Free Republic

There is a well know saying amongst Yellowstone National Park staff about bison safety that goes like this “don’t pet fluffy cows.” It’s comical and cute but is an actual warning for tourists not a treat the park’s wildlife like a petting zoo. Bison may seem like docile creatures that would have little recourse to a human dead set on making contact but that is a very dangerous misconception. In a park with predators roaming around like grizzly bears and mountain lions, bison stand above all other species when it comes to injuring the most tourists.

An American Navy sailor has been detained in Venezuela while visiting the country on personal travel, several U.S. officials confirmed to CBS News. It's not yet known why the sailor is being detained, but one of the officials told CBS News the sailor was not on approved leave by the U.S. military or on official travel to Venezuela at the time of the detention.

A tourist in Florence, Italy has sparked outrage and criticism recently after she was filmed simulating an insulting sexual act with a Roman statue. The statue was that of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and excess, the equivalent to the Greek god Dionysus. This incident, totally insulting to the Italians and to everyone who admires the Roman world, took place near the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge of the beautiful Italian metropolis. Florence statue incident condemned as insulting act of tourist Images of the woman who allegedly committed the insulting act on the statue in Florence have been circulating on...

Two suspects wanted for allegedly brutally beating and mugging a tourist outside a Times Square hotel are believed to be migrants who’d been living in shelters, police sources said. The two are wanted for attacking the 44-year-old Indiana man outside the four-star Club Quarters Hotel on West 45th Street just before 2:30 a.m. May 10, according to police appeals and sources. They allegedly punched and kicked the tourist during the savage attack. The suspects fled on foot after snatching the victim’s phone and wallet, police said.

Shocking video captured the moment a serial offender pulled out a massive knife and stabbed a passing tourist near Times Square in a horrifying unprovoked attack. Video of Saturday evening’s attack shows the man using a walker to exit Port Gourmet Deli at West 43rd and Eighth Avenue and loitering outside the storefront before lunging at an unsuspecting woman on the sidewalk. The attacker can be seen in the clip wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt under a dark jacket and an orange hat leaving a store and sitting outside on his walker.

A tourist from Singapore fell to her death Friday while snapping photos with her husband on the edge of a cliff in a New York state park, authorities said. Nur Aisyah Binte MD Akbar, 39, plunged 70 feet after slipping off the cliff while on a hiking trip with her husband in the Hudson Valley region, state police said. The woman and her husband stopped to take photos at the edge of a cliff on the Beacon Hill Trail in Minnewaska State Park when she “lost her footing” and went over the side Friday afternoon, according to police.

When in Rome … another tourist has defaced the Colosseum. A Swiss girl carved her initials into the iconic amphitheater — less than a month after another tourist stunningly defaced the ancient landmark with his and his fiancée’s names Police have launched an investigation after Italian tour guide David Battaglino captured video of the unidentified 17-year-old girl carving the letter “N” into the wall, La Repubblica reported. The footage posted on Twitter by Italian news agency ANSA shows the blond girl, whose face is blurred, using an object to carve the letter before she backs off amid the attention. “It...

The Titanic tourist submersible that vanished on a trip to the 111-year-old shipwreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is believed to have run out of oxygen — but authorities pushed ahead with the search operation Thursday morning. OceanGate Expeditions, which operates the Titan sub and whose CEO, Stockton Rush, is aboard the missing vessel, told the Coast Guard on Sunday evening that the vehicle was equipped with only 96 hours of oxygen, with the timer running out around 7:08 a.m. Thursday. The status of the five passengers aboard the ill-fated trip remains unclear as US and Canadian officials...

A North Carolina tourist town plagued by rising crime is resorting to hiring off-duty county sheriff's deputies at an overtime hourly rate to help city police patrol the downtown district. A team of six deputies with the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office in western North Carolina are being paid $75 per hour to help their counterparts in the staff-strapped Asheville Police Department (APD) on Fridays and Saturdays from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., according to a document reported by local outlet Asheville Watchdog.

Business owners and workers in a Democrat-run North Carolina tourist town said their downtown district is deteriorating amid rising crime, rampant homelessness and diminishing police. Multiple people who work in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, bemoaned the condition of the city and pinpointed a lack of police presence to its decline, according to an investigation by local outlet Asheville Watchdog. "We really need beat cops, police on bicycles," Rose Garfinkle, who lives and works downtown, told the outlet. "The lack of a police presence is noticeable. Things have taken a turn in the last five years." Violent crime has spiked in...

