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.
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
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