stray

Brian Setzer was on tour with the Stray Cats last year when he noticed the earliest signs of what was eventually diagnosed as an autoimmune disorder.

Now, it seems that disorder may be keeping Setzer off the road.

The Stray Cats said Tuesday they would be canceling their fall U.S. tour as Setzer, 66, battled a “serious illness.” The announcement comes months after Setzer’s diagnosis, although it’s not yet clear if this is a separate health issue.

“I know this affects so many people and I am devastated to have to deliver this news,” Setzer wrote Tuesday on X. “I’ve been trying everything I can to go on and do these shows, but it is just not possible.

“I’ve been looking forward so much to being on stage with my band mates again,” he said, “and playing for all of our amazing fans, and I’m gutted.”

The Stray Cats initially canceled the first two stops on their fall run, in Mount Pleasant, Mich., and Rockford, Ill., before scrapping the whole tour Tuesday. The band said refunds would be available at the point of purchase and did not announce any future tour dates.

Setzer first shared details about his unspecified autoimmune disease in February, writing on social media that, although the illness was not painful, it rendered him unable to play guitar.

“It feels like I am wearing a pair of gloves when I try to play,” he wrote, adding that the disease had for a time hindered his ability to accomplish everyday tasks like tying his shoes.

The artist said that he had been improving as he received care at “the best hospital in the world down the block from me,” the Mayo Clinic.

“I know I will beat this, it will just take some time,” he said. “I love you all.”

The Stray Cats, formed by Setzer, Lee Rocker and Slim Jim Phantom in 1979, have dissolved and re-formed several times over the decades. In 2019, the founding trio reunited to release a 40th anniversary album, aptly dubbed “40,” their first album in a quarter of a century.

On Friday, the band rolled out its first release since then. The pair of singles, consisting of original song “Stampede” and a cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Teenage Heaven,” were described on the band’s website as “loud, upbeat, and unmistakably The Stray Cats.”

“Jim and I cut both songs in Minneapolis at Terrarium Studios,” Setzer said in a statement posted to the site. “‘Stampede’ was an instrumental that I wrote lyrics for. I basically copied the guitar part, which was pretty ahead of its time to begin with, and ‘Teenage Heaven’ is one of the few Eddie Cochran songs that has not been covered to death.”

Rocker said “‘Stampede’ has the drive and intensity that brings me back to our first album,” and “‘Teenage Heaven’ is a classic Eddie Cochran song that we put our [Stray] Cats magic on.”

“The Cats are back and better than ever,” the bassist said.

Times staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.

India’s Supreme Court in early August issued a dramatic order calling for the removal of all stray dogs from the streets of the national capital, prompting outrage from animal rights activists.

Days later, the country’s top court amended that order after a larger bench of judges looked at the case, effectively allowing municipal authorities to return most strays to the neighbourhoods they were picked up from after being sterilised and vaccinated.

But while the revised order has calmed some of the passions that erupted over the initial verdict, the court’s interventions have also set off a broader debate in India over dogs on the country’s streets, the menace they pose and how best to deal with them.

So what were the court orders all about, what was the trigger, how big of a problem are India’s stray dogs – and how many such dogs does the country have in the first place?

What did the Supreme Court order?

On August 11, a Supreme Court bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan directed the Delhi government and local bodies to immediately commence the removal of stray dogs from all localities in the National Capital Region – including the city of New Delhi and its suburban cities of Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurugram and Faridabad.

The court’s orders required authorities to “start picking up stray dogs from all localities” and “relocate these dogs into designated shelters/pounds”, with the stipulation that they would not be released back into public spaces again.

The ruling drew criticism from animal rights activists who questioned whether local governments had the infrastructure and resources needed to execute the order, amid worries that it could lead to acts of cruelty towards the dogs.

Some experts also pointed out that the Supreme Court order might stand in violation of India’s Animal Birth Control Rules, introduced in 2023. Those rules were framed to control stray dog populations humanely, through a policy of capturing, sterilising, vaccinating and then releasing them. But the August 11 order barred their release onto the streets of Delhi.

Eventually, amid protests, a new three-judge bench heard the case again, on August 22 and modified the earlier order. “The dogs that are picked up shall be sterilised, dewormed, vaccinated, and released back to the same area from which they were picked up,” the court said, staying in line with the birth control rules.

