Foreign News
Dog enjoys priciest meal of his life – $4,000 cash
A money-hungry pooch was in the dog house for chewing up $4,000 (£3,153) cash that his owners had left out.
Cecil, a golden poodle from Pennsylvania, has gone viral for snacking on the envelope of money his owners had set aside for a contractor.
Clayton and Carrie Law pieced together most of the shredded bills after a smelly search of Cecil’s droppings and vomit – only $450 is still missing. Cecil’s veterinarian told the couple their greedy pet would be OK.
In early December, Clayton Law laid an envelope containing $4,000 on his kitchen counter at his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Carrie, needed to pay their contractor in cash for installing a fence. About 30 minutes later, to his surprise, he found his beloved dog enjoying the priciest meal of his life, leaving rough strips and scattered pieces of cash everywhere.
“Suddenly Clayton yelled to me, ‘Cecil’s eating $4,000!'” Carrie Law said in an interview with the Pittsburgh City Paper. “I thought, ‘I cannot be hearing that.’ I almost had a heart attack.”
The Laws described Cecil as “a goofy guy” when speaking to the Washington Post. “He’s very particular – you could leave a steak on the table, and he wouldn’t touch it because he’s not food motivated,” Carrie Law told the paper. “But apparently he is money motivated.”
While Cecil scurried off to the couch to nap off his meal, the pair immediately called Cecil’s veterinarian to see if he would need any medical treatment. Luckily, because Cecil is a larger dog, they only had to monitor him at home.
The couple then began an unexpected and laborious jigsaw puzzle: Piecing together their shredded notes.
Before they even began taping together their puzzle, however, they had to wait for Cecil to cough up the cash. After that, they scrubbed the bills thoroughly.”There we are at the utility sink,” Carrie told the City Paper. “It smelled so bad.”
The couple then attempted to tape together the destroyed $50 and $100 bills bit by bit. They worked to locate the serial numbers on both sides of the bills to ensure the banks would accept and replace them with fresh notes. The bank took most of the notes – they were unable to recover $450 – and told the Laws that these types of incidents are fairly common.
A similar situation occurred in 2022, Newsweek reported, when a Florida woman’s labrador ate $2,000 (£1,576) in cash. A video of the incident, which made the dog a momentary internet star, showed the pet owner in tears.
The Laws, meanwhile, said they are trying to see the levity of the situation, writing on their viral video that “the remaining scraps will be our most expensive piece of art”.
(BBC)
Donald Trump will sign an executive order on today [28] making English the official language of the United States, according to White House officials, and scrapping requirements that federal agencies provide language services to non-English speakers.
The US has never had an official language in the nearly 250 years since the country was founded.
The order is intended to improve government efficiency and promote national unity, according to White House officials.
Nearly 68 million of the country’s 340 million residents speak a language other than English, according to the US Census Bureau, which includes more than 160 Native American tongues.
Friday’s executive order will roll back a policy from 2000 signed by former President Bill Clinton requiring that government agencies and federal funding recipients “ensure that their programs and activities normally provided in English are accessible to LEP (low-English proficiency) persons”.
Agencies will be allowed to still provide that language access to non-English speakers, according to White House officials.
Republicans have led efforts in the past to label English as the country’s official language, with members of the House as recently as 2021 introducing legislation on it that failed.
Those who have opposed those efforts say that the country does not need an official language, pointing to the high numbers of people who speak it and to the country never having one, while also saying establishing one could promote discrimination against non-English speakers.
During his presidential campaign last year, Trump included non-English languages in his statements calling for stricter immigration policies.
“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” he told a crowd of supporters in February 2024.
“It’s the craziest thing – they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing,” he said.
And during the 2016 campaign he said, “This is a country where we speak English. It’s English. You have to speak English!”
When the US was founded, most residents spoke English and those writing the country’s constitution did not feel it was necessary to enshrine it as the official language and also did not want to alienate fellow new citizens who spoke German or other languages, according to most scholars.
The languages currently spoken the most in the US after English are Spanish, various Chinese languages, Tagolog, Vietnamese and Arabic, according to the Census Bureau. Another approximately one million people use American Sign Language, according to experts.
Approximately 180 countries around the world designate official national languages, and most countries recognise multiple official languages. However, several countries besides the United States do not have an official language, including the United Kingdom.
There are more than 30 US states which have designated English as the official language, while Alaska and Hawaii have also bestowed official status on several native languages.
[BBC]
A leading independent journalist and book author from Vietnam has been sentenced to 30 months in jail over Facebook posts critical of the government.
Following a trial that lasted only for a few hours, a court in the capital Hanoi convicted 63-year-old Huy Duc of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state” through posting 13 articles on Facebook.
