Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- In 2011 a stray cat was found in the Cumbria town of Ambleside. She became popular in the town, popping in and out of people's houses and petted by both locals and
tourists. The cat, dubbed 'Riley' died in January, but a fundraising campaign raised £4,000 ($5,060) for a lifesized bronze statue of Riley, which has been placed
at a spot in a park where she enjoyed lying in the sunlight. ● In an earlier issue we reported on an orangutan seen self-medicating a wound with a plant. Now
chimpanzees in Uganda have been seen doing the same thing, using plants with anti-bacterial and pain-relieving properties. ● Last year nineteen captive-bred wildcats
were released into the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland as part of the effort to save the critically-endangered species. At least two of the females have now given
birth. ● A dinosaur skull discovered in Montana in 2019 has been identified as being from a previously unknown species. The herbivorous Lokiceratops rangiformis
was related to the Triceratops but lacked the nose horn and had two massive 'horns' at the back of its frill. ● A man and two police officers have rescued a young
moose calf that had fallen into the water at a dock in Homer, Alaska, becoming trapped between the dock and a floatplane. ● The International Union for Conservation
of Nature has reclassified the Iberian lynx from 'endangered' to 'vulnerable' after wild population levels across Spain and Portugal grew from just 62 mature individuals in
2001 to 648 in 2022 and a total population at all ages of more than 2,000 this year. ● The Keswick Mountain Rescue Team has appealed to dog owners to consider their
pets before taking them walking in the mountains, after bringing a four-year-old German Shepherd dog down from a fell on a stretcher. It had damage to all four pads from walking on the
rocks. ● Staff and students at City of Portsmouth College have been stunned after a 13-year-old 6'- (1.8m)-long boa snake gave birth to 14 snakelets. Not only had the
snake been on its own for at least nine years, everyone had thought that it was male, and called it 'Ronaldo'. ● An 8-year-old Pekingese called Wild Thang has been
named the World's Ugliest Dog in an annual contest at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in California. Wild Thang suffered from distemper when he was 10 weeks old, leading to his teeth not
growing properly, his tongue hanging out of his mouth and muscular disorder in one of his legs. "I love that [the competition] represents dogs that are imperfect -
imperfectly perfect," Michelle Grady, who owns second-placed wheelchair-using pug Rome, told reporters.
- The Chinese Chang'e-6 spacecraft has landed successfully in Mongolia, carrying the first rock samples taken from the far side of the Moon, close to the lunar
south pole, after a 53-day mission. The samples could help prove or disprove theories about how the Moon formed. Both China and America are planning manned missions within the
next decade. ● NASA's Perseverence rover has sent back a picture of a bright white rock on the surface of Mars, in the middle of a field of dark rocks, and scientists
are at a loss to explain it; it is possible that it formed far from its present location and was carried there by water millions of years ago. ● A Florida family are
suing NASA after a piece of debris from the International Space Station smashed through their roof and ceiling. NASA admitted that the 1.6lb (700g) metal fragment was part
of a 5,800lb (2,630kg) dump of hardware following the installation of new batteries on the station; it had been expected to all burn up in the atmosphere. ● A
multi-agency exercise led by NASA has found that humanity would fail to defend itself against an impending asteroid strike, even with up to 14 years' notice because of
conflicting international politics and slow mission planning.
- Finnish folklore holds that the 'Lemminkäinen Temple', filled with riches worth at least £15,000,000,000 ($19,000,000,000) lies buried in a cave, filled in
during the Middle Ages to protect it from Christian crusaders. There is no record of the cave's location but a group of 12 amateur archaeologists known as the "Temple
Twelve" have spent more than 100,000 hours over the last 37 years clearing mud and rock from a cave in an undisclosed location near Helsinki, and have now found the head
of a Viking axe (the wooden handle having long since rotted away) which they claim lends credence to their search. ● The Parthenon temple at the Acropolis in Athens
is a world heritage archaeological site, but historians have long wondered if there was a temple at the site before it. A newly-discovered graffiti drawn by a shepherd
called 'Mikoin' in the sixth century BCE has recently been found at the site, which depicts an earlier temple. The graffiti was dated by the script used to sign it.
● Hundreds of intact amphorae - storage jars - have been recovered from what is believed to be the oldest deep sea shipwreck yet found, 56 miles (90km) off the
northern coast of Israel, in the Mediterranean Sea. The jars are thought to be some 3,300 years old. The wreck was discovered by robot submersibles being used to search for
potential oil and gas fields. ● Researchers studying the risk of devastating 'megaquakes' in South Asia have discovered evidence of a previously-unrecorded earthquake
that struck the area that is now Bangladesh 2,500 years ago, significantly changing the course of the Ganges river. ● A Victorian carousel that has been undergoing
restoration work for the last 15 years is to be unveiled and opened to the public at the Strumpshaw Steam Museum this weekend. ● A letter sent by Albert Einstein to
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, encouraging the development of the world's first nuclear bomb, is to be auctioned in New York later this year. The letter,
part of the personal collection of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is expected to sell for $4-6m (£3.2m-4.7m).
