Global Oddities

Police in southwestern Ohio say a police chief mistakenly shot himself in the thigh after giving his daughter a gun safety lesson.
A police report says 54-year-old Middletown police Chief Greg Schwarber was preparing to clean his Glock .45-caliber pistol on Friday and didn’t realize the gun was still loaded.
The report written by officers from neighboring Monroe says the bullet entered Schwarber’s leg just above the knee.
When officers arrived, they found the chief lying on the floor with a towel covering his leg. Schwarber was taken to a hospital for treatment.
The hospital had no record of Schwarber being treated or admitted. A home phone number for him couldn’t be found.
Source: AP November 29, 2008

An eight-year-old German schoolboy who wanted to complain to his mother about being sent out of class took his teacher’s car and crashed it, police said.

The boy, banished from class for disrupting a lesson, pinched the 40-year-old teacher’s car key when she was not looking and managed to start up her compact car, accelerating and putting the vehicle into first gear.

“The little fellow drove for about 25 m (yards) before crashing into a Volvo, also parked in the car park outside the school,” a police spokesman in the eastern German city of Zwickau said on Thursday.

The boy later told police he had wanted to drive home to his mother to complain about the teacher sending him out of class.

Police estimated he caused 8,000 euros ($10,340) of damage.

Source: Reuters, November 27, 2008

It’s billed as the world’s most expensive, most beautiful new book.

Valued at well over US$100,000, a 28-kilogram handmade tome depicting the life and work of Michelangelo has arrived at the New York Public Library, fresh from publication in Italy.

The velvet-and marble-bound book will go on public display next Tuesday.

It takes six months to make each book, using Italian artisan skills dating to the Renaissance. The copy on display was donated to the library but more than 20 books have been sold.

“I love books,” Marilena Ferrari, the Italian publisher who produced the extravagance, said in a telephone interview from Bologna, Italy, where she’s president of a company called FMR, which publishes fine books about art.

“Books are being destroyed by the Internet, they’re losing their identity – it’s the modern, Internet version of burning books,” she said. “Today, things last so little before they disappear. ”

The book, titled “Una Dotta Mano” or “the learned hand,” has a front cover made of white marble from Michelangelo’s favourite quarry, in Carrara. The binding is covered with a red silk velvet handmade by the same Italian shop that made the main stage curtains at The Metropolitan Opera and Milan’s Teatro Alla Scala.

The book is filled with photographs of Michelangelo’s drawings and sculptures. The text is by Michelangelo biographer Giorgio Vasari, with essays by the director of the Vatican Museums, Antonio Paolucci.

Source: AP November 27, 2008

A controversial pastor who claimed he could give infertile couples “miracle babies” is a step closer to extradition on child abduction charges.

Two High Court judges have refused to give Gilbert Deya permission to appeal to the House of Lords against the order to extradite him to Kenya.

Mr Deya, the self-proclaimed bishop of a church in Peckham, South London, says he faces torture in his native Kenya.

The Kenyan government alleges he stole five children between 1999 and 2004.

Deya’s lawyers argued his case should be certified as one raising issues of general public importance that should be considered by the Law Lords, but this was rejected by Lord Justice Dyson.

Mr Deya has no more avenues of appeal in the UK and his lawyers are considering a last-ditch application to the European Court of Human Rights.

Mr Deya, 55, runs Gilbert Deya Ministries, which claims a UK membership of 36,000.

‘Political vendetta’

The five children that he is accused of stealing have all been taken into care in Kenya.

Police in Nairobi say their investigation revolves around the disappearance of babies from Nairobi’s Pumwani Maternity Hospital and involves suspects in Britain, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya.

In fighting extradition, Mr Deya has argued that he is the victim of a political vendetta in Kenya and said his human rights would be compromised by the poor conditions in a Kenyan prison.

The High Court rejected his fears of ill treatment and accepted the Kenyan government’s assurance that the country’s new coalition government was committed to improving jail conditions.

It refused to certify the case was fit for the House of Lords.

Lord Justice Dyson said the court found it “very difficult to believe Mr Deya would be incarcerated in any prison conditions” which were in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights as his lawyers had argued.

