A leopard strayed into a village in India and attacked a boy and a forest ranger before officials were able to tranquillise it and lock it up in a cage.

The boy, Milan Rana, and forest ranger Bijay Khuntia were attacked in Bolangir district in the state of Orissa.

Another man, Satyajit Kundakel, suffered minor injuries when he jumped off the roof of a house in a bid to save himself from the marauding leopard.

After a rescue operation which lasted 12 hours the leopard was captured, caged and taken away.

The animal first appeared in the village in the early hours of Monday morning, when it sneaked inside the house of a villager, Aniruddh Rana.

Visitors to a New Zealand park recently found the grass blanketed not by flowers, but by silk webs produced by what appeared to be thousands of tiny spiders.

Park-goer Tracey Maris noticed something unusual about the scene on April 16 and captured video footage of the gently rolling silk waves. The web blanket was approximately 98 feet (30 meters) long and as wide as 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 m), The New Zealand Herald reported. Webs covered ground near a soccer field at the Gordon Spratt Reserve in suburban Papamoa, near the Bay of Plenty on New Zealand's eastern coast, the newspaper said.

Initially, Maris thought the silk nets were unoccupied, she said. But as she and her family explored the webs' outer perimeter, they noticed that there were "little black things on top" — spiders, numbering in the thousands, Maris told The NZ Herald. "So, as you do, we screamed really loudly," she said.

Maris spotted the webs on a newly made tsunami evacuation mound, she told the news agency Storyful. "There was a bright glistening coming from the top of the mound. It looked almost like the hill was sparkling," Maris said. The elevated mound may have attracted spiders seeking higher ground after recent flooding from Cyclone Cook earlier that week, Maris told Storyful.

A mahout who was suddenly attacked by a domesticated elephant that unexpectedly got agitated, lost his life. Another labourer suffered serious injuries in the same attack. This incident happened at the Dubare elephant camp in Kodagu district.

Annu (48), working as mahout in this camp, died in this incident, while labourer, Chandra (28), suffered injuries.

Annu was the mahout of a tamed elephant named Ranjan, which is housed in the camp. At around 8 am, Annu was releasing his elephant, Ranjan, from the ropes when an eight-year old elephant, Kartik, which was nearby, suddenly surged ahead and attacked both Annu and Chandra.

Zimbabwe's rains have made sure that crocodiles are on the move, with four people having been killed by crocodiles in one river in less than a month.

The latest victim is an 11-year-old boy who was killed while swimming in the Kana River with two friends.

Conservation groups are warning that heavy rains and flooded rivers have resulted in crocodiles turning up in places where they're least expected.

Village headman Muziwakhe Ndlovu told the state-run Chronicle that the boy was the fourth person to die from crocodile attacks in that river this month.

The five-year-old dog was described as a member of the family, raised from a puppy but Monday afternoon it attacked the one person who may have loved him the most.

"My pit bull attacked my wife for no reason, bit a big hole in her side. If the law don't get him, he's a dead dog here."

The dog Milton Weeks raised from a 6-month-old puppy, crated and taken out of the house. Half an hour earlier.
his wife was airlifted to a trauma center after the dog attacked. "I had to pick up an electric heater and hit him across the head and then he jumped at me."

A reader in Russia sent this link about unusual cold in St Petersburg.

St. Petersburg authorities have asked lay people to support migrating birds suffering a lack of food, writes Alexey Parkhomenko. The temperature anomaly there is -5-7 degrees C (9 to 12.5F) below normal.

"In the Moscow Region, where I live, the temperature this morning has been below freezing, with some snow and strong NW wind."

The Smolny Committee on Nature Management, which asked residents and city visitors for help, said the unexpected snow that came to replace the spring heat caught the birds unawares.

Perched in trees and scampering down sidewalks, green iguanas have become so common across South Florida that many see them not as exotic invaders, but as reptilian squirrels.

Native to Central and South America, green iguanas that escaped or were dumped as pets have been breeding in the Miami suburbs and the Keys for at least a decade without making headlines like other voracious invasive reptiles such as Burmese pythons or black-and-white tegu lizards.

