Eideard

The cat that vanished in baggage claim at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and whose plight became an online sensation has been found after being missing for two months.

“American Airlines is happy to announce that Jack the Cat has been found safe and well at JFK airport,” the carrier wrote in a post on the “Jack the Cat is Lost in AA Baggage at JFK” Facebook page Tuesday evening.

“Jack was found in the customs room and was immediately taken by team members to a local veterinarian. The vet has advised that Jack is doing well at present.”

The airline plans to fly the cat to California to be reunited with his owner, Karen Pascoe.

The saga started on August 25, when Pascoe was flying from New York to San Francisco with Jack and a second cat as part of a job relocation. But Jack escaped his kennel and was last seen at JFK’s inbound baggage claim…

When a search failed to turn up Jack after a few days, Pascoe became frustrated with American Airlines and started the Facebook page “to help us put pressure on AA to step up their efforts.” She also urged fliers to “do whatever they can do to keep their animals out of cargo.”

American even hired a pet detective and issued a pet Amber alert in hopes of locating the feline. I’m not quite certain how a pet Amber alert functions – but, I am glad they found Jack.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Germany is investigating reports that the blueprints for the future headquarters of its BND intelligence agency have gone missing. If the report in Focus magazine is confirmed, it could pose a serious security risk – and would be a huge embarrassment for the spy agency…

The government said a commission was looking into the “serious issue“.

The plans purportedly show extremely sensitive aspects of the building’s construction, such as the alarm system, anti-terror installations, emergency exits, cable routes and sewers.

“It has not yet been possible to verify the authenticity of the reports, but an investigation was launched into the matter on Friday,” government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a regular news conference…

Building in a former East German district of the capital began in 2006 and is scheduled for completion in 2014. It is set to be one of the most expensive and hi-tech government structures in Germany.

Sounds like they hired someone from George W. Bush’s brain trust to design and secure the facility. Could end up being as much of a white elephant as the State Dept/NSA/CIA/Military Intelligence [sic] barn we’re still paying for in Baghdad.

You probably can buy duplicate copies by now in any souk in the Middle East.

Australia’s military has lost its X-Files, detailing sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, across the country…

After a two-month search in response to a newspaper Freedom of Information (FOI) request, which forces government officials to release documents of public interest, Australia’s Department of Defence had been unable to locate the files, the Sydney Morning Herald said.

“The files could not be located and Headquarters Air Command formally advised that this file is deemed lost,” the department’s FOI assistant director, Natalie Carpenter, told the paper. Defence officials could not be contacted by Reuters.

The only file Defence had been able to locate was a folder called: “Report on UFOs/Strange Occurrences and Phenomena in Woomera,” a military weapons testing range in the center of Australia’s vast outback, Carpenter said.

All other files had been lost or destroyed, which the Herald said could fuel conspiracy theories about their disappearance.

Do you really think so?

With the next organized search for a 6-year-old Aurora boy not planned until after the holiday weekend, officials from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are encouraging the public to stay vigilant.

The Virginia-based group has partnered with letter carriers and Wal-Mart stores to hang posters with photos of the boy, Timmothy Pitzen, especially around Aurora, Wisconsin Dells and Sterling, where police have determined he stopped with his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, before his disappearance.

Fry-Pitzen of Aurora committed suicide in a Rockford hotel sometime after checking in on May 13 and left a note saying her son was in the care of unnamed people, police said.

During a search on May 19, dozens of officers unsuccessfully checked out more than 25 sites in the Dixon area, about 100 miles west of Chicago. The next search will focus on an area around a cell phone tower near the small northwest Illinois town of Sterling, the last place to get a cell phone signal from Fry-Pitzen, Aurora police said…

“We’re trying to send a message that there is hope,” Ernie Allen said. “Our firm belief is that somebody out there knows something … and they’ll come forward.”

Timmothy is about 4 feet 2 inches tall, weighs about 70 pounds and has brown hair and brown eyes. Any one with information is asked to call 630-256-5500 or 911.

The jewel-encrusted 2.75 tonne black carriage, made with £161,000 of Australian taxpayers’ money, was supposed to be delivered in 2006, but government officials have admitted they have no idea where it is.

The coach, named Britannia, is decorated with 24 diamonds, 130 sapphires and 400 books of gold leaf and is estimated to be worth a total of £900,000.

It was made by monarchist Jim Frecklington and is said to feature fragments of more than 100 British historical artefacts including timber from Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose, a piece of the 1760 doorway from 10 Downing Street and gold from Admiral Nelson’s crown from the Battle of Trafalgar.

While he was prime minister, John Howard committed $250,000 worth of public money to the project to support “Australian craftsmanship”.

Two years ago Mr Frecklington said the coach was ready and awaiting shipment to Britain, but under questioning in a Senate inquiry on Wednesday, government officials admitted that they do not know where the coach is and had never inspected it.

“Someone could have absconded with it,” Senator John Faulker told the inquiry “Is there any hope that the carriage will be presented to Her Majesty by the time she is 90?”

Do they tow away coaches parked in a No Parking Zone in Oz? Maybe it’s in some coppers’ hostage lot?

Why do they need lawyers and accountants to sort their church pension fund?

