Japanese police said on Tuesday they found the bodies of 100 cats, some badly decomposed, in the apartment of a woman who found it hard to part with her pets even after they died. The woman, who had adopted sick and stray cats for years, kept the bodies in containers.
Whoever George Green is, he now has a good excuse for standing up Gwen at Monty’s — 56 years ago. That’s how long it took her handwritten letter to George to reach Trinity College in Cambridge, eastern England, where it arrived the other day, postmarked in London on March 3 1950.
A musical mystery surrounded Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, on Wednesday after a piano was discovered near its 1 347m summit. The piano was recovered at the weekend by 15 volunteers from the John Muir Trust, a conservation charity that owns the Scottish peak.
A New Zealander’s plan to sell his amputated leg has been tripped up by police and an internet auction website. Shane Torrance (42), whose tattooed right leg was amputated 15 months ago, wants to sell it to cover his debts and raise money for his daughter who has diabetes, <i>The Nelson Mail</i> reported on Thursday.
German politicians and football authorities reacted with anger on Thursday to a warning from a former government spokesperson that World Cup visitors from abroad risked race attacks in eastern Germany. ”There are small and mid-sized towns in Brandenburg and elsewhere where I would advise anyone with a different skin colour not to go,” Uwe-Karsten Heye said.
Evidence in a court case in which Botswana’s San Bushmen are fighting for rights to ancestral land in the Kalahari wound up in court this week, with a rights group on Thursday calling for a speedy end to the case. The Bushmen are taking Gaborone to court to challenge their eviction four years ago from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
If the forecasts are to be believed, Japan’s players in next month’s World Cup are small fish in a big pond. An aquarium in Yokohama is organising a piscine World Cup, in which fish the colours of national teams fight for a ball packed with bait in a tank holding two goal posts.
Police cracked down on demonstrators in central Cairo, arresting 100 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including one of its leaders, as they were protesting on Thursday near a Cairo court where two hearings for pro-reform figures were scheduled.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Thursday accepted Parliament’s rejection of a constitutional change that would have enabled him to stand for a third term in office, saying it was victory for democracy. "For me and for all members of our party, the outcome is victory for democracy," Obasanjo said.
An elderly woman died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Egypt on Thursday, marking the country’s sixth fatal case of the virus in humans, a World Health Organisation official (WHO) said. ”We have some basic information that she was a 75-year-old woman from al-Minya” in southern Egypt, WHO regional health regulation officer John Jabbour told Agence France-Presse.