NEW ZEALAND
Tooth fetishist found guilty
A man with a fetish for “fat gummy ladies,” who yanked women’s teeth out with pliers during sex was found guilty yesterday of assault and indecent assault. In a case described as “bizarre” by prosecutors, a Wellington court heard six days of evidence about Philip Lyle Hansen’s sexual habits and obsession with dentistry. Four women gave evidence against him after he pleaded not guilty to 10 charges relating to incidents from 1988 to 2011. He was convicted of five counts of assault and one of indecent assault, while the jury acquitted him on another four charges, including one of rape. The court was told the 56-year-old was a domineering and controlling personality, who preferred his women without teeth. Prosecutors said more than 600 searches relating to dentistry and extracting teeth were found on his computer, including ones looking for “fat gummy ladies.” They said one women recounted how “during sex he suddenly got the pliers, she could hear her teeth cracking.” The same woman told how “during the night she woke up, he had her in a headlock with a rag over his hand and was trying to get her teeth.”
AUSTRALIA
Koala in hospital visit
Staffers at a hospital’s emergency department received a rather unusual late night visitor — a koala. The marsupial casually strolled through the automatic doors of Hamilton Base Hospital in Victoria State at 3:30am on April 20, said Brigid Kelly, spokeswoman for the Western District Health Service. Surprised staff, not wanting to put any pressure on the animal, watched from a distance as it wandered around the emergency department’s waiting room for about three minutes, before showing itself back out. The koala’s visit was captured by security cameras and the footage released by the Western District Health Service on Tuesday. “He was quite relaxed, just sort of checking everything out, and then he sort of came back past the doors, and they opened and he went on out again,” Kelly said. “He wasn’t stressed at all. It was nice to just watch him poke around there for a little while.” Although the nation’s famously unique fauna occasionally ends up in odd places — a crocodile wandered into a Northern Territory bar a few years ago — Kelly said the hospital has never had a koala visitor before. “This is a first for us,” she said.
CAMBODIA
Oxen cause consternation
The nation’s royal oxen refused to eat any rice grain yesterday during an ancient ritual to predict agricultural fortunes, raising fears of a poor rice harvest among superstitious citizens. Thousands of people gathered to observe the animals at the live televised royal plowing ceremony, presided over by King Norodom Sihamoni, on a soccer pitch in northwestern Battambang Province. After a symbolic plowing of a portion of the pitch, a pair of decorated royal oxen were led to seven dishes — rice, corn, beans, sesame, grass, water and alcohol — laid out on trays. The rice, corn, beans and sesame represent the harvest — the more the oxen eat the better. If they go for the grass, it predicts illness, while drinking water signals floods and sipping alcohol warns of war. Yesterday the oxen ate only beans and corn, prompting the palace’s chief astrologer Kang Ken to declare that this year the “beans and corn harvests will be bountiful.” The astrologer did not spell out to the crowd the implications for the rice harvest, but some observers voiced concern. “Older people say that when the royal oxen do not eat rice, the harvest will be small,” Svay Sophoan, 56, said.
UNITED KINGDOM
UKIP hopeful suspended
The isolationist UK Independence Party (UKIP) on Tuesday suspended a parliamentary candidate two days before the general election for apparently threatening to shoot a rival. Robert Blay, a candidate for North East Hampshire in southern England, was filmed by the Daily Mirror newspaper insulting Conservative Party rival Ranil Jayawardena and calling him “not British enough.” In the video, Blay said that Jayawardena had been tipped to be the nation’s first Asian prime minister. “If he is, I will personally put a bullet between his eyes,” Blay said. “If this lad turns up to be our prime minister, I will personally put a bullet in him. That’s how strong I feel about it... I won’t have this fucker as our prime minister. I absolutely loathe him.” A UKIP spokesman described Blay’s comments as “abhorrent” and said he had been immediately suspended.
AUSTRIA
‘Tasteless’ Sept. 11 cake
A Vienna baker has stirred up anger by making a cake depicting the country’s main political parties as New York’s former twin towers coming under attack from opposition party aircraft. “It is ironic that a baker has no taste,” wrote one critic on the Web site of the mass-circulation Heute tabloid that highlighted the unusual creation. “I would call this incitement to terrorism,” wrote another. However, baker Thomas Kienbauer on Tuesday defended his work, saying it represented legitimate political commentary. “The cake is supposed to represent the collapse of the ‘grand coalition,’” he told reporters, referring to the center-left Social Democrats and the conservative People’s Party who share power and have dominated post-World War II politics.
GREECE
Dismembered girl ‘lost’
Police on Tuesday said the body of a four-year-old Bulgarian girl believed to have been killed by her father would likely never be found, due to how her killer disposed of her remains. A nationwide hunt for young Anny, reported missing by her 25-year-old mother on April 24, ended on Monday when both her parents were arrested and her father charged with murder and defiling a body. Attica Police Chief Christos Papazafiri said the little girl was dismembered and her remains were dumped in various trash bins in Athens “in a way that it was not possible to determine they were body parts.” Papazafiri said that the child’s body parts had been made to appear like discarded food leftovers.
UNITED STATES
Chronic stowaway caught
A woman notorious for sneaking onto commercial airline flights was arrested at Chicago O’Hare International Airport late last month after she was found in a restricted area without a ticket, police said on Tuesday. Marilyn Hartman, 64, was taken into custody on April 24 after police determined that she had no ticket and no official business or reason to be in the terminal, Chicago Police Department Officer Barri Lemmon said. Hartman, who had been observed loitering near a ticket counter in the airport’s international terminal, was charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass and ordered to appear in court on May 29, Lemmon said. Hartman, a retired legal secretary, has gained attention for hanging around airports without tickets and attempting to board flights. She has been arrested multiple times and sentenced to jail, including last year in California after sneaking onto a Southwest Airlines flight from San Jose to Los Angeles.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema