Sharks stalk teenage girls
November 23, 2007 | Leave a Comment
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Stranded on a rusty piece of sunken ship, these two teenage girls were forced to watch helplessly as two sharks circled them for 40 minutes off a NSW beach.
The 14-year-olds thought they were going to be fish food as they waited to be rescued at Byron Bay on Wednesday.
The girls, who regularly swim out to the sunken ship known as The Wreck, were horrified to see a shark, followed shortly after by a much larger predator, when they had clambered on to the structure.
“They were right there, we could see them so clearly and fully thought if we lost our balance we were going to be eaten alive by sharks,” a shaken Caitlin Robinson told The Daily Telegraph yesterday.
Caitlin and her friend Jett Coates had swum out to the popular spot which is just 50m off Byron Bay’s main beach and were about to jump back into the water when they noticed a shark.
“We go out there all the time to jump off,” Caitlin, a Byron Bay High School student, said.
“We’ve heard there had been some shark sightings but we thought nothing of it seeing as we hadn’t seen any.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the first shark.”
A nearby surfer heard the girls cry out and attempted to save them but a shark started swimming towards him so he went back to shore to raise the alarm.
As the crying pair sat clinging to each other waiting to be rescued “the worst possible” thoughts entered their minds.
“We were crying and shaking, holding on to to each other so we wouldn’t fall off and thinking about the worst possible scenarios,” Caitlin said.
“It felt like we were stuck in the middle of nowhere because the tide was starting to rise and it was getting pretty windy. The waves were knocking against the wreck.”
She said at one point the smaller shark jumped over part of the wreck, while the larger one - which was “bigger than a Malibu surfboard” - kept swimming beneath them.
“They just kept circling and I was thinking, ‘Do sharks jump?’,” Caitlin said.
After a gruelling 40 minutes on the wreck, lifeguard boats rescued the girls.
“We won’t go back out there in a hurry but we will go back swimming just in shallow water,” she said.
North Region Lifeguard Co-ordinator Steven Leahy said the girls had to wait for help because there are no lifeguard patrols until December 10.
While volunteer lifesavers man the beach on the weekends, there is no one during the week.
“The alarm was raised by police who then contacted volunteers to come and get boats to save them,” he said.
He said there had been 32 shark sightings and one attack in the Byron Bay area in the past six weeks.
Everything from great whites, tiger sharks, makos, bronze whalers and bull sharks had been sighted.
“The water is still warm, there are lot of bait fish close to shore and whales migrating with their calves, which is attracting them,” Mr Leahy said.
Byron Bay woman Linda Whitehurst, 52, thought she was going to die when she was forced to fight off a great white shark at Byron Bay on October 15.
Italian porn star teacher suspended
November 23, 2007 | Leave a Comment
An Italian teacher has been suspended from school because of her extra-curricular activities as a porn star.
The out-of-hours behaviour of Anna Ciriani, who calls herself “Madameweb” in hard-core videos on the internet and at erotic shows, was “not compatible with educational activity”, the head of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia education authority said.
Ms Ciriani, dubbed the “porno-prof” by Italy’s main newspapers, said she never let her hobby get in the way of her teaching.
“My behaviour at school has always been professional and irreproachable,” she was quoted as saying by the AGI agency.
“I am a normal woman, with my family and my work as a teacher. I am (also) looking for transgression and sex.”
Five years ago Ms Ciriani was transferred from her post as teacher of Italian literature in a secondary school in the north-eastern town of Pordenone after students covered the toilets with nude photos of her downloaded from the Internet.
Since then she has been giving evening classes to foreign adult students in a nearby town.
Madameweb’s popularity surged after a video of her shot at the Venus erotica festival in Berlin last month attracted a wide internet following, prompting the authorities to suspend her from teaching altogether.
Mike Tyson sentenced to jail and pink underwear
November 22, 2007 | Leave a Comment
The prison uniform has become all too familiar to Mike Tyson - but not, perhaps, the pink handcuffs and socks.
