Steven Seagal killed my puppy. So says Jesus Sanchez Llovera, an Arizona man whose home was raided by armed detectives filming a reality TV programme in which the veteran actor works as a volunteer police officer.

When Nicholson Baker stopped writing about sex after Vox and The Fermata, I thought he'd lost his nerve; now he has returned to it with House of Holes, I fear he's lost his mind. What was so impressive about Baker's previous sexually explicit work (only part of a wide-ranging oeuvre) was that the transgression took place within a thought-out narrative structure. Vox, written entirely in dialogue, contained long male and female fantasies exchanged on a phone-line as they progressed towards mutual satisfaction (the book gained notoriety when Monica Lewinsky made a gift of it to Bill Clinton). The Fermata was a bawdy take on Wells's The Time Machine, featuring a narrator, Arno Stine, who stopped time to undress women without their consent - which he slowly realised was a bad idea.

A man who accidentally impaled himself on pruning shears is lucky to be alive. Leroy Luetscher, 86, was working in his garden in Green Valley, Arizona, when he dropped the shears. As he went to pick them up, he lost his balance and fell face down on the handle. It penetrated his eye socket and went into his neck, coming to rest on the external carotid artery.

Notebook

Sex assault case a nightmare for my family, says former IMF chief

For the third time in a month, hot weather has whipped up thick dust storms in Arizona, cutting power lines and delaying flights.

The Andregg brothers might have the cure for all our illnesses in their grasp. But how do a pair of penniless science nerds raise the millions needed to unlock the very fabric of our DNA? Dream big - and get lucky...

Hal Hodson explains why a good heart is hard to find

Mel B is going to give birth in the same delivery suite as her former Spice Girls bandmate Victoria Beckham.

The saga of Warren Jeffs' long-running trial shocked most of America – but many sects still hail him as a hero. Guy Adams reports

In 1878 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio turned his telescope on a little red dot in the night sky and noted some features which he later described as canali. The word means "channels" in Italian, but it was mistranslated as "canals".

Streams of salty water could be coursing their way down the steep sides of craters on Mars, scientists believe after identifying a series of dark lines in photographs.

Congresswoman and Arizona shooting survivor Gabrielle Giffords is met with applause during her return to Washington.