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Tag: Oddities

  • Logan Paul’s Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card sells for record $16.5M at auction

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    NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Logan Paul has set a new world’s record — for the auction price of a trading card.

    The wrestling and social media star’s rare Pickachu Illustrator Pokémon card, a “Holy Grail” for collectors, sold for $16.5 million Monday at Goldin Auctions after 41 days of bidding. Paul had purchased the card in 2021 for $5.275 million, a Guinness record at the time for a Pokémon card. He had added a diamond necklace and custom case and wore the card at WrestleMania 38 in 2022.

    Guinness World Records adjudicator Sarah Casson was on hand Monday for the auction’s closure, which was livestreamed on YouTube, and confirmed the price was a record not just for a Pokémon card, but for any trading card sold at auction.

    “Oh my gosh, this is crazy,” said Paul, who placed the card around the neck of winning bidder A.J. Scaramucci, a venture capitalist and son of former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.

    The card was designed by Atsuko Nishida for a 1998 contest. Only a few dozen are believed to exist, and Paul’s card is believed the only with a quality rating of 10.

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  • Obama shuts down alien buzz and says there’s no evidence they’ve made contact

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    Former U.S. President Barack Obama said he did not see evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” after sending social media abuzz by saying aliens were real on a podcast over the weekend.

    During a lightning round of questions with podcast host Brian Tylor Cohen, Obama was asked, “Are aliens real?”

    “They’re real,” he answered, continuing: “But I haven’t seen them. And, they’re not being kept in Area 51.”

    On Sunday night, the former president released a statement on Instagram, appearing to clarify what he meant by his comments that have since gone viral.

    “I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

    Secrecy around Area 51, a top-secret Cold War test site in the Nevada desert, has long fueled conspiracy theories among UFO enthusiasts.

    In 2013, the CIA acknowledged the existence of the site, but not UFO crashes, black-eyed extraterrestrials or staged moon landings.

    Declassified documents referred to the 8,000-square-mile (20,700-square-kilometer) installation by name after decades of U.S. government officials refusing to acknowledge it.

    The base has been a testing ground for a host of top-secret aircraft, including the U-2 in the 1950s and later the B-2 stealth bomber.

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  • Photos of the Westminster dog show

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    The Westminster Kennel Club hosted its 150th annual show.

    This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors.

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  • Groundhog Day puts Punxsutawney Phil’s forecast about winter’s length in spotlight

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    PUNXSUTAWNEY, Pa. — It’s already been a long, cold winter across much of the United States, and on Monday, Punxsutawney Phil’s handlers will announce whether the weather-predicting groundhog says there’s more of the same to come.

    When Phil is said to have seen his shadow upon emergence from a tree stump in rural Pennsylvania, that’s considered a forecast for six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t see his shadow, an early spring is said to be on the way.

    Tens of thousands of people will be on hand at Gobbler’s Knob for the annual ritual that goes back more than a century, with ties to ancient farming traditions in Europe. Punxsutawney’s festivities have grown considerably since the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” starring Bill Murray.

    Last year’s announcement was six more weeks of winter, by far Phil’s more common assessment and not much of a surprise during the first week of February. His top-hatted handlers in the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club insist Phil’s “groundhogese” of winks, purrs, chatters and nods are being interpreted when they relate the meterological marmot’s muses about the days ahead.

    Phil isn’t the only animal being consulted for long-term weather forecasts Monday. There are formal and informal Groundhog Day events in many places in the U.S., Canada and beyond.

    Groundhog Day falls on Feb. 2, the midpoint between the shortest, darkest day of the year on the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It’s a time of year that also figures in the Celtic calendar and the Christian holiday of Candlemas.

    ___

    Scolforo reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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  • Video shows flames flying from NASA plane that touched down without landing gear

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    A NASA research plane malfunctioned and had to touch down in Texas without landing gear on Tuesday, sliding across the runway on its belly and sending plumes of flame behind it, a video posted to social media showed.

    The crew landed the plane at Ellington Airport, southeast of Houston, and are “all safe at this time,” NASA said in a post on X. The federal space agency added that there was “mechanical issue” that will be investigated.

    The aircraft with its distinct thin fuselage is the NASA WB-57. The plane with two crew seats is capable of flying for about 6 1/2 hours at high altitudes — beyond 63,000 feet (19,200 meters).

    Video shows the plane slowly descending toward the runway, then touching down with a jolt, its wings bouncing as yellow fire and white smoke bursts from beneath it. It steadily slides down the track, the flames bursting and disappearing in a cloud of smoke. The aircraft begins to slow before the video ends.

    Local news footage from KHOU 11 shows the plane at a stop, the cockpit hatch open, fire trucks flashing nearby and emergency responders working around the black nose of the aircraft.

    The NASA WB-57 has flown research missions since the 1970s and continues to be an asset for the scientific community, according to the agency’s website.

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  • Scientists recover the oldest wooden tools from a site in Greece

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    NEW YORK — Two artifacts found at a lake shore in Greece are the oldest wooden tools to be uncovered so far and date back 430,000 years.

