Month: October 2024

A construction crew in California might have just discovered a piece of Vietnam War history right here at home. 

According to CBS News, workers found what appeared to be an undetonated bomb near the Roseville Railyards outside Sacramento. It was uncovered near where a munitions train carrying bombs meant for the Vietnam War caught fire and exploded back in 1973, sending bombs and explosive material all over the area. 

“According to the official report, they can’t say what happened for sure, but they think one of the wheels of the boxcar overheated and set the train on fire and set some of the bombs off, and it was a chain reaction,” Citrus Heights Historical Society president Larry Fritz recounted to CBS News.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department has yet to confirm its origins, but Fritz sent a photo of the bomb to his friend who worked on the clean-up after the 1973 disaster. “He confirmed it. He said, ‘Yeah, that’s one of the bombs,'” Fritz noted.

Thankfully, no one was killed in the explosions, which lasted about a day and a half. “We just sat there and watched the bombs go off at night and just, you know, about every four or five minutes you’d see a big orange fireball going off,” Fritz, who had just turned 18 at the time, told KCRA. 

“There was, I believe, about 1,200 of them that went off,” he remembered. “A lot of them were just thrown free and without exploding. So I’m sure they cleaned up as many as they could. But, you know, there were so many of they didn’t catch them all.” He pointed out that the newly discovered bomb was “right near the epicenter,” and its location can say a lot about its origin. “I can’t think of any other reason why it would be there. And so, I’m pretty certain that’s from the 1973 explosion,” he said. 

Local authorities haven’t yet confirmed the bomb’s connection to the Roseville Railyards explosion, but they also believe it could be a remnant of the destructive event. 

“I’d never say never. Our bomb squad guys haven’t said that just yet, but obviously they’ll get into that,” Amar Ghandi of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office told KCRA. “It’s crazy, right? 51 years later, things like this could still potentially be popping up because again, as we keep growing, more houses are going to develop, more construction is going to be happening. So hopefully this is the last. But it wouldn’t surprise any of us if more turn up.”

The start to 2024’s Fat Bear Week, which was supposed to kick-off on Monday, did not go as planned after two Alaskan grizzlies engaged in a brutal fight on the livestream in Katmai National Park, leaving one bear dead. As a result, the reveal of this year’s contestants in the March Madness-style bracket has been pushed back until Tuesday evening.

The tournament has been held annually by Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve since 2014, giving bear fans the opportunity to vote on which of the park’s brown bears has had the greatest success in preparation for winter hibernation. However, this marks the first year that the competition has been impacted by bear-on-bear violence.

According to CBS News, the fight went down between a previous contestant, an older female bear known as Bear 402, and a male brown bear identified at Bear 469, at the mouth of the Brooks River in Katmai where the bears feed on sockeye salmon to fatten up for the winter months. It’s unclear what sparked the encounter, but National Park officials said that it did not appear to be a typical confrontation over food.

Mike Fritz, resident naturalist at Explore.org, the multimedia organization that hosts the livestream, explained during what would have been the annual unveiling on Monday why the competition was being delayed.

“Earlier today, a bear killed another bear on the river. It was caught live on the webcams and we thought, well, we can’t go ahead with our Fat Bear Week bracket reveal without addressing this situation first,” Fritz said. “We love to celebrate the success of bears with full stomachs and ample body fat. But the ferocity of bears is real, the risks that they face are real, their lives can be hard and their deaths can be painful.”

Fritz added that Bear 402 was “beloved” and unfortunately most likely died by drowning.

Katmai park ranger Sarah Bruce noted that when bears are in a state of hyperphagia—the period of excessive eating which takes place in late summer and fall—they will eat anything and everything they can. But still, it doesn’t explain the confrontation between the two apex predators.

“I don’t know why a bear would want to expend so much energy trying to kill another bear as a food source,” Bruce said. “It’s an uncommon thing to see a bear predating on another bear, but it’s not completely out of the question. So it’s hard to say how this started.”

“National parks like Katmai protect not only the wonders of nature, but also the harsh realities,” National Park Service spokesperson Matt Johnson in a statement. “Each bear seen on the webcams is competing with others to survive.”

The son of a collector was stunned to discover that a “junk” painting in his father’s attic was actually a Pablo Picasso painting worth more than $6 million.

Andrea Lo Rosso, 60, told The Guardian that his father, Luigi, found the painting in 1962 while he was cleaning out a house in his hometown in Italy. “My father was from Capri and would collect junk to sell for next to nothing,” Andrea explained.

But when he returned home to Pompeii, Andrea’s mother tried to convince Luigi to throw the painting away because she found it especially hideous. Despite Picasso’s signature taking up a significant portion of the top left-hand corner, the identity of the artist managed to elude the family for decades.

“He found the painting before I was even born and he didn’t have a clue who Picasso was,” Andrea explained. “He wasn’t a very cultured person. My mother didn’t want to keep it, she kept saying it was horrible.”

For decades, the painting hung in a cheap frame in the Lo Rosso’s living room. Throughout his childhood, Andrea frequently juxtaposed the signature on the painting to Picasso’s handwriting in an art encyclopedia gifted to him by his aunt. “While reading about Picasso’s works in the encyclopedia, I would look up at the painting and compare it to his signature. I kept telling my father it was similar, but he didn’t see it,” Andrea said. “As I grew up, I kept wondering.”

After his mother and father passed, Andrea turned to the Arcadia Foundation’s scientific committee, which deals in the valuations, restorations, and attributions of famous works of art. Along with the well-known art detective Maurizio Seracini, experts spent years analyzing the painting before determining the signature was legitimate.

“After all the other examinations of the painting were done, I was given [the] job of studying the signature,” Cinza Altieri, a graphologist and member of the Arcadia Foundation, explained. “I worked on it for months, comparing it with some of his original works. There is no doubt that the signature is his. There was no evidence suggesting that it was false.”

The painting, which today is valued at $6 million, depicts a distorted image of Dora Maar, a French painter and photographer who was Picasso’s mistress and muse. Experts believe it was painted sometime between 1930 and 1936. Picasso frequently visited the island of Capri during that period. The painting also bears a resemblance to Picasso’s Buste de Femme, another painting inspired by Maar which was rediscovered in 2019 after being stolen in 1999.

Luca Marcante, the Arcadia Foundation’s president, believes that the recently discovered painting and Buste de Femme might be two versions of the same artwork. “They could both be an original,” Marcante told local outlet Il Giorno. “They are probably two portraits, not exactly the same, of the same subject painted by Picasso at two different times.

Marcante plans to take the recently discovered painting and present it to the Picasso Foundation for appraisal. The foundation is particularly thorough in its evaluations, as it receives hundreds of messages every day from people claiming to have an original piece. “I am curious to know what they say,” Lo Rosso said. “We were just a normal family, and the aim has always been to establish the truth. We’re not interested in making money out of it.”