Quick Takes

Close shave

Egyptian prosecutors in Cairo are recommending criminal prosecution for eight museum employees who broke a famous ancient Egyptian artifact and then botched a repair job. Prosecutors say the employees acted with “gross negligence” when one of them broke the beard off of the 3,300-year-old golden mask of King Tutankhamen. The employees reportedly then tried to hide the damage by gluing the beard back on the iconic artifact. In December, the mask went back on display after a team of specialists cleaned the epoxy off the mask and reattached the beard using beeswax.

New lease on life

A red-and-white Hereford that led New York City police on a brief chase on Jan. 21 after escaping a Queens slaughterhouse has found amnesty in New Jersey. The cow broke free from a pen outside Archer Halal Live Poultry and fled down Jamaica Avenue, when police spotted it. A short time later, NYPD corralled the cow in a nearby parking garage. The next day, after several media outlets published the story, the owner of a New Jersey animal sanctuary made arrangements to adopt the animal and save it from the slaughterhouse.

Food pushers

Chinese authorities on Jan. 20 said they would take action against 35 restaurants for allegedly sprinkling morphine, codeine, and other opioids onto entrées in an effort to engender customer loyalty through addiction. The government agencies provided no clues for how the opium was added to the food, but in 2014, authorities closed hundreds of restaurants in the Guizhou region after chefs attempted to hook customers on narcotics-laced noodles.

Never surrender

Donald Rumsfeld: statesman, Washington insider, presidential confidant—and video game developer? In January, the former secretary of defense’s first foray into game development hit Apple’s App Store for mobile devices with the release of Churchill Solitaire. Using memos and a dictaphone, Rumsfeld helped software designers recreate for iOS devices an advanced version of solitaire that Winston Churchill was known to play. Rumsfeld said he learned the game as a Nixon administration official in Belgium from a Belgian politician who picked it up from the legendary British prime minister.

Amphibian evasion

Motorists in Berkeley, Calif., will have to find a new route to the University of California Botanical Garden after city officials closed down South Park Drive in January. The reason for the closure: It’s salamander mating season. According to Botanical Garden Supervisor Joel Dahl, countless hordes of newts cross South Park Drive every year to reach a pond near the garden in search of a mate. The city says the road will remain closed until March to prevent a massacre of the semiaquatic amphibians.

Where’s the beef?

It’s a picture of a plain potato against a black background. And photographer Kevin Abosch has sold the photograph for just over $1 million. Abosch, 46, took the photograph in 2010 as part of a special series of potato pictures. Abosch, who is noted for his photographs of plain objects set in front of black backgrounds, said he happened upon the buyer by chance at a party he was hosting at his home in Ireland in late 2015. “We had two glasses of wine and he said, ‘I really like that.’ Two more glasses of wine and he said: ‘I really want that,’” Abosch told The Sunday Times. “It is the most I have been paid for a piece of work that has been bought [rather than commissioned].”

One Glew over the cuckoo’s nest

Self-proclaimed Buddhist monk Julian Glew says he lived peacefully in seclusion for nearly a decade in a tent pitched in a forest near Pocklington, U.K. But in September, authorities say, Glew wandered into town and became enraged after accidentally squashing an insect. To vent his rage at harming a living creature, Glew allegedly went on a vandalism spree over two days wherein he slashed tires on 162 cars in the town. After running from the law for three months, Glew was finally convicted and sentenced in January to 11 weeks in jail on criminal damage charges.

Melted hopes

Where’s the cheese? Many customers buying McDonald’s new value-menu offering of mozzarella sticks are posing that question on Twitter after discovering their mozzarella sticks were nothing more than deep-fried bread capsules filled with air, not cheese. In a Jan. 28 statement, McDonald’s spokeswoman Lisa McComb acknowledged the problem, blaming the cooking process for voiding the cheese sticks of cheese. “In these instances,” she said, “we believe the cheese melted out during the baking process in our kitchens and should not have been served.”

Washed out

A Worcester, U.K., woman says she would gladly step forward and accept a $47 million lottery prize but for one fact: She accidentally ran the winning ticket through the laundry in a pair of jeans. The unidentified woman contacted the U.K.’s lottery authority in late January after damaging her Jan. 9 ticket. The Ambleside News, which has met with the woman, confirmed that the ticket’s winning numbers are correct, but that the date and barcode are unreadable due to the wash. According to the paper, the woman has sent the ticket to lottery authorities for investigation.