Burglar made to clean up at gunpoint
October 22, 2007 | Leave a Comment
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A burglar in Montgomery chose the wrong family to mess with, literally. Adrian and Tiffany McKinnon returned home on Tuesday after a week away to find that thieves had emptied almost everything the family of five owned, Tiffany McKinnon said through tears.”Tears just rolled down my face as I walked in and saw everything gone and piles of trash all over my home,” she said.
Adrian McKinnon sent his wife to see her sister while he inspected the piles left behind. As he walked back into the sunroom, a man walked through the back door straight into him, Tiffany McKinnon told the Montgomery Advertiser in a story Thursday.
“My husband Adrian caught the thief red-handed in our home,” she said. “And what is even crazier, the man even had my husband’s hat sitting right on his head.”
Adrian McKinnon held the suspect, 33-year-old Tajuan Bullock, at gunpoint and told him to sit on the floor until he decided what to do.
“We made this man clean up all the mess he made, piles of stuff, he had thrown out of my drawers and cabinets onto the floor,” Tiffany McKinnon said.
When police arrived, Bullock complained about being forced to clean the home at gunpoint.
“This man had the nerve to raise sand about us making him clean up the mess he made in my house,” she said. “The police officer laughed at him when he complained and said anybody else would have shot him dead.”
Dumbledore gay - outed by Rowling
October 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
HARRY Potter author JK Rowling has confirmed what fans have long suspected - the principal of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, is indeed gay.Rowling outed the headmaster at a sell-out appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York. After a brief reading from the final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Rowling took questions from the audience.
When a young fan asked if Dumbledore would find “true love”, Rowling answered: “Dumbledore is gay”.
The outing was greeted with gasps, then applause from the crowd, the Associated Press has reported.
Speculation on Dumbledore’s sexuality has been rife on Potter fan sites, after it was noted that Dumbledore had no female love interest, but that he did have a mysterious past.
Rowling revealed that Dumbledore was still smitten with evil wizard Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated in battle.
“Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling explained, defending Dumbledore’s taste in men.
She said Dumbledore had been “horribly, terribly let down” and that his doomed love for Grindelwald was his “great tragedy”.
She told the crowd that a reference to a woman whom Dumbledore had once been interested in was removed from the script for the sixth film - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - after a discreet word in the director’s ear.
“Fan fiction” had already been produced involving explicit scenes with Dumbledore. The scenes have not evaded Rowling’s notice.
“Oh, my god, the fan fiction,” she said with a laugh.
Australian cemetery workers trained for life saving
October 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment
An Australian cemetery is training gravediggers as lifesavers and has installed a defibrillator to jumpstart the hearts of grief-stricken mourners who regularly collapse at funerals.
“A lot of people who die are old, so the people who come to the services are frail and they are vulnerable anyway, and the additional stress of a funeral tips them over the edge,” Vicki Pridmore, chief executive of Melbourne’s Cheltenham cemeteries, told local newspapers on Friday.
Pridmore said a family or friend collapsed at a funeral every two months on average, so now gravediggers were being trained to use the new defibrillator.
“We have had a couple recently with strokes and we call the ambulance four or five times a year. Everybody is doing their training,” she said.
An ambulance spokesman said defibrillators, which deliver an electric pulse to an affected heart to restore regular rhythm, not only treated heart attacks, but could also help assess illness for arriving paramedics.
Make sure I’m dead before you bury me
October 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Those were some of the most popular requests by people planning their funerals, according to research by the British charity Age Concern, which promotes the interests of elderly people.
Britain is known for being a nation of animal lovers and it seems Britons cannot bear to be separated from their beloved pets - even when both parties are dead.
Age Concern Funeral Plans polled more than 100,000 of its customers and found that being buried with their pet’s ashes was the most common funeral rite request.
But several top requests suggested many were worried about being buried alive, with those planning their funerals asking to be certified dead, a mirror to be held over their faces to check for vapour signs of breathing, and a mobile phone left in the coffin.
Others were related to appearance, such as being buried naked “as they came into the world” or with their false teeth in.
Horror writer admits killing, denies cannibalism
October 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment
A Mexican writer suspected of frying and eating pieces of his ex-girlfriend after strangling her has confessed to murdering the woman but denies being a cannibal, a government prosecutor said on Tuesday.Police burst into Jose Luis Calva’s Mexico City apartment last week and found fried human flesh on a dining table set with cutlery. They found more flesh in the refrigerator and an unfinished book by Calvo called “Cannibal Instincts.”
The mutilated body of Alejandra Galeana, 32, was in the bedroom closet.
Calva told prosecutors he killed Galeana after an argument, then cut an arm and a leg off of her body so that he could dispense of it in parts.
“He denies having tasted her flesh,” Mexico City’s chief homicide prosecutor Gustavo Salas told reporters. “According to him, he thought it was better to cook the meat so he could feed it to the dogs.”
Prosecutors also suspect Calva of strangling and dismembering two other women in the last two years. One victim, Veronica Martinez, had lived with Calva before her death.
Calva denied any involvement in those crimes.
Galeana’s mother had reported her missing for two weeks and said she suspected her daughter’s former lover was involved.
Calva kept books on black magic and apparently made a living selling his writings on the street. He was injured falling from his balcony when he tried to escape police as they forced their way into his apartment.
Police found copies of the Hannibal Lecter films, which tell the tale of a genius serial killer who eats his victims.
A former girlfriend told police Calva was a jealous, possessive lover who believed in witchcraft and practiced rituals, including hammering a cow’s tongue to a board.
