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.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home