    One is a spindly stick about 2 1/2 feet (80 centimeters) long that could have been used for digging in the mud. The other is a smaller, more mysterious handheld chunk of willow or poplar wood that may have been used to shape stone tools, according to research published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Scientists think ancient humans wielded a whole litany of tools made from stone, bone and wood. But it’s particularly difficult to find evidence of wooden tools today because wood rots so quickly. Such tools are only preserved in specific environments like in ice, caves or underwater.

    The newest tools, found in Greece’s Megalopolis basin, were possibly buried quickly by sediment and preserved by a wet environment over time. For years, researchers have found other remnants at the site, including stone tools and elephant bones with cuts on them. While scientists didn’t directly date the wooden tools, the site is about 430,000 years old, which provides insight into the objects’ age.

    “I’ve always just been thrilled to be able to touch these objects,” said study author Annemieke Milks with the University of Reading.

    Human remains haven’t been found at the site yet, so it’s not yet clear who used the tools. The owners could have been Neanderthals, early human ancestors or someone else.

    The site in Greece probably has more gems from the past that are waiting to be found, said archaeologist Jarod Hutson with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. But the unassuming appearance of these two new tools makes them harder to interpret.

    “It’s difficult to get excited about these because they don’t strike you immediately as wooden tools. And we don’t know what they were used for,” said Hutson, who was not involved with the new study.

    Other examples of ancient wooden tools include a set of spears from Germany and 300,000-year-old Chinese digging sticks that may have been used to harvest plants.

    The new find offers a rare look into the varied collection of tools used to survive — a glimpse at a “little known aspect of the technology of early humans,” study author Katerina Harvati with the University of Tübingen said in an email.

    —-

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Detroit suburb agrees to $3.25M settlement in case of woman found alive in body bag

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    A Detroit suburb has agreed to a $3.25 million settlement with the family of a young woman who had been declared dead at home but then gasped for air and opened her eyes when her body bag was unzipped at a funeral home.

    Southfield paramedics were accused of gross negligence in how they responded to Timesha Beauchamp after a 911 call in 2020. The 20-year-old, who had cerebral palsy, was eventually rushed to a hospital and died two months later.

    “We recognize that no resolution can undo the profound tragedy that occurred on August 23, 2020, or ease the pain experienced by Ms. Beauchamp’s family,” Southfield said in a statement. “This case involved extraordinarily difficult circumstances that arose in the complex world of a global pandemic.”

    Beauchamp was struggling to breathe when her family called 911. A medical crew tried to resuscitate her and also consulted a doctor, who declared her dead over the phone without going to the home.

    Later that day, a funeral home opened the body bag and found Beauchamp gasping for air. She was swiftly taken to a hospital but never recovered.

    “She was put in a situation she never should have been in,” Steven Hurbis, an attorney for Beauchamp’s family, said Tuesday.

    Medical professionals, he added, said Beauchamp would have survived if she had been taken immediately to a hospital from her home.

    Southfield fought the lawsuit and persuaded a judge to dismiss it based on governmental immunity. The Michigan Court of Appeals, however, overturned that decision in 2024.

    The Southfield fire chief had said Beauchamp’s situation might have been a case of “Lazarus syndrome,” a reference to people who come back to life without assistance after attempts to resuscitate have failed.

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  • Viral ‘6-7’ tops 2025 list of overused words and phrases

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    Respondents to an annual Michigan college survey of overused and misused words and phrases say ” 6-7 ” is “cooked” and should come to a massive full-stop heading into the new year.

    Those are among the top 10 words on the 50th annual “Banished Words List,” released Thursday by Lake Superior State University. The tongue-in-cheek roundup of overused slang started in 1976 as a New Year’s Eve party idea, and is affectionately called the list of “Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”

    Around 1,400 submissions came from all 50 states and a number of countries outside the U.S., including Uzbekistan, Brazil and Japan, according to Lake Superior State.

    Also in the top 10 are “demure,” “incentivize,” “perfect,” “gift/gifted,” “my bad” and “reach out.” “My bad” and “reach out” also made the list decades ago — in 1998 and 1994, respectively.

    “The list definitely represents the fad and vernacular trends of the younger generation,” said David Travis, Lake Superior State University president. “Social media allows a greater opportunity to misunderstand or misuse words. We’re using terms that are shared through texting, primarily, or through posting with no body language or tone context. It’s very easy to misunderstand these words.”

    Few phrases in 2025 befuddled parents, teachers and others over the age of, say 40, more than “6-7.” Dictionary.com even picked it as their 2025 word of the year, while other dictionaries chose words like “slop” and “ rage bait.”

    But what does “6-7” actually mean? It exploded over the summer, especially among Gen Z, and is considered by many to be nonsensical in meaning — an inside joke driven by social media.

    “Don’t worry, because we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” the dictionary’s editors wrote.

    Each number can be spoken aloud as “six, seven.” They even can be combined as the number 67; at college basketball games, some fans explode when a team reaches that point total.

    The placement of “6-7” at the top of the banished list puts it in good company. In 2019, the centuries-old Latin phrase “quid pro quo” was the top requested phrase to ban from popular use. In 2017, ” fake news ” got the most votes.

    Alana Bobbitt, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is unapologetic about using “6-7.”

    “I find joy in it,” Bobbitt said. “It’s a little bit silly, and even though I don’t understand what it means, it’s fun to use.”