“These articles have a large number of interactions, comments and shares, causing negative impacts on social order and safety,” the indictment quoted by Vietnam News Agency read.
Huy Duc worked for influential state-run newspapers before authoring one of Vietnam’s most popular blogs and Facebook accounts, where he criticised the country’s communist leaders on issues such as corruption, media control and relations with China.
Huy Duc, whose real name is Truong Huy San, is a former senior army lieutenant. He was fired from a state news outlet in 2009 for criticising past actions by Vietnam’s former communist ally, the Soviet Union.
In 2012, Huy Duc spent a year at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship. During his time abroad, his account of life in Vietnam after the end of the war with the United States, The Winning Side, was published.
His conviction comes just a few months after blogger Duong Van Thai was jailed for 12 years on charges of publishing antistate information.
He had almost 120,000 followers on YouTube where he regularly recorded livestreams critical of the government.
In January, a prominent former lawyer was also jailed for three years over Facebook posts.
Shortly before his arrest in June, Huy Duc took aim online at Vietnam’s new powerful leader To Lam, as well as his predecessor Nguyen Phu Trong. It is unclear if the charges were related to these particular posts.
Vietnam, a one-party state, has no free media and clamps down hard on any dissent. It is one of the world’s top jailers of journalists, according to the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom campaign group.
RSF said previously that his articles were “an invaluable source of information enabling the Vietnamese public to access censored information by the Hanoi regime”.
Rights campaigners say the government has in recent years intensified its crackdown on civil society.
In December, Vietnam enacted new online rules requiring Facebook and TikTok to verify user identities and hand over data to authorities.
Under “Decree 147”, all tech giants operating in Vietnam must verify user accounts by phone number or Vietnamese identification numbers and store that information alongside their full name and date of birth.
[Aljazeera]
Actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who rose to fame as a child star in the 1990s and 2000s, has died aged 39.
Police in Manhattan said they responded to an emergency call on Wednesday morning and found Trachtenberg “unconscious and unresponsive”. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The US actress was best known for playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s younger sister Dawn Summers, and later took on the role of manipulative socialite Georgina Sparks in Gossip Girl as an adult.
Trachtenberg made her film debut in Harriet the Spy in 1996, and also appeared in several Nickelodeon productions.
Co-stars paid tribute to her, describing her as a “fiercely intelligent” person who “cared deeply” about her work.
Her family’s representatives confirmed her death in a statement.
“It is with great sadness to confirm that Michelle Trachtenberg has passed away. The family requests privacy for their loss,” it said.
Authorities said her death was not being treated as suspicious.
“Criminality is not suspected. The medical examiner will determine the cause of death. The investigation remains ongoing,” the NYPD said in a statement.
Trachtenberg got her start in acting at age nine on the Nickelodeon television series The Adventures of Pete & Pete.
In the early 2000s, she was nominated for several acting awards – including a Daytime Emmy Award – for her role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
She also starred in films including EuroTrip, Ice Princess, Killing Kennedy, and Sister Cities.
Blake Lively, a Gossip Girl co-star, said everything Trachtenberg did “she did 200%”.
“She laughed the fullest at someone’s joke… she cared deeply about her work, she was fiercely loyal to her friends and brave for those she loved, she was big and bold and distinctly herself,” she wrote on social media.
“The real tragedies in life are the ones that blindside you on an idle Tuesday. Hold those you love and have loved dear.”
US comedian Rosie O’Donnell, who starred alongside Trachtenberg in her Harriet the Spy debut, said her death was “heartbreaking”.
“I loved her very much. She struggled the last few years. I wish I could have helped.”
Josh Safran, a writer and producer on Gossip Girl, said it was “an honour and joy to write for Michelle for so many years”, as she had a “clear voice” as an actor.
“You heard her as you typed,” he wrote. “You knew she’d make each line rougher, more real, much funnier – and that made the writing better.
Former castmates also paid tribute.
Buffy cast member James Marsters said on social media that the actress was “fiercely intelligent, howlingly funny, and a very talented person”.
“She died much too young, and leaves behind scores of people who knew and loved her,” Marsters said.
How I Met Your Mother actress Alyson Hannigan, who played Willow Rosenberg in Buffy, shared a series of photos on social media, including images of the two sharing scenes, and said Trachtenberg “brought a loving energy to the set of Buffy”.
Trachtenberg first appeared in Gossip Girl – which ran from 2007 to 2012 – in 2008. She returned to the role for two episodes of the second season of HBO Max’s reboot in 2023.
Her last major acting role was in 2021 as the host of a true-crime docuseries Meet, Marry, Murder, which appeared on digital streamer Tubi.
In 2021, Trachtenberg accused Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon of inappropriate behaviour on set, after her co-star Charisma Carpenter said she had been left traumatised due to the treatment she received from Whedon.
[BBC]
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