BOSTON (AP) — A Massachusetts contestant on “The Price Is Right” was hoping to win a getaway to some tropical locale during a recent appearance on the game show.
Instead she won a trip to neighboring New Hampshire.
Catherine Graham had already won a firepit and a love seat when she was picked to go on stage and play “Side By Side” with host Drew Carey.
Then she found out she’d be playing for a trip to New Hampshire, just across the border from Massachusetts. She won by correctly guessing the value of the prize was $7,696 instead of $9,676.
Graham confessed she was hoping for somewhere a bit more exotic than the “Live Free or Die” state, which she said she’s already visited “a million times.”
“I just wish it was Tahiti or some place, or Bora Bora. A cruise around the world maybe,” Graham told WBZ-TV, laughing.
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Feb. 10 (UPI) — A Maine woman who pulled over on a road while driving home captured footage of a fearless moose that walked up to eat snow off the hood of her car.
Margo Lukens of Orono said she and her dog had been cross-country skiing in the Caribou Bog Conservation Area and were traveling home on Taylor Road in Orono when she saw lines of cars stopped on both sides of the road.
“I could see that there was a police car, pulled over facing our traffic, on the other side and I thought, ‘well, something’s going on,'” Lukens told the Bangor Daily News.
Lukens said she soon spotted the reason that traffic had come to a halt — a young moose in the road. She said the moose turned its attention to her vehicle when the car in front of her drove away.
“It came up close and began nibbling on the snow on my hood,” Lukens said.
She captured video of the moose eating snow and licking at the ice on the front of her car.
“I didn’t feel at all threatened by this moose. He was obviously a yearling or something,” Lukens said. “I was a little bit concerned that it was being so unguarded.”
Lukens said her dog was in the car with her, but the canine seemed unconcerned.
“It was a really nice moment,” Lukens said, “and my dog, who’s usually quite vigilant, I think she was too tired to pay attention.”
Lukens said she saw a police officer and another person ushering the moose out of the roadway as she drove away from the scene.
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(Cp24.com) A woman has been arrested after allegedly stealing and driving a Toronto fire truck around the city early Thursday morning, police say.
At around 4:45 a.m., police responded to trouble at Toronto Fire Station 227, located at Queen Street East And Woodbine Avenue.
Police say someone broke into the station and drove a fire truck through the bay door.
A part of the door was found across the street on the ground.
Police say a low-speed pursuit ensued and came to an end on Unwin Avenue, about a 10-minute drive away from the fire station.
A 28-year-old woman was arrested and charges are pending.
Police say there is nothing to suggest at this time that the theft is related to any protest or convoy.
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CANAJOHARIE, N.Y. (AP) — Ellie the potbellied pig snuggles up to Wyverne Flatt when he watches TV and sometimes rolls over to let him pet her belly. The 110-pound pig is “family,” Flatt says, an emotional support animal who helped him through a divorce and the death of his mother.
Officials in his upstate village of Canajoharie see it very differently. To them, the pig is a farm animal Flatt is harboring in the village illegally.
The case could soon be headed to a criminal trial. But it has already caught the attention of pig partisans who believe the animals should be respected more as companions instead of just a food source.
“I could never dream of giving away somebody who’s part of my family,” Flatt said recently as he patted the pig in his kitchen. “She’s very smart. She’s more intelligent than my dogs. I think she can kind of hone in on you when you’re feeling bad because she’ll want to come in and snuggle with you.”
Ellie is a knee-high Vietnamese potbellied pig with a black coat and hooves that clack on the floor as she walks from her kitchen food dish. Flatt was living in South Carolina when he got the pig in 2018, when she was “about as big as a shoe.”
She came north with Flatt in 2019 when he moved to Canajoharie, a modest village on the Mohawk River dominated by the husk of the old Beech-Nut food plant.
Flatt, 54, bought a fixer-upper near the business center of the village with plans to remodel it and maybe open restaurant on part of the ground floor. He also has two dogs and two cats.
A village code officer told Flatt he was housing Ellie illegally in October 2019 during a visit for a building permit request. When the village noticed Ellie was still there six months later, Flatt was formally notified he was violating the local code barring farm animals in the village. Violation of a zoning code is a misdemeanor under state law, according to court filings.
Both sides have dug in since then.
Flatt says the village is picking on his pig, which he says is clean and smart. Several of his neighbors have signed affidavits saying they like Ellie.
