Newscan

Bouncing baby boy

Three-year-old Lateef Wise, of Philadelphia, PA, was alone at home last week. Frightened and crying, the boy pushed out the screen of an open window. He fell from the apartment, bounced off an air conditioner protruding from a second floor window and landed on a narrow strip of grass. After hitting the ground Lateef amazingly got up, began to cry and started walking around. Lateef was later discharged from a local hospital with just a minor larceration.

Honey, I blew up my lung

When a 24-year-old man showed up at a British hospital emergency room with chest pain, the doctors also heard a loud crunching sound each time his heart beat and felt air bubbles under his skin. According to the British Medical Journal, the patient disclosed that the day before he had blown up about 20 party balloons. Doctors concluded that the man had burst some of the little air sacs in his lungs when he blew up the first balloon, then inflated himself a little bit more each time he blew up another balloon. His symptoms cleared up within 10 days.

Tiger snarling traffic

An escaped tiger stopped rush-hour traffic on Germany's busiest motorway for more than two hours before he was recaptured. "Sahib", a young male weighing 330 pounds, ran away from a nearby circus and was spotted by passing motoristson the A66 motorway at Wiesbaden.

The tiger caused a 12-mile traffic jam as he defied attempts by a team of more than 50 police, firemen, animal experts and the circus manager to catch him in the dark.

Police located him with the help of a helicopter and heat-seeking equipment. It took six shots from an anaesthetic dart gun before he was pacified enough for police to approach and throw a net over him.

Road less travelled

King Cove, Alaska, a remote town populated by about 250 families, is campaigning for something the residents wanted for years in their small town - a road. A tight-knit village of native fishermen and cannery workers, King Cove has been campaigning for the road with single-minded intensity since the mid-1980s. The National Audobon Society has denounced the village's "golden gravel road" as a wasteful expense and an unacceptable incursion into a designated wilderness.b

Compiled by

NIMI KURIAN

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