Emily the stowaway cat is back -- after flying home in the lap of luxury.
The curious cat from Wisconsin who disappeared two months ago and wound up traveling to France in a cargo container touched down at the Milwaukee airport on Thursday, greeted by her family and a horde of reporters.
"She'll be held onto a lot all the way home. And then when we get home, too, she'll be cuddled a lot," owner Donny McElhiney said.
Her sumptuous return in business class on a trans-Atlantic Continental Airlines flight was a sharp departure from her trip the other way, when she arrived thin and thirsty but still alive. On her flight home, Emily passed up a menu of peppered salmon filet and "opted for her French cat food" and some water, airline spokeswoman Courtney Wilcox said.
"She seems a little calmer than she was before, just a little quieter, a little, maybe, wiser," Lesley McElhiney said.
A Continental cargo agent carried Emily from the plane and handed her over to the McElhineys' 9-year-old son, Nick Herndon. Emily meowed and pawed at reporters' microphones as the family answered the media's questions.
The airline offered to fly the cat home from Paris after her tale spread around the world and she cleared a one-month quarantine.
"This was such a marvelous story, that we wanted to add something to it," Continental spokesman Philippe Fleury said at Charles de Gaulle airport.
A full-fare ticket for Emily's seat would normally cost about US$6,000. The airline provided two company escorts for the cat.
Emily vanished from her home in Appleton, Wisconsin, in late September. She apparently wandered into a nearby paper company's distribution center and crawled into a container of paper bales.
The container went by truck to Chicago and by ship to Belgium before the cat was found Oct. 24 at Raflatac, a laminating company in Nancy, France.
Workers at Raflatac used her tags to phone her veterinarian in Wisconsin, and the vet called her owners.
Emily's escort across the ocean, Newark-based Continental employee George Chiladze, said he was thrilled to take Emily home.
"I will make somebody really happy to deliver this poor traveler back home," he said.
Continental cargo agent Gaylia McLeod accompanied the cat aboard a 50-seat plane on the last leg of the trip to Milwaukee.
"I know it's close to the holidays," a tearful McLeod said. "I'm happy to be a part of reuniting Emily with her family."
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on Friday after dissolving the Kosovar parliament said a snap election should be held as soon as possible to avoid another prolonged political crisis in the Balkan country at a time of global turmoil. Osmani said it is important for Kosovo to wrap up the upcoming election process and form functional institutions for political stability as the war rages in the Middle East. “Precisely because the geopolitical situation is that complex, it is important to finish this electoral process which is coming up,” she said. “It is very hard now to imagine what will happen next.” Kosovo, which declared
RSS