    Jalen Brezzell says a small group of his friends use “6-7” and that it comes up a couple of times each week. But he won’t utter it.

    “Never. I don’t really get the joke,” said Brezzell, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. “I don’t see what’s funny about it.”

    But banning it, even in jest, might be a bit of a stretch, he said, adding that he does use other words and phrases on the list.

    “I’ve always used the word ‘cooked,’” Brezzell said. “I just think it got popular on the internet over this past year. It’s saying, like, ‘give it up, it’s over.’”

    Some of the phrases do have longevity, Travis said.

    “I don’t think they’ll ever go away, like ‘at the end of the day,’” he said. “I used ‘my bad’ today. I feel comfortable using it. I started using it when I was young. A lot of us older people are still using it.”

    Travis said that while some terms on the list “will stick around in perpetuity,” others will be fleeting.

    “I think ‘6-7,’ next year, will be gone,” he said.

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  • Betty Boop and ‘Blondie’ enter the public domain in 2026, accompanied by a trio of detectives

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    LOS ANGELES — LOS ANGELES (AP) — Betty Boop and “Blondie” are joining Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh in the public domain.

    The first appearances of the classic cartoon and comic characters are among the pieces of intellectual property whose 95-year U.S. copyright maximum has been reached, putting them in the public domain on Jan. 1. That means creators can use and repurpose them without permission or payment.

    The 2026 batch of newly public artistic creations doesn’t quite have the sparkle of the recent first entries into the public domain of Mickey or Winnie. But ever since 2019 — the end of a 20-year IP drought brought on by congressional copyright extensions — every annual crop has been a bounty for advocates of more work belonging to the public.

    “It’s a big year,” said Jennifer Jenkins, law professor and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, for whom New Year’s Day is celebrated as Public Domain Day. “It’s just the sheer familiarity of all this culture.”

    Jenkins said that, collectively, this year’s work shows “the fragility that was between the two wars and the depths of the Great Depression.”

    Here’s a closer look at what will enter the public domain on Thursday, based on the research of Jenkins and her center.

    Betty Boop began as a dog. Seriously.

    When she first appears in the 1930 short “Dizzy Dishes,” one of four of her cartoons entering the public domain, she’s already totally recognizable as the Jazz Age flapper later memorialized in countless tattoos, T-shirts and bumper stickers. She has her baby face, short hair with groomed curls, flashy eyelashes and miniature mouth. But she’s also got dangling poodle ears and a tiny black nose. Those would soon morph into dangling earrings and a tiny white nose.

    She started as essentially the Minnie Mouse to a popular anthropomorphic dog named Bimbo, whom she would eventually outshine — and push aside. She’s got a supporting role in “Dizzy Dishes,” performing a slinky song-and-dance in a tiny black dress. She’s not named, but sings “boop boop, a doop.”

    Jenkins suggests this canine Betty Boop could be rich for exploitation in new works, and has a free idea: “She was bitten by a radioactive dog, that’s why she had this weird backstory,” she said with a laugh. “This movie needs to be made.”

    The character was designed and owned by Fleischer Studios, and the shorts were released by Paramount Pictures. She was based at least in part on singer Helen Kane, known as the “Boop-Oop-a-Doop Girl,” thanks to a hit 1929 song. Kane would lose a lawsuit over Betty Boop’s character and use of the phrase. During the proceedings the defense alleged Black singer Esther Lee Jones used similar phrases first.

    Artists are now free to use this earliest Boop in films and similar work. But making merch won’t be free. In an important distinction often raised by Disney over Mickey Mouse, a character’s trademark is distinct from the copyright of works that feature them. The Fleischer Productions trademark of Betty Boop remains intact.

    Boops and doops were apparently in the air in 1930. Blondie Boopadoop was, like Betty, a young flapper, and the central character of Chic Young’s newspaper comic strip that debuted in 1930. It inspired a film series and radio show, and is still running today in papers that still have comics.

    The strip followed her carefree breeze through life with her boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead. The two would marry (and she would change her name) in 1933, and the strip would become the sandwich-heavy domestic comedy familiar to later readers. Though the strip was meant to be based on a woman’s life, Dagwood would in many ways become its breakout star — a proto- Adam Driver, if you will, as the breakout actor from “Girls.”

    Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons also are becoming public domain, two years after “Steamboat Willie” made the first version of him public property. He’s joined this year by his dog Pluto, who, in 1930, was known as Rover. (He would get his long-term moniker the following year.)

    The books entering the public domain this year open the door to three iconic detectives from the 20th century:

    — The teen sleuth Nancy Drew, whose first four books came in 1930, starting with “The Secret of the Old Clock.” They were written by Mildred Benson under the pen name Carolyn Keene.

    — The middle-aged(-ish) sleuth Sam Spade, who debuted via the full-book version of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon.” (It had been serialized in a magazine the previous year.)

    — The elderly sleuth Miss Marple, who solves her first mystery in Agatha Christie’s “Murder at the Vicarage.”

    A year after his “The Sound and the Fury” became public, William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” becomes public domain. It would help lead to his Nobel Prize in literature.

    And kiddie lit legends Dick and Jane, who taught generations to read and became essential parody fodder for decades, become public via the “Elson Basic Readers” textbooks.