A district judge ordered Mr Deya deported last year, a ruling which was later confirmed by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

Source: BBcC news online. November 27, 2008

A father who got his two daughters pregnant 19 times in a 25-year campaign of sexual abuse has been jailed for life.
The 56-year-old man “took pleasure” in knowing the harm he was doing to his two daughters and threatened them with a “real hiding” if they refused to have sex with him, Sheffield Crown Court heard.
The Recorder of Sheffield, Judge Alan Goldsack, ordered the rapist to serve a minimum of 19 and a half years before being considered for parole.
The defendant made his elder daughter pregnant seven times, fathering two children by her. She bore two other babies but they died the day they were born.
He made his younger daughter pregnant 12 times and she has five surviving children. The man also had a son, who lived with them until his teenage years.
Prosecutor Nicholas Campbell QC said: “All the defendant’s children spoke of his domination over their family life.”
He added: “All the family were frightened of him. When they heard his car pulling up outside the house, the children and their mother ran to their respective rooms.
“His son described him as having a Jekyll and Hyde personality and that his dad had a one-second fuse and that he could flip and turn just with the click of his fingers.”
Mr Campbell said the daughters were raped every three days at times, adding: “One sister would babysit the other children while the other was being raped.
“One of them did try to offer him £100 a month to stop and paid it from her child benefit. That went on for two to three months.”
The daughters gave their father as much whisky as he wanted in the hope he would drink himself to death.
But it was not until last summer that the younger daughter managed to flee her father’s grasp.
The defendant, from Sheffield, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted 25 rapes and four indecent assaults last month.
He has been compared with the Austrian rapist Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter locked in a dungeon for 24 years as he fathered seven children with her.
Source: ITN, November 25, 2008

A Japanese man upset by the death of his pet turned himself in after fatally stabbing a bureaucrat and his wife, Japanese police and media said on Sunday.
Police were searching the house of a 46-year-old man who said he murdered a former vice minister for health and welfare, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department said.
Kyodo news said the man also admitted to the fatal stabbing of the 66-year-old bureaucrat’s wife, although the police spokesman was unable to confirm that.
Takehiko Yamaguchi and his 61-year-old wife, Michiko, were found dead at their home with stab wounds to the chest on Tuesday, Kyodo News said.
Also Tuesday, the wife of another former health and welfare bureaucrat was seriously stabbed at the entrance to her home by a man pretending to be making a delivery, domestic media reported.
Her husband, who had also been vice minister, was not home at the time, according to media reports.
Japanese police and media originally believed the stabbings may have been a backlash against former employees of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, due to widespread resentment over the government’s handling of the national pension system.
However, the man who turned himself in to police said he was upset over the death of a pet, Kyodo said.
“I was angry because my pet was killed in a public welfare center,” Kyodo quoted the man as saying.
The police spokesman could not confirm the comment, but did say the found “several” survival knives after searching his car.

Source: Reuters, November 24, 2008

Hiroshi Nohara is on a layover at the Mexico City airport.

It has lasted almost three months and he has no plans to leave.

For reasons he can’t explain, the Japanese man has been in Terminal 1 of the Benito Juarez International Airport since Sept. 2, surviving off donations from fast-food restaurants and passengers and sleeping in a chair.

At first, he frightened passengers and airport authorities asked the Japanese Embassy to investigate why the foul-smelling man refused to leave. Now, he’s somewhat of a celebrity, capturing Mexico’s collective imagination with nearly daily television news reports on his life at the food court.

Tourists stop to pose with him for photographs or an autograph.

The Tokyo native flew into Mexico with a tourist visa and a return ticket home but he never left the airport. In an interview Thursday alongside the airport McDonald’s, he said he had no motive for his extended stay and doesn’t know how much longer he’ll remain.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” he said through a visiting interpreter originally hired by a television station.

“I don’t have a reason.”

The embassy can’t force him to leave and since Nohara’s visa is valid all Mexican officials can do it wait for it to expire in early March.

