The German environment minister, Werner Schnappauf, on Tuesday ordered hunters to shoot and kill a rampaging bear in the south of the country. The animal is the first to show up in the region over the last 170 years. It has killed more than a dozen sheep and several chickens. The 200 pounds animal tears open its victims, eats their hearts leaving the rest of the carcass behind. Schnappauf admitted the animal had become a problem one, "A man-bear encounter could occur at any time. It cannot be allowed to roam freely. We will ask hunters to shoot the bear. "

A Finnish woman fended off a bear attack by kicking the bear on the nose, Finnish news agency STT reported on Monday. The young woman was walking in woods near Hankasalmi, in the centre of Finland, when she came face to face with the female brown bear and its cub.

"Ice Bear" Lewis Gordon Pugh has broken his own world record for the longest ice water swim on Friday. Lewis swam for 1. 2 kilometres inside the Norwegian mountains where the water temperature in the lake, about 300km northeast of Bergen, was just above zero degrees.

A bear that was shot and killed last month in Canada has been confirmed by a DNA test to be a grizzly-polar hybrid, the first known documented case of this kind of bear found in the wild. An Inuit tracker from the Northern Territories thought the American hunter he was guiding had probably shot a hybrid bear after he saw that its fur was white with brown spots.