Village Mayor Jeff Baker said the board has no comment while the court case is pending. But an attorney for the village wrote in a court filing that the pig is a potential public health hazard. She argued that if “every citizen were to openly scoff at the Village zoning codes … we would live in a lawless society.”
Ellie’s fate could hinge on federal housing guidance that says municipalities should provide a “reasonable accommodation” when a person can demonstrate an animal provides emotional support for a disability-related need. Flatt’s attorney argues that his client meets that test, saying that Ellie allowed Flatt to get off his medication and cope with his anxiety.
The village has argued in court filings it is willing to make reasonable accommodations, but that Flatt never met the standard.
A note from a nurse practitioner saying Ellie helped Flatt get off of medication is in dispute. And while he keeps in his wallet a laminated card illustrated with a headshot of Ellie saying she is a “registered emotional support animal,” the village’s attorney said it was obtained online for a fee with no formal legal process.
“Defendant provided no legitimate proof that he is a person under disability, and no proof that his disability was remedied by having an emotional support animal, nor that the particular animal — a pig — was the only suitable remedy for his condition,” attorney Kirsten Dunn wrote in a filing last year.
A trial was scheduled to start March 22, but has been delayed. If found guilty, Flatt could face jail time or have the pig taken from him, according to his attorney.
Emotional support animals have become common in recent decades. After years of passengers bringing pigs, rabbits, birds and other animals on airplanes, federal transportation officials in 2020 said airlines no longer had to accommodate emotional support animals.
And Flatt is not the first pig owner seeking emotional support to run afoul of local housing laws.
In 2019, a family in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst were not allowed to keep a potbellied pig, named Pork Chop, they said was an emotional support animal for their daughter-in-law. An Indiana woman was told in 2018 to get rid of her emotional support pig for similar reasons.
Although people in the United States have been keeping smaller pigs as pets for decades, their advocates say they’re still viewed by some people as little more than livestock.
“There’s a disconnect in most people’s minds that even though these animals were imported originally as pets, they were never intended to be food. There’s still a lot of people who do that equation: Pig equals food,” said Kathy Stevens, founder of the Catskill Animal Sanctuary for rescued farm animals and a supporter of Flatt.
Still, many municipalities around the country allow residents to keep pigs as pets. Some local rules specify pet pigs must be under a specified weight or allow only pot-bellied pigs, according to information from the North American Pet Pig Association.
Canajoharie approved a new law in January clarifying its laws on keeping animals, citing a surge in violations. Farm animals are still barred under the law, which spells out rules for residents seeking a reasonable accommodation.
Flatt said he’s received offers from people to house Ellie outside the village, but he wants to fight to keep her.
“I’m hoping this sets a precedent that people start understanding that these are pets,” he said. “These are not something you go home and slaughter and eat.”
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Feb. 10 (UPI) — Patrons at a social club in Britain were treated to an unusual sight when a loose pig wandered into the establishment before being lured back outside with potato chips.
Witnesses said the pig wandered into the Easington Colliery Club in County Durham, England, just after 10 p.m. Tuesday.
Club regulars said the pig was friendly and approached them for affection.
Kayleigh Parkin, the club’s manager, said she was in her residence above the business when staff called her to report the uninvited customer.
“I live on the premises so I was upstairs, and the bar staff phoned me and said ‘I’m sorry to disturb you but there’s a pig in the bar,'” Parkin told ITV News. “They got some crisps from behind the bar and lured him outside with some cheese and onion.”
Parkin said the pig was contained at the club’s fenced-in garden and she posted about the animal on Facebook.
She said the owner of the pig, which turned out to be named Roddy, got into contact within 15 minutes and brought their pet home.
“Everyone was laughing about it. It was a bit of entertainment for a Tuesday night,” Parkin said.
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A bidet company announced that it’s holding an unusual Super Bowl contest, and the news made a big splash with Twitter users.
On Wednesday, Tushy tweeted that its “Super Bowel” contest will award $10,000 to the best post-Super Bowl poop sent on what it is dubbing “Super Bowel Monday.”
Tushy’s social media team was sure to note that the contest does not start until next week.
Thoroughly unsurprisingly, Twitter users had lots of thoughts about the crap-seeking contest.
But while Tushy specifically asked people to hold off on submissions, some couldn’t help submitting parody entries already.
