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January 2011


4 January 2011

Reporting a common sentiment at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, a medical student said: 'The first autopsy is really, really emotional.' In this student's case, there was some added emotion: the classroom full of students reported that they had been shocked to see their former teacher's name on the toe tag of their first corpse. Head of Department Tina Dalianis responded: 'It's terrible, but it's part of education sometimes. Unfortunately, they have to deal with it.'

According to AFP reports, Yulia Peyeva had an idea to lift people's spirits during the holidays. For the last year, her company in eastern Ukraine has offered drinking companions for hire, in addition to more traditional wedding and party planning. Kind Fairy emphasises that it does not provide escort or matchmaking services, and that the service is quite popular among people who need to talk through things with someone but don't want to see a therapist.

About 150 copies of a Chinese translation of Grimm brothers fairy tales had been sold in Hangzhou when publisher Beijing Mediatime started receiving phone calls from purchasers reporting that 'they did not think the book was healthy for children', according to deputy chairman Li Yong. 'Complicated' was the word he used to describe the translation process, which had resulted in, for example, Snow White having sex with all seven dwarves and later catching the eye of a necrophiliac prince.
It then emerged that at least some of the - uncredited - source text was the Japanese erotic reinterpretation The Dreadful Truth of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Local media supply excuses for the gaffe from another executive with the company: those selecting the material for translation didn't speak Japanese, and 'we trusted the translator, who is a postgraduate student'.

A police report in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, states that officers were called to a law office in response to 'a report of a naked postal carrier in the building's hallway'. Later, postman David A. Goodman, 52, explained that a woman on his rounds had seemed 'stressed out' and that, to cheer her up, he offered to arrive naked next time. He took her response as a dare to do so. She wasn't happy with the result, and he returned 20 minutes later, fully clothed, to apologise. After his arrest for lewd and lascivious behaviour, Goodman admitted that delivering mail while naked probably wasn't a good idea.

An Oklahoma woman told the police that her 18-year-old daughter had advertised child-minding services on the Craigslist Web site. When a 'David' asked her to watch his 19-year-old autistic son at her home, the older woman took on the job herself. She did feel uncomfortable with the young man becoming sexually aroused when she cleaned him during nappy changes, and with him grabbing her daughter's chest but tried not to let these things bother her.
Eventually, however, it became clear that this man was 'David', or 21-year-old Mark Anthony Richardson, Jr, and that he had pretended to be autistic for what he later admitted was a 'sexual purpose'. At least one other child-minder had fallen for his tricks.
Richardson has been charged with felonious sexual battery (for the breast-grabbing) and seven counts of misdemeanour outrage to public decency (for seven nappy changes).

Alabama's Gadsden Times reports that four armed men robbed a bank and left the scene. They then switched from their getaway car to another vehicle, to throw officers off their scent. Cherokee County Sheriff Jeff Shaver says that officers nonetheless worked out where they were: heading down a state highway at speed in a red Nissan Maxima with banknotes flying out the window. In the ensuing chase, the car ended up crashing, and all of the suspects were arrested. Dogs found one of them hiding in a garbage can.

Harold Lee, a 75-year-old farmer in Somerset, was moving his herd of 100 dairy cows along the side of a small road for milking when he died as a result of careless driving. At fault, according to Exeter Crown Court, was Julian Lawford, a 49-year-old fireman. He approached the cows from behind and his siren caused the startled cows to trample their owner to death.

In Japan, officers stopped motorcyclist Yoshitsugu Yamagami, 54, at a speed trap and showed him the incriminating printout from the radar gun. He decided that he couldn't be fined in the absence of evidence, so he tore off the note and ate it. He allegedly then asked: 'Without the paper, you can't prove my speeding, can you?'.
After his arrest for obstructing officers in their duties and destroying an official document, he called his action stupid.

Two things happened while an Auburn, Washington, police officer was driving into the police station car park. He heard dispatchers relay a call concerning the theft of a television set from the back of a delivery truck, and he saw a man in full camouflage fatigues walk past with a shopping trolley containing a 50-inch television set.
The officer asked the man, 22-year-old Johnathan D. Barnes, what he was doing. Barnes replied that he'd bought the item from a friend. He then took off running, and the officer arrested him.

Even less successful in their theft of a television set were burglars who entered a Sacramento home, removed a television set, and tried to cram it into their Lexus. They eventually gave up and drove off, leaving the television on the kerb. A neighbour reported the incident to the police, who traced the car to a 19-year-old man. He was arrested, and two accomplices are still at large.

Connecticut's Deane Moss sold classic cars and other items from the outbuildings behind his residence. He made $18,000 by doing this. This did not please his landlord, who was the owner of the 1940 Ford Coupe and the other items, valued at $265,000. Moss later explained to the police that he has a chemical imbalance that made him think he owned the house and the storage areas, which his lease clearly designated as off limits.