- A New Zealand court has dismissed a woman's attempt to sue her now ex-partner for breach of a verbal contract after he failed to drive her to an airport to catch a
flight and then dogsit for her. She claimed to have incurred the cost of travelling the next day, including a taxi to the airport, and putting her dogs in a kennel. The
court ruled that there had been a social agreement rather than a legal one. ● Another tourist, this time from Kazakhstan, has been caught carving his name on a world
heritage site in Italy, this time on a wall in Pompeii, the town buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE which is being gradually excavated. Last June a tourist was
caught carving his name into a wall of Rome's Colosseum. ● A thief who lost his phone was delighted to see a social media post saying a phone matching his had
been found in a street, and contacted the poster to arrange to collect it. When he turned up and confirmed that it was his, he soon discovered that the poster was a police
officer, as were three others nearby, and the phone had been found at the scene of a burglary rather than in the street...
- A 6'- (1.8m)-high wax replica of the Lincoln Memorial statue of Abraham Lincoln, placed outside an elementary school in Washington, D.C. as part of a history/art trail,
has partially melted in the soaring temperatures affecting the city. Lincoln's head has fallen off and his legs have melted into blobs. ● Elon "#SpaceKaren"
Musk's Starlink satellite constellation - and others like it - are not just a threat to earth-based astronomers, they might also pose a significant risk to the atmosphere,
according to researchers at the University of South California. As each satellite reaches its end-of-life, thought to be about five years for Starlink, it is designed to
fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. As it burns up it will release a significant quantity of aluminium oxide nanoparticles which will eventually reach the stratospheric
ozone layer and contribute to ozone depletion. The Montreal Agreement in the 1980s significantly reduced the damage to the ozone layer being done by other chemicals, known
as chloroflourocarbons, and the ozone layer had been expected to recover to pre 1980 values around the mid century, but more research now needs to be done into the long term
effects of low Earth orbit satellite networks like Starlink. ● Non-profit organisation The Ocean Cleanup has deployed unique technology to attempt to clean up the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a circular current, or gyre, more than six times the size of the U.K., between Hawaii and California, which is the world's biggest rubbish dump,
with plastic and other rubbish accumulating in it. The technology is theoretically capable of cleaning up an area the size of a soccer pitch every five seconds, removing
foreign objects without harming marine lifeforms.
IN BRIEF: A 20-month-old toddler had to be rescued by firemen after becoming stuck inside a Tesla Model Y car in Arizona, during the recent heatwave when its
mother put it in a child seat then temporarily shut the door. The car's battery had died and the doors could not be opened from the outside (there are safety latches
inside, but they were, for obvious reasons, not usable). Fire fighters had to smash a window with an axe. [A similar thing happened to me 13 years ago in a Citroen
C3 Pluriel, which had manual exterior door handles but electronic releases inside; I smashed a window with a hammer and reached out to open the door. -Ed]. ● The
McDonald's fast food chain has dropped its experimental artificial intelligence (AI) system from its drive-through restaurants across the U.S. after it interpreted
orders bizarrely, including identifying orders as bacon-topped ice cream, adding stacks of butter to caramel ice cream and hundreds of dollars' worth of chicken nuggets...
● Hiker Lukas McClish, 34, has been rescued after being lost in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California, for 10 days. He survived on wild berries and a gallon of water
a day, which he collected in one of his boots. ● The World Nettle Eating Championships are due to be held in Waytown, Dorset. Contestants have 30 minutes to eat as
many stinging nettle leaves as possible, with cider to wash them down. ● Endurance runner Pawel Cymbalista has set a new world record for running up and down Ben
Nevis, Scotland's highest mountain at 4,413' (1,345m), seven times in under 24 hours. He completed the challenge in 20 hours and 40 minutes to reclaim the record, which was
he first broke in 2021 but was taken from him in 2023. ● Triplets Anna, John and Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco, 22, have all graduated together with first-class honours from
the University of Aberdeen. ● English Heritage managed to clean up the orange powder paint sprayed on Stonehenge by protesters last week in time for around 15,000 people to
watch the summer solstice sunrise at the site. Meanwhile in Hobart, Tasmania, about 3,000 people gathered for a nude swim in the River Derwent to mark the (for them)
winter solstice, with air temperatures around 6oC (42oF) and water temperatures around 12oC (54oF).
UPDATES: Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is to remain docked at the International Space Station indefinitely, while NASA and Boeing try to iron out various
problems with it. The agency has confirmed that it could still be used in an emergency. ● The container ship MV Dali, which crashed into the Francis Scott Key
Bridge in Baltimore earlier this year, finally sailed from the port, headed for Norfolk, Virginia, where it arrived on June 25th, to unload its cargo and undergo
repairs. The bridge is expected to be rebuilt by 2028, at a cost of around $1.9bn (£1.5bn).
Little Jennifer's mother had a cake stall at the school bazaar, and her daughter was helping her. They saw their snobbish neighbour Mrs Jones
approaching. "I saw, what charming little cakes," she said, picking one up and inspecting it.
"That's £1," Little Jennifer said.
"'Please', Little Jennifer. Be polite," her mother hastily added.
"Well," Mrs Jones said, "I suppose it's in a good cause," and handed over the money before taking a bite of the cake.
"Do you like it?" Little Jennifer asked.
"Why, yes, I have to admit it is rather nice," Mrs Jones answered.
Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "That's funny. Mummy always says you've got no taste!"