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We all get spam calls, and most people hang up on them. But one of those relentless phone scams led to an unlikely friendship.
Stephen Ira Adams, who owns an insurance agency in central Louisiana, answers his phone constantly — even anonymous calls because that’s just part of the business. In 2016, he got a call that unexpectedly moved him. He heard a pain that he knew all too well.
“Something in that young man’s voice, I felt like I could hear him through the phone that he was a broken person,” Adams told “CBS Mornings” lead national correspondent David Begnaud.
The man on the other end was at a call center in Ghana, Africa. He asked Adams to purchase a gift card.
“I said to him, ‘What you’re doing right now is a scam. You know, you are targeting elderly Americans and it’s not right,'” Adams said. “And I said, ‘When you get off, call me.'”
The man called him back.
“He did not ever ask me for any money ever again. Nope, he did not. He asked me for mosquito nets, malaria drugs, educational things,” Adams said.
That man was Prince Anderson, who is from a small village in Ghana. As the oldest son in the family, he took on the duty of caring for his sick mother and supporting his younger brother through school after his father died.
It’s now been five years since Stephen Ira Adams and Prince Anderson first spoke and they still keep in touch via FaceTime.
“The kind of love he showed me, the things he sends me, the money, and the care and love with my mom and everything — the love he showed me, it’s overwhelming,” Anderson said.
Adams, a 41-year-old father of two boys, said he sees himself as a father figure to 25-year-old Anderson.
“I told him to quit that call center, and he never went back because he found out what it was about,” Adams said. “Some of the people working there, I found out, don’t even know what’s going on. His next job after he quit that call center, he was washing windows at the airport.”
Anderson is now working for a private security company in the capital of Ghana.
In a twist of fate, his brother, Isaac, got a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he recently started his freshman year. When the dorms closed for winter break, Adams invited Anderson’s younger brother to spend Christmas with his family in Alexandria, Louisiana.
“I see him to be my father, of course, the kind of things he’s doing for me, care and all that. He’s a top man, like really top,” Isaac Anderson said.
They may look like an unlikely family, but Adams says he learned early on as a boy about the enduring power of kindness from strangers. He was born to young parents and says he had a tumultuous childhood that included abuse, abandonment and poverty.
After a brief time spent in foster care, Adams was raised by his grandmother and grandfather — a U.S. Air Force veteran, who he says instilled in him a profound love of country, leading him to serve his country himself.
“I think about when I was younger, the different random people that helped me. Everything from neighbors to people I met on my bicycle, to the janitors at my high school, to the lunchroom lady, give me some extra food to bring home with me,” Adams said.
He said he wanted to be reliable to others because they were reliable to him when he was in need.
“You never know who you’re going to be able to help out there. If you’re just open to it,” Adams said. “We are our brother’s keepers. It’s our responsibility to make sure, you know, our neighbors taking care of our children, our family. And if we all do that for each other, then we’re going to be fine. I think what the world is missing is love.”
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Feb. 11 (UPI) — An animal rescuer was summoned to a subway station in New York to capture a hawk that had flown into the facility and was unable to find its way out.
Paul Flores, a station agent at the Westchester Square-East Tremont Avenue subway station in the Bronx, said the Cooper’s hawk appeared to be having trouble finding its way out of the facility after apparently chasing a pigeon or smaller bird into the station.
“It had to be in some sort of distress and just tired of flying back and forth and it needed help just getting out of the station and it would be alright after that,” Flores told WABC-TV.
Flores said the hawk was inside the station for multiple days. He contacted the Audubon Society, which connected him with Bobby Horvath, a retired firefighter who works with Wildlife in Need.
Horvath brought an 18-foot net to the station and was able to ensnare the bird of prey.
“He was exhausted and he had a slight tumble, so I was able to net him on a step,” Horvath said.
The rescuer said the hawk was returned to the wild Thursday afternoon at Pelham Bay Park.
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(NPR) It’s not exactly smooth sailing these days in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, where locals are voicing their objection to a plan that would temporarily dismantle a historic bridge to enable the passage of a record-breaking yacht reportedly owned by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
In fact, some are already making plans — albeit in jest — for what they will do if the project comes to fruition: throw eggs at the yacht as it traverses the water under the Koningshaven Bridge, known locally as “De Hef.”