They've been considered mostly harmless because they eat plants instead of native animals. But their burrows undermine seawalls, sidewalks and levees, and they eat their way through valuable landscaping as well as native plants. Their droppings can be a significant cleanup problem, as well as a potential source of salmonella bacteria, which causes food poisoning.

A 17-year-old girl has died after being attacked by a shark in Western Australia.

Monday's attack happened at Kelp Beds, near Wylie Bay in Esperance, just before 4pm, police said.

Caitlyn Rintoul (@caitlynrintoul)

17yo girl fighting for her life after Wylie Bay shark attack. #esperance pic.twitter.com/kCNdidIXa6
April 17, 2017

The girl was surfing with her father when she was attacked and was taken to Esperance hospital in a critical condition. The girl's mother and two sisters reportedly watched in horror from the beach as the teenager was grabbed by the shark.

It is understood her leg was badly mauled and she had lost a lot of blood when pulled from the water, Seven News reported.

Shortly before 8am on 26 December 2004, the cicadas fell silent and the ground shook in dismay. The Moken, an isolated tribe on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, knew that the Laboon, the 'wave that eats people', had stirred from his ocean lair. The Moken also knew what was next: a towering wall of water washing over their island, cleansing it of all that was evil and impure. To heed the Laboon's warning signs, elders told their children, run to high ground.

The tiny Andaman and Nicobar Islands were directly in the path of the tsunami generated by the magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Final totals put the islands' death toll at 1,879, with another 5,600 people missing. When relief workers finally came ashore, however, they realised that the death toll was skewed. The islanders who had heard the stories about the Laboon or similar mythological figures survived the tsunami essentially unscathed. Most of the casualties occurred in the southern Nicobar Islands. Part of the reason was the area's geography, which generated a higher wave. But also at the root was the lack of a legacy; many residents in the city of Port Blair were outsiders, leaving them with no indigenous tsunami warning system to guide them to higher ground.

Humanity has always courted disaster. We have lived, died and even thrived alongside vengeful volcanoes and merciless waves. Some disasters arrive without warning, leaving survival to luck. Often, however, there is a small window of time giving people a chance to escape. Learning how to crack open this window can be difficult when a given catastrophe strikes once every few generations. So humans passed down stories through the ages that helped cultures to cope when disaster inevitably struck. These stories were fodder for anthropologists and social scientists, but in the past decade, geologists have begun to pay more attention to how indigenous peoples understood, and prepared for, disaster. These stories, which couched myth in metaphor, could ultimately help scientists prepare for cataclysms to come.

Anyone who has spent time around small children gets used to the question 'why?' Why is the sky blue? Why do birds fly? Why does thunder make such a loud noise? A friend's mother told us that thunder was God going bowling in the sky. Nature need not be scary and unpredictable, even if it was controlled by forces we could neither see nor understand.

The human penchant for stories and meaning is nothing new. Myths and legends provide entertainment, but they also transmit knowledge of how to behave and how the world works. Breaking the code of these stories, however, takes skill. Tales of gods gone bowling during summer downpours seems nonsensical on the surface, but know a little about the sudden thunderclaps and the clatter of bowling pins as they're struck by a ball, and the story makes sense.

Florida has had eight separate shark attacks in the last two weeks. Five of which have occurred within the last week alone. All of the shark bites were non-fatal.

Recent shark attacks In Florida:

April 2, 2017: 17-year-old Caitlyn Taylor, of Louisville, Kentucky, was visiting Florida to play in a softball tournament when she was bitten by a shark while swimming in the Gulf of Mexico off of the Florida Panhandle near Destin.

April 3, 2017: 16-year-old Kody Stephens, of Peachtree City, Georgia, was on a family vacation when he was bitten by a shark while swimming off of Daytona Beach.

April 4, 2017: 51-year-old Melanie Lawson, of Marietta, Georgia, was bitten by a shark while standing in only three feet of water off of New Smyrna Beach, which is just a few miles south of Daytona Beach.

April 10, 2017: 23-year-old Heather Orr, of Palm Bay, Florida, was bitten on the hand while swimming off of Melbourne Beach.