Quirky World: On a bicycle made for two... people sink to a new low with river dumping
A tandem bike, a tin bath, and firearms are just some of the items dumped in canals and rivers, research carried out this winter has revealed.
They are among the stranger objects recovered in a four-month survey of rubbish thrown in waterways, as part of a £45m (€57m( restoration and repairs programme by the Canal and River Trust. The bizarre rubbish joins a 16ft dead python, a Volkswagen camper van, a bus stop sign, an unexploded Second World War grenade, a bag of bullets, and a pizza delivery bike still carrying a pizza, which have all been recovered in the past five years.
A baby tarantula rescued from a group of children who planned to throw it in the bin is being cared for the Scottish SPCA.
The youngsters were playing with the spider at a petrol station in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, when a woman overheard their plans to dump it. She stepped in to save the tarantula and it is now being cared for by the animal welfare charity.
Animal rescue officer Emma Sergeant said: “While tarantulas frighten a lot of people, they are actually quite popular pets.”
A baby gorilla born by emergency caesarean is being cared for by keepers as her mother is still too ill to look after her.
The six-week-old Western lowland gorilla has almost doubled her birth weight, now weighing 4.9lb (2.2kg), has started teething and has even giggled for the first time.
The infant was born after an emergency caesarean procedure at Bristol Zoo — a rare occurrence in gorillas and only carried out a handful of times in the world.
She is now being hand-reared round the clock by a small team of experienced gorilla keepers, although she is not currently on show to the public.
A man who spent more than 24 hours perched near the top of an 80ft-tall sequoia tree in the centre of Seattle has finally climbed down safely.
As onlookers cheered and chanted “Man In Tree” — in deference to the Twitter hashtag by which he became known — he sat down near the base of the conifer and appeared to be chomping on a piece of fruit. Officers initially kept their distance, but soon approached the man, got him on a wheeled stretcher, and took him for a medical evaluation.
Reasons for the drama remained unclear. At times, the man appeared agitated, gestured wildly, yelled and threw apples and branches at officers. “Issue appears to be between the man and the tree,” the Seattle Police Department tweeted at one point.
It was not a happy hour for some central Florida drivers when trucks carrying Busch beer and Frito Lay chips collided, spilling them both along Interstate 95.
Florida Highway Patrol spokeswoman Kim Montes said that Zachary Basinger had stopped his Frito Lay box truck on the right shoulder. Roberto Ferrer Rodriguez told troopers he was trying to move his beer truck into the centre lane but saw another vehicle and swerved back into the right lane. His truck struck the chips truck.
The Frito Lay truck overturned. The beer and chips spilled on to the highway. Traffic backed up as troopers closed the road while clearing the debris. Rodriguez was ticketed for failing to maintain a single lane.
Authorities have seized a newly-built house in California with all mod cons — including a cross-border tunnel that ran the length of four football fields into Mexico and was used to smuggle drugs. The tunnel was the 12th to be discovered along California’s border with Mexico since 2006.
Drug traffickers bought the property in Calexico, California, in April for $240,000 (€214,600) and finished building a three-bedroom house by December. Prosecutors say the first drugs shipment came through the tunnel on February 28. The tunnel extended about 300m in Mexico from the El Sarape restaurant and ran about 100m into the US to the house in a quiet residential area of Calexico, a city of about 40,000 people 190km east of San Diego.
But the tunnellers were unaware that police were onto the scam.
“This house and tunnel were constructed under the watchful eye of law enforcement,” said Laura Duffy, US attorney for the Southern District of California.
“For the builders, the financiers and the operators of these passageways, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. We will seize your drugs and your tunnel before you even have a chance to use it.”
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