However, the court clarified that the release after capture would not “apply to the dogs infected with rabies or suspected to be infected with rabies, and those that display aggressive behaviour”.

Further, the court ordered the creation of dedicated feeding spaces for stray dogs in each municipal ward, making it clear that feeding dogs on the streets would now be prohibited.

And the court asked other states and federally governed territories to also join the case as parties – in effect, setting the stage for the order, currently restricted to the capital and its surrounding areas, to become a nationwide law.

Does India have a dog bite crisis?

The Supreme Court took on the case because of concerns over an increasing number of dog bite cases in the country.

According to the federal Ministry of Health data, the country recorded 2,189,909 dog bite cases in 2022, a number that rose to 3,052,521 cases in 2023, and to 3,715,713 cases in 2024.

Dog bites, similar to bites from other animals, can transmit the rabies virus to humans. When left untreated, it manifests as either furious or paralytic rabies, both of which are almost always fatal once symptoms develop. In India, dog bites account for 99 percent of rabies fatalities.

Federal Health Ministry data shows that India recorded 21, 50, and 54 rabies-induced human deaths, respectively, in the last three years. But experts question those numbers.

While federal data shows that the southern state of Kerala recorded 0,1, and 3 rabies-induced deaths in 2022, 2023 and 2024, the state’s health authorities themselves say that Kerala had 15, 17 and 22 deaths respectively, in those years. And a recent Lancet study estimated 5,726 human rabies deaths occurring annually in India.

That too is a conservative estimate, according to Omesh Bharti, deputy director and epidemiologist at the northern Himachal Pradesh state’s health department. “I think it is closer to the 10,000 mark,” Bharti said. “In the last 10 years, dog bite cases have increased 10 times. At the same time, deaths have reduced as well,” he added, because of the increased prevalence of the rabies vaccine and immunoglobulin, which provides immediate short-term protection from rabies after potential exposure.

India contributes 36 percent of global rabies deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Does India have a dog-counting problem?

Nishant Kumar, head of Thinkpaws, a New Delhi-based think tank whose research focuses on the interaction between people, animals and waste systems, said that stray dogs form territorial packs.

“Bonded dogs learn to discriminate between familiar feeders and unfamiliar strangers, resulting in strategic aggression like barking or chasing to guard their streets,” he said.

“The issue arises when humans adjusted to dogs from one part of the city meet dogs in new locations, such as rickshaw pullers and delivery boys,” he added.

But questions linger over whether Delhi and India even have an accurate count of their stray dog populations.

The 2019 Livestock Census conducted by the Indian government’s Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying – the most recent nationwide stray dog count – found that India housed 15 million stray dogs, with Delhi accounting for 55,462 of them.

But the government’s own data also showed that Delhi recorded 45,052 bite cases in 2019 – a very high number of bite cases when compared with the estimated population, raising doubts about the quality of the data in question.

An unpublished study by Thinkpaws, meanwhile, assessed the dog density of the national capital region at roughly 550 dogs per square kilometre. When extrapolated across Delhi, that suggests an estimated population of 825,313 stray dogs – nearly 15 times the 2019 census data.

The 2024 Livestock Census was expected to be completed on March 31, but has been delayed.

How did Bhutan achieve 100 percent sterilisation?

The ruling by India’s top court has also prompted questions over whether all stray dogs can realistically be sterilised. While it is a tiny country by comparison, Bhutan has shown that it can be done.

In 2023, the Himalayan nation, sandwiched between India and China, became the first country in the world to achieve 100 percent sterilisation of its stray dog population. The country also vaccinated 90 percent of its 1,10,000-strong stray dog population in just two years – that’s more than the 70 percent vaccination levels needed to maintain herd immunity in the case of diseases like rabies.

Kinley Dorji, veterinary superintendent at the National Veterinary Hospital, Bhutan, who also led these efforts, said what worked was a “whole of nation” approach and the time-bound nature of the programme, which was pushed by the country’s king.

“Because the command came from our king, everybody cooperated. It was not just left to the livestock department or the municipality. Everybody from the armed forces and volunteers from De-suung [Bhutan’s national service programme] to the farmers participated,” Dorji said.

The programme was executed in three phases. “Nationwide sterilisation took just two weeks. Subsequently, the mopping phase began, targeting the dogs that had been missed during the nationwide phase. The final combing phase took us a few months, as we spent a lot of time capturing the remaining elusive dogs,” Dorji said.

