UNITED STATES
Cat crawls from grave
Bart the cat was hit by a car, buried and crawled back from the dead. Earlier this month, a car hit the one-and-a-half-year-old cat in Tampa, Florida. Bart’s owner, Owner Ellis, was so distraught that he could not stand the thought of burying him, so he asked a neighbor to dig a shallow grave. Five days later, on Jan. 21, a matted and injured Bart emerged, meowing for food. “At first it blew me away,” said Dusty Albritton, the neighbor who buried Bart. “All I knew was this cat was dead and Pet Sematary is real.” Bart had a broken jaw, a ruptured eye and a torn-up face. He was dehydrated and hungry, but alive. Hutson did not know what to do. “It was unbelievable,” he told the Tampa Bay Times. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” On Tuesday, the cat underwent surgery to remove an eye, wire his jaw shut and insert a feeding tube, which cost more than US$1,000, but it was expected to recover in about six weeks.
UNITED STATES
‘Mr Incredible’ convicted
A man who dresses as the comic superhero Mr Incredible has been sentenced to three years probation after pleading guilty to attacking a woman costumed as Batgirl in a Hollywood Boulevard turf dispute, prosecutors said on Tuesday. Muhammet Bilik, 35, was also ordered to attend anger management therapy, perform 20 days of roadside cleanup and stay away from the so-called Hollywood Entertainment District where the spat erupted. Prosecutors say Bilik attacked the woman clad as Batgirl, whose civilian identity was not revealed by authorities, following a disagreement over sidewalk territory along a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. A video of the incident captured by a passerby and posted on YouTube shows Bilik, in his Mr Incredible costume, slamming Batgirl into a rack of souvenir baseball caps as Chewbacca and Freddy Krueger characters try to intervene.
LITHUANIA
Caiman finds new home
A baby caiman has found a new home at a zoo after its previous owner tried to sell it online, apparently upon realizing that the reptile was not a harmless lizard. Officials at the national zoo in Kaunas said authorities confiscated the caiman from a student who had posted an ad for a large lizard. They said the student had kept it for several months, but stunned by how fast it was growing, decided to get rid of it. Local law prohibits raising dangerous animals at home. The 1.3kg, 63cm caiman, named “Croc,” was handed to the zoo, where visitors could see it for the first time on Wednesday.
UNITED STATES
Cemetery to restrict access
New Orleans’ oldest cemetery will soon be closed to visitors without an official escort or familial ties to the deceased, the result of a spate of vandalism that has included the tomb of voodoo queen Marie Laveau. Vandalism is not a new problem at Laveau’s tomb and others at St Louis Cemetery No. 1, which dates to the late 1700s. However, the defacement, which includes X’s written in marker on the Laveau tomb as part of a local ritual for good luck, has accelerated in recent months, said Sarah McDonald, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which owns the cemetery. “It became apparent that we needed to take some action to protect the sanctity of the space, as well as the historic nature of the cemetery,” she said. In one particularly egregious incident last year, someone broke into the cemetery and painted the entire Laveau tomb pink, triggering a tedious restoration, McDonald said.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
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