■ United States
Pig spat turns serious
A Minnesota woman wants abuse charges filed against an acquaintance who was pet-sitting for her potbellied pig and allowed the animal to get fat. Michelle Schmitz said her pig, Alaina Templeton, weighed 22.7kg when Schmitz left her with a co-worker who offered to care for the animal in February, when Schmitz went on medical leave to recover from ankle surgeries. Nine months later, the pig weighed 68kg, the Winona Daily News reported. Officers are investigating whether Alaina was abused by the sitter's neglect and overfeeding. Investigator Jeff Mueller of the Winona County Sheriff's Department said on Tuesday that no charges had been filed against the pig sitter, whose name was not released. Schmitz said she cried for three days after she discovered her pet's weight problem. "That pig is my life," said Schmitz, who has a tattoo of Alaina's name.
■ United States
Biggest black hole found
US astronomers have discovered the biggest black hole yet, found orbiting a star 1.8 million light years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia, with a record-setting mass of 24 to 33 times that of our Sun, NASA said on Tuesday. It beats the previous stellar-mass black hole discovered on Oct. 17 in the M33 galaxy, which has 16 times the mass of our Sun, the US space agency said. A team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, found the new black hole using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The discovery paper is to appear in the Nov. 1 edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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