A peacock that escaped the Bronx Zoo was back in his enclosure on Thursday after strutting his stuff down a Bronx sidewalk earlier this week. The peacock escaped Wednesday and spent the night in a tree nearby before flying back to zoo grounds. Zoo staff said they kept an eye on the bird and expected him to return, and so they chose not to intervene.
MANNEQUIN CHALLENGE RETURNS
Remember the viral mannequin challenge that swept the internet back in 2016? Well, it's back. A dance team on a flight from Manchester to Orlando recently perfected the challenge, which involves people staying perfectly still while a camera moves between them. All the passengers and crew on the flight took part. The team said they had time to kill on the nine-hour flight to their dance competition and wanted to bring back the old trend.
NEW ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERY
Finally, a new discovery from astronomers that could point to extraterrestrial life. Do you remember the movie Contact with Jodie Foster? She played a scientist who received a radio message from space that ultimately led to the discovery of life on other planets. Well, it turns out real Canadian astronomers just discovered 25 new "fast radio bursts" in space. These signals also repeated, leading them to conclude it "wasn't a coincidence" that multiple bursts were coming from the same area in space. The origins of the bursts are still unknown.
The world population grew by 75 million people over the past year and on New Year's Day, it was estimated to stand at more than 8 billion people, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday.
UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow. Wisconsin-La Crosse fired Gow on Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2023, after learning Gow and his wife have been producing and appearing in pornographic videos. Gow maintains the firing violated his free speech rights.
The U.S. military is now putting independent lawyers in charge of its investigations of sexual assault and other major crimes, what Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has called the "most important reform" to the military justice system in recent history.
A decades-old law bans Medicare from paying for weight loss drugs. Now, drugmakers and a wide-ranging bipartisan coalition of lawmakers are gearing up to push for that to change next year.
Barring a court order, in March Texas police will start being able to arrest people they suspect have entered the U.S. illegally, but increases in border crossings since a 2021 law authorizing some arrests shows the limits of that approach in the face of desperation that causes people to risk everything and travel thousands of miles to the U.S.
Mexico began clearing tents, both occupied and unoccupied, from the encampment in the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, starting Tuesday.
