Ohio farm where exotics escaped faces foreclosure

Authorities said Thursday they believe a lion killed a 24-year-old volunteer at a Central California animal park after it escaped from a feeding cage and attacked her while she was cleaning its larger enclosure area. Fresno County Coroner David Hadden said Dianna Hanson died instantly when the 550-pound lion broke her neck, apparently with a swipe of a paw. Investigators believe the 5-year-old male African lion used a paw to lift a partially open door that was meant to keep him in a cage and out of the enclosure while Hanson cleaned, Hadden said.

DUNLAP, Calif. (AP) — Authorities are trying to determine what provoked a lion at an exotic animal park in Central California to attack and maul to death a 24-year-old woman, who had been on the job as an intern there for just a few weeks.

Investigators have discovered a large industrial incinerator on the property of the man accused of Tim Bosma’s murder, fuelling speculation of a gruesome end for the Ancaster father. Staff-Sgt. Matt Kavanagh, lead homicide investigator in the Tim Bosma case, would not confirm whether or not the machine was involved in Mr. Bosma’s death or in the disposal of Mr. Bosma’s remains. Police have seized the incinerator from the property of Dellen Millard, charged with first-degree murder in the death of Mr. Bosma.

CLARENCE, N.Y. — Paul Marinaccio Sr. traces his fear of frogs to a childhood incident in Italy when a man holding bullfrogs chased him away after he’d wandered from the vineyard where his parents worked. Decades later, he found himself describing his phobia to a jury, calling himself “a prisoner in my own home” after runoff water from a nearby development turned his 40-acre property into wetlands and inundated it with frogs.

DUNLAP, Calif. (AP) — The investigation into a lion attack that killed a 24-year-old woman who loved big cats is focusing on a cage door that the 550-pound animal managed to escape through to reach the volunteer intern, officials say.

Dozens of animals, some of them rare, remained missing from Tasmania's only accredited zoo Saturday, two days after someone released the creatures into the wild, the zoo's co-owner said.

PALMDALE, Calif. (AP) — Homicide investigators were conducting DNA tests to determine whether any of the six pit bulls seized after a jogger was mauled to death had attacked her in the Mojave Desert.

A major meeting of governments on threats to endangered species on Thursday rejected a ban on international trade in polar bears amid fears it would distract from the bigger threat of global warming.