US customs inspectors at Los Angeles International Airport seized a shipment of several dozen live giant African snails, considered a delicacy in Nigeria but also voracious pests that can eat paint and stucco off houses, officials said on Monday.
Weighing nearly 2 pounds (0.9 kg) each, including their shells, and measuring about 6 inches (15 cm) in length, the 67 snails arrived from Lagos, Nigeria, in two plastic baskets with paperwork describing them as being for human consumption, the US Customs and Border Protection agency said.
Man dies by jumping into bonfire
Police in Utah are investigating after a man killed himself by jumping into a 30-foot (9-metre) bonfire during an arts and culture festival at the weekend in the desert west of Salt Lake City, local media reported.
More than 1,000 people were watching as the man ran past safety barriers and leapt into the blaze on Saturday night at the Element 11 event, which has ties to the Burning Man festival held each year in northern Nevada.
Accused of stabbing watermelon
A Connecticut man faces charges of threatening his wife after stabbing a large butcher’s knife through a watermelon and leaving it on the kitchen table for her to see.
Carmine Cervellino, 49, was arraigned on Monday on misdemeanor counts of threatening and disorderly conduct, Thomaston Police Department Chief James Campbell said. Cervellino was arrested on Saturday and released after posting $500 bond.
Diamond ring found in thrift shop
Employees at the national thrift store chain Goodwill discovered a 3-carat diamond ring among piles of donated second-hand clothes and shoes, and it was auctioned on Tuesday for more than $11,000. An anonymous person made the donation last month at the Annandale, Virginia, store, stashing the ring in a Ziploc bag along with other jewelery.
Ex-slave’s son is world’s oldest?
A Brazilian rest home for the elderly believes it may be home to the world’s oldest person, a former agricultural labourer born in a runaway slave community, who is identified in documents stating he was born 126 years ago at a time when Brazil still had an emperor.
A birth certificate and identity documents issued by a judge in 2001 show that Jose Aguinelo dos Santos, a resident of the Vila Vicentina shelter for the elderly in Bauru, Brazil, was born on July 7, 1888, less than two months after the end of slavery in the country, said Cesar Siqueira, the rest home’s vice president.
‘COPSLIE’ licence plate approved
The New Hampshire driver who got the state’s top court to approve his “COPSLIE” vanity plate could soon be joined on the highways by motorists declaring themselves “BIGTACO,” “MAMS” or “KNUCKL.”
The state Department of Motor Vehicles resumed processing applications on Monday for customised licence plates, following a state Supreme Court ruling in May that found it was using “unconstitutionally vague” criteria to reject plate ideas.
Billionaire’s California breakup bid
A long-shot effort to break California into six separate states got a boost when the billionaire venture capitalist behind the proposal said he had gathered enough signatures to place it on the ballot in two years.
Timothy Draper, a founder of a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that has invested in Twitter, Skype and Tesla, among other companies, has been agitating for months for a ballot initiative to chop the most populous US state into smaller entities.