A particularly timid dog at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home is so petrified of what lurks outside her kennel that she rarely ever meets other animals or their owners.
Staff hope a televised appeal with Paul O’Grady will help the agoraphobic dog, named Whisper, find a new permanent place to live.
Whisper’s story is due to feature on ITV’s Paul O’Grady: For The Love Of Dogs this Thursday. Battersea senior animal welfare assistant Karen Slavid said: “Whisper has had a terrible start to life and she really deserves a happy ending.”
Bronson’s beard up for auction
Artwork by Charles Bronson, one of the country’s most violent prisoners, is to be sold at auction – including part of his beard.
A sale next week will offer 200 lots including paintings, personal effects, clothing, signed books, a hand-made Christmas present and even part of his beard, said auctioneer Jonathan Humbert. The sale takes place at JP Humbert Auctioneers of Towcester, Northamptonshire, on Thursday, October 9.
The 61-year-old inmate, born Michael Peterson and now called Charles Salvador after he changed his name by deed poll, is serving a life sentence for robbery and kidnap and has earned public notoriety with a history of violence inside and outside jail.
Time for children to talk turkey
British children should grow up knowing the taste of Melton Mowbray pork pies, Norfolk turkeys and black pudding, Liz Truss has said.
The Environment Secretary said it was a “disgrace” that the UK imported large numbers of apples, pears and cheese at a time when “we have never had it so good” for British food and drink.
Speaking at the Conservative Party conference, she told delegates: “We are producing more varieties of cheese than the French. And we are selling tea to China – Yorkshire tea.”
Budding row over marathon
The manager of Zola Budd’s South African running club said the former Olympic athlete will take authorities to court after they disqualified her from an age-category prize in a marathon.
Hooters Athletics Club manager Ray de Vries said 48-year-old Budd finished first in the 40 to 49-year-olds class at the gruelling 56-mile Comrades Marathon in June but was unfairly disqualified for not displaying an age tag on her vest.
Mr de Vries said the now US-based Budd was instructed before the race, which was billed as her South African homecoming, that there was no need for a separate tag as her age category was shown on her main race number. Budd has started proceedings to take the regional athletics body and Comrades Marathon Association to court.
Missing sketchbook back on show
A rare sketchbook by US artist Grant Wood dating from 1929 is back in its home art gallery in Davenport, Iowa, after it went missing from a museum about 50 years ago.
The 100-page sketchbook signed by Wood, the painter of American Gothic, is again in the Figge Art Museum’s possession, said collections and exhibitions manager Andrew Wallace. The small book of drawings for the 24ft stained-glass window in Cedar Rapid’s Veterans Memorial Building may have been stolen during an open house in 1966 at what was then the Davenport Museum of Art.
Mossad sheds its shadowy image
It used to be that if you wanted to join one of the world’s most secretive espionage organisations you had to sneak into a foreign embassy, answer a cryptic newspaper ad or show up in a nondescript building in Tel Aviv to meet a shadowy recruiter. Now all it takes to apply for a job at Israel’s Mossad spy agency is a click of the mouse.
The typically shadowy Mossad revamped its website last week to include a snazzy recruiting video and an online application option for those seeking employment.