Some 13,000 people are “interested” and nearly 4,000 have said they will attend a Facebook event titled “Throwing eggs at superyacht Jeff Bezos,” which has been shared more than 1,000 times in the week since its creation.
“Calling all Rotterdammers, take a box of rotten eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through the Hef in Rotterdam,” wrote organizer Pablo Strörmann.
He told the NL Times that the protest started as a joke among friends and has quickly gotten “way out of hand.” (The English-language news site also notes that this isn’t Strörmann’s first campaign to go viral.)
The news of De Hef’s potential disassembly, however brief, has clearly struck a chord with both locals and international observers.
It all started last week when Dutch broadcaster Rijnmond reported that the city appeared willing to grant a request to dismantle the decades-old steel bridge so that Bezos’ yacht could pass through.
De Hef was built in 1927 as a railway bridge, with a midsection that can be lifted to allow ship traffic to pass underneath, according to The Washington Post. It was replaced by a tunnel and decommissioned in 1994, but was saved from demolition by public protests and later declared a national monument.
The ship’s three masts are apparently too high for the bridge’s roughly 130-foot clearance.
After backlash, Jeff Bezos suggests naming library auditorium for Toni Morrison
The sailing yacht in question was reportedly commissioned by the billionaire Amazon founder and is currently being built at the Oceanco shipyard in the Netherlands, according to Boat International. It will consist of three masts with aluminum and steel construction and will measure more than 415 feet in length.
“Once delivered, not only will she become the world’s largest sailing yacht but she will also hold the title for the largest superyacht ever built in the Netherlands,” it added.
The waterway where the bridge sits is the only way the ship can get from the shipyard in Alblasserdam to the open seas, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. So Oceanco asked Rotterdam officials to temporarily remove the middle section of the bridge.
City spokesperson Netty Kros told the CBC that “the applicant” would cover the costs of the project but did not clarify whether that refers to the yacht’s owner, the shipbuilder or both. Bloomberg reports that Oceanco will foot the bill. NPR has reached out to Amazon and Oceanco to confirm these details.
The city appeared to agree to the arrangement last week, with municipal project leader Marcel Walravens telling Rijnmond that the project would proceed for logistical and economic reasons. He said an exact plan was being developed but estimated it would take about a week to prepare and another week to “put everything back in place.”
“At the Koningenne Bridge, we can press a button, and it opens. That’s not possible here because De Hef has a maximum height,” Walravens said, according to a translation from the NL Times. “The only alternative is to take out the middle part.”
That prompted an immediate backlash from locals, lawmakers and social media users, with the Rotterdam Historical Society pointing out that city officials had promised never to dismantle the bridge again after completing a major restoration in 2017.
Officials then walked back the reports, with Rotterdam’s mayor telling a Dutch newspaper on Thursday that “no decision has yet been taken, not even an application for a permit,” according to The Guardian.
He said the municipality would consider an application and assess the potential impacts, like whether the dismantling can be done without damaging the bridge and who would cover the costs.
Proponents of the plan say the project will bring more economic opportunities to the region, while critics say there’s a double standard at play.
“Normally it’s the other way around: If your ship doesn’t fit under a bridge, you make it smaller,” Strörmann told the NL Times. “But when you happen to be the richest person on Earth, you just ask a municipality to dismantle a monument. That’s ridiculous.”
With a net worth of more than $188 billion, Bezos is the third-richest person in the world behind Tesla founder Elon Musk and French businessman Bernard Arnault, according to Forbes’ real-time list.
Hypothetically, if the project does come to pass, and locals do show up with eggs, just how hard of a moving target would the yacht be? The website Curbed set out to find out.
After examining several studies and making a few calculations, reporter Clio Chang says an egg would have to travel about 238 feet to hit the hull — “a difficult, but not impossible, feat.”
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(Sky News) A thieving parrot offered a remarkable birds-eye view of a national park in New Zealand after picking up a GoPro camera and flying off.
A family were having a rest during a trek when the parrot was filmed swooping down, picking up the device, and making a swift getaway.
The camera kept on filming as the bird flew high above the tree-covered hills of the Fiordland National Park in Te Anau.
The feathered fiend was a kea parrot, a species which is native to the park and known for its curiosity.
After the brief aerial tour, it placed the camera down on the ground and gave it a close inspection before losing interest and flying off.
A young boy then shouted “found it” as he came to collect the borrowed camera.
