■ UNITED STATES
Cat takes surprise road trip
A cat that took a three-week ride across the US in a storage container is headed home to Florida. Humane Society officials in the state of Arizona say the two-year-old gray cat crawled into the locker in Pompano Beach, Florida, while a man loaded it for a move to Phoenix. A worker in Phoenix heard a cat meowing inside the container on Tuesday. The cat, named Meatloaf, was hungry and thirsty but unharmed. Meatloaf's owners had put up posters around their neighborhood. Officials will give Meatloaf time to recover before flying him home.
■ FRANCE
Self-healing rubber bands
A group of scientists have made a self-healing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by simply pressing the broken edges back together for a few minutes. The material, described in the journal Nature, can be broken and repaired over and over again. It is made from simple ingredients -- fatty acids like those found in vegetable oils, and urea, a waste compound in urine that can be made synthetically. The material would be an asset to industry and might help shed light on the physics of elasticity, wrote Philippe Cordier and colleagues at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris.
■ UNITED STATES
`Iraqi Air Force' in Florida
A small propeller airplane stenciled with the words "Iraqi Air Force" made an emergency landing on a country road near the rural Florida community of Sebring on Wednesday. Police surrounded the plane and stopped journalists from photographing it. The plane's markings were covered. As it turns out, it was a training aircraft built for the Iraqi military that was being flown from the Tampa area to Miami for shipment to Iraq, Cessna spokesman Doug Oliver said on Thursday. The Cessna C-172 experienced mechanical problems and the pilot was forced to land, Federal Aviation Administration records said.
■ UNITED STATES
Senior busted with pot bales
A 72-year-old man was arrested after more than US$1 million in marijuana was found in his car. The arresting officer had seen the suspect back his car into another vehicle in New Carrollton, Maryland, said Police Chief David Rice. "The officer ran a check on the driver and found out his license was suspended," Rice said. He then asked the driver if he could help him to get items out of the car before it was impounded, Rice said. The man asked the policeman "to pop the trunk," and when he did, the officer was struck by strong odors emanating from two bags that were later found to contain bales of marijuana, each weighing around 11kg, Rice said.
■ UNITED STATES
Two dead in gang violence
Two gang shootings led to a police gunbattle in which officers killed one gunman, wounded another and captured a suspect in a surging Los Angeles gang conflict, authorities said. The police gunbattle followed two gang shootings on Thursday: the first in which a man carrying a toddler was shot multiple times and a car-to-car shooting soon afterward, authorities said. The first victim died a few hours later. The child was not hit. Police said officers went to a known location for the Avenues gang and found four suspects in both shootings. Three got out of a car and opened fire with three weapons, police said. The officers fired back, killing one person armed with an AK-47 and wounding another, police said.
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