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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion