Central Thai City Aims To Put An End To Monkey Mayhem

BANGKOK (AP) — Thai wildlife officials laid out a plan on Wednesday to bring peace to a central Thai city after at least a decade of human-monkey conflict.

The macaques that roam Lopburi are a symbol of local culture, and a major tourist draw. But after years of dangerous encounters with residents and visitors and several failed attempts to bring peace with population controls, local people and businesses have had enough.

The monkeys frequently try to snatch food from humans, sometimes resulting in tussles that can leave people with scratches and other injuries. But outrage grew in March when a woman dislocated her knee after a monkey pulled her off her feet in an effort to grab food, and another man was knocked off a motorcycle by a hungry monkey.

Authorities hope to round up some 2,500 urban monkeys and place them in massive enclosures, said Athapol Charoenshunsa, the director-general of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. They’ll work with wildlife experts to find a way for a limited number of monkeys to stay at liberty in the city, he added.

“I don’t want humans to have to hurt monkeys, and I don’t want monkeys to have to hurt humans,” he told reporters during a news conference in Bangkok.

An official monkey catching campaign was launched week, prioritizing more aggressive alpha males. It has caught 37 monkeys so far, most of whom have been placed put under the care of wildlife authorities in the neighboring province of Saraburi, while others were sent to the Lopburi zoo.

Officials said they plan to capture the rest of the monkeys once the enclosures are complete, especially those in the residential areas. Separate cages will be prepared for different troops of monkeys to prevent them from fighting.

Athapol said he expects the first phase of the operation to start within weeks, and believes the huge cages will be able to contain thousands of them and “will solve the problem very quickly.”

The monkeys are a symbol of the province, about 140 kilometers (90 miles) north of Bangkok, where the ancient Three Pagodas temple celebrates an annual “Monkey Buffet” festival, and they’re commonly seen throughout the city. Macaques are classified as a protected species under Thailand’s wildlife conservation law.

Some have blamed the city’s monkey troubles on tourists and residents feeding the animals, which they say drew monkeys into the city and boosted their numbers, as well as getting them accustomed to getting food from humans.

But an earlier effort to limit feeding may have made things worse, some residents say. Local officials began threatening fines for feeding monkeys outside a few designated areas around the main tourist attractions in recent years. But those feeding areas were dominated by a few troops of the highly territorial creatures, while rival bands grew hungry and turned to harassing humans in other areas for food even more.

Athapol said people shouldn’t see monkeys as villians, saying that the authorities might have not been efficient enough in their work to control the simian population.

People also need to adapt to the city’s monkeys, said Phadej Laithong, director of the Wildlife Conservation Office, explaining that a lack of natural food sources prompts the animals to find food wherever they can, including from humans.

Previous control measure have fallen short. From 2014-2023, the wildlife authorities neutered about 2,600 Lopburi monkeys.

Athapol said they are also working in other areas of Thailand that are facing problems with monkeys, such as Prajuab Kiri Khan and Phetchaburi. He said 52 of the country’s 77 provinces report frequent problems from monkeys.

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Lopsided English Pub Bulldozed After Fire Will Be Rebuilt As It Was

LONDON (AP) — The owners of a quirky 18th century British pub unlawfully bulldozed after a mysterious fire last year were ordered on Tuesday by a local council to rebuild it — and to stick to its original, lopsided dimensions.

The watering hole — known as the Crooked House for its leaning walls and tilting foundation — favored by many locals in the village of Himley, central England, was gutted by a fire and subsequently demolished last August.

Its demise saddened many in the village, about 210 kilometers (130 miles) northwest of London, and became the subject of a criminal investigation. Three people were arrested and later released on bail in connection with the blaze but no one was charged.

In a statement, the South Staffordshire Council said it had “engaged with the owners” and now ordered the pub rebuilt “back to what it was prior to the fire” by February 2027 or face prosecution for failing to comply. The notice was served on owners, Adam and Carly Taylor and the company secretary of ATE Farms, which bought the inn. They have 30 days to appeal the notice.

The fire took place two weeks after the pub was sold by operator Marston’s. Two days later — and before a cause could be determined — the pub was bulldozed without authorization, which raised questions among local residents.