The team used oral sedation, trapping and darts. Only in the heavily populated Thimphu did they have to set up separate shelters for problematic dogs that were biting people. All the other dogs were released back to the same area from which they were picked up.

The programme, which began in August 2021, was shut in October 2023, once the country achieved 100 percent stray dog sterilisation. Bhutan spent 305 million ngultrum ($3.5m) and employed 13,000 people during the programme.

What does the future look like for stray dog management in India?

India, by comparison, has a long way to go, say experts.

Bharti, the Himachal Pradesh epidemiologist, who deals with dog bite victims regularly, says the Supreme Court ruling highlights the failure of local governments and nonprofits across the country.

“They have failed to protect the citizens, and they have failed to sterilise and immunise these dogs,” he said.

Meghna Uniyal, director at the Humane Foundation for People and Animals, a nonprofit, welcomed the latest directives from the country’s top court. “We have waited two years for this,” Uniyal said. “Public feeding is now banned, and biting dogs are to be taken off the streets.”

But concerns around human-dog conflict won’t vanish in India anytime soon, said Kumar of Thinkpaws.

What’s needed, he said, is a long-term plan, including shelter-based quarantine for dogs that are known to be carrying diseases or that bite, vaccination of dogs, adoption of strays and mechanisms to reduce the practice of dogs eating from open rubbish dumps.

Anything less, he said, “is misguided compassion”.

In the latest instance of the war in Ukraine spilling over into neighboring countries, officials in Estonia say a Ukrainian one-way attack drone exploded inside that Baltic nation about 50 miles west of the border with Russia. They blamed Russian jamming for sending the drone off course, likely during an attack on a Russian gas processing plant near St. Petersburg. 

While there have been previous incidents of attack drones flying into neighboring nations, this appears to be the first publicly known case of a Ukrainian drone entering a non-combatant’s airspace since a Tu-141 jet-powered one flew into Croatia in March 2022. In addition, aside from raising concerns about collateral damage, the Estonian drone incident highlights worries about how electronic warfare is affecting civilian aviation and communications.

A farmer found pieces of a drone and a crater in his field and called authorities, the head of Estonia’s Internal Security Service (ISS) told reporters Tuesday morning. There were no injuries or major property damage, however Estonian authorities warned that if the drone hit a residential building, the consequences could have been far more severe. Destruction of civilian buildings and infrastructure and resulting loss of life is a frequent occurrence in Ukraine.

“Based on very preliminary data, we estimate that the drone came down already in the early hours of Sunday, around 4 a.m. to 5 a.m.,” ISS Director General Margo Palloson told reporters on Tuesday, according to the official Estonian ERR news. “We have reason to believe that this may be a Ukrainian drone that was [targeting] inland Russian sites but was diverted from its course by Russia’s GPS jamming and other electronic warfare measures, causing it to veer into Estonian airspace. At this time, there is nothing to indicate that it could be a Russian drone.”

Russia “is using very strong GPS jamming and spoofing near our borders,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told the Estonian Postimees newspaper. “As a result, one day a drone ends up in Lithuania, the next day in Latvia, and now one has reached Estonia. These objects fly at very low altitudes to avoid detection by Russia, and that’s precisely why they are difficult to detect.”

Also on Sunday, another drone crashed into the Russian side of Lake Peipus, a large body of water separating eastern Estonia and western Russia, Estonian officials said. That same day, Ukraine carried out a drone attack on the Novatek gas processing complex. Located in the port of Ust-Luga, this is Russia’s largest liquefied gas producer, located about 20 miles from the Estonian border. Video emerged from the scene showing an explosion followed by a massive fire that is still burning.

You can see the results of that attack in the following video.

Speaking at the press conference, Pevkur said these incidents highlight the need for sensors that can detect low-flying drones.

“Can this create full blanket coverage?” he asked rhetorically. “Theoretically, yes — it depends on how many resources we put into it. Our capabilities will improve significantly. Whether it will be 100 percent coverage, time will tell. At the same time, the war in Ukraine shows that 100 percent coverage does not exist anywhere.”

Estonia’s Prime Minister Kristen Michal called for a “layered air defense” to prevent further incursions. While neither official offered specifics about what these sensors and defenses would be, a layered defense can help plug surveillance gaps, but the most effective way of surveilling for low and slow-flying drones, as well as other low-flying aircraft, is by providing persistent look-down radar capabilities. Airborne early warning and control aircraft can provide this but keeping one airborne continuously is extremely resource intensive. Poland is working to build a network of aerostats that carry look-down radars. They are designed to detect low-flying drones, as well as aircraft and cruise missiles. You can read more about that in our story here.

