A Mexican woman on Monday shielded her son after a bear leaped on a picnic table and devoured the tacos and enchiladas meant for the boy’s birthday dinner.
Silvia Macias of Mexico City had traveled to Chipinque Park on the outskirts of Monterrey to celebrate the 15th birthday of her son, Santiago, who has Down syndrome.
Soon after they sat down to eat the food they had brought, the bear showed up and gulped down French fries, enchiladas, tacos and salsa.
A video shot by her friend, Angela Chapa, shows Macias sitting stoically, inches from the bear’s mouth, holding Santiago and shielding his eyes with her hand. She kept her eyes downcast, to avoid anything the bear might consider a challenge.
“The worst thing was that Santiago might get scared,” Macias said on Tuesday. “Santiago is very afraid of animals, a cat or a dog, any animal scares him a lot.”
“That’s why I covered his eyes, because I didn’t want him to see it and scream or run. I was afraid that if he got scared or screamed or scared the bear, that the bear would react,” she said of the incident.
Macias said that she and Chapa had previously thought about the possibility of a bear encounter — they are not unknown in the park, although usually the bears come out more toward dawn or dusk, not midday — and they had come up with a plan.
“We are going to play a game where we cover Santiago’s eyes and we are going to act like statues,” she said of their rehearsals of the plan.
That is exactly what they did: Santiago remained motionless, even though “the bear was very close to us, we heard him as he growled, as he ate, you could smell the bear. It was really very, very close.”
Asked if he had been scared, Santiago, who attends middle school in Mexico City, said: “Yes, a lot.”
Chapa, who filmed the scene, lives in Monterrey and knew the proper behavior for a black bear encounter: Never run.
She noticed a plate of enchiladas the bear had not eaten — the bear appeared to prefer French fries and as a true Mexican, had eaten the salsa — and she tossed the enchilada far away, after showing it to the animal.
As expected, the animal followed the food and Angela stood in front of the bear, shielding Macias and her son and allowing them to retreat quietly and slowly.
Eventually, the bear went away.
Santiago got his birthday tacos replaced, and all ended well.
Macias said she does not consider herself a hero.
“I just think I’m a mother who protected her cub,” she said.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS