`A prison inmate who shed 31 pounds so he could escape through a narrow hole in a wall has been recaptured after three days on the run in Sydney, the prison department said Sunday.
Robert Cole, 36, who was serving time for sex offenses and armed robbery, escaped from a hospital wing of Sydney’s Long Bay Jail on Wednesday through 6-inch wide hole he had chiseled in the brickwork beside a window frame. He had been undergoing treatment for a psychiatric illness. [..]
He was recaptured in a Sydney shopping mall Saturday disguised with a beard drawn on his face with a pen, The Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported.’
`A Sanford mother says she will never be able to hold her newborn because an Orlando hospital performed a life-altering surgery and, she claims, the hospital refuses to explain why they left her as a multiple amputee.
The woman filed a complaint against Orlando Regional Healthcare Systems, she said, because they won’t tell her exactly what happened. The hospital maintains the woman wants to know information that would violate other patients’ rights. [..]
“I want to know what happened. I went to deliver my baby and I came out like this,” Mejia said.’
`An Indian man is being refused entry to his house – because his family say he is a spirit come back to haunt them.
Raju Raghuvanshi was greeted with cries of “ghost” and neighbours locking doors when he returned from a short spell in jail to his village in Madhya Pradesh.
He had fallen ill in prison and was taken to hospital. Relatives heard he had died and performed his last rites.
Now, unable to convince them he is alive and well, he is staying nearby and has asked the police for help.’
`She survived brutal Nazi and Communist regimes to ultimately be brought down by a banana.
Slovenian migrant Ivanka Perko died in hospital last week in bizarre circumstances – she suffered complications after she dropped a banana on her leg.
Comical to the end, the 73-year-old old quipped to friends and family while on her deathbed: “I can’t believe after all this time it was a bloody banana that killed me.”
A family friend told The Saturday Daily Telegraph yesterday that Ms Perko – who was treasured by her Blue Mountains community – had been ill for several months with a condition that made her skin delicate and fine.
“She had tried to open a banana and dropped it,” the friend said. “The pointy end scraped down her leg and she died from complications.”‘
`The Washington State Patrol says it happened when a truck driver had to brake suddenly about 25 miles north of Seattle. The trailer had only a cloth top and much of the waste sloshed out. It spilled over the cab and onto the southbound lanes.
Not only did it stink, but it took about five hours to vacuum it up. Traffic was rerouted.
A spokesman for the state Ecology Department advises anyone who drove through the stuff to go to a commercial car wash.’
‘An “incompetent” burglar who was tackled by elderly members of a petanque club would never again be able to hold his head up among his criminal peers, his lawyer told Christchurch District Court today.
Clinton Michael Dearman, 38, was in court for sentence after admitting charges of burglary and aggravated assault at Christchurch Petanque Club on December 11. [..]
At sentencing today, Dearman’s lawyer, Michael Knowles, urged Judge Michael Crosbie to regard the publicity and humiliation his client had suffered as a result of media attention as a mitigating factor.
Dearman had been pictured in media hog-tied and surrounded by elderly club members while they waited for police to arrive.’
follow-up to Pensioners ‘hog-tie’ burly intruder.
`It turns out the officers’ in-car computers interfere with Dunkin’ Donuts computer system. Police using the drive-through have to disconnect their computer modems to avoid clashing with the restaurants’ system.
That’s not the only problem with the city’s police computer system, says Sergeant Eliezer Rivera. Rivera says the network is spotty and only as fast as a dial-up connection.’
This is unacceptable. How can people expect police to diligently and efficiently protect the community without donuts? Crazy.
`A dog apparently fell from a highway overpass and crashed through a car windshield, fatally injuring the driver, police said today. [..]
Investigators do not believe the 27- to 32-kilogram Labrador retriever was thrown, but rather fell while trying to avoid a car, State Police Sgt. Michael A. Shaw said.
Police questioned the dog’s owner. [..]
“We’ve had rocks and other stuff like that fall off of overpasses,” Shaw said.
“This would be the first dog we’ve had.”‘
`Spain’s most important modern art museum has confessed it has lost a 38-tonne sculpture by the prestigious American artist Richard Serra. [..]
The museum admitted on Wednesday that the last document it had relating to the piece and the payments made for its storage was dated 1992. [..]
When the museum’s new director, Ana Martinez, told her staff to produce an inventory last year, they discovered that the storage company had gone into receivership in 1998 and the blocks had disappeared. The owner of the company said he did not know where the sculpture had gone.’