    A year after their film debut, “The Cocoanuts,” entered the public domain, the Marx Brothers’ beloved “Animal Crackers” joins it, as they entered their prime of high cinematic antics. The film finds Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo invading a Long Island society party celebrating an explorer of Africa.

    Other movies entering the public domain include:

    — “The Blue Angel,” the German film from Josef von Sternberg that emblazoned Marlene Dietrich’s top-hatted image into film lore.

    — “King of Jazz,” featuring the first screen appearance of Bing Crosby.

    — A pair of Oscar best picture winners, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which won in 1930, and “Cimarron,” which won in 1931. The award was known as “Outstanding Production” then, and the Academy Awards eligibility period didn’t sync with the calendar year.

    The coming decade will bring a true bounty of Hollywood Golden Age films into the public domain. 2027 will be a truly monster year, literally, with the original 1931 Universal Pictures versions of “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” among the titles due.

    As in the last several years, a whistle-worthy stream of tunes from the Great American Songbook will become public:

    — Four cherished classics written by George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother Ira: “Embraceable You,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “But Not for Me” and “I Got Rhythm.”

    — “Georgia on My Mind,” written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell.

    — “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” written by Gus Kahn, Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt.

    Different laws regulate the actual recordings of songs, and those newly in the public domain this week date to 1925. They include Rodgers and Hart’s “Manhattan” by the Knickerbockers, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” by Marian Anderson and “The St. Louis Blues” by Bessie Smith, featuring Louis Armstrong.

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  • ‘The best gift ever’: Baby is born after the rarest of pregnancies, defying all odds

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    Suze Lopez holds her baby boy on her lap and marvels at the remarkable way he came into the world.

    Before little Ryu was born, he developed outside his mom’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors plan to write about the case for a medical journal.

    Just 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus, and those that make it to full term “are essentially unheard of – far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane.”

    Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, didn’t know she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth.

    When her belly began to grow earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since her 20s, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.

    Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.

    For months, she and her husband Andrew Lopez went about their lives and traveled abroad.

    But gradually, the pain and pressure in her abdomen got worse, and Lopez figured it was finally time to get the 22-pound cyst removed. She needed a CT scan, which required a pregnancy test first because of the radiation exposure. To her great surprise, the test came back positive.

    Lopez shared the news with her husband at a Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a package with a note and a onesie.

    “I just saw her face,” he recalled, “and she just looked like she wanted to weep and smile and cry at the same time.”

    Shortly after the game, Lopez began feeling unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out she had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood work and gave her an ultrasound and an MRI. The scans found that her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.

    “It did not look like it was directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It looked like it was mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”

    Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved with the case, said almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — go on to rupture and hemorrhage if not removed. Most commonly, they occur in the fallopian tubes.

    A 2023 medical journal article by doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which mother and baby survived, pointing out that fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in such cases and birth defects are seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.

    But Lopez and her son beat all the odds.

    On August 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby while she was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery. She lost nearly all of her blood, Ozimek said, but the team got the bleeding under control and gave her transfusions.

    Doctors continually updated her husband about what was happening.

    “The whole time, I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside,” Andrew Lopez said. “It was just something that scared me half to death, knowing that at any point I could lose my wife or my child.”

    Instead, they both recovered well.

    “It was really, really remarkable,” Ozimek said.

    Since then, Ryu — named after a baseball player and a character in the Street Fighter video game series — has been healthy and thriving. His parents love watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kaila, and say he completes their family.

    With Ryu’s first Christmas approaching, Lopez describes feeling blessed beyond measure.

    “I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking down at her baby. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Harvard morgue manager who sold body parts gets 8-year prison term

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    A former manager of the Harvard Medical School morgue in Boston was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling body parts “as if they were baubles.”

    Authorities said Cedric Lodge was at the center of a ghoulish scheme in which he shipped brains, skin, hands and faces to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere after cadavers donated to Harvard were no longer needed for research.

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    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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    By ED WHITE – Associated Press

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  • Interstellar comet keeps its distance as it makes its closest approach to Earth

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    CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A stray comet from another star swings past Earth this week in one last hurrah before racing back toward interstellar space.

    Discovered over the summer, the comet known as 3I/Atlas will pass within 167 million miles (269 million kilometers) of our planet on Friday, the closest it gets on its grand tour of the solar system.

    NASA continues to aim its space telescopes at the visiting ice ball, estimated to be between 1,444 feet (440 meters) and 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) in size. But it’s fading as it exits, so now’s the time for backyard astronomers to catch it in the night sky with their telescopes.

    The comet will come much closer to Jupiter in March, zipping within 33 million miles (53 million kilometers). It will be the mid-2030s before it reaches interstellar space, never to return, said Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies.

    It’s the third known interstellar object to cut through our solar system. Interstellar comets like 3I/Atlas originate in star systems elsewhere in the Milky Way, while home-grown comets like Halley’s hail from the icy fringes of our solar system.

    A telescope in Hawaii discovered the first confirmed interstellar visitor in 2017. Two years later, an interstellar comet was spotted by a Crimean amateur astronomer. NASA’s sky-surveying Atlas telescope in Chile spotted comet 3I/Atlas in July while prowling for potentially dangerous asteroids.

