■ UNITED STATES
AP correspondent dies at 93
John Roderick, an Associated Press correspondent who won renown for his reports on Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and other communist guerrilla leaders while living with them in their cave headquarters in the mid-1940s, has died. He was 93. Roderick died on Tuesday morning, friends and family said. He spent his last days in his Honolulu apartment gathering friends for final farewells, smiling and nodding when his weakened condition from heart failure and pneumonia prevented speech. He was an avid journalist to the end, completing a memoir about his restored farmhouse in Kamakura, Japan.
■ UNITED STATES
Bounty put on stray cats
A tiny town in Iowa is offering a US$5 bounty for each feral feline turned in. Those not claimed will be destroyed. Mayor Vance Trively said that Randolph, the southwest Iowa town of 200 people, is being overrun by dozens of feral cats and that something had to be done. "You can't just let them keep multiplying in town," Trively said on Tuesday. Town officials approved the bounty after receiving numerous complaints, ranging from a cat attacking a small dog to a dozen cats showing up at the bowl when a resident tried to feed his own cat.
■ UNITED STATES
Bailiff forgets inmate in cell
A bailiff in Little Rock, Arkansas, is under an internal investigation after a woman spent four days forgotten in a holding cell without food, water or a toilet. Bailiff Jarrod Hankins put Adriana Torres-Flores in the cell to await transport to jail last Friday and did not let her out until Monday morning. No one on the fourth floor of the courthouse had heard her cries or her banging on the 5cm thick steel door of the 2.74m by 3m cell. "There's nothing at all that indicates this was done intentionally," said Washington County Chief Deputy Jay Cantrell.
■ UNITED STATES
Toilet gets lots of use
Police said a woman in Ness City, western Kansas, sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years. They were investigating whether she was mistreated. Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said a man called his office last month to report that something was wrong with his girlfriend. The sheriff said the woman's muscles had atrophied and that medical personnel had to remove her from the toilet because she had become bound to it by "natural means." Whipple said the woman at first refused ambulance service and "didn't want to leave." She is hospitalized in Wichita, but so far has been refusing to talk to the authorities.
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