`A big brown cockroach crawls across the table in the laboratory of Japan’s most prestigious university. The researcher eyes it nervously, but he doesn’t go for the bug spray. He grabs the remote. This is no ordinary under-the-refrigerator type bug. This roach has been surgically implanted with a micro-robotic backpack that allows researchers to control its movements. This is Robo-roach.
Unfortunately spammers are emailing the roaches when they broadcast to cell phones. “We had an incident last week where we sent a roach into an duct to test for an air leak, when we asked the roach to turn right, it responded by asking for our email addresses and offered to send us viagra in return.” said Assistant Professor Isao Shimoyama, head of the bio-robot research team at Tokyo University.’
`A computer programmer found out his girlfriend was having an affair when his pet parrot kept repeating her lover’s name, British media reported Tuesday.
The African grey parrot kept squawking “I love you, Gary” as his owner, Chris Taylor, sat with girlfriend Suzy Collins on the sofa of their shared flat in Leeds, northern England. [..]
Taylor said he had also been forced to part with Ziggy after the bird continued to call out Gary’s name and refused to stop squawking the phrases in his ex-girlfriend’s voice, media reports said.’
`A Texas Department of Transportation employee was killed Sunday when he stepped in front of a moving 25-ton roller.[..]
Witnesses said Hayes stepped in front of the machine as it was backing up. The machine, known as a pneumatic roller, compacts pavement.
Hayes died instantly, [a spokesman] said. [..]
“He was a very experienced man, and for some inexplicable reason, he walked out in front of one of those rollers,” [the spokesman] said. “We’re stunned.”‘
`A mechanic standing near a Boeing 737 at El Paso International Airport in Texas was sucked into one of the engines and killed Monday, officials said. [..]
[The CEO of Continental Airlines] said the incident occurred during a maintenance check in preparation for the plane’s departure.
A spokeswoman for Boeing said Monday’s incident is not the first such accident. “It doesn’t happen very often,” spokeswoman Liz Verdier said. “It has happened in the past.”
Either way, she said, the responsibility lies with Continental: “The airlines are responsible for their safety procedures.”‘
`Marijuana, cocaine and narcotics began disappearing from the evidence room, and police say they’ve found the culprit — rats.
About a month ago, North Port Police Department evidence and property technician Pamela Schmidt picked up a bag and noticed that it looked like it had been chewed through, said Capt. Robert Estrada. [..]
Estrada said some narcotics and marijuana were eaten by the rats, but did not know how much was eaten.’
`”This is a truly historical meeting of the established and new media,” said Les Moonves, the head of CBS, about his network’s new video partnership with Google. Um, no, Les. So far, it’s just a really crap web site.
If, like us, you expected the new and improved Google Video service to rival something like Apple’s iTunes store, then do yourself a favor and don’t visit the Google shop for a few months. Google has done nothing to celebrate its unique access to shows such as CSI, Survivor and Star Trek. Instead, the company has buried CBS’s shows beneath a dismal interface wrapped in a shambles of a delivery mechanism. [..]
Take CSI, for example. If you highlight it, only one show appears at the time of writing – an episode called “Werewolves.” Even MacGyver gets five episodes.’
`Two clerks in Pennsylvania attacked a knife-wielding thief in the store and seriously injured him with baseball bats, according to a Local 6 News report. [..]
Surveillance video at the store showed a man in a black hood approaching the counter at the gas station before getting hit with the bat by employee Kuldip Singh.
Singh and his co-worker then hit the man repeatedly in the head.’
with video.
`A spider that nested in the ear of a Swedish woman was discovered and removed alive after 27 days.
The black spider, “the size of a thumbnail”, crept into the woman’s ear while she was sleeping and went undiscovered for almost a month, Swedish tabloid Expressen reported Wednesday.
The woman, whose name was not disclosed, told the paper that she at first experienced “a slight loss of hearing” and assumed that she had a build-up of wax.
But when she heard “a scratching sound” in her ear she decided to go to the pharmacy to buy a cleanser to wash out her ear cavity.’
`The problem, it appears, was partly down to teething troubles with the limited edition DVD players issued last year to Bafta members. Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD “screeners”, but prevent the creation of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe.
The faulty DVDs only reached Bafta members on Saturday, which meant the film had already missed out on the first round of voting on January 4. In a further twist to the tale, a previous batch mailed out before Christmas were reportedly held up by customs officials in the UK. “It’s been quite a cock-up,” said one Bafta member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.’