Last week, Polish officials said a suspected Russian drone crashed into a cornfield near the village of Osiny, about 60 miles southeast of Warsaw. 

Polish Gen. Dariusz Malinowski, deputy commander of Armed Forces Operational Command, said it was a military drone propelled by a Chinese-produced engine, according to The Guardian. As we have previously reported, Chinese engines are a basic component of many Russian drones.

“I’ll say one thing that is certain: Russia will never admit to this,” said Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. “Just as it hasn’t admitted to any of the eight incidents in Moldova, three incidents in Romania, three in Lithuania, two in Latvia, or the one drone incident in Bulgaria.”

Meanwhile, frequent missile and drone attacks by Russia have led to multiple instances of NATO jets scrambling in response.

While this appears to be the first time a Ukrainian drone went off course into a non-combatant’s territory in more than three years, an errant Ukrainian air defense munition was suspected of killing two in Poland in 2022.

Beyond having errant weapons landing on neighboring countries, Ukraine’s drone campaign on Russia is playing havoc with civil aviation there. The latest example took place Sunday, when a passenger plane carrying Russians heading to St. Petersburg was forced to make an emergency landing in Estonia early Sunday morning due to the aforementioned Ukrainian drone attack, Postimees reported.

“The aircraft was rerouted to land in Tallinn, as it could not land at Pulkovo Airport due to a temporary closure,” Margot Holts, head of Communications and Marketing at Tallinn Airport, told the publication. The aircraft, operated by Egyptian carrier AlMasria Universal Airlines, had departed from Sharm El Sheikh and landed in Tallinn at 5:33 a.m. local time. It was able to continue its journey to St. Petersburg nearly six hours later.

The suspected Ukrainian drone crash also raises the specter of another major problem affecting countries outside the war zone. European governments have repeatedly accused Moscow of jamming GPS in recent years. The issue has been so concerning that last month, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) warned that Russian GPS jamming and other commercially-used signals near the Baltic Sea posed a “serious threat” to civilian aviation, especially in Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland and Sweden.

In addition, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Luxembourg and Ukraine filed complaints last year after Russian interference reportedly “disrupted air traffic control systems and hijacked television broadcasts, including children’s programming, replacing them with war propaganda,” according to the Moscow Times.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a member of the UN, “demanded that Russia stop interfering with the satellite systems of European countries,” the publication reported. The ITU blamed “ground stations located in the areas of Moscow, Kaliningrad and Pavlovka” and demanded that Russia immediately cease its actions and investigate the incidents.

As we previously reported, last year, U.K. authorities confirmed that a Royal Air Force Dassault 900LX business jet transporting Grant Shapps, at the time the U.K. defense secretary, experienced GPS jamming while flying near Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave.

From our story at the time: “It’s critical to note that GPS jamming can be executed over a broad area. So it is difficult to ascertain with any degree of certainty whether Shapps’ aircraft was specifically targeted and the U.K. has offered no evidence that directly points to that being the case. Still, its flight path would have been easily tracked via Russian radar and visible on flight-tracking websites.

It has also been pointed out that a very large number of other aircraft — some 511 according to open-source intelligence analyst Markus Jonsson — were also jammed on the same day in the region. Jonsson has also questioned the likelihood of jammers being directed against individual planes in a targeted fashion.”

All this comes as both Russia and Ukraine are doing everything they possibly can to produce as many long-range standoff attack weapons as possible. This also includes developing missiles and drones with increasing range and payloads. As we recently reported, Ukraine’s new Flamingo ground-launched long-range cruise missile is said to have a range of 1,864 miles (3,000 kilometers) and a warhead weighing 2,535 pounds (1,150 kilograms). That would make Flamingo a much farther-reaching and more destructive weapon than any missile or one-way-attack drone available to Ukraine now.

Russia, too, is making advances in its missile and drone technology. 

The goal to all this is to ratchet-up the pace of long-range cross-border attacks. This snowballing race to field newer, deadlier and longer-reaching weapons and strike more frequently will only raise the risk of munitions straying into neighboring countries, and the possibility that a major inadvertent destructive event could add new volatility to the conflict.

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