Georgia brewheisters steal 2,600 cases of beer

Sounds like some south Georgia crooks have been stocking up for a big holiday bash.

Thieves took tractor-trailers loaded with beer and swiped the suds twice within the past week, authorities said.

Dougherty County authorities are investigating a report of a missing 53-foot-long trailer that was loaded with more than 2,300 cases of beer. Police said the beer disappeared sometime between Dec. 21 and Thursday...

--USA Today

Tater Tots start blaze in Idaho firehouse

A fire station crew must be a little embarrassed by the way some of this state's famous potatoes got fried.

Boise firefighters returning from a medical call had to turn their hose on the firehouse kitchen after an overheated pan full of Tater Tots melted and set some cabinets ablaze.

The Christmas Eve fire at Station 8 was quickly extinguished, with no injuries. No damage estimate was available...

--USA Today

Christmas card mailed in 1914 finally arrives

A postcard featuring a color drawing of Santa Claus and a young girl was mailed in 1914, but its journey was slower than Christmas. It just arrived in northwest Kansas.

The Christmas card was dated Dec. 23, 1914, and mailed to Ethel Martin of Oberlin, apparently from her cousins in Alma, Neb.

It's a mystery where it spent most of the last century, Oberlin Postmaster Steve Schultz said. "It's surprising that it never got thrown away," he said. "How someone found it, I don't know."

Ethel Martin is deceased, but Schultz said the post office wanted to get the card to a relative.

That's how the 93-year-old relic ended up with Bernice Martin, Ethel's sister-in-law. She said she believed the card had been found somewhere in Illinois...

--USA Today

Surfer encounters two sharks, same day

A New Zealand surfer has good reason for feeling once bitten, twice shy after two encounters with sharks on the same day, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

Olivia Hislop was waiting for a wave at a beach near the South Island tourist town of Kaikoura on Sunday when she felt a tug on her board.

She turned around, expecting to see a friend fooling around.

Instead, there was a shark half on top of her board and gnashing its teeth, the Marlborough Express newspaper reported...

--USA Today

South Koreans clone cats that glow in the dark

South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday.

In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.

A team of scientists led by Kong Il-keun, a cloning expert at Gyeongsang National University, produced three cats possessing altered fluorescence protein (RFP) genes, the Ministry of Science and Technology said.

"It marked the first time in the world that cats with RFP genes have been cloned," the ministry said in a statement.

"The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as humans," it added...

--Yahoo! News