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.
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
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
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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