NORWAY
Fisherman trawls sex toy
An unexpectedly sexy catch ended up in the net of a fisherman, who said on Friday that he had landed a cod with a dildo in its stomach. Bjoern Frilund, 64, this week found a 5 or 6kg cod in his net while fishing for herring on the west coast and noticed the unusual shape of its stomach when he gutted it. “First two herrings came out, and then I found this rubber thing,” he said. Frilund added that, at a guess, the orange-colored sex toy was “15 or 16cm.” “I knew cods swallow pretty much anything, but I couldn’t expect this,” he said. “The odds of something like this happening are the same as being hit by a meteorite in the head.” Frilund thought the cod had mistaken the dildo, which still had its motor, but had no batteries, for a squid. As for its origin, “maybe a frustrated lady threw it overboard from the Coastal Express,” a tourist ship which cruises along the coast, he said.
SOUTH SUDAN
Nile walk hits fourth nation
Close calls with crocodiles and a brutal civil war have not deterred a British man from attempting to walk the length of the Nile River. The year-long, 6,840km journey along the world’s longest river is to take the former British Army captain through seven countries. After four months trekking through Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, Levinson Wood is now in South Sudan, a country with little infrastructure, which has been destabilized by months of fighting between pro- and anti-government forces. The 31-year-old Wood said it took three years to plan the walk from Rwanda to Egypt. Wood said he faces many dangers on the walk from people and beast, but added that past explorers did not have the luxury of a satellite telephone or Google maps.
KENYA
Poaching prompts takeover
The central government says it will oversee the running of the country’s wildlife authority for the next three months in a bid to stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. Richard Lesiyampe of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources said on Friday that six senior Kenya Wildlife officials have been placed on leave to pave the way for investigations into the wildlife service’s operations. Lesiyampe outlined a raft of changes the organization is to undergo in the coming days. Last month, Richard Leakey, a famed scientist and founding head of Kenya Wildlife Service, alleged that the service had been infiltrated by people enriching themselves from poaching. He urged the government to overhaul management at the service. Poachers have killed 18 rhinos and 51 elephants so far this year.
UNITED STATES
Chimps plot zoo escape
Seven chimpanzees used an improvised ladder from a tree to scale a wall and briefly escape their enclosure at the Kansas City Zoo on Thursday, a zoo official said. One of the chimps apparently pulled a log or a branch and leaned it against the wall of the enclosure, giving the primates a leg-up to the top, zoo director Randy Wisthoff said. The animals did not have any contact with zoo visitors, as they escaped into an area reserved for zookeepers, he added. There are 12 chimps in total at the zoo, which was closed after the incident. “We had a ringleader,” Wisthoff said. “He got up on the log and got some others to join him.” Using food to entice them, the zookeepers herded the wayward chimps back into an indoor enclosure. The chimps were on the loose for about an hour.
UNITED STATES
Stiletto killer sentenced
A woman was sentenced to life in prison on Friday for fatally stabbing her boyfriend with the stiletto heel of her shoe, striking him at least 25 times in the face and head. Ana Trujillo was convicted of murder on Tuesday by the same jury for killing 59-year-old Alf Stefan Andersson, a native of Sweden who became a US citizen, during an argument in June last year at his Houston condominium. Defense attorneys argued that Trujillo, 45, was defending herself from an attack by Andersson, who was a University of Houston professor and researcher. Prosecutors said that jurors told them that it was the physical evidence that proved to them this was not self-defense. “She hit him 25 times in the head. That is a hard thing to overcome,” prosecutor John Jordan said.
UNITED STATES
Crash further investigated
The investigation into a fiery crash between a FedEx tractor-trailer and a bus that killed 10 people in northern California, five of them teenage students en route to a college recruitment event, focused on Friday on what caused the truck to veer out of control. A day after the accident, it remained unclear whether the FedEx driver was somehow distracted or lost consciousness, or whether a mechanical failure occurred when his truck swerved across the median of Interstate 5 and slammed head-on into the motor coach full of students from the Los Angeles area. The California Highway Patrol also raised the possibility that a separate collision on the truck’s side of the highway might have been a factor in Thursday evening’s fatal crash. According to early highway patrol accounts of the accident, the truck side-swiped a car after crossing the center divider but before hitting the bus.