`A 19-year-old youth-camp leader has broken his leg in two places after kicking ”one of the largest” huntsman spiders he had ever seen.
The teen saw the spider on a wall this morning while at the Attunga Country Campsite in the NSW Southern Highlands and attacked it with a deadly kick that ended the spider’s life – and badly affected his own.
He was airlifted to Liverpool hospital by an NRMA CareFlight helicopter from the camp, which is 25 kilometres west of Mittagong.’
`Constantin, 67, lived in a formerly peaceful village near Galati. But lately Constantin just couldn’t get any sleep, all because of a single noisy chicken. Night after night he dreamed of wringing its neck, or even better, chopping its head off. One night, he finally had enough. He roused himself from bed and headed out to the yard in his underwear, determined to bring silence once more to his home.
The sleep-deprived villager grabbed that chicken by the neck and chopped its head right off. Only then did he realize that he had confused his own penis for the chicken’s neck. While Constantin stood stunned by his folly, his dog rushed over and gobbled up the treat.’
It’s a Darwin Award nomination from 2004, but quality stupidity never gets old. :)
`Sumeyya Mamuk considered the chickens in her backyard to be beloved pets. The 8-year-old girl fed them, petted them and took care of them. When they started to get sick and die, she hugged them and tenderly kissed them goodbye. The next morning, her face and eyes were swollen and she had a high fever. Her father took her to a hospital, and five days later she was confirmed to have the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu. [..]
When her mother saw Sumeyya holding one of the dying chickens, she yelled at her and hit the girl to get her away.
Sumeyya began to cry. She wiped her tears with the hand she’d been using to comfort the dying chicken.’
`A wild boar was found taking a nap in the guest bedroom in a Bavarian family’s house after fleeing from hunters, police said on Monday. [..]
When the 60-kg (132 lb.) boar woke up late on Saturday afternoon after sleeping for a few hours, it started panicking again when it could not find its way out of the house. That’s when the family noticed their uninvited visitor.
They called in a neighbour, also a hunter, who shot and killed the animal.’
`Wedged in his sister’s 8kg capacity washing machine with his knees pressed tight to his chest, Robin Toom, 30, was stuck and hot.
“I just hopped in there, playing hide and go seek with the kids,” the baker’s assistant said yesterday from Townsville.
“I got in there and couldn’t even get the lid down and the kids came in and said ‘ha ha we found you’.”
With his wife, sister, brother-in-law and the kids crammed in the bathroom around the machine, embarrassment turned to perspiration.’
`A mouse got its revenge against a homeowner who tried to dispose of it in a pile of burning leaves. The blazing creature ran back to the man’s house and set it on fire.
Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner said he caught the mouse inside his house and wanted to get rid of it.
“I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house,” Mares said from a motel room Saturday.’
`State Senator Jeff Miller of Cleveland says he and his wife, Brigitte, have reached a divorce settlement.
Miller was one of the sponsors of a bill passed last session that solemnizes marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Last February, Miller told reporters most of the legislators recognized traditional marriage is “something worth protecting.”
In an e-mail statement today, the Republican said they were announcing that they have amicably resolved all marital differences and their divorce is final.’
`Police in a Vancouver suburb reminded residents on Tuesday it was not a good idea to play with a loaded gun while using the bathroom, after a man accidentally shot himself.
A 21-year-old North Vancouver man was facing numerous weapons charges after he shot off one of his fingers while appar’
`A man has fallen off his bike and onto a snake at Viewbank in Melbourne’s north-east this morning.
Ambulance paramedic Damien Warrillow says the man was riding along the Yarra River when the accident happened.
“He’s fallen off his bike and fallen on top of a snake by the sounds of it and he’s been bitten on the lower leg either by a tiger or brown snake,” he said.’
‘Hardman actor Sylvester Stallone was knocked unconscious in a boxing ring making the new Rocky movie.
He was left flat on his back for several minutes with cameras still rolling because the crew thought he was acting.
Fortunately, he came round and later made a fully recovery.’
`Thousands of airline passengers unexpectedly found themselves stranded in line at U.S. border checkpoints in August, after a Department of Homeland Security computer crashed. [..]
The holdups can be attributed in part to the Homeland Security Department’s antiquated computer systems. The agency’s mainframes do not share data and are accessible only by some offices. An upgrade to Microsoft’s Windows 2000 operating system failed because of application incompatibilities, which meant one division had to undertake a cumbersome reversion back to Windows 95. [..]
Not one of the systems can talk with another, according to government reports, and not all offices are equipped to log into the systems they need to update records.’