    Scientists believe the latest interloping comet, also harmless, may have originated in a star system much older than ours, making it a tantalizing target.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • A dance hall in Buenos Aires guarantees tango sessions with professional partners

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    BUENOS AIRES (AP) — At a dance hall in the heart of Buenos Aires, 14 men in elegant dark suits sat at separate tables while across the room, 14 women in dresses and high heels waited to be asked for a dance.

    As the first notes of a popular tango began to hum, the male dancers signaled to the women and crossed the dance floor in search of partners. Moments later, the couples’ legs traced the gracious movements of tango at an event that ensures every woman gets to dance.

    The women book their sessions in advance with an organizer via WhatsApp, securing a dance and avoiding the interminable wait they’ve endured at other “milongas,” or dancing gatherings, where women outnumber men.

    Antje Rickel, of France, left, dances with professional tango dancer Jared Ramos at the Che Che Tango Premium, where people can book guaranteed two‑hour dances with professional partners known as “Taxi Dancers,” in Buenos Aires, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

    Women dance with professional tango dancers at the Che Che Tango Premium, where people can book guaranteed two‑hour dances with professional partners known as “Taxi Dancers," in Buenos Aires, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

    Women dance with professional tango dancers at the Che Che Tango Premium, where people can book guaranteed two‑hour dances with professional partners known as “Taxi Dancers,” in Buenos Aires, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

    Professional tango dancers known as "Taxi Dancers" take a break at the Che Che Tango Premium, where people can book guaranteed two‑hour dances with professional partners in Buenos Aires, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

    Professional tango dancers known as “Taxi Dancers” take a break at the Che Che Tango Premium, where people can book guaranteed two‑hour dances with professional partners in Buenos Aires, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

    Among the dancers on a recent Wednesday was Antje Rickel, a 69-year-old French woman in a semi-transparent red blouse and with her hair coquettishly styled up. Her dancing partner was a young man about 5 inches shorter than her. But the difference in age and height was irrelevant to the couple, who felt in perfect communion as they glided across the dance floor to the rhythm of a tango.

    “He has great control,” said Rickel of her young dancing companion, Jared Ramos, a professional tango dancer with the Che Che Tango Premium “milonga,” where people can book guaranteed two‑hour dances with professional partners known as “Taxi Dancers.”

    Held on Wednesdays and Fridays, the program offers dance aficionados like Rickel the opportunity to practice tango steps, going from one dancer’s arm to another’s. A two-hour session goes for 55,000 pesos (about $37) for foreigners and about $30 for Argentine nationals and residents.

    The dance events are organized by dancers Alejandro Justiniano and Sara Parnigoni, who present it on social media as “a tango space where you can be sure you’ll dance like you’ve always dreamed.”

    Justiniano said that the male dancers are carefully chosen, with most being professional dancers or tango teachers who perform at different events. “We’ve looked for dancers with a lot of experience,” he said.

    Beth Wolff, of German-Argentine, front right, dances with a professional tango dancer at the Che Che Tango Premium, where people can book guaranteed two‑hour dances with professional partners known as “Taxi Dancers," in Buenos Aires, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

    Beth Wolff, of German-Argentine, front right, dances with a professional tango dancer at the Che Che Tango Premium, where people can book guaranteed two‑hour dances with professional partners known as “Taxi Dancers,” in Buenos Aires, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

    He came up with the idea after observing the “long faces” of many women who would spend evenings at dance events watching from the sidelines. Justiniano created what he calls a “mini milonga,” something a little more intimate so that “for two hours they can reach their full potential in their dancing.”

    Ramos, a professional tango dancer, said women face several challenges at other “milongas.”

    “There are 10 women for every man,” he said, which means many women are left out. Adding to the problem, he noted, is the fact that “not all of them dance well.”

    ___

    Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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  • Hiker mired in quicksand in Utah’s Arches National Park is rescued unharmed

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    Getting trapped in quicksand is a corny peril of old movies and TV shows, but it really did happen to one unfortunate hiker in Utah’s Arches National Park.

    The park famous for dozens of natural, sandstone arches gets over 1 million visitors a year, and accidents ranging from falls to heat stroke are common.

    Quicksand? Not really — but it has happened at least a couple of times now.

    “The wet sand just kind of flows back in. It’s kind of a never-ending battle,” said John Marshall, who helped a woman stuck in quicksand over a decade ago and coordinated the latest rescue.

    On Sunday, an experienced hiker, whose identity wasn’t released, was traversing a small canyon on the second day of a 20-mile (32-kilometer) backpacking trip when he sank up to his thigh, according to Marshall.

    Unable to free himself, the hiker activated an emergency satellite beacon. His message got forwarded to Grand County emergency responders and Marshall got the call at 7:15 a.m..

    “I was just rolling out of bed,” Marshall said. “I’m scratching my head, going, ‘Did I hear that right? Did they say quicksand?’”

    He put his boots on and rendezvoused with a team that set out with all-terrain vehicles, a ladder, traction boards, backboards and a drone. Soon, Marshall had a bird’s-eye view of the situation.

    Through the drone camera he saw a park ranger who’d tossed the man a shovel. But the quicksand flowed back as soon as the backpacker shoveled it away, Marshall said.

