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[Catholic Caucus] "Buenos Aires: lightning on the halo and keys of St. Peter. Bergoglio at the end of the road?"I am reposting another article by Andrea Cionci that was originally published in Sfero.Well, from a faith perspective, how should we interpret the lightning bolt that struck the statue of St. Peter on December 17th?Statue of Saint Peter, Buenos AiresOn Sunday December 17, 2023, lightning literally pulverized the key and halo of the statue of Saint Peter, located on the facade of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rosary of San Nicolas , north of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The news...

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — South Texas ranchers brought nilgai antelope from a California zoo decades ago, when it became fashionable to stock their sprawling acreage with exotic quarry. These days the species native to India and Pakistan are not so much a rarity in South Texas as a nuisance. For cattle ranchers they are a possible nemesis, threatening to spread a deadly tick to their herds. Federal wildlife officials say they are competing with native Rio Grande Valley species for food and trampling the brush they are trying so hard to preserve. The fast-running, 600-pound antelope have wandered all around the...

Pythons swallow their prey whole, and take several days or even weeks to fully digest it.Biting off more than it could chew cost a 20-foot python its life in Junagadh district. The python died yesterday after swallowing a blue bull (‘nilgai’) at Baliavad village near Gir wildlife sanctuary, a Gujarat forest department official said. Villagers found the python lying on the road, its belly distended beyond normal capacity, and apparently struggling to digest the animal it had swallowed. “Forest officials were informed and they rushed to the site to ascertain its condition,” Deputy Conservator of Forest R Senthilkumaran said today....

Kazakhstan – An aerial survey conducted as part of a national monitoring program earlier this year estimated that the saiga antelope population numbered approximately 250,000 animals prior to this mass die-off, which has therefore halved the total population in about one month. snip The animals die within hours of showing symptoms, which include depression, diarrhea and frothing at the mouth.

A giraffe at Norway’s Kristiansand zoo was gored to death on Monday by an eland antelope as horrified adults and children looked on. ”It was very traumatic. People were crying everywhere,” Øivind Hansen, who witnessed the killing, told VG. His daughter Sissel Finstad, 23, had come home crying from the zoo. ”It was a horrible experience for everyone who saw it. It has really affected people,” he said. Per Arnstein Aamodt, the zoo's chief executive, confirmed that the giraffe, which had been stuck in a fence, had been killed by the antelope.

Liberal activists organized by CREDO SuperPAC are planning to protest outside a fundraiser that House Speaker John Boehner is holding Wednesday on Portola Road in Woodside with Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Gold River. The event with Boehner, R-Ohio, costs up to $35,000 a plate or $5,000 for a photo opportunity, and is occurring just six miles from the Atherton home in which President Obama is scheduled to hold a $35,800-a-plate fundraiser at about the same time.CREDO SuperPAC says it has launched a campaign against Lungren with four full-time organizers and a Carmichael field office to mobilize local voters to defeat a...

Four from Panoramio (there are quite a few more; this place generates amazing pictures readily). click for full-size

During mating season, male topi antelope trick females with false alarms of nearby danger to boost chances for sex, a new study says. If a female starts wandering out of a male's territory, the male will begin snorting and staring, ears pricked, at nonexistent predators. "The female will be walking away, and the male runs in front, looks not at the female but where she's going, makes this snort, and she typically stops," said lead researcher Jakob Bro-Jørgensen of the University of Liverpool. The researcher, who observed the topi's tricky behavior in Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve, noted that the...

Pronghorn antelope tangle with a fence in Wyoming's upper Green River Basin in fall 2008. Unable to hurdle the barrier, they're forced to squeeze slowly through or underneath the wire--or turn their backs on a 6,000-year-old annual trek. At 125 miles (200 kilometers) long, the migration is one of the longest among land mammals. Last fall and spring, biologist and photographer Joe Riis, funded by the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Council, became the first to document the entire pronghorn migration on foot. The experience made clear just how arduous human-made hurdles--fences, roads, natural gas fields, housing developments--are making the journey

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A lioness in Kenya has adopted another baby oryx - her third in as many months, game wardens at the northern Samburu National Park have reported. The lioness is said to allow a female oryx several minutes each day to feed the new-born calf. The last calf was killed while she was sleeping snip One was seen in her company in December last year, but it was eaten by other lions after two weeks. Another calf was taken away from her in February and placed in a zoo because it showed signs of malnourishment. Dangers The chief game warden in...

Where's the dignity? The Republican National Convention is over, and George W. Bush's "leadership" was showcased -- leadership resulting in 962 U.S. service members killed and 6,690 wounded in an unnecessary and counterproductive war that is creating jihadists faster than we can capture or kill them at a cost of $1 billion a week. One billion dollars a week could be spent on supporting homeland security or domestic programs. Under Bush, the number of Americans living in poverty increased in 2003 for the third straight year and those without health coverage rose an additional million people to 15.4 percent of...