Roger Lees, the leader of the council, praised campaigners whose “aim is to see the Crooked House back to its former glory.” More than 35,000 people joined the ‘Save The Crooked House (Let’s Get It Re-Built)’ Facebook page.

“We have not taken this action lightly, but we believe that it is right to bring the owners, who demolished the building without consent, to account and we are committed to do what we can to get the Crooked House rebuilt,” Lees said.

Andy Street, the mayor of the wider West Midlands region who has supported the pub’s reconstruction, welcomed the decision in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “Fantastic work from South Staffordshire Council,” Street said.

The pub, originally built as a farmhouse in 1765, started sinking on one side as a result of extensive coal mining in the area, which is part of England’s region widely known as the Black Country, a reference to its industrial and mining heyday in the mid-19th century.

Around 1830, it became a pub and was called The Siden House — siden meaning crooked in the local dialect.

In the 1940s, it was renamed the Glynne Arms but was condemned as unsafe and scheduled for demolition until a forebear of Marston’s bought it and made it safe.

Renamed as The Crooked House, it became a tourist attraction, drawing visitors to admire its odd structure, one side standing about 1.2 meters (4 feet) lower than the other.

Now, there is only three years to go until the pub rises again and thirsty regulars can sip a beer — or two.

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Baa-d Boys: Video Shows Escaped Goats Evading Police In Texas Neighborhood

A herd of goats made a mad dash away from an enclosure before trotting past police officers during a wild scene in a Texas community Tuesday.

The goats roamed the streets of Arlington after escaping from the enclosure in the Crystal Canyon Natural Area, a park where the city brought them to “help clear underbrush and other invasive plants” to reduce fire danger in the area, according to the Arlington Police Department.

Body camera footage shared by police shows officers helping to wrangle the herd as goats evade them and head down the street in one neighborhood.

“Oh, it’s a mess,” said one officer in the video as the herd darts off the road and onto grass past a police vehicle.

“Go, goats, go back to where you came from, please. Who knew we were goat wranglers, now?”

The goats trot down another road before being led off the street. The herd was eventually guided back to their enclosure, police said.

Officials believed that “a runner or a jogger” may have let the goats go, KTVT reported.

The herd is in the park as part of a partnership between the city and Open Space Development, a Texas company that says the goats “work exceptionally well in eradicating invasive species” in herds “professionally and humanely managed by a dedicated team.”

Officials told KTVT that the “brush-clearing” goats are expected to consume about 50 miles of brush over a two-week period.

WFAA reported the herd ended its getaway without injuries, and all goats “were ultimately accounted for.”

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Wiggly Maggots Fall On Delta Passenger From Overhead Bin

A passenger on a Delta Air Lines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit is probably very bugged by her experience.

That’s because at least a dozen maggots fell from an overhead bin and onto the woman, which led to the flight returning to the Netherlands.

The unidentified woman’s seat mate, Philip Schotte, told Fox-affiliate WJBK-TV in Detroit how the woman reacted to having creepy larvae descend upon her.

“She was freaking out,” Schotte said. “She was just trying to kind of fight off these maggots.”

Schotte said at first he thought the falling maggots were some kind of prank but had no clue what was really happening.

“I don’t really know what was going through my mind. I was trying to process it ― disgust is one thing of course,” Schotte said. “We had to wait there for help to actually come.”

Schotte was eventually moved to another seat while flight attendants searched the overhead bins for the source of the maggots.

“They found out that there was a rotten fish in there,” Schotte said. “I did see everyone’s reaction to the bag being opened, which was just an immediate pinching of the nose.”

A man then claimed ownership of the rotting fish, which was wrapped in a newspaper. Flight attendants grabbed the maggot-infested fish and took it to the back of the plane.

The plane was flying over England when the pilot informed passengers they were returning to Amsterdam.

When the plane landed, passengers exited and were scheduled onto other, hopefully less smelly, flights, according to AirLive.net. In addition, the suitcase that held the decomposing fish was put into a bag to be burned.

Schotte told WJBK he does not know if the man who brought the fish and the maggots on the plane was detained or fined. He was just happy to get on another flight a few hours later.

Still, he has questions.