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    The Grand County Search and Rescue team positioned the ladder and boards near the backpacker and slowly worked his leg loose. By then he’d been standing in near-freezing muck, in temperatures in the 20s (minus 6 to minus 1 Celsius), for a couple of hours.

    Rescuers warmed him up until he could stand, then walk. He then hiked out on his own, even carrying his backpack, Marshall said.

    Quicksand is dangerous but it’s a myth total submersion is the main risk, said Marshall.

    “In quicksand you’re extremely buoyant,” he said. “Most people won’t sink past their waist in quicksand.”

    Marshall is more or less a quicksand expert.

    In 2014, he was a medic who helped a 78-year-old woman after she was stuck for over 13 hours in the same canyon just 2 miles (3 kilometers) from where Sunday’s rescue took place.

    The woman’s book club got worried when she missed their meeting. They went looking for her and found her car at a trailhead. It was June — warmer than Sunday but not sweltering in the canyon’s shade — and the woman made a full recovery after regaining use of her legs.

    “Both had very happy endings,” Marshall said.

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  • Buddhist monks resume 2,300-mile walk for peace after accident near Houston

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    HOUSTON (AP) — A group of Buddhist monks in the middle of a 2,300-mile (3,700-kilometer) walk across the U.S. to promote peace planned to resume their journey after two of them were injured during a traffic accident near Houston, a spokesperson for the group said Thursday.

    The collection of about two dozen monks began their walk on Oct. 26 from Fort Worth, Texas, to “raise awareness of peace, loving kindness, and compassion across America and the world,” according to the group, Walk for Peace. The monks planned to travel through 10 states before reaching Washington, D.C.

    So far, the monks have visited various Texas cities on their trek, including Austin and Houston, often walking along roads and highways while being escorted by law enforcement or by a vehicle trailing behind them, said Long Si Dong, a spokesperson for the group. The monks are being accompanied on their journey by their dog Aloka.

    At around 6:13 p.m. Wednesday, the monks were walking along the side of U.S. Highway 90 near Dayton, Texas, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) northeast of Houston, when their escort vehicle, which had its hazard lights on, was hit by a truck, said Dayton Interim Police Chief Shane Burleigh.

    The truck “didn’t notice how slow the vehicle was going, tried to make an evasive maneuver to drive around the vehicle, and didn’t do it in time,” Burleigh said. “It struck the escort vehicle in the rear left, pushed the escort into two of the monks.”

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    One of the monks has “substantial leg injuries” and was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Houston, Burleigh said. The other monk with less serious injuries was taken by ambulance to another hospital in suburban Houston.

    In a video posted on Walk for Peace’s Facebook page, an unidentified spokeswoman for the group said the most seriously injured monk was expected to have a series of surgeries to heal a broken bone, but his prognosis for recovery was good. The group said the monk’s surgery on Thursday went well.

    “He’s in good spirits. He’s giving us thumbs-up,” the spokeswoman said. The condition of the other monk was not immediately known.

    The monks, who camped overnight near Dayton, planned to resume their walk “with steadfast determination,” Walk for Peace said.

    “We kindly ask everyone to continue keeping the monks in your thoughts and prayers as healing begins and the journey toward peace continues,” the group said in a post on Facebook.

    After the accident, the monks do not plan to change how they conduct their walk, which takes place along highways but also through open fields, Dong said. Walk for Peace plans to continue working with local law enforcement in the areas they travel through to ensure the safety of the monks, he said.

    “Right now, everything is still as planned,” Dong said.

    The driver of the truck that hit the monk’s escort vehicle is cooperating with the investigation, which is still ongoing, Burleigh said.

    “Right now, we’re looking at this as driver inattention,” said Burleigh, who added that police will determine at the end of the investigation if any charges will be filed.

    ___

    Follow Juan A. Lozano: https://x.com/juanlozano70

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  • All roads in ancient Rome stretched far longer than previously known, study shows

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    WASHINGTON — As the saying went, all roads once led to Rome — and those roads stretched 50% longer than previously known, according to a new digital atlas published Thursday.

    The last major atlas of ancient Roman road networks was published 25 years ago. Since then, advances in technology and other newly accessible sources have greatly expanded researchers’ ability to locate ancient roadways.

    Over five years, a team of archaeologists combed through historical records, ancient journals, locations of milestones and other archival data. Scientists then looked for clues in satellite imagery and aerial photography, including recently digitized photos taken from planes during World War II.

    When ancient accounts hinted at lost roads in a certain area, researchers analyzed the terrain from above to spot subtle traces — things like faint differences in vegetation, soil variations or shifts in elevation, as well as traces of ancient engineering like raised mounds or cut hillsides — that revealed where Roman lanes once ran.

    “It becomes a massive game of connecting the dots on a continental scale,” said Tom Brughmans, an archaeologist and co-author of the study published in Scientific Data.

    The data and an interactive digital map are also available online for scholars, history teachers or anyone with an interest in ancient Roman history.

    Earlier research had focused on “the highways of the Roman Empire” — the large thoroughfares most often mentioned in familiar historical accounts, said Brughmans.

