The Wild

An adult female red-shouldered hawk found sitting in a resident's driveway about a mile from the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center in Roanoke was not hurt, UPI reports: she was simply too heavy to fly.

Rescuers checked her for broken bones, lead poisoning, eye problems, head trauma, emaciation and bruising and found nothing. The center's veterinarians said she weighed 2 pounds, nearly a pound over normal for a female of her species, and that they "couldn't even palpate her keel due to the heavy layer of fat covering it."

The woman who found the bird asked around and learned that a neighbor's free-roaming chickens had been "disappearing at an alarming rate" for weeks. The center said the hawk had been eating her fill and napping in nearby trees. She is now on a weight-loss diet, and the center asked residents to keep chicken runs covered so they don't "indirectly" feed wildlife.

Brenda Willison, a town crier in Newmarket, Suffolk, England, now holds two Guinness World Records titles: loudest town crier (female) and loudest shout by an individual (female), Guinness World Records announced. On Sept. 9 she cried "oyez" at 105.9 dB (C-weighted), which Guinness compares to standing next to a snowblower or a blasting car horn. She said she had a cold and expects she can get louder.

She has been a town crier since 1987, when the Peterborough paper advertised for one. Unknown to her, her daughter wrote in that if Willison shouted "chips" outside one café at the country park where she worked, people could hear it at the other, a mile and a half away. Since then, Guinness says, she has cried at Buckingham Palace for the Queen Mother's 100th birthday and Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee, and at the bridge over the River Kwai in 1995.

A local under-20 semi-final in Minas Gerais, Brazil, ended with 53 red cards, a number reports describe as a new world record for dismissals in one match, The Business Standard reports, citing ESPN.

Mamoré led Uberlândia 3-1 in the second half when a brawl broke out. According to referee Fernando Patrick Drosghic Modesto's report, Mamoré's Davi taunted the Uberlândia bench while celebrating the third goal, and Uberlândia goalkeeping coach Paulo Sérgio Dias Dos Santos ran onto the pitch to confront him. The referee then sent off 40 players and eight team officials; three players had already been sent off earlier, and two Uberlândia board members were also dismissed.

The match was stopped for 40 minutes and then abandoned. The referee said several people threatened him, and a police report was filed. The previous record cited is 36 red cards, from a 2011 fifth-division match in Argentina between Claypole and Victoriano Arenas.

Surveillance video from Bagel Dock Express in Southport, North Carolina, shows a 3-foot alligator coming in through an open back door, passing through the stockroom and kitchen and ending up near the front counter, NBC 6 South Florida reports. The shop was closed at the time, on Oct. 29, and owner Jesse Driscoll was there while a new oven was being installed, Boston 25 News reports.

"Never in a million years did I think I'd see an alligator," Driscoll told WWAY. He called 911; Southport police and Animal Protective Services caught the young alligator and relocated it, and no one was hurt. Police joked "Alligator- Isle 1" on social media, and the shop's Facebook post of the video said "word of our fresh bagels has made its way into the swamp!" The video spread widely this week.

Glenwood Hoskin Jr., a 60-year-old retired tax officer, watched 1,207 films in one year at his local Regal cinema in York Haven, Pennsylvania, Guinness World Records announced, an average of 3.3 a day. That beats the previous record of 777, set by Zachariah Swope, for the most films seen in a cinema in one year. His year ran from April 2024 to April 2025.

Hoskin told Guinness he checked the listings each day and watched from early morning until midnight. He started in spring hoping to pass 777 before winter because "I hate driving in the winter," and a mild Pennsylvania winter let him keep going. Cartoons were his favorite, partly because they are shorter, and he enjoyed hearing audiences laugh at jokes he had already heard many times. He said he couldn't take on the separate record for seeing the same film the most times, because most films left his cinema for streaming too quickly.

Bram Dunehew of Concord, North Carolina, a college student studying civil engineering, filled up his car on Friday, but the pump didn't print his receipt, so he went inside the store, the North Carolina Education Lottery says. While there he bought a $3 Powerball ticket.

In Saturday's Halloween drawing, the ticket matched all five white balls for $1 million, doubled to $2 million by the Power Play option. "It's crazy because I never would have even bought that ticket if the receipt printed outside," he said. He bought it at Sam's Mart on N.C. 49 in Harrisburg and took home $1,440,201 after federal and state tax withholding. He told the lottery he plans to buy his father a Cadillac and that "Halloween's now my favorite holiday."

A sculpture of La Catrina, the elegant skeleton of Day of the Dead imagery, standing in Mexico City's main square is now the Guinness World Records holder as the tallest Catrina monument, Popular Science reports. At nearly 110 feet, roughly 11 stories, the steel-and-fiberglass figure tops the 92.3-foot Catrina built in Puerto Vallarta in 2023.

About 140 people assembled it. Her purple dress is more than 88 feet long, and the ofrenda (memorial altar) around her is surrounded by an estimated 70,000 marigold plants grown in the Xochimilco borough. Day of the Dead is observed on Nov. 1 and 2.

Underwater archaeologists have recovered a Bronze Age sword from Lake Mezzano, a volcanic crater lake about 60 miles northwest of Rome, and its blade is still sharp, according to Italy's Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria, as reported by Gizmodo and Vice. The team, working with the Carabinieri underwater unit of Rome, dates it to the 13th century BCE.

Divers also brought up axes, arrowheads, daggers, spearheads, pins, a bronze razor and intact ceramic vases. It is the third sword found at the lake since the 1970s. The superintendency says a pile-dwelling (stilt) settlement very likely stood there in the Bronze Age. Why the sword ended up in the water isn't known; Vice reports two theories: it belonged to a high-status person (it lay beside the razor), or it was a ritual offering to water deities.

Claude P. Moore of Detroit holds the Guinness World Records title for the largest rubber band ball: 5,251.69 kg (11,578 lb), measured at Belle Isle in Detroit on Aug. 29, 2026, according to Guinness. UPI reported the record this week. It beats Florida man Joel Waul's 9,032-pound ball from 2008.

Guinness says Moore spent much of his childhood in and out of hospitals being treated for hemophilia, and making rubber band balls passed the time between appointments; in middle school he made one "as big as a chair" before a classmate stole it. In 2015 coworkers challenged him to build a massive one. It outgrew his garage and moved to a storage unit, and in August dozens of helpers rolled it out and a crane lifted it for the trip to Belle Isle, UPI reports. Moore told Guinness the record is a first step toward a bigger goal: ending world hunger.

A nearly 2-pound, rose-colored meteorite found in Mali in 2022 is from Mars and about 4.1 billion years old, a NASA-funded study has determined, CBS News reports. Named Teghaza 001 after the salt plain where it turned up, it is one of the three most ancient Martian meteorites found on Earth, and one of roughly 435 known to come from Mars.

Lead author Yang Liu of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said one of the paper's reviewers called it "a Rosetta Stone for Mars." Its mix of volcanic minerals, including zircon crystals, matches terrain that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has seen in the planet's southern highlands. Using a dating method that worked on a piece smaller than a fingernail, the team found the rock was altered by Martian water about 4.1 billion years ago, and it may have formed even earlier. The data suggest early Mars may have had a more dynamic water cycle than scientists thought.