113 dead kittens found in apartment

113 dead kittens found in apartment

SEASIDE, Calif.

Authorities said they found 113 dead kittens in an apartment believed to belong to a cat hoarder, and dozens of ailing adult cats were discovered in a nearby house.

None of the dead kittens appeared to be more than 2 months old, they said.

Seaside police and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for Monterey County discovered the animals Tuesday, SPCA Sgt. Stacy Sanders said.

Officers were alerted by a property manager who discovered dead kittens during an inspection. They received another tip that more cats were moved to a nearby house.

There, another group of investigators found 51 adult cats that were alive but sick and neglected.

Israel fears Syrian chemical arsenal

JERUSALEM

Israelis rushed to get government-issue gas masks Wednesday, the latest sign of mounting fears that Syria’s chemical- weapons stockpiles could be used against them as the crisis there deepens.

Until a few days ago, the possibility of getting dragged into Syria’s civil war was not a major issue in Israel, whose leaders have had a laserlike focus on the potential threat posed by Iran’s suspect nuclear program. That changed when Syrian threatened Monday to unleash chemical and biological weapons if the country faces a foreign attack; Syria is believed to have nerve agents as well as mustard gas.

Study: Expanding Medicaid saves lives

WASHINGTON

States that expand their Medicaid programs under President Barack Obama’s health care law may end up saving thousands of lives, a medical journal report released Wednesday indicates.

Until now, the Medicaid debate has been about budgets and states’ rights. But a statistical study by Harvard researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine found a 6 percent drop in the adult death rate in Arizona, Maine and New York, three states that have recently expanded coverage for low-income residents along the general lines of the federal health care law.

The study found that for every 176 adults covered under expanded Medicaid, one death per year would be prevented.

House rejects plan for offshore drilling

WASHINGTON

In an election-year swipe at President Barack Obama’s energy policies, the Republican-led House on Wednesday voted to revoke Obama’s five-year plan for offshore drilling, replacing it with its own plan that calls for more- ambitious oil and gas development off the U.S. coast.

The legislation likely will go nowhere in the Senate, and the White House has issued a veto threat, but as with the tax and regulatory bills the House also is taking up this month, it puts lawmakers on the record on the issues that divide the two parties.

Rain ignites China credibility crisis

BEIJING

Deadly rains that battered the nation’s capital over the weekend have ignited the latest credibility crisis for the Chinese government, which is accused of underreporting the number of dead while failing to provide adequate infrastructure to safeguard against flooding in a swiftly modernizing metropolis.

The official death count in Saturday’s downpour, described as the heaviest in more than 60 years, was 37 people. The deluge paralyzed Beijing’s obsolete drainage system, flooding wide swaths of the city, toppling homes, downing power lines and trapping an unknown number of motorists in submerged vehicles.

Combined dispatches