    The updated map fills in more obscure details about “secondary roads, like the country lanes, that connected villas and farms” and other locations, said Brughmans, who’s based at Aarhus University in Denmark.

    Researchers previously tallied the extent of Roman roads as covering around 117,163 miles (188,555 kilometers). The new work shows nearly 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) of roads across the extent of the Roman Empire, allowing travel from Spain to Syria.

    The study added a lot to archaeologists’ knowledge of ancient roads in North Africa, the plains of France and in the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece.

    “This will be a very foundational work for a lot of other research,” said archaeologist Benjamin Ducke of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, who was not involved in the project.

    But one caveat, he said, is that it’s still not clear if all the roads were ever open and active at the same time.

    Being able to visualize the ancient routes that Roman farmers, soldiers, diplomats and other travelers took will provide a better understanding of key historical trends that depended on the movement of people during Roman times, said Brughmans, including the rise of Christianity across the region and the spread of ancient outbreaks.

    “The Romans left a huge impact with this road network,” which created the blueprint for many roads still in use today, said study co-author and archaeologist Adam Pažout of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

    Roman engineering feats to build and maintain roads — including arched stone bridges and tunnels through hillsides — still shape the geography and economy of the Mediterranean region and beyond, he said.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Costumed canines get their chance to trick-or-treat at ‘Howloween’ event

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    LANSING, Mich. — LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Dogs dressed up as everything from Elvis Presley to Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine went trick-or-treating in Michigan’s capital Friday as part of the annual Howloween event organized by a local pet store.

    The costumed canines made a loop through Lansing’s Old Town arts district, stopping outside restaurants, gift shops and jewelry stores, where owners were waiting to provide treats and a scratch behind the ears.

    Wendy Beck’s pooch, Bella, “got filled up on biscuits” and had to stop along the route for a power nap.

    It was the 9-year-old St. Bernard’s first Howloween, but Alicia Town’s dog, Mojo, is a veteran in more ways than one. The 13-year-old Pomeranian was a tank driver, rolling around in a little green tank – an ode to Town’s husband serving in the Army.

    “There are so many dogs and so many people. You see the cutest things,” Town said. “People go above and beyond on their costumes, and you get everything. It’s amazing.”

    Makenzie Smith-Emrich accompanied her pit bull, Sadie, who was dressed up as a kissing booth pumpkin.

    “This is something we wait for all year, because it’s something that we can do with our dogs that they absolutely adore,” the Lansing resident said. “And they get to dress up, and people give them attention.”

    The event is organized each year by Preuss Pets, an Old Town fixture. The number of dogs is capped at 200, and their owners have to preregister. It is all part of an effort to keep the numbers down for safety’s sake.

    General manager Kirbay Preuss said Howloween is “joyous” and “a very good thing.”

    “I think right now with everything going on in the world we need more joyous events, and that’s what this is,” she said.

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  • Some other critter likely created Chicago’s ‘rat hole’

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    Ah, rats!

    Researchers think they have debunked the origin of Chicago’s so-called “rat hole,” one of the Windy City’s weirdest local landmarks.

    Hold on. The rat hole wasn’t what you think. It wasn’t some back alley bar that served as a speakeasy for the city’s notorious gangster clientele or a tenement stuffed to the brim with junk. It was actually a full-body impression of an unlucky critter that got trapped in wet sidewalk cement in the city’s Roscoe Village neighborhood about 20 or 30 years ago. The imprint closely resembles that of a spread-eagled rat, complete with outlines of what appear to be tiny claws, arms and legs and even a tail.

    The rat hole went viral early last year after comedian Winslow Dumaine posted a photo of it on X. The post drew curious tourists to the site at all hours, with some leaving coins and other odd objects around the impression as a tribute.

    The constant traffic drew complaints from neighbors, though, and in April 2024 someone filled the impression with a substance resembling plaster. City workers eventually removed that slab of sidewalk and took it to the City Hall-County Building. A plaque honoring the rat hole remains at the actual site.

    Researchers hailing from the University of Tennessee, New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine and the University of Calgary published a paper Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters that concludes the rat hole was most likely created not by the titular rodent but a squirrel or a muskrat.

    The researchers studied online photos of the rat hole and compared measurements of the imprint to museum specimens of animals commonly found in the Chicago area. The presence of arms, legs and a tail excluded birds, snakes, frogs and turtles, shrinking the possibilities to a mammal. The claw outlines further reduced the field to rats, mice, squirrels, chipmunks and muskrats, the study said.

    The creature’s long forelimbs, third digits and hind paws were too large for a rat but fell into the measurement ranges for Eastern gray squirrels, fox squirrels and muskrats. The most probable suspect is the Eastern gray squirrel given how abundant that creature is in the Chicago area, the study concluded.

    Other researchers have theorized that a squirrel created the imprint, the study acknowledged. Cement is typically wet during the day, and rats are nocturnal and the creature didn’t leave any tracks, suggesting a squirrel misjudged a leap or slipped from a branch and landed in the wet cement, the study noted.

    The imprint didn’t show any sign of a bushy tail, but hair often lacks the rigidity to create deep, well-defined impressions, and it would have been surprising to find such an imprint, the study said.

    “We therefore propose that the specimen be rechristened the ‘Windy City Sidewalk Squirrel’ — a name more fitting of its likely origins and more aligned with the evidence at hand,” they wrote.

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  • Long-lost ancient Roman artifact reappears in a New Orleans backyard

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    NEW ORLEANS — NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A New Orleans family cleaning up their overgrown backyard made an extremely unusual find: Under the weeds was a mysterious marble tablet with Latin characters that included the phrase “spirits of the dead.”

    “The fact that it was in Latin that really just gave us pause, right?” said Daniella Santoro, a Tulane University anthropologist. “I mean, you see something like that and you say, ‘Okay, this is not an ordinary thing.’”

    Intrigued and slightly alarmed, Santoro reached out to her classical archaeologist colleague Susann Lusnia, who quickly realized that the slab was the 1,900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus.

    “When I first saw the image that Daniella sent me, it really did send a shiver up my spine because I was just floored,” Lusnia said.

    Further sleuthing by Lusnia revealed the tablet had been missing from an Italian museum for decades.

    Sextus Congenius Verus had died at age 42, of unknown causes, after serving for more than two decades in the imperial navy on a ship named for the Roman god of medicine, Asclepius. The gravestone calls the sailor “well deserving” and was commissioned by two people described as his “heirs,” who were likely shipmates since Roman military could not be married at the time, Lusnia said.

    The tablet had been in an ancient cemetery of around 20 graves of military personnel, found in the 1860s in Civitavecchia, a seaside in northwest Italy about 30 miles (48 kilometers) from Rome. Its text had been recorded in 1910 and included in a catalog of Latin inscriptions, which noted the tablet’s whereabouts were unknown.

    The tablet was later documented at the National Archeological Museum in Civitavecchia prior to World War II. But the museum had been “pretty much destroyed” during Allied bombing and took several decades to rebuild, Lusnia said. Museum staff confirmed to Lusnia the tablet had been missing for decades. Its recorded measurements — 1 square foot (0.09 square meters) and 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) thick — matched the size of the tablet found in Santoro’s backyard.

    “You can’t have better DNA than that,” Lusnia said.

    She said the FBI is in talks with Italian authorities to repatriate the tablet. An FBI spokesperson said the agency could not respond to requests for comment during the government shutdown.

    A final twist to the story suggests how the tablet made its way to New Orleans.

    As media reports of the find began circulating this week, Erin Scott O’Brien says her ex-husband called her and told her to watch the news. She immediately recognized the hunk of marble, which she had always seen as a “cool-ass piece of art.” They had used as a garden decoration and then forgot about it before selling the home to Santoro in 2018.

    “None of us knew what it was,” O’Brien said. “We were watching the video, just like in shock.”

    O’Brien said she received the tablet from her grandparents — an Italian woman and a New Orleans native who was stationed in the country during World War II.

    Perhaps no one would be more thrilled by the tablet’s rediscovery than Sextus himself. Grave markers were important in Roman culture to uphold legacies, even of everyday citizens, Lusnia said.

    “Now Sextus Congenius Verus is being talked about so much,” Lusnia said. “If there’s an afterlife and he’s in it and he knows, he’s very happy because this is what a Roman wants — to be remembered forever.”

    ___

    Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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  • Once-secret Emperor Commodus’ passage to Rome Colosseum opens to public for 1st time

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    ROME — ROME (AP) — For the first time in nearly 2,000 years, visitors to Rome’s world-renowned Colosseum will have the opportunity to walk through a hidden imperial passage that once allowed Roman emperors to reach the ancient amphitheater unseen.

    The once-secret corridor — known as the “Commodus Passage” and named after the Roman emperor turned into a pop icon by Ridley Scott’s movie “Gladiator” — opens to the public on Oct. 27, marking an extraordinary milestone in archaeological preservation and access.

    Archaeologists at the Colosseum Archaeological Park explained that Roman emperors would use the passage to enter the arena unseen and protected, leading them directly to their reserved honor box overlooking the games.

    The passage was named after Emperor Commodus, who lived between 180 and 192 A.D., when it was initially discovered in the 1810s. Commodus was known to be passionate about gladiators’ games and history relates that while he was passing through the tunnel, someone attempted to assassinate him, but was unsuccessful.

    At the passage entrance, archaeologists discovered remnants of decorative elements directly related to arena spectacles, including depictions of boar hunts, bear fights and acrobatic performances. These artistic elements provided a fitting prelude to the brutal entertainments that awaited beyond, they noted.

    The corridor is shaped as an ’S’ and continues outside the Colosseum arena, but its final destination remains uncertain.

    “Visitors can now have a taste of what it was like to be an emperor entering the arena,” said Barbara Nazzaro, the architect who oversaw the restoration works. “With a little effort of imagination and the help of a virtual reconstruction, they can appreciate the decorations, stuccoes, frescoes and marbles that covered the walls.”

    The project — completed between Oct. 2024 and Sept. 2025 — included structural conservation, restoration of decorative stuccoes and plasters and the installation of a new walkway.

    A new lighting system recreates the natural light that once filtered through small vault openings, and a digital reconstruction helps visitors visualize the passage’s original appearance.

    A second restoration project, expected to begin in early 2026, will involve the section of the tunnel extending beyond the perimeter of the Colosseum.

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