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.
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
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