23.7.04

Acupuncture Gone Bad!

Acupuncture Gone Bad!

A German acupuncture patient was left pierced with needles in a clinic after a therapist forgot about her, locked up his practice and went home, police in Hanover said on Thursday.

The 41-year-old woman from the north German town had booked an afternoon session of the ancient Chinese therapy which involves inserting needles into the skin and is believed to prevent disease and relieve pain.

The doctor left her in the treatment room for what she assumed would be a short while, especially since she still had needles embedded in her body.

After 90 minutes the woman began to shout for attention. Getting no response, she realized she was alone and trapped in the building. She alerted police by phone and was later set free when the doctor returned.

Man Learns He's Dead, Thanks to Blind Ex-Wife

Man Learns He's Dead, Thanks to Blind Ex-Wife

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian taxi driver got a rude shock when he discovered his blind ex-wife, who thought he had died in an explosion, had him buried in a Moscow cemetery, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

Oleg Lunkov learned of his apparent death when he applied for a passport and was told he died in a bomb blast on Moscow's metro on February 6. His ex-wife thought he was on the train, but being blind, she got her mother to identify the remains.

"I thought, 'I hope they didn't bury me on my birthday'," Lunkov told the Moscow Times after visiting his grave in southeastern Moscow. "But it turns out they did."

The grave has been exhumed by police investigating his wife for possible fraud.

Lunkov's name still appears on prosecutors' official list of the 38 people who died in the explosion.


Woman Who Offered Pig as Tiger Bait Faces Charge

Woman Who Offered Pig as Tiger Bait Faces Charge

MIAMI (Reuters) - A Florida woman who offered up a Yorkshire pig as bait to entice an escaped tiger back home will face charges of animal cruelty, local newspapers reported on Thursday.

Linda Meredith, of Loxahatchee where "Bobo" the tiger was killed by wildlife officers on Tuesday in a shooting his owner labeled a "murder," is being punished for putting the piglet in a car trunk, an official told the Palm Beach Post.

"I was appalled," said Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control Director Diane Sauve. "Carrying an animal in a trunk in 90-degree (32 degrees Celsius) heat, where it's probably 140 degrees (60 degrees Celsius) inside, is not acceptable."

Meredith had urged sheriff's deputies to hold the piglet by its hind legs or twist its ears to make it squeal and attract Bobo, who spent 24 hours as a fugitive after escaping from former B movie Tarzan actor Steve Sipek's home, 50 miles north of Miami. The deputies declined to use the pig.

Meredith said she also was outraged to find out she could face animal cruelty charges.

"I can't believe they have the gall," she told the Palm Beach Post. "I was just trying to help the tiger find his way back home. Apparently, it's not nice to be nice."

Meredith said that the trunk of her Cadillac was air conditioned and that she had planned to eat the pig anyway once it had grown up.

Wildlife officers had hoped to shoot Bobo, a 600-pound (270-kg), six-year-old Bengal tiger, with tranquilizer darts to end his dash for freedom. But he was killed by an officer armed with an M4 rifle after he said the big cat lunged at him.

Sipek, who played Tarzan in two movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who has a permit to keep exotic animals as pets, decried the shooting as unnecessary. Covered in the blood of the cat he raised since it was a cub, Sipek has given a string of TV interviews saying Bobo's death was plain murder.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has been inundated with hate mail and phone calls from distraught cat lovers, and supporters have set up a Web site to collect donations to help Sipek protect his other animals -- another tiger, two lions, a black leopard and a cougar.

Neither Sauve nor Meredith could be reached for comment.

Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited.


Schwarzenegger to Take a Licking

Schwarzenegger to Take a Licking

VIENNA (Reuters) - Austrian fans of their famous compatriot Arnold Schwarzenegger will be able to lick the back of the California Governor when his image appears on a special edition of postage stamps at the end of this month.

The former bodybuilder and film star chose the portrait of himself that will be used on one-euro stamps to be issued in Austria on his 57th birthday, July 30, a postal service spokesman said on Friday.

"He is one of the most famous Austrians...We can be very proud of him," spokesman Siegfried Grobmann said.

The stamp is a head-and-shoulders shot of Schwarzenegger with the U.S. Stars and Stripes on his right and a smaller Austrian flag to his left. A run of 600,000 stamps will be printed, Grobmann said.

Dangling from Meat Hooks, for Fun

Dangling from Meat Hooks, for Fun

MIAMI (Reuters) - Law enforcement officials in the Florida Keys are mystified by a bizarre new pastime -- young people dangling themselves from meat hooks on a popular sandbar.

A U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman said on Sunday that the Monroe County sheriff's office and Coast Guard were called on July 12 to the sandbar off Whale Harbor in Islamorada where locals say wild behavior is becoming a tradition.

They found that five young people had erected a bamboo tripod and hung meat hooks from it. A young woman, her feet brushing the surface of the shallow water, dangled from the frame, hooks embedded firmly in her shoulders.

According to a Coast Guard video, she did not seem to mind the hooks.

Lt. Tom Brazil of the Coast Guard told the Key West Citizen newspaper that a young man, who also had hooks embedded in his heavily pierced and tattooed skin, assured him the group was "just enjoying the afternoon."

A Coast Guard spokeswoman in Miami said the group had clearly done this before and intended to post photos of themselves on a Web site dedicated to "body modification" -- the ritualistic piercing of the body.

“It looked like a daily routine for them," she said, adding that the hooks had been inserted in the skin in a professional manner and had drawn very little blood."

"As long as they weren't creating any kind of ruckus or riot within a crowd they really weren't breaking any laws."

The Coast Guard passed the video on to federal justice authorities but no further action will be taken.

Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited.


20.7.04

WIERD WEBSITE OF THE DAY

WIERD WEBSITE OF THE DAY

Aluminum foil Deflector Beanie

Learn how to make yours here:

http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html

An Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (AFDB) is a type of headwear that can shield your brain from most electromagnetic psychotronic mind control carriers. AFDBs are inexpensive (even free if you don't mind scrounging for thrown-out aluminium foil) and can be constructed by anyone with at least the dexterity of a chimp (maybe bonobo).



Tyisha McCoy died over a $100 hairdo.

Tyisha McCoy died over a $100 hairdo.

Stunning reporters and cops alike, a Bronx parolee yesterday admitted ordering the murder of the 13-year-old girl because she refused to pay him for braiding her hair. "The braids were $100. She didn't pay me, so I sent someone there to do it," Kenneth Smith, 24, blurted in response to a Daily News reporter's question outside the 30th Precinct stationhouse in Harlem. Smith, a paroled armed robber who met Tyisha on a teen phone-chat line, said he sent a pal to the girl's Riverside Drive apartment last week.

Smith fingered ex-con Parris France, 22, for strangling the teen and snatching $3,000 of her guardian's jewelry."I did not do the killing myself. But I saw who did it," said Smith, whose dramatic sidewalk confession could help convict him of murder. "He's upstairs [being questioned]." Smith, whose hair was done up in immaculate cornrows, was arraigned on murder and burglary charges along with France. Despite Smith's attempt to shift the blame, prosecutors said he told cops he strangled Tyisha with the shoelace from a boot because he feared she could identify him.

The admissions piled more heartache on the custodial family of the teenager, who was born in jail and was removed from her mother's care two years ago over allegations of neglect. "Pretty sad, isn't it?" said George Thompson, whose mother, Carolyn Thompson, had custody of the girl. "It's a child, for crying out loud." "I'm glad they caught him," added Rhonda Ramseur, Tyisha's mother. Even Smith's sister blasted him, saying news of the crime "ran chills through my body." "I just want [Tyisha's family] to know that someone in Kenny's family cares," said Shirley Evans, 31, a mother of twin girls who said her brother learned how to braid hair in prison. "I am deeply sorry for what happened."

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly branded the slaying a "terrible crime" that cut short a tormented but promising life. "These are two adult males," he said. "This is a 13-year-old girl." Cops say Tyisha, who often dated older men, met Smith on a phone-chat line for teens, and he agreed to braid her hair at her apartment. When Carolyn Thompson, a prominent Harlem community activist, saw the older man, she tossed him out of her apartment. "She walked in on him and said, 'What are you doing with her? She is a little girl,'" a police source said. "Words were exchanged, and he menaces her by saying, 'You have a lot of nice [stuff] in here.'"

Cops said McCoy later let France and Smith into the apartment, where they throttled the girl and Smith looted Thompson's baubles. After McCoy's body was found Thursday, cops quickly tracked down Smith, who was sprung in July 2001 after serving seven years for robbery. Sources said that detectives lifted a fingerprint from Thompson's jewelry box that belonged to France, an ex-con with a record of drug offenses, and that France quickly implicated Smith, who in turn blamed his fellow felon.

Man Jailed for Shooting off His Testicles

LONDON (Reuters) –

A British man who accidentally shot himself in the
testicles after drinking 15 pints of beer was jailed
for five years on Tuesday for possessing an illegal
firearm, a court spokesman said. David Walker, 28, was
arguing with a friend at a pub in South Yorkshire, northern
England, when he went home to get his sawed-off shotgun,
which he jammed into his trousers. But as he walked back
to the pub, the gun went off, blasting pellets into his testicles.
Doctors later removed what remained of his testicles during
emergency surgery.Walker admitted possessing a prohibited
weapon at a hearing in June at the court in Sheffield.

Robbers Strip Corpse of Jewelry

LILLE, France (Reuters) - Thieves dug up a Frenchwoman's grave and stripped her corpse of thousands of euros (dollars) worth of jewelry she had asked to be buried with to avoid arguments between her five children.
Police said Monday the former partner of the woman, who died aged 82 in April, found her coffin abandoned in an alley near the cemetery in the village of Haulchin in northern France Monday.
Her body was still in the coffin but her earrings, two necklaces, two bracelets, and five rings had been stolen

Itsy-Bitsy Spider Catches ... a Snake

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese house spider sitting on its web waiting for lunch got the biggest helping of its life -- it caught a snake.
The 12-inch snake crawled into a farmer's house in Qingyuan county in eastern Zhejiang prvince, apparently oblivious of the spider patiently spinning its web in the corner, Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.
"Unfortunately, it got desperately trapped in the tough, sticky web of the spider," the agency said.
"The spider pulled the web higher and suspended the snake above the ground. It then managed to get to the neck of the snake, using its beak to pierce the snake and inject its poison."
The David and Goliath battle took 80 minutes, drawing farmers from all around to watch, Xinhua said.
"The snake died soon and the hunter spider began to suck its blood."

Man Dodges Suicide Pact with Bride

Man Dodges Suicide Pact with Bride

TEHRAN (Reuters) - An Iranian man who struck a suicide pact with his new bride over their guilt for having pre-marital sex is being held by police after he backed out on his side of the bargain, judiciary officials said on Sunday.

The couple, who were not named, had been married for just two days when, "due to their guilty consciences for having illicit sexual relations, they decided to kill each other at the same time," the official said.

The man helped to hang his wife but then changed his mind about killing himself and handed himself in to police in the northeastern Khorasan province, the official told the ISNA student news agency.

Pre-marital sex is taboo in the Islamic state where some girls have to go through a virginity test before tying knot.