The police spokesman in Gorj, Romania, told AFP that a teenaged burglar was caught because of his mobile phone. The homeowners, a couple in their 70s, 'were resting on the bed when the phone rang. They realised that someone else was in the room, as they have no phone.' It was an 18-year-old neighbour who faces up to seven years in jail. The police reported that this is the second time the young man had tried to rob his neighbours.

Michigan computer technician Leon Walker accessed his wife Clara's Gmail account and thus found out that she had been having an affair with her second husband. He forwarded the relevant messages to her first husband, the father of her young boy. Leon explained that Clara's second husband had once been arrested for beating her in front of the boy.
When she found out about her husband's snooping, Clara filed for divorce. Leon has now been charged with felonious hacking and could face up to five years in prison.

19 January 2011

A 20-year-old woman in Finland complained about her doctor using an old 'diagnostic trick' traditionally applied by midwives. The man had sucked on her nipple during an ultrasound breast exam. The doctor has now been fined 80 days' salary, after two lower courts' judgement that this act was non-sexual in nature.

Reuters reports that a pair of drug addicts broke into a home in Silver Springs Shores, Florida, and began snorting the stash they found within. However, what they had snorted was in reality the cremated remains of the homeowner's two Great Danes. When caught in connection with another burglary, later in the week, five teenagers explained that, upon recognising the urn-related mistake, they'd considered returning the two urns but, worried about fingerprints, had thrown them in a lake.
Police divers are searching the lake, and the teens have been jailed on a range of charges, according to sheriff's office spokesman Judge Cochrane.

William Pace was suspicious when a man in Boston, Massachusetts, approached him at a supermarket and offered to sell him gold jewellery. It is unclear which contributed more to his scepticism: Pace's job as police chief in the town of Randolph or his experience at the jewellery shop he owns.
Johnnie Butts, the man trying to sell fake gold, is being charged with attempted larceny.

A pregnant woman drove herself to the hospital in Lowell, Massachusetts, where the valet told her she wasn't allowed to park right outside the emergency room. She handed this uniformed man her keys and rushed inside.
The hospital does not have a valet service, and the miscreant remains at large. The car was later found abandoned.

In Green Bay, Wisconsin, a woman opened a gift her children had bought for her at a department store. While pleased with the hoover, she was puzzled by the illegal drugs alongside the machine in its box. Police lieutenant David Poteat explained that smugglers probably had added the shrink-wrapped kilo each of cocaine and crystal methamphetamine before the refurbished vacuum-cleaner left the Juarez, Mexico, repair facility. An investigation is in progress.

A wanna-be thief in Cologne, Germany, used a lift's emergency telephone to report: 'This sounds really dumb, but I'm afraid that we wanted to break in and the lift has become stuck.'
When officers arrived at the office building in question, they freed the two men, ages 31 and 37, then arrested them.

A neurosurgeon in Nagoya, Japan, opened the skull of an 80-something-year-old man who had arrived as an urgent case from another hospital. Not finding the expected pooling of blood, he quickly closed the hole and worked out that he had been looking at the wrong side of the x-ray film just before surgery. One symmetric hole later, on the correct side; the man was on his way to recovery. The hospital apologised to him, and he is not seeking compensation.

A Canadian man woke early in the morning when someone opened the door to his flat in Victoria. The someone was a woman, who proceeded to remove her clothes and climb into his bed.
The man rang the police while the intruder slept off her long Friday evening. It turned out that she'd had the right flat number but the wrong floor. Her flat could be identified by the handbag, shoes, and jacket beside the door.
The woman was taken into custody and held until sober.

Sisters Gladys and Jamie Scott were serving a life sentence for an armed carjacking that had netted them $11. The governor of Mississippi has offered them a deal, however: he would arrange for their release if Gladys, 36, were to donate a kidney to her sister, who requires dialysis, paid for by the state. Gladys said, after the pair were released, that she'd have been a willing donor anyway.

Terry Allen Lester is a 37-year-old Minnesota man who'd had two failed romantic relationships. When he moved house and left some Christmas presents and bags of other items behind, his room-mates felt uncomfortable. This was partially because the items included sex toys and gunpowder, and partially because he had told them that he planned to give his ex-girlfriends a Christmas gift: vibrators that would explode.
A bomb squad confirmed that one of the vibrators in the abandoned bags was a homemade explosive device and that there were materials for making more. Lester has been arrested.

Kevin Jaycob Slagter dropped his mobile phone, so, when police officers showed up at his home in Edgewater, Florida, to return it, he figured that he was in luck. The 32-year-old Slagter confirmed that the phone was his and soon was confirming that he had burgled the property where he'd dropped it, as well as 10 other properties.

There were three warrants out for the arrest of Jonothan Ray Gonsalez. Therefore, at a routine traffic stop in Montana, he supplied a false name: Timothy Michael Koop, Jr. There were outstanding warrants for Koop too.
After Gonsalez shared his real name, a charge of making a false report was added to his rap sheet, along with a charge related to the methamphetamine he was carrying at the time of his arrest.


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© 2011 Anna Shefl