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Dog survives 40-foot cliff drop

SOMERSHAM, England, July 28 (UPI) -- A British woman whose dog survived a 40-foot fall from a cliff described her pet as a "walking miracle."

Margaret Sills, 65, said she was visiting England's Isle of Wight with her Golden Retriever, Mac, when the dog chased a rabbit through a bush and over the edge of a cliff, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.

Sills, of Somersham, England, said Mac's collar caught on rocks while the dog was falling, absorbing some of the fall.

"It saved his life," she said of the collar. "If he hadn't been wearing one he would have just free-fallen all the way and there's no way he could have survived."

Sills said Mac suffered a collapsed lung and two broken front legs as a result of the fall.

"It is going to take at least six months before he is back to normal and even then he will only have 50 per cent usage in one of his legs," she said. "I can't praise the vets enough for what they have done. I really thought I had lost him.

"He can't walk very far at the moment but compared to how he was a few weeks ago, he is a walking miracle," Sills said.

Urinating in canal angers Venice mayor

VENICE, Italy, July 28 (UPI) -- The mayor of Venice, Italy, says he lectured and called the police on a man he caught urinating into a canal.

Mayor Massimo Cacciari said he came upon a Portuguese tourist urinating into the canal Monday night, ANSA reported Tuesday.

"I saw a gentleman peeing in a canal and took the liberty of telling him that he probably wouldn't do so in his living room," Cacciari said. "I then called the city police to clear things up."

Police fined the man $70.

Italian court: 'Cretin' a slanderous term

ROME, July 28 (UPI) -- Italy's top court ruled Tuesday against a Sicilian town councilor who had argued that calling a political opponent a "cretin" did not constitute slander.

The Cassation Court's precedent-setting ruling said accepting the defendant's argument was equivalent to "accepting the thesis that there is an area of discourse where offensive terms have become so desensitized as to lose their criminal significance," ANSA reported Tuesday.

The judges said the defendant's case was "an unacceptable assertion of inequality before the law."

The ruling, which upheld a lower court's decision on the case, imposed a $425 fine on the councilor.

Robber addicted to glasses

MILWAUKEE, July 28 (UPI) -- Wisconsin authorities said a man who confessed to robbing three eyewear stores told police he "really likes to be around glasses."

Jerry Lowery, 38, who was charged Monday with three counts of armed robbery and a felony count of evading police, told investigators when he surrendered last week that he was driven to commit the crimes by an eyewear fixation, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Tuesday.

Police said Lowery stole bags of eyeglass frames from Metro Eye during an April 25 robbery and Kind Optical June 23. Investigators said he attempted to rob Innovative Optique July 18, but fled after he was punched in the face by a manager. Lowery told police a gun reported by witnesses during the Kind Optical robbery was a toy.

The criminal complaint against Lowery says he was paroled in January from a jail sentence resulting from an eyeglass robbery in Chicago. He has nine convictions for robbery in Illinois.