UNITED STATES
Ex-marine secretly retried
Iranian-American Amir Hekmati, a former US marine whose previous death sentence in Iran on espionage charges was overturned, has been secretly retried, convicted of collaborating with the US government and sentenced to 10 years in prison, the New York Times reported on Friday, quoting his lawyer. The newspaper quoted lawyer Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei as saying Hekmati, held since 2011, was not told by Iranian officials about the retrial, conviction or prison sentence. The Times quoted Tabatabaei as saying Hekmati was retried by a revolutionary court in December last year and convicted of “practical collaboration with the American government.”
CANADA
Suspended senator to detox
A court on Friday ordered a suspended senator to attend an alcohol and drugs detox program, a day after his arrest for alleged assault. Patrick Brazeau, 39, was taken into custody on Thursday at an Ottawa area residence, and charged with assault, cocaine possession and making death threats. Crown prosecutor Stephanie Robitaille said Brazeau had “specific conditions to respect, one of them is to go to therapy for drug and alcohol problems.” He was also told to respect a curfew from 11pm to 6am. Brazeau was already on bail after being arrested last year for allegedly sexually assaulting his former girlfriend. He and two other lawmakers were suspended from the Senate in November last year after collectively charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for travel and housing expenses in a political scandal that has been a drag on the ruling Conservatives’ popularity. Since being booted from the Senate, Brazeau has been working as the day manager at an Ottawa strip club.
PAKISTAN
Baby accused of murder freed
A lawyer says a judge has freed a nine-month-old boy accused of attempting to murder police in Lahore after police withdrew charges. Lawyer Irfan Tarar says the judge announced the decision after yesterday’s court hearing during which police said it had dropped the charge against the boy. He says police had registered the case against the toddler and his family members without investigating the matter and the judge had sought an explanation. The case highlights the country’s dysfunctional criminal justice system, where even children are not immune from questionable legal decisions. The toddler was brought to court on Friday last week as part of an investigation relating to an incident where residents in his neighborhood clashed with police.
DUBAI
Paramedic dies from virus
The interior ministry says one of its paramedics has died after contracting Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and that five others are also infected. State news agency WAM quoted the ministry on Friday as saying that the victims are all Philippine nationals. It did not provide further details on their identities. It says the five infected paramedics have been placed under quarantine and that people who have recently been treated by them are being checked for infection. The five were found during routine check-ups to have contracted the virus. MERS belongs to a family of viruses known as coronaviruses that include both the common cold and SARS, which killed about 800 people in a global outbreak in 2003. It can cause fever, breathing problems, pneumonia and kidney failure.
GERMANY
Store sorry for Hitler mugs
A furniture store chain has apologized for selling coffee mugs featuring faint portraits of Adolf Hitler it had mistakenly ordered from a Chinese supplier, a news report said on Thursday. The vintage-style ceramic cups feature a faint image of a Nazi-era postage stamp that shows a black-and-white profile of Hitler, postmarked with a swastika stamp, all obscured by other design elements, including a rose and cursive script. The Zurbrueggen furniture chain had ordered a batch of 5,000 mugs and had already sold at least 175 when the mistake was noticed, reported the Neue Westfaelische Zeitung daily from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The owner blamed the “terrible” mistake on “a stupid chain of unfortunate circumstances” involving a Chinese designer who has mistakenly chosen the image of the Nazi leader, the news report said. “No one noticed the problem during unpacking,” the store owner told the newspaper, adding that every customer who had bought a mug would be compensated with a 20 euro (US$27) gift voucher.
UNITED STATES
Croc left outside pet store
Do not shed any tears for a crocodile that was captured wandering outside a pet store at a northern California shopping mall. California Fish and Wildlife officials have taken custody of the croc, are feeding it rainbow trout and will likely donate it to a zoo. Police say the crocodile was apparently left outside the Roseville store by someone who did not want it anymore. The animal had grown to 1.2m, and its jaws had been wrapped shut with heavy-duty tape. There was a note identifying it as a Nile crocodile and requesting someone “call rescue.” Police say no one was hurt on Wednesday when the animal was picked up with the help of a catch-pole typically used to nab stray dogs.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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