Elderly man in critical condition after apartment blaze

A 73-year-old man is in critical condition after a two-alarm blaze at an apartment complex at 278 Montreal Rd. Wednesday.

The fire was promptly extinguished by the 35 firefighters and 13 vehicles responding to the call at 10:53 a.m.

The man was found unconscious in an apartment by firefighters. Paramedics treated him for third-degree burns to his chest, neck, face and arms, in addition to smoke inhalation. Paramedics also treated a male in his late teens or early 20s for smoke inhalation.

When firefighters arrived on the scene, the kitchen was engulfed in flames. The fire was contained to the apartment, with some minor smoke damage elsewhere in the building.

According to fire platoon leader Dennis Gobey, the fire doesn’t seem to be suspicious, and “could be a malfunction of the stove or maybe it was left unattended.”

Melissa Marshall, 24, a tenant in the apartment above the fire, said that her son “saw smoke coming out of the radiators.” After sending a family member to check the hallway, Marshall escaped from the blaze with her visiting family, including a three-month-old baby, her six-year-old son and her Rottweiler, who recently had a litter of nine.

“The fire alarm didn’t even go off for a while,” said Marshall. “We didn’t hear one until our own alarm went off.”

Neighbours have identified the man in critical condition as Peter Belanger.

Teen Tries to Kill Mother for Breast Implants

FOUNTAIN, Colorado (AP) — A Colorado teenager hired men to kill his mother so he could use her money to get breast implants for his girlfriend, police said.

Nikita Lee Weis, 18, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, said Fountain Deputy Police Chief Mike Barnett.

Weis’ mother, Hyun Weis, was attacked Thursday with a small wooden baseball bat at her home but escaped, authorities said. She was released Friday from a hospital.

His girlfriend, Sophia Nicole Alsept, and two men police said he hired, Juan Antonio Velez Gonzalez, 18, and Brandon Michael Soroka, 19, were also arrested on the charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

Barnett said Weis wanted to sell his mother’s car and use money in her bank accounts to pay for breast implants for Alsept, 21.

Barnett also said the suspects discussed wrapping Hyun Weis’ body in plastic and dumping it in the desert in New Mexico or Arizona.

All were being held on $50,000 bail. Officials did not know whether they had attorneys and said they couldn’t get messages to them.

Fountain is about 10 miles south of Colorado Springs.

World’s Tallest Man Now World’s Tallest Dad

BEIJING – The world’s tallest man, China’s Bao Xishun, became the world’s tallest father this week with the birth of his first child, a boy whose initial height seems a compromise between his gigantic dad and average-sized mum.

Bao’s son measured 22 inches long at birth, the senior doctor at Zunhua Hospital in Hebei province told Reuters.

Although slightly taller than average for newborn children, Bao’s boy came up well short of the 29.5 inches claimed as a record birth length last year, also in China.

“Bao is quite happy. The baby is healthy and a normal size,” the hospital’s senior doctor Zhang told Reuters.

Bao, a 7-foot-9-inch herdsman from Inner Mongolia, last year married Xia Shujuan, a pygmy by contrast at 5-foot-6 inches.

“I hope he or she can be about 2 meters tall,” Bao, 57, said last year about his wishes for a child. “Then he or she can play basketball.”

His son weighed 4.2 kilograms at birth, a touch heavier than average.

Bao briefly lost his Guinness World Records title as the tallest man to Ukrainian Leonid Stadnyk but regained it in August when Stadnyk refused to be measured under new guidelines.

Bao’s son was born on Thursday but news of the birth only spread widely on Saturday, with the Chinese press according the newborn a level of privacy that is rare for the world’s tallest man.

The former goat herder hires himself out for publicity stunts and his wedding last year was sponsored by at least 15 companies.

Algerian Baby Survives Four Days in Pool of Mud

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) – A baby was found alive by rescuers after spending four days in a pool of mud following flash floods that killed at least 41 people in central Algeria last week, a local official said Sunday.

“It’s a miracle, really a miracle to find it alive after all this time,” the town governor of Ghardaia, Yahia Fahim, told national radio.

The state-run APS news agency said the 4-month-old baby appeared in good health after being discovered late Saturday and had been handed to a family while authorities looked for its parents.

Journalists in Ghardaia, where most of the victims drowned, said none of them had seen the baby since it was saved. But the governor said its photo would be posted in all local media for the family to recognize it. It was not clear from his comments whether the baby was a boy or a girl.

Authorities did not say how they knew the baby had been in the mud since the flooding.

The reported rescue came as authorities confirmed at least 41 deaths in the floods caused by torrential rains last week in this usually arid region. In addition to 33 casualties already reported in and around Ghardaia, two more people drowned in the adjacent district of Ourghla and four died farther to the north in the town of Tebessa, APS said.

Authorities say massive rescue efforts are ongoing in the zone and that emergency measures have been taken to prevent epidemics from spreading through polluted waters.

Hundreds of troops and security services have deployed to prevent looting and help with recovery operations. Thousands of blankets, tents and food units were being handed out in Ghardaia, home to about 100,000 people.

