Big Apple Circus puts assets up for auction

Big Apple Circus puts assets up for auction

NEW YORK

The Big Apple Circus is up for sale.

The one-ring circus filed for bankruptcy in November and is putting its assets up for auction. Buyers can put in bids by a Feb. 3 deadline. The court-ordered auction is expected to take place Feb. 7.

The circus said its debts amounted to $8.3 million, against assets of $3.8 million, in its Chapter 11 filing.

The company conducting the auction is selling the assets in bulk lots. For example, the big top tents are in one lot.

The Big Apple Circus began in 1977 and at its height staged more than 300 shows.

Italy: Tests show Fiat 500X cars meet rules

ROME

The Italian transportation ministry says its tests show that Fiat 500X cars meet emissions rules, despite German contentions that the cars contain so-called defeat devices meant to cheat emissions tests.

A ministry statement Monday says it carried out the necessary checks and sent a detailed report to Germany indicating the model “meets the existing regulations” on emissions testing.

The ministry says no illegal defeat device system turned up in the testing.

Germany’s transport minister has insisted that according to German experts Fiat used the devices.

Parents of charged girl speak out

MILWAUKEE

The parents of one of two Wisconsin girls who were 12 when they purportedly stabbed another girl 19 times to impress the fictional internet character “Slender Man” say they were as shocked as anyone by the 2014 attack.

In an interview Monday with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Bill and Kristi Weier, parents of Anissa Weier, say she’s remorseful.

The interview came ahead of an HBO documentary, “Beware the Slenderman.”

Anissa, now 15, and 14-year-old Morgan Geyser have pleaded not guilty in adult court by reason of mental disease to attempted homicide in the 2014 stabbing of classmate Payton Leutner in Waukesha.

Shooting at resort in Mexico kills 5

PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico

Gunfire broke out in a crowded beachfront nightclub throbbing with electronic music before dawn Monday, causing five deaths and setting off a bloody stampede by screaming concertgoers at an international festival in this Caribbean resort.

In the crush to escape, at least one person died and some of the 15 people injured were hurt, authorities said.

Quintana Roo state Attorney General Miguel Angel Pech ruled out any terror attack, and the state’s governor said it involved a personal dispute. Pech said the shooting erupted when security personnel tried to stop a man from entering the Blue Parrot club with a gun.

Three of those killed were part of the security detail at the 10-day BPM electronic music festival, Pech said.

N. Ireland unity government breaks up

DUBLIN

Northern Ireland’s shattered unity government will be dissolved next week to make way for an early election demanded by the coalition’s main Irish Catholic party, the secretary of state for the British territory announced Monday.

Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Brokenshire said the election to re-elect the Northern Ireland Assembly would take place March 2, six weeks after its dissolution.

Brokenshire’s declaration became inevitable once the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party refused hours earlier to fill its vacated top post in the nearly decade-old coalition with the major British Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists.

Associated Press