In the news
Lance Lohrke, the fire chief in Sheridan Township, Mich., said it was “Game on!” when he, several officers and firefighters were called to catch an angry mother raccoon and her four kits that had startled a homeowner by crashing through a ceiling and landing on an upholstered living room chair.
Oliver North, 74, the retired Marine lieutenant colonel and a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, has been named the next president of the National Rifle Association, which described North “as a hero and a warrior who will vigorously fight to preserve gun owners’ rights.”
LaToya Cantrell, 46, sworn in Monday as the first woman to hold the job of New Orleans’ mayor since the city’s founding, told her jubilant supporters: “After 300 years, don’t you think it’s about time a woman was in charge?”
Maxine Thompson, 70, the mother of a Philadelphia police officer who says she’s never used her handgun before, shot and wounded a 43-year-old intruder in the arm when he broke into her home around 4 a.m. and then chased him back out the way he came in, police said.
Kendall Robbins and her husband, Ross, named their newborn twins Rowan Luke and Kai Leia after she gave birth in Ogden, Utah, on May 4, also known as “Star Wars Day” because it sounds like the movie’s line, “May the force be with you.”
James Shaw Jr., hailed as a hero for wresting an assault-style rifle away from a gunman at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tenn., has raised more than $227,000 for shooting victims through an online campaign that as of Monday had attracted more than 6,200 donations.
Harshdeo Pandey, magistrate of Sitapur, a rural town in North India, said parents are being told not to let their children go outside or use outhouses alone after six children were killed and at least two dozen more injured in the past week by roaming packs of feral dogs.
Ken Jeong, 48, who left his career as an internal medicine doctor to do standup comedy full time, used his training to help a woman who began having a seizure while he was performing at a comedy club in Phoenix until paramedics arrived.
Zanele Ndlovu, who lost her right arm and suffered injuries to her left hand when attacked by a crocodile while canoeing with her fiance on Zimbabwe’s Zambezi River, kept her wedding date intact by getting married five days later in a hospital chapel.