“I am surprised that both a rotten fish and live maggots were not picked up on by security,” he said.

In a statement to various media outlets, Delta said the flight “was interrupted due to an improperly packed carry-on bag. The aircraft returned to the gate and passengers were placed on the next available flight. The aircraft was removed from service for cleaning.”

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Texas Man Accused Of Putting Antiques Up His Kilt-Covered Butt

A kilt-wearing man in Spring, Texas, was arrested last week for a crime that can truly be described as “asinine”: taking items for sale at antique stores and placing them in his anus.

Oh, and then he allegedly put the tainted items back on the shelves, presumably so unsuspecting shoppers would purchase them.

Mitchell Vest was arrested Feb. 15 on charges of criminal mischief stemming from incidents that occurred on Feb. 10, where he was observed allegedly placing items in his rectum and then putting them back on shelves at two antique shops in Spring, according to a news release from the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable’s Office.

Some of the items the 60-year-old allegedly contaminated include a makeup brush, an antique bottle opener and a “tobacco tent can,” according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by Law&Crime.

The total cost of the items was a little over $200. The items had to be thrown away because of fecal contamination, but investigators were able to connect them to Vest.

He was freed on a $100 bond.

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Doctors Remove 150 Live Bugs From Florida Man's Nose

A Florida man is breathing easier now that 150 live bugs have been removed from his nose.

The unidentified patient went to a hospital earlier this month after noticing that his whole face felt like it was on fire, according to a Friday report by Jacksonville’s First Coast News.

Although the man first started experiencing symptoms in October, it wasn’t until recently that they became serious.

“Over a couple hours my face just started swelling, my lips swelled, I could hardly talk,” the patient told First Coast News. “I couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom without my nose starting to bleed.”

The man visited HCA Florida Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville and consulted with Dr. David Carlson, an ear, nose and throat specialist who was on call.

Carlson was shocked when he looked inside the man’s nose with a camera. He saw dozens and dozens of bugs feeding on the nose and sinus cavity ― some as big as the end of his pinkie.

“I knew he was in big trouble, there was erosion that was occurring near the skull base in very close proximity to his eye and his brain,” Carlson said.

At first, the physician tried using suction to remove the insects, which were in the larval stage. But they were too large, so he had to extract them one by one from the man’s nose.

“They were right up against his skull base, right under the brain, had they gone through that it could have killed him,” Carlson said.

The bugs have since been sent to an epidemiologist to determine their species. The patient is expected to make a full recovery.

It remains a mystery how the larvae got inside the man’s nose, but he told First Coast News that the problem might have stemmed from his bad hygiene habits when handling dead fish.

“Before I would rinse my hands in the river, now I’ll use cleaner to do a better job and not touch my nose or my hand,” the man told the station.

See the full story at First Coast News.

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English Pancake Racers Say The Key Is Just Going 'Flat Out'

OLNEY, England (AP) — Women in matching checkered aprons, headscarves and a rainbow of running shoes limbered up Tuesday as they prepared for the centuries-old pancake race in this English country town.

They rolled their shoulders in unison, raised up on their toes and did squats before stepping to the starting line — frying pans in hand.

At the word “Go” they sprinted through the streets, trying not to drop their pancakes as they roughly traced the path taken by a harried housewife in 1445, who legend has it heard the church bells signaling the Shrove Tuesday service and raced off with her skillet.

“It’s a horrible distance,” said Kaisa Larkas, 44, a mother of four who legged it past Eloise Kramer to capture the Olney title with a time of 63.37 seconds. “You just have to go flat out and then hope that you’re not gonna fall over. … But it’s good fun.”

The tradition has been repeated over the centuries — not only in Olney but across England and even in the United States, where the Kansas town of Liberal copied the idea and has been trying to outrun their friendly British rivals for 75 years.

This year the U.S. leg won, with Pamela Bolivar, a 19-year-old college student and nursing assistant, crossing the line in a time of 63.03 seconds. It was one of the closest races ever.

The race is held the day before the start of Lent, the Christian period of repentance and sacrifice before Easter. Celebrated as Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday in other parts of the world, the name Shrove Tuesday derives from the English word meaning to seek forgiveness or be granted absolution.

