Thu, Oct 26, 2023 page5

• World News Quick Take

  • Agencies
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  UNITED STATES

  Pilot blames mushrooms

  An off-duty pilot who tried to shut down the engines of a plane mid-flight over the weekend had taken magic mushrooms and thought he was having a nervous breakdown, court documents showed on Tuesday. Pilots wrestled Joseph Emerson out of the cockpit on Sunday after he lunged for handles that would have starved the engines of fuel. Emerson, who told police he had not slept in 40 hours, also tried to open an emergency exit in the rear of the aircraft and had to be restrained by the cabin crew during an emergency landing. “I pulled both emergency shutoff handles because I thought I was dreaming and I just want to wake up,” Emerson told police, according to a criminal complaint. Emerson and the investigating officer “talked about the use of psychedelic mushrooms, and Emerson said it was his first time taking mushrooms.” The 44-year-old was arrested on Sunday evening after the Alaska Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon.

  ZIMBABWE

  Missing tourist found

  A German tourist who went missing in a national park teeming with wild animals has been found alive and in “good health” along with his rental car three days later, a spokesman for the national parks agency said on Tuesday. Tinashe Farawo with the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority said that Andreas Hoberg had last been seen buying a drink at the park shop in Matusadona National Park before going for a game drive at about 3.30pm on Saturday. He failed to return by 6pm, when all game drives should end, and the car rental company failed to locate him on its GPS tracking system, Farawo said. Authorities deployed a helicopter, land vehicles and sniffer dogs to scour the remote 1,400km2 park that is home to lions, buffalo, leopards, elephants “and all the dangerous animals you can expect in the bush,” he said. The telephone network is poor in the area and he was yet to get more information about the tourist’s age, whether he was with others or how deep in the park he had ventured, he said. “We were gravely worried. We are happy he is well,” Farawo said. “He says his car developed a mechanical fault. It’s a white car, so we were hopeful we would find it.”

  PORTUGAL

  World’s oldest dog dies

  Bobi, who was this year ordained the oldest dog in the world by Guinness World Records, has died at the ripe old age of 31, media reported on Monday. “We have better memories of a long life where he was happy and, above all, where he made a lot of people happy, especially his family,” Bobi’s owner Leonel Costa told local media from the village where he lives. A purebreed Rafeiro, a Portuguese livestock guard dog whose normal life expectancy is between 12 and 14, Bobi was not supposed to make it beyond puppyhood. He was born on May 11, 1992, along with three other pups in a wood storage shed owned by the Costa family in the village of Conqueiros. Because the family owned so many animals, the father decided they could not keep the newborn puppies and the parents took them from the shed the next day, while the mother dog Gira was out, said Leonel Costa, who was eight years old at the time. However, they did not realize they had left one puppy behind, and that puppy became Bobi. “He died at the age of 31 years and 165 days,” Guinness World Records said, which declared him the world’s oldest dog in February.
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