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Weekly Update: Girl found years after thought dead
PHILADELPHIA: A 6-year-old girl thought to have died in a fire as an infant has been found alive after being raised by a woman who may have set the blaze and abducted the baby, authorities said.
DNA tests confirmed on Monday that Delimar Vera is the biological daughter of Luz Cuevas, who recognized her daughter by her dimples in a chance meeting at a birthday party in Philadelphia two months ago.
“When she smiled she had eye dimples and when she was a baby she had dimples,” Cuevas told CN8 TV.
The woman who raised Delimar, Carolyn Correa, 41, of Willingboro, New Jersey, was being sought by police. She is charged with 15 offenses, including kidnapping, aggravated assault and arson.
Police suspect Correa, thought to be distantly related to the girl’s father, set the December 1997 fire in Philadelphia as a cover that would allow her to abduct the child.
Cuevas said she always suspected the girl did not die in the fire.
The child was in protective custody in New Jersey where officials planned to tell her that the woman who raised her for six years is not her mother, said Angel Cruz, a Pennsylvania state legislator who helped in the investigation.
Cruz said Cuevas, 31, will be reunited with her daughter when the girl is judged to be emotionally prepared.— Reuters
NASA: Mars once “drenched” with water
WASHINGTON: Water once drenched parts of the planet Mars and conditions may have existed for life as we know it, the US space agency announced Tuesday.
NASA associate administrator Ed Weiler told reporters the robotic probe Opportunity “has landed in an area of Mars where liquid water once drenched the surface. Moreover, this area would have been a good habitable environment for some period of time.”
Weiler hailed the mission by Opportunity and its twin probe Spirit as a “giant leap” toward answering the question of whether life ever existed on the Red Planet.
Steve Squyres, the scientific head of the Mars mission, stressed that there was no sign yet that life has existed on the planet. But he told a press conference that an outcrop of rocks in the area where Opportunity has been conducting research had provided signs of water.
He said there was strong evidence that water had “acted” on the rocks, including the high sulfur content and hollows in rocks where crystals have developed.
“All of those clues together have led us to the conclusion these are probably what geologists call concretions, which form when there is liquid water in a rock, stuff is dissolved in it and it begins to precipitate ... begins to solidify from solution,” said Squyres.— AFP
Parrot banned for Queen’s ship visit
LONDON: A foul-mouthed parrot, which blurts out expletives and pecks people when she’s angry, is to be removed from a British Royal Navy ship to spare any embarrassment during a visit by Queen Elizabeth.
African-grey parrot Sunny will be sent ashore from HMS Lancaster so she doesn’t ruffle any royal feathers when the queen and her husband Prince Philip visit the ship on British newspapers reported on Wednesday.
The frigate’s 205-strong crew are determined to avoid a repeat of a recent visit by the British fleet’s commander-in-chief, when Sunny’s four-lettered rantings could be heard even though she was locked in a cupboard.
“She learns new words all the time and mimics what people say,” Lieutenant Commander John Pheasant was quoted as saying. — Reuters
‘Hello Kitty’ coin on character’s 30th anniversary
TOKYO: The Japanese creator of the hugely popular Hello Kitty cartoon character, Sanrio, said on Wednesday it will launch 24 carat gold ‘coins’ to mark the cat’s 30th anniversary.
The company said the limited edition medallions, cast by the official Mint Bureau, are modelled on Japanese oval gold coins from the 17th-19th centuries.
The Hello Kitty coin is made of 128 grams of pure gold and measures 7.3 by 12 centimetres.
It comes with a smaller 15.1-gram, wafer-thin gold replica, both set in a traditional Japanese lacquered box. Each set is priced at 500,000 yen ($4,545).
The medallion carries the portrait of Kitty as Yukihime, the Snow Princess from an 18th-century kabuki play.— AFP
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