Some 1,400 houses were severely damaged in this medieval town located in a long and narrow valley known as the M’zab, some 600 kilometers (370 miles) from Algiers, APS said. The M’zab is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site and lies on the edge of the Sahara, the world’s largest desert.

Algeria’s Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia was in Ghardaia on Sunday for an emergency cabinet meeting, APS said, dealing with emergencies including how to accommodate 12,000 students left without schools.

Beau of Woman Stuck on Toilet Wins Lotto

GREAT BEND, Kan. (AP) – A Kansas man whose girlfriend was physically stuck to the toilet in their home wins $20,000 in the state Lottery, for the second time this year.

Kory McFarren cashed in his winning $2 Bonus Crossword ticket in Great Bend Monday. On July 29, the 37-year-old received six months of probation after pleading no contest to misdemeanor mistreatment of a dependent adult.

McFarren called deputies in February to report that his girlfriend, Pam Babcock, had refused to come out of the bathroom for two years. Authorities found her stuck to the toilet. Medical personnel estimated Babcock had been on the toilet for at least a month and said the seat had adhered to sores on her body. She was released from a Wichita hospital after several months of treatment.

T.O. Eatery Closed After Rat Spotted

Toronto public health officers have ordered the closure of a Chinatown restaurant after rats were seen scampering in the window on Spadina Avenue.

The images were captured by a passerby and quickly made their way onto the internet.

The Happy Seven Restaurant was not open at the time and attempts by CBC News to reach the owner have not been successful.

Shockingly, one of the images posted on the internet captures the image of rat alongside one of the city’s public health signs showing the restaurant had passed an inspection on Oct. 2.

In July, members of the Chinatown Business Improvement Area (CBIA) took steps to try and eliminate the infestation problem in the neighbourhood.

Business owners were worried that their area, hugely popular with tourists, was suffering from an image problem — including rats.

For years, people at the fruit stands, grocery stores and restaurants that give the shops on and around Spadina Avenue such character have heard complaints about dirty streets, rotting garbage and bad smells.

Owners have taken steps to clean up the image: every night garbage is put into bins and bags with the cardboard boxes neatly folded and left out for pickup. Every night, many of the merchants hose down the sidewalks.

But Stephen Chan, chair of the CBIA, has said in the past that there’s no getting around it — where there’s food, there are rats.

“Chinatown is actually not that dirty. It’s a high-traffic area. I feel we’re being identified as not clean in this area,” said Chan.

Another complaint voiced by many restaurant owners is the lack of garbage collection by the city.

They say having garbage picked up only twice a week isn’t enough.

In July, a pest control company was hired to install rat traps in Chinatown’s back alleys.

Scientists Confirm Shark’s ‘Virgin Birth’

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) – Scientists have confirmed the second case of a “virgin birth” in a shark.

In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female blacktip shark in a Virginia aquarium contained no genetic material from a male.

The first documented case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Nebraska, zoo.

“This first case was no fluke,” Demian Chapman, a shark scientist and lead author of the second study, said in a statement. “It is quite possible that this is something female sharks of many species can do on occasion.”

The scientists cautioned that the rare asexual births should not be viewed as a possible solution to declining global shark populations. The aquarium sharks that reproduced without mates each carried only one pup, while some species can produce litters of a dozen or more.

“It is very unlikely that a small number of female survivors could build their numbers up very quickly by undergoing virgin birth,” Chapman said.

The medical mystery began 16 months ago after the death of Tidbit, a blacktip shark that had lived for eight years at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach. No male blacktip sharks were present during her eight years.

In May 2007, the 5-foot, 94-pound shark died after it was given a sedative before undergoing a yearly checkup. The 10-inch shark pup was found during a necropsy, surprising aquarium officials. They initially thought the embryonic pup was either the product of a virgin birth or a cross between the blacktip and a male of another shark species — which has never been documented, Chapman said.

Tidbit’s pup was nearly full term, and likely would have been quickly eaten by “really big sand tiger sharks” that were in the tank, Chapman said in a telephone interview from Florida.

That is what happened to the tiny hammerhead pup in the Omaha case.

“By the time they could realize what they were looking at, something munched the baby,” he said of aquarium workers. The remains of the pup were used for the DNA testing.

Virgin birth has been proven in some bony fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds, and has been suspected among sharks in the wild.

The scientists who studied the Virginia and Nebraska sharks said the newly formed pups acquired one set of chromosomes when the mother’s chromosomes split during egg development, then united anew.

Absent the chromosomes present in the male sperm, the offspring of an asexual conception have reduced genetic diversity and, the scientists said, may be at a disadvantage for surviving in the wild. A pup, for instance, can be more susceptible to congenital disorders and diseases.

The scientists said their findings offer “intriguing questions” about how frequently automictic parthenogenesis occurs in the wild.

“It is possible that parthenogenesis could become more common in these sharks if population densities become so low that females have trouble finding mates,” said Mahmood Shivji, one of the scientists and director of the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida.

The DNA fingerprinting techniques used by the scientists are identical to those used in human paternity testing.

Chapman, who is with the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook, was assisted in the study by Beth Firchau of the Virginia Aquarium.

Chapman and Shivji were on the team that made the first discovery of virgin birth involving the Nebraska shark.