During his stay, Nohara’s wiry goatee has grown into a scraggly mass. His red-tinted hair is speckled with dust and dandruff and his cream-coloured jacket and fleece blanket are dingy with overuse. He smells like he hasn’t had a shower in months.

“He’s a calm person, a nice man,” said Silvia Navarrete del Toro, an airport janitor.

“He just sits here and eats all day.”

Various stalls in the food court give Nohara free snacks and drinks, sometimes even throwing in hats or coffee mugs with store logos for free publicity during his frequent television appearances.

Strangers often buy him pastries or hamburgers; he prefers the latter.

He sits with the interpreter, talking and laughing for hours, at a small table covered with cups of cold coffee, packets of ketchup and sandwiches wrapped in foil.

Stroking his facial hair, Nohara said the 2004 film “The Terminal,” starring Tom Hanks as an Eastern European man stuck in a New York City airport, was not his inspiration. But he acknowledged the similarities.

“My life,” he joked, “is ‘The Terminal 2.”‘

Source; AP, November 21, 2008

Police in Ohio have arrested a 68-year-old woman on a bank robbery charge — and they want to know if she’s the so-called “Granny Robber” they’ve been seeking since last May.

Police in the southwest Ohio town of Franklin say a woman handed a note to a teller in a Huntington Bank branch Friday and made off with an undisclosed amount of money.

Officers said Barbara Joly of Middletown was arrested a short time later and they say she fit the description of the woman who robbed the bank.

Investigators say Joly had sunglasses and a scarf with her.

They won’t say if those items were worn by the robber in Friday’s bank holdup, but that is how an older woman was dressed during four bank robberies in the area since May.

Source: AP November 22, 2008

An Australian mayor who invited ugly women to move to his outback mining town, saying even they would find a man there, has won the top “award” for the most sexist public comment of the year.

Mayor John Moloney of remote Mount Isa was chosen by the volume of boos, jeers and stamping of feet that greeted his nomination at the annual women-only Ernie Awards in the New South Wales parliament on Thursday night.
Moloney won the Golden Ernie for telling a newspaper that his town, where men vastly outnumber women, was a place for “ugly ducklings to flourish into beautiful swans.”
He called on “beauty-disadvantaged” women to flock there, saying he often saw unattractive women in Mount Isa who looked like they were enjoying life in the northwestern Queensland town.
“Quite often you will see walking down the street a lass who is not so attractive with a wide smile on her face,” he said.
“Whether it is recollection of something previous or anticipation for the next evening, there is a degree of happiness.”
He later told national radio that obese women could even lose weight under the gaze of Mount Isa males.
“There’s a great incentive because there’s that much attention focused on them and they become interested in looking better — and in no time they just shed it.”
Confronted by a protest by scores of insulted Mount Isa women, he said: “The protesters are blaming me for their looks.”
An unrepentant Moloney told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Friday that news of his remarks had sparked interest in Mount Isa among women internationally.
“I had a lot of email responses from women around the world who wanted to come to Mount Isa and no doubt some of those people have come to Mount Isa and found the happiness they sought,” he said.

Source: AFP, Nov 21, 2008

Thieves have stolen the remains of a billionaire who died in 2006 from his vault in southern Austria, moving granite slabs to reach his coffin.
Police believe they must have used heavy lifting gear to remove the coffin of German-born Friedrich Karl Flick in the town of Velden, Carinthia.
Flick, who ran a German industrial empire and owned Austria’s largest private forest, died at the age of 79.
Austrian media have speculated that his body was stolen for ransom.
It is believed that the theft was committed at the weekend but news of the crime only emerged in recent days.

The coffin was reportedly made from solid zinc and weighed more than 200kg (441lb). The grave-robbers also had to remove heavy granite slabs to break into the tomb.
The late billionaire’s father was Friedrich Flick, a German industrialist convicted at Nuremberg of employing slave labour in his armaments factories in Nazi Germany. He served three years in prison before emerging to rebuild his business.
His son, Friedrich Karl Flick, steered the family concern after his father’s death in 1972.
He was listed by Forbes magazine shortly before his own death in 2006 as one of the world’s 100 richest people.

Source: BBC news online, November 20, 2008