Four other tourists “sustained non-life-threatening injuries” and were treated onboard. The ship suffered minor damage and was anchored off Ushuaia, 3,200 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) from the capital Buenos Aires, with several windows smashed on the side, AFP journalists reported. Viking said it was “investigating the facts surrounding this incident.” Scientists often refer to rogue waves as extreme storm waves that surge out of nowhere, often in an unpredictable direction, and can look like a steep wall of water, up to twice the size of surrounding waves. These rare killer waves were once seen as a myth reported by mariners...

Honolulu police have opened a first-degree robbery investigation after three male suspects allegedly robbed a visitor in Waikiki. Police said the suspects approached the victim, 23, in the 400 block of Ena Road brandishing knives and a handgun and demanded money at about 2 p.m. Wednesday. The suspects fled on foot with money taken from the victim. No injuriies were reported.

On Monday morning at around 7.30 a.m. the woman was caught on camera by appalled locals posing for pictures with just a red strip of material covering her front, in front of the cathedral doors, which were cast in 1067 in the-then Constantinople, and beneath a mosaic of St. Andrew, whose relics are said to be housed inside. The location of the shoot was particularly hurtful to members of the community, said art historian and writer Laura Thayer, who who lives in Amalfi "The Duomo is a place of worship and a place very close to the hearts of the...

An angry tourist smashed two ancient sculptures at the Vatican after being denied a chance to meet with the pope. It's just the latest in a series of instances of visitors behaving badly in Rome. Read on to find out what happened, what authorities said about the man, and how long it will take for the ancient works to be repaired. The incident happened around lunchtime in the Museo Chiaramonti, which is part of the Vatican Museums. It holds about 1,000 works of ancient statuary and Roman portraits. The man demanded to see the pope, the newspaper Il Messaggero reported....

At least 14 people were killed and more than a dozen others injured when a bus carrying domestic tourists crashed into an advertising sign in Indonesia's East Java province early on Monday, police said. The bus -- which was carrying 31 passengers, the driver and a crew member -- hit the pole and then rolled over on a toll road connecting the town of Mojokerto to the country's second city, Surabaya. The victims were from Benowo, a village near Surabaya, and were returning home after a long weekend at popular holiday destination Dieng Plateau, about 400 kilometers away in Central...

Charred bodies were recovered at the scene on the side of a highway in the country’s south. Five Egyptians, four French people and a Belgian were killed. Among the injured were eight people from France and six from Belgium, and all are in stable condition after suffering fractures, burns and bruises, officials said. The bus was en route to the ancient Temple of Esna on the West Bank of the Nile River when it crashed on the highway, but the reason for the collision is unknown. The crash comes mere days after another tourist bus crashed near the Red Sea,...

ZIMPARKS spokesperson Tinashe Farawo said Michael Bernard Walsh (71) was killed while taking an unguided tour with his son in Mana Pools National park in the north of the country. The two had walked about 40 meters from where they had parked their car when they encountered the elephants, with one of them charging at them, Farawo said. The son managed to escape and reach the car while Walsh could not outrun the elephant which trampled him to death.

The typical rocket launch dumps the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as one airliner does in the course of a trans-Atlantic crossing If you’re worried about your ‘carbon footprint’ - a concept foisted on the world in 2004 by British Petroleum to persuade people that their own behaviour, and not giant oil companies like BP, is causing the climate problem -- then you definitely should not sign up for a sub-orbital space flight. Besides, you probably can’t afford it ($250,000 pp). Millions of people can afford it, however, and since the Branson/Bezos ‘space race’ last month tickets for...

A Georgia man “randomly” shot and killed a tourist dining outside with his family in Miami Beach, then danced over the body, cops and a witness at the disturbing scene said. Tamarius David, 22, of Norcross, Georgia, allegedly opened fire on Dustin Wakefield, 21, from close range as he was eating in the outdoor section of La Cerveceria de Barrio on Miami Beach’s famous Ocean Drive on Tuesday night, CBS Miami reported. “After the shooting, he was dancing on top of the guy,” a witness, who didn’t want to be identified, told the news station. Wakefield, who was on vacation...

Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam was locked down for hours because of a bomb threat. Play Video: https://www.kitv.com/clip/15223704/bomb-threat-locks-down-joint-base-pearl-harborhickam A bomb threat forced military officials to lock down Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. By the afternoon, it was back to normal for the busy Oahu base, after its gates were closed for four hours. The ripple effects of the bomb threat were also felt around Pearl Harbor. A line of traffic stretched out from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam after its gates were closed at 9:39 a.m. Drivers not only waited to get in, but also were unable to leave because of a security...