries, banned, and we have gone on writing." But she cited Flaubert, Strindberg, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie more than herself.

"There is a paradox," she added. "In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment. The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties."

International investigators say armed rebels have limited their inspection of the eastern Ukraine site of the downed Malaysian Airlines flight.

Some two dozen observers from the Organization of Cooperation and Safety in Europe say they were only allowed into a small area of the crash site for just over an hour, according to the BBC. One OCSE member said the team was confronted by a "visibly intoxicated guard" who fired shots into the air.

Meanwhile, the crash site and debris, which spreads over miles of fields and farmland, are still unsecured and bodies lie exposed to the elements — some still strapped to seat belts and wearing inflight headphones, CNN reports.

"Most everything is unguarded, there for the curious — or for the taking," write CNN reporters Phil Black and Ben Brumfield. "There are so many of them. Bodies lie by the roadside, some in fields, some intertwined with parts of the aircraft. And they are spread out so far."

All 298 aboard the Boeing 777 were killed. Flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. It crashed in a rebel-held area near Donetsk, likely shot down by a surface-to-air missile, U.S. officials have said.

Securing evidence at the site is crucial to determining the exactly who and what caused the plane to fall from the sky. Workers also need to recover and identify the bodies, but the OCSE observers are not trained for that job and local emergency workers say it's not their job either.

National Transportation Safety Board and FBI teams are on their way to the country, NPR's David Schaper tells our Newscast desk. However, they are likely to find the same barriers as the OCSE officials, Schaper says.

They will have to travel 90 minutes down a pothole-ridden road from Donetsk, past checkpoints run by a number of different local militias, CNN says. No central command is in charge of the area, and virtually no rule of law governs there. At least three separatist groups guard the crash site.

As former NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman tells NPR, "There are a lot of challenges here, I think chief among them is probably the war zone that they're in, and just the very nature what the people on the ground are facing."

The bodies are starting to bloat and decay and need to be recovered quickly, OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw tells the Guardian. "We will keep coming back tomorrow and the next day and the next day."