In the news
Cynthia Abercrombie said her Great Pyrenees mix named Apollo is back home in Florida after a six- week adventure, somehow traveling 1,100 miles to Swansea, Mass., where an animal control officer found Apollo and identified its owner through a microchip.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York signed into law legislation barring phone, cable and utility companies in New York from charging early termination fees when service is discontinued because of a customer’s death.
Anton Karner, a lawyer for a Moroccan woman who startled customs officials by taking a piece of her dead husband’s intestine on a flight to their home in Graz, Austria, said his client suspects her spouse was poisoned while visiting relatives in Marrakesh.
Malgorzata Chodyla, spokesman for a zoo in Poznan, Poland, said combat engineers were called in when a visiting Border Guard officer noticed that a female bear named Ewka was playing with something odd in its pen that turned out to be a rusty World War II mortar grenade.
Keshunte Taylor, 20, was arrested on armed robbery charges after, police in Gainesville, Fla., said, she pointed a gun at a clerk as she robbed a fast- food restaurant and then tried to make her getaway in a taxicab, which police stopped a few blocks away.
Espen Brungodt, 28, of Bergen, Norway, who traveled to Portland, Maine, as a tourist, pleaded guilty to making threatening interstate communications and now faces up to five years in prison for threatening on social media to shoot police from a parking garage, just hours before his arrest.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran noted for his hardline stance against the West, announced he won’t run in next year’s presidential election, ending weeks of speculation after the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei discouraged his candidacy.
Russell Bertram, 64, the former police chief of Harrisburg, S. D., was found guilty of first- degree murder in the 2009 killing of his pregnant, 26- year- old fiancee, which prosecutors said was partly motivated by jealousy because Bertram had undergone a vasectomy and knew the child couldn’t be his.
Mike Morris, coroner of Clearfield County, Pa., said Boris Reyes, a Guatemalan found sprawled dead over a guardrail by a passing motorist, had swallowed “multiple packets” of heroin and died when one of the packets burst.