Skip to main content

Cat emerges two weeks after landslide tragedy

Monday, August 03, 2009 BERLIN: Two weeks after tragedy struck, a spark of good news has emerged from the Nachterstedt landslide: a cat belonging to the couple killed in the accident has survived, Bild newspaper reported on Friday.Incredibly, the dead couple’s neighbours, who lost their home but survived because they were out of town at the time, came across the bedraggled Angora cat called “Miezi” while driving through town.“Suddenly Miezi was on the street,” neighbour Elke Schirrmeister, 59, told the paper. “I thought I wasn’t seeing right.”The couple drove on, but the next day, Miezi was sitting in front of the Schirrmeisters‘ motor home, which they are using as temporary accommodation.Their house was one of the two destroyed on July 18 when a piece of ground the size of six football pitches tore free and slid into Concordia Lake, a former open-pit mine filled with water on the edge of Nachterstedt in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.Their neighbours Ilka, 48, and Peter K., 51, were killed in the accident along with one other person.The healthy but ravenous Miezi wolfed down a whole box of cat food after he turned up, Schirrmeister said.“She was completely trusting,” she said. “Who knows what the poor animal had been through.”The couple has adopted the cat.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

US troops in Iraq head to Afghanistan

BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.

Cuba's world-famous cigar festival closes in Havana

Sunday, February 28, 2010 HAVANA: Hundreds of wealthy merchants and cigar aficionados from all parts of the world gathered in Havana this week to bid high stakes for humidors full of premium cigars. Cuba's annual Habanos festival ended on Friday night with an auction of ornate humidors of cedar and mahogany stacked with hand-rolled stogies that raised 800,000 euros ($1.09 million dollars). Habanos S.A. executives this month said cigar sales fell 8 percent to $360 million in 2009, so they have created the Julieta, a smaller, milder version of the Romeo y Julieta cigar, aimed specifically at female smokers. Women now make up only 5 to 10 percent of customers for Habanos. But even with the creation of the Julieta, Garcia said Habanos has only modest hopes for 2010 sales, due largely to a weak economy in Spain, the biggest market for Cuban cigars. The flavor of premium tobacco relies on the soil and climate in which it is grown. The western province of Pinar Del Rio, famous fo...

Berlin Celebrates the Day the Wall Fell

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 BERLIN: World leaders and partying Germans are descending on Berlin Nov. 9 to mark the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall was breachedIt is a day for celebrations and commemorations, for festivities and sober reflection. Berlin is marking 20 years since the fall of the Wall on Monday with a series of events, big and small. Leaders from around the world are descending on the German capital to help celebrate the momentous events of Nov. 9, 1989, a date that has come to symbolize the end of communism in Eastern Europe. The main focus of events will be the historic Brandenburg Gate, where 20 years ago, joyful East and West Berliners gathered together to dance on top of the wall and celebrate the sudden opening up of the Iron Curtain. The iconic gateway had once stood in the midst of no man's land, surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns. Now 20 years on, a concert and fireworks display will recall those heady moments. A line of 1,000 foam dominoe...