In a highly unusual case pending before the Supreme Judicial Court, an order of nuns is suing Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, after years of trying in vain to withdraw from a church-run pension fund. Nuns fighting a cardinal in court is almost unheard of, and their lawyers say they are doing so only as a last resort…

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of troubles for the pension funds overseen by the Archdiocese of Boston. The archdiocese’s pension fund for lay workers — the trust the nuns invested in, alongside many other independent Catholic organizations — is significantly underfunded. A pension fund for priests has also been troubled in recent years, although the archdiocese says the condition of that fund has now improved…

The funds at stake in the lawsuit are not for the nuns’ own retirement, but for the retirement of their lay employees. The order has about four dozen employees and retirees in the Boston area and another four dozen or so nationwide…

The nuns believe they are owed $1.371 million, based on their estimate of the value of the assets in 2007. The archdiocese declined to say what it believes the nuns’ assets are worth, saying this is a point of disagreement that it hopes to resolve in mediation…

In their lawsuit…the Daughters of St. Paul say that they asked to leave the archdiocesan fund in 2005. They sought to establish a single pension plan for all their US employees that the Daughters would run themselves.

Their lawsuit alleges that representatives of the church-run plan were unable to supply data concerning the Daughters’ contributions and earnings required to effectuate the spinoff. The trustees, the lawsuit alleges, never kept separate records for each contributing employer — even though, it alleges, they were required to do so by the document establishing the trust.

Marcia S. Wagner, a pension law specialist whom the nuns hired in 2007, said she has never encountered such difficulty acquiring basic information to complete what she said should have been a straightforward matter. “What struck me as most atypical is the incredible lack of responsiveness, the lack of any hard data or information, non-answers to very specific questions, and just endless, fruitless negotiations,’’ she said.

She added: “When you want to accomplish something that is par for the course and ordinary, and it becomes mired in arcane complexity, nonresponsiveness and non-answers, that will usually mean that something is amiss.’’

In my experience, “something is amiss” is putting it too politely. Someone’s been skimming the cream off the milk of human kindness. Probably someone who thinks his god is on his side.

Army patrol searching for Ericka Gandara

The last remaining police officer in the Mexican border town of Guadalupe has disappeared.

A spokesman for prosecutors in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state says a search has started for 28-year-old Ericka Gandara, who hasn’t been seen Dec 23.

Some local media have reported Ms Gandara was kidnapped, but spokesman Arturo Sandoval says her relatives have not filed a kidnap complaint.

Surprised?

Mr Sandoval said on Tuesday the search was started as a missing-person case. The same day she disappeared, assailants also set fire to the home of a Guadalupe town councilwoman.

Drug cartels have fought bloody battles for control of the Juarez Valley where Guadalupe is located, leading most police officers there to resign.

The only surprise was that someone took the job.

FedEx could learn today [Friday] what happened to a package containing radioactive materials that went missing a day before.

The company said it is searching in the Tennessee area and that the item is safe as long as nobody tampers with the protective packaging around it.

The item is a cylinder containing rods used for hospital machinery that were being sent to a person in Knoxville, Tennessee, said Sandra Munoz, a company spokeswoman. “The rods are used for quality control calibration,” Munoz said. “We have lots of experience in handling this kind of shipment.”

Munoz said the company may learn more Friday morning when two employees who handled the shipment return to work.

Uh, no one swiped the bar code in transit?

My experience, memory of screw-ups like this – unfortunately – usually ends in tragedy. Often, someone walked off with the radioactive marker source, putting themselves and their families at serious risk.

Phew! They found it. It had been double-boxed and the outer box with shipping info went to the destination. The inner box containing the radioactive rod inside a protective tube – was left aside because of no shipping info – in a FedEx terminal in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The sludge reservoir before it collapsed

The reservoir of an alumina plant in western Hungary burst on Monday, flooding several towns with towering waves of red sludge. Two people died, seven were missing and several dozen were injured, rescue services said.

The spill of an estimated 600,000-700,000 cubic meters of sludge affected seven localities near the Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant in the town of Ajka, 160 kilometers southwest of Budapest, the capital.

In Devecser, the sludge flooded some 400 homes, and 40 people had to be rescued in the neighboring town of Somlovasarhely. In Kolontar, the rushing sludge reached a height of two meters.

The sludge, a waste product in aluminum production, contains heavy metals and is toxic if ingested…

Some 120 people, including six who were seriously hurt, were treated by medical staff. Two of the injured were in life threatening condition. The most common injuries caused by the caustic sludge were burns on the skin and eyes, said Jozsef Czirner, the regional rescue service director.

What is there to say?

Give corporate creeps minimal standards and they will work very hard not to exceed them.

UPDATE: Death toll now up to 4.

Sounds like we’re not even relying on Nick Nolte

Federal prison officials fail to properly keep track of thousands of inmates who are granted unescorted furloughs when they are temporarily released, an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded.

More than 90,000 federal inmates were allowed to leave institutions unescorted in the past three years, often for medical reasons.

Currently, the Federal Bureau of Prisons operates the furlough program using manual processes. [That sounds like it means paper and pencil] The investigation found the prison system does not have accessible or accurate data on inmate escapes while on furlough, nor on crimes committed by furloughed inmates.

The report sharply criticizes the Bureau of Prisons for failing to implement proposed policy improvements drafted seven years ago. Among the policy changes still awaiting implementation is a requirement to notify crime victims and witnesses when a prisoner is being temporarily released…

About 13 percent of the prison population qualifies for furloughs each year. Furloughs are authorized absences by an inmate not under the escort of a Bureau of Prisons staff member.

The prison system has two types of furloughs: transfer and nontransfer. The report says there is a lesser problem in nontransfer furloughs, in which a prisoner returns to the same institution. The absences are for short-term medical treatment, to strengthen family ties or to allow participation in approved activities.

But with transfer furloughs — in which prisoners are being moved for longer-term treatment at a medical facility or a halfway house — the documentation tends to fall apart, the report says.

This is easier than being in the Army. At least if you go AWOL, someone notices. There’s a piece of paper that keeps track of departing and arriving.

I thought the Good Behavior/all is forgiven part didn’t kick in until you were up for parole.