If a secret recipe behind winning the race exists, it probably would call for a pinch of skill, a dash of athleticism and an extra scoop of whimsy. The competition falls somewhere between the Great British Bake Off and zany local pursuits such as the rough-and-tumble cheese wheel chase down Cooper’s Hill.

Runners must flip the pancake at the start and finish.

The 415-yard (380-meter) sprint itself may be a form of penance ahead of Lent.

Two Kansas sisters who competed in Liberal since they were children traveled to Olney this year to see where it all began.

“We’ve been talking about it for a long time,” said Amy Thompson, who painted her nails with British and American flags and, of course, pancakes. “We like those festival odd things and we decided to quit talking about it. It’s the 75th anniversary and ... this would be the perfect time to come.”

Olney in Buckinghamshire, is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of London. Liberal is in southwest Kansas, just north of the Oklahoma state line and about 200 miles (320 kilometers) west of Wichita.

___

Melley reported from London. Heather Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas.

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Stingray With No Male Companion Still Manages To Get Pregnant

Charlotte, a rust-colored stingray the size of a serving platter, has spent much of her life gliding around the confines of a storefront aquarium in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains.

She’s 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) from her natural habitat under the waves off southern California. And she hasn’t shared a tank of water with a male of her species in at least eight years.

And yet nature has found a way, the aquarium’s owner said: The stingray is pregnant with as many as four pups and could give birth in the next two weeks.

“Here’s our girl saying, ’Hey, Happy Valentine’s Day! Let’s have some pups!” said Brenda Ramer, executive director of the Aquarium and Shark Lab on Main Street in downtown Hendersonville.

An expert on the stingrays said it would have been impossible for Charlotte to have mated with one of the five small sharks that share her tank, despite news reports suggesting that was the case after Ramer joked about a possible interspecies hookup.

The small aquarium is run by Ramer’s educational nonprofit, Team ECCO, which encourages local schoolchildren and others to take an interest in science.

Its biggest lesson now is on the process of parthenogenesis: a type of asexual reproduction in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, meaning there is no genetic contribution by a male.

The mostly rare phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not mammals. Documented examples have included California condors, Komodo dragons and yellow-bellied water snakes.

Kady Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta who is not involved with the North Carolina aquarium, said Charlotte’s pregnancy is the only documented example she’s aware of for this species, round stingrays.

But Lyons isn’t at all shocked. Other kinds of sharks, skates and rays — a trio of animals often grouped together — have had these kinds of pregnancies in human care.

“I’m not surprised, because nature finds a way of having this happen,” she said.

To be clear, Lyons said, these animals are not cloning themselves. Instead, a female’s egg fuses with another cell, triggers cell division and leads to the creation of an embryo.

The cell that fuses with the egg is known as a polar body. They are produced when a female is creating an egg but usually aren’t used.

“We don’t know why it happens,” Lyons said. “Just that it’s kind of this really neat phenomenon that they seem to be able to do.”

Ramer said she and others at the nonprofit at first thought that Charlotte had a tumor when they noticed a lump on her back that was “blowing up like a biscuit.” But an ultrasound revealed her pregnancy.

“We were all like, ’Shut the back door. There’s no way,” Ramer said. ”We thought we were overfeeding her. But we were overfeeding her because she has more mouths to feed.”

Charlotte currently lives in a tank that’s about 2,200 gallons (8,300 liters), or nearly the size of a construction dumpster. Ramer said they’re hoping to get a tank nearly twice that size to accommodate Charlotte’s offspring. They also want to put live cameras up for people to see them.

“It is very rare to happen,” Ramer said. “But it’s happening in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the ocean.”

As for the suggestion that Charlotte could have been impregnated by a shark, Lyons said that’s impossible. Besides being different sizes, the animals wouldn’t match up anatomically. Neither would their DNA.

“We should set the record straight that there aren’t some shark-ray shenanigans happening here,” said Lyons, whose graduate work focused on the species.

Round stingrays like Charlotte are abundant on the Pacific coasts of southern California and Mexico, often resting on the ocean’s sandy bottom near the shoreline.

In the wild they are typically the size of a small dinner plate, and their name comes from their circular shape. They come in all shades of brown. They eat small worms, crabs and mollusks, and they are preyed upon by certain types of sharks, seals and giant sea bass.

