QUIRKY WORLD ... A daily look at some of the world’s stranger stories
A small Albuquerque cemetery appears to be the victim of fowl night-time activity.
KRQE-TV reported that Michael Gabaldon, co-owner of Romero Cemetery, said for two years, dead chickens and chicken parts have been dropped off overnight with bones or feathers scattered throughout the cemetery. He said he doesn’t know if the chickens are part of a religious ceremony, but he plans to close off the cemetery at night to put an end to the “creepy” practice.
An off-duty Houston fireman made the best of his resources when trying to put out a truck tyre fire — he used the beer that the truck was hauling.
Fire Captain Craig Moreau and his wife were driving home after a trip to Austin when they found an 18-wheeler truck on fire.
Mr Moreau and the trucker, whose brake problems started the fire, tried using a small extinguisher.
But when they noticed the blaze had flared up again, the fireman asked the driver what he was hauling and sprayed the beer on the tyres to extinguish the flames. There were no injuries.
A Scottish adventurer battled with temperatures of -40C as he competed in a 180-mile (290km) dog sled race.
John Stewart faced freezing and blizzard conditions as he raced in the hills of Minnesota in the US in the first week of the new year.
Mr Stewart, originally from Aberdeen, is a professional dog sled racer and was competing in the Gichigami Express race, near Grand Marais. He was accompanied on the mountains by 12 dogs along the three stages of the race.
The first “fairly-traded” own-brand rubber gloves are to go on sale at the Co-operative supermarket.
The household gloves are made from fairly-traded rubber produced by smallholder farmers in Sri Lanka.
Rubber is mass-produced in Sri Lanka from trees grown on large-scale plantations owned by multinational companies, but the Co-operative is working with a small community of independent farmers who rely on rubber tapped from their own trees for their livelihood.
The Co-operative has worked with fair trade organisation Traidcraft to develop a model to ensure the rubber is fairly traded.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo has made its third rocket-powered supersonic flight in the Mojave Desert, soaring to a record 71,000ft.
The company says the reusable space vehicle was carried by aeroplane to 46,000ft and then released.
The craft used its rocket motor the rest of the way to reach its highest altitude to date. SpaceShipTwo and its two-member crew then glided to a safe landing in the desert north of Los Angeles.
A cat that spent at least three days in a north-west Ohio drainpipe has been rescued after initially refusing attempts to lure it out with tuna, the classic call of “here, kitty, kitty,” and even a mobile phone app that meowed.
The Courier newspaper reported a resident in Findlay heard the cat’s cries and groundsmen at a school cut through the pipe to free the orange cat, which was muddy, emaciated, and hypothermic.
The male cat has been named Piper. It has a broken leg and other injuries. A vet who treated the cat said: “If they truly have nine lives, he probably has three left.”
A huge fire in a Cincinnati suburb destroyed a 10,000sq-ft mansion.
Lieutenant Jim Gilligan of the Madeira and Indian Hill Joint Fire District told The Cincinnati Enquirer it took firefighters about seven hours to extinguish the blaze.
No one was injured in the fire, but Lt Gilligan said the 22-room mansion — estimated to be worth in the region of $4m (€2.9m) — was completely destroyed.
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