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)
More than a thousand people have been left with respiratory problems after a sandstorm swept across Iraq’s central and southern parts of the country, health officials said.
One official in Muthanna province reported to the AFP news agency at least 700 cases of what they said was suffocation.
Footage shared online showed areas cloaked in a thick orange haze, with local media reporting power cuts and the suspension of flights in a number of regions.
Dust storms are common in Iraq, but some experts believe they are becoming more frequent due to climate change.
Pedestrians and police wore face masks to protect themselves from the dust and paramedics were on site to assist people with difficulty breathing, according to AFP.
Hospitals in Muthanna province in southern Iraq received at least “700 cases of suffocation”, a local health official said.
More than 250 people were taken to hospital in Najaf province, and at least 322 patients including children were sent to hospitals in Diwaniyah province.
A further 530 people reported breathing issues in Dhi Qar and Basra provinces.
The sandstorm blanketed Iraq’s southern provinces in an orange cloud that reduced visibility to less than one kilometre (0.62 mile).
The authorities were forced to shut down airports in the provinces of Najaf and Basra.
Conditions are expected to gradually improve by Tuesday morning, according to local weather services.
Iraq is listed by the UN as one of the five countries most vulnerable to climate change as it encounters regular sandstorms, sweltering heat and water scarcity.
A severe sandstorm in 2022 left one person dead and more than 5,000 needing treatment for respiratory illnesses.
Iraq will be experiencing more “dust days” in the future, according to its environment ministry.
[BBC]
Indian businessman Mehul Choksi has been arrested in Belgium following India’s request for his extradition.
Choksi, who left India in 2018, was arrested on Saturday, his lawyer Vijay Aggarwal told the BBC on Monday.
The diamond merchant is wanted by India for allegedly defrauding one of the country’s largest banks of nearly $1.8bn (£1.3bn).
Choksi has not commented publicly on the case, but his lawyer said they would appeal against his detention and also oppose his extradition to India.
“These are the obvious grounds on which we will argue the case, that he is not a flight risk and secondly, that he is extremely sick. He is undergoing cancer treatment,” Mr Agarwal said. He added that they would “contest the extradition on grounds that there isn’t enough evidence against him and the extradition request is politically motivated and the trial in India may not be fair”.
The BBC has reached out to India’s foreign ministry and financial crimes agency – the Enforcement Directorate (ED) – for comment.
According to a Times of India report, Choksi was arrested on the basis of two non-bailable warrants issued by an Indian court in 2018 and 2021 – although it’s not clear why the action came now.
Mehul Choksi and his nephew, Nirav Modi, are wanted by Indian authorities in connection with a $1.8bn fraud case at Punjab National Bank (PNB).
Niray Modi, who’s also been living abroad since 2018, is lodged in a prison in London and is awaiting extradition to India.
Both were high-profile diamond traders. Modi’s jewellery was worn by several Hollywood celebrities such as Naomi Watts and Kate Winslet. One of the biggest Bollywood stars, Priyanka Chopra, was his company’s brand ambassador. Choksi, meanwhile, was the owner of Gitanjali Gems, an Indian jewellery retailer which once had about 4,000 stores across India.
The ED has accused Choksi and Modi of colluding with some employees of PNB’s Brady House branch in Mumbai city to get fraudulent advances for payments to overseas suppliers of jewels.
These funds were then allegedly diverted and laundered.
Choksi and Modi have denied the allegations against them.
After leaving India, Choksi reportedly travelled to the US and later to Antigua – where he has citizenship. In 2021, he was reportedly arrested in Dominica and deported back to Antigua.
Hariprasad SV, a Bengaluru-based entrepreneur who had in 2016 alerted authorities about the alleged scam at PNB, said Choksi’s arrest was “great news”. “Apart from bringing him back, the most important thing is to get back all those billions of dollars he looted from India,” he told ANI news agency.
[BBC]
US President Donald Trump’s administration has exempted smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices from “reciprocal” tariffs, including the 125% levies imposed on Chinese imports.
US Customs and Border Patrol published a notice late on Friday explaining the goods would be excluded from Trump’s 10% global tariff on most countries and the much larger Chinese import tax.
The move comes after concerns from US tech companies that the price of gadgets could skyrocket, as many of them are made in China.
This is the first significant reprieve of any kind in Trump’s tariffs on China, with one trade analyst describing it as a “game-changer scenario”.
[BBC]
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