The final humiliation for the one-time “baddest man on the planet” came yesterday courtesy of Joe Arpaio, the self-styled toughest sheriff in America, who believes pink has a psychological calming effect.
Mr Arpaio, who has vowed to make an example of law-breakers in Phoenix, Arizona, also obliged the former heavyweight boxing champion to wear pink underwear under his prison stripes.
Unsurprisingly, 41-year-old Tyson - who had been jailed for a day after admitting charges of possessing cocaine and driving under the influence - looked anything but amused when he reported to Tent City, an infamous open-air jail near a dog pound and a rubbish dump.
Mr Arpaio said Tyson would be required to serve the full term of his 24-hour sentence, in contrast to recent cases in Los Angeles where celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan have been released from jail after only a few hours.
“We don’t house celebrities for 84 minutes like they do in Hollywood,” Mr Arpaio said, noting that Tyson had ironically given a speech to young offenders at the prison in 1999 to urge them to stay out of trouble.
“Apparently he didn’t listen to his own advice.”
The sentence, on top of 360 hours of community service, followed the fallen fighter’s arrest in his BMW after leaving a nightclub last Christmas.
But it could have been worse.
Had Tyson, who has served prison terms for rape and assault, been jailed for longer he might have had to endure another of Mr Arpaio’s pet punishments - the chain gang.
Meredith Kercher’s Vampire killer Youtube video
November 21, 2007 | 1 Comment
Rudy Hermann Guede, a 20-year-old man of joint Italian and Ivory Coast nationality, has been arrested in connection with the death of Meredith Kercher. He posted this clip on website YouTube nine months ago.
‘Vampire’ suspect in student’s murder arrested
November 21, 2007 | 2 Comments
A fugitive suspect in the gruesome murder of a British exchange student was arrested on a train in Germany overnight after an undercover policeman reportedly befriended the man on Facebook and convinced him to return to Italy.
Rudy Hermann Guede Youtube video here.
Rudy Hermann Guede disappeared soon after Amanda Kercher’s murder in the Italian university town of Perugia, telling friends he was “going dancing in Milan”, The Daily Mail reported.
Detectives reportedly found a bloody fingerprint from Guede on a pillowcase and DNA on toilet paper at the shared house where Ms Kercher’s half-naked body was discovered with her throat slit on November 2.
Before he was arrested, a video — in which twenty-year-old Guede rants in almost incomprehensible English — was posted on YouTube.
Cross-eyed and crazed-looking, Guede says he is a vampire who wants to suck blood.
“I’m from alien earth who must be called human people.
“Oh Mamma. I’m a vampire, I’m Dracula. I’m gonna suck your blood.”
Giacinto Profazio, chief of Perugia’s flying squad, told The Mail officers contacted Guede through Facebook.
“An officer pretended to be a friend of his and over time convinced him to come back to Italy,” said Mr Profazio.
“During his journey he was stopped by an inspector, who found he had no ticket. He tried to bluff his way through, but when police were called his real identity was revealed.”
Guede’s arrest came just hours after an Italian judge ordered the release of a Congolese man held for two weeks on suspicion of involvement in Kercher’s murder.
Diya’s lawyer Carlo Pacelli told AFP his client Patrick Lumumba Diya had no immediate comment for the media, preferring to head straight home to his wife and son in the central Italian city.
Diya, a Congolese immigrant who runs a bar in Perugia, was accused of Kercher’s murder by the victim’s American housemate, Amanda Knox, who worked for him part-time.
Knox and her Italian boyfriend Rafaele Sollecito were arrested along with Diya on November 6, accused of murder and sexual assault.
Early clues implicating Diya included a text message from Knox on the night of the murder reading “See you later,” according to press reports.
Diya told the investigating magistrate he was at his pub Le Chic at the time of the murder, and that the message should not be taken as meaning he was to meet her that night.