They’re well known to humans because of their painful sting, often resulting from a beachgoer’s foot stepping on them. Southern California lifeguards encourage people to do the so-called stingray shuffle as they wade through the water, in large part because of round stingrays.

Lyons finds the species fascinating. For example, embryos in the womb are bathed in uterine milk that provides nutrients to help them develop.

“I’m glad the round stingray is getting the media attention that it deserves,” Lyons said. “It’s not necessarily as sexy as a white shark, but they do a lot of really neat stuff.”

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Russia Fires Genetics Institute Chief Who Claimed Humans Lived 900 Years

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s science and higher education ministry has dismissed the head of a prestigious genetics institute who sparked controversy by contending that humans once lived for centuries and that the shorter lives of modern humans are due to their ancestors’ sins, state news agency RIA-Novosti said Thursday.

Although the report did not give a reason for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church called it religious discrimination.

Kudryavtsev, who headed the Russian Academy of Science’s Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, made a presentation at a conference in 2023 in which he said people had lived for some 900 years prior to the era of the Biblical Flood and that “original, ancestral and personal sins” caused genetic diseases that shortened lifespans.

He also claimed that children “up to the seventh generation are responsible for the sins of their fathers,” according to the Russian news website Meduza.

The head of the Russian church’s commission on family issues, Fyodor Lukyanov, said Kudryavtsev’s dismissal “for religious beliefs and statements in accordance with these beliefs violates the ethics of the scientific community,” RIA-Novosti said.

“We have already gone through Soviet times, when genetics was long considered a pseudoscience,” Lukyanov said. The Soviet Union under Josef Stalin suppressed conventional genetics in favor of the theories of Trofim Lysenko, who contended that acquired characteristics could be inherited by offspring.

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7 King Cakes Stolen From New Orleans Bakery In A Very Mardi Gras Way

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — With their purple, gold and green colors and toy babies hidden inside, king cakes are staples of Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, but apparently they’re also valuable enough to steal — at least this time of year during the Carnival season.

A thief stole seven king cakes — about as many as he could carry — during a break-in last week at a New Orleans bakery. The thief also took cash and a case of vodka from Bittersweet Confections last Wednesday, according to New Orleans Police Department.

“Our king cakes are just that good,” the bakery wrote on social media. “But please come and purchase one during our regular store hours.”

While it’s a secular celebration, Carnival in New Orleans — and around the world — is strongly linked to Christian and Roman Catholic traditions. The season begins on Jan. 6, the 12th day after Christmas, and continues until Mardi Gras, known as Fat Tuesday, which is the final day of feasting, drinking and revelry before Ash Wednesday and the fasting associated with Lent.

King cakes are among the foods most associated with Carnival in New Orleans. The rings of pastry are adorned with purple, green and gold sugar or icing, and they often have a tiny plastic baby hidden inside as a prize.

One wisecracker responded to the bakery’s social media post with a tongue-in-cheek false-admission that he was the thief.

“It was me. ...I’m holding all 7 babies hostage until I get a lifetime supply of King Cakes from you every year,” the man posted.

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Pigeon Suspected Of Being Chinese Cleared By Indian Police

NEW DELHI (AP) — Indian police cleared a suspected Chinese spy pigeon after eight months’ detention and released it into the wild Tuesday, news agency Press Trust of India reported.

The pigeon’s ordeal began in May when it was captured near a port in Mumbai with two rings tied to its legs, carrying words that looked like Chinese. Police suspected it was involved in espionage and took it in, later sending it to Mumbai’s Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit Hospital for Animals.

Eventually, it turned out the pigeon was an open-water racing bird from Taiwan that had escaped and made its way to India. With police permission, the bird was transferred to the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose doctors set it free on Tuesday.

Mumbai police could not be reached for comment.

It is not the first time a bird has come under police suspicion in India.

In 2020, police in Indian-controlled Kashmir released a pigeon belonging to a Pakistani fisherman after a probe found that the bird, which had flown across the heavily militarized border between the nuclear-armed nations, was not a spy.

In 2016, another pigeon was taken into custody after it was found with a note that threatened Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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