Man finds woman living in wardrobe
May 31, 2008 | 3 Comments
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The 57-year-old man who lives alone - or so he thought - in the western city of Fukuoka installed a security camera and called the police when he saw images of someone walking around his home while he was out.
“We searched the house in the man’s presence. We found the woman in the closet,” said a local police spokesman.
The woman, named as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found in a flat storage space only just big enough for a person to squeeze into lying down.
She had sneaked a mattress and several plastic bottles into the cubby hole, police said, adding that the women had been arrested.
“She told police that she had nowhere to live,” the spokesman said.
“She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time.”
It is unclear how she managed to enter the home undetected. Police suspect she might have been closet-hopping, moving from house to house.
Giant crane plummets into New York street
May 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A LARGE crane has collapsed in New York, killing two people and damaging an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side just a day after city officials investigated the crane’s operations.
The crane operator and another construction worker died in the collapse shortly after 8am local time (10pm AEST), a third worker was seriously injured and a pedestrian received minor injuries, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and police said.
Mr Bloomberg said the top section of the crane broke off and smashed into an apartment building called The Electra, which is more than 20 floors high, on 91st Street and First Avenue. “We don’t know why it snapped off and we will certainly do an investigation,” he said.
The crane was being used to build a 32-storey apartment building across the street. Mr Bloomberg said seven buildings had been evacuated while the stability of the crane section still standing was checked.
Television footage showed part of the crane in a crumpled mess in the street and a corner apartment at the top of The Electra that had been demolished. Balconies had also been ripped from apartments on The Electra as the crane fell.
New York City’s Department of Buildings visited the site yesterday after receiving a complaint about the crane hoisting over the street, which is a building code violation, said acting buildings commissioner Robert LiMandri.
“Yesterday’s investigation was about an inspection about hoisting over the street, not about the crane and the way it was installed,” he said.
The crane, owned by New York Crane Corp, was being used by DeMatteis Organisations to build the Azure apartment building, LiMandri said. The company is also building the US mission to the UN across the road from the UN headquarters.
In March, a giant crane fell and crushed a residential building in midtown Manhattan, killing seven people and injuring more than 10 others. Last October, a crane dropped a container of debris from the 53rd floor of a skyscraper near Times Square, injuring several people.
The accidents could further dampen the multibillion-dollar Manhattan real estate industry, which already is suffering a downturn from the credit crisis.
New building regulations added as a result of the latest crane accident could increase the time it takes to build, he said. Following the March accident all tower cranes were inspected and the buildings department said an inspector had to be on-site whenever a tower crane was raised or lowered.
Mr Bloomberg told local radio that public safety was top priority and that the city would not “tolerate any rate of accidents higher than it has to be”.
“This is just unacceptable,” he said. “The public walking by shouldn’t be at risk.”
Space station toilet broken
May 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
So NASA may order an in-orbit plumbing service to call when the space shuttle Discovery visits next week.
Until then, the three-man crew will have to make do with a jerry-rigged system when they need to urinate.
While one of the crew was using the Russian-made toilet last week, the toilet motor fan stopped working, according to NASA. Since then, the liquid waste gathering part of the toilet has only been working on-and-off.
Fortunately, the solid waste collecting part is functioning normally.
Russian officials do not know the cause of the problem and the crew has been unable to fix it. The crew has used the toilet on the Soyuz return capsule, but it has a limited capacity.
They are now are using a back-up bag-like collection system that can be connected to the broken toilet, according to NASA public affairs officials.
“Like any home anywhere, the importance of having a working bathroom is obvious,” NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said.
The seven-year-old toilet has broken once before but not for a long time, said Johnson Space Centre spokeswoman Nicole Cloutier in Houston.
Discovery is already set for launch on Saturday with a planned docking with the space station on Monday.
Cloutier said NASA officials were considering having parts flown to Cape Canaveral and placed in the shuttle during its countdown, an unusual and delicate situation.
Because the shuttle’s payload weight is limited and balance carefully calculated, it will be tricky to try to figure out where the parts can go, a Kennedy Space Centre spokesman said.
Discovery’s main payload, a 14,515kg Japanese laboratory addition, is so big that the shuttle’s boom sensor system had to be removed to make room for the lab.
Dunkin Donuts axes terror symbol ad
May 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
DUNKIN’ Donuts has axed an online advertisement featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray over a fringed black-and-white scarf that critics said offered symbolic support for Muslim extremism and terrorism.
In the ad, Ray wears the scarf around her neck and holds an iced coffee.
US critics, including conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, complained that the scarf looked similar to the black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf, the Associated Press reported.
The kaffiyeh “has come to symbolise murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularised by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons,” Ms Malkin said.
Dunkin’ Donuts said the scarf had a paisley design, and was selected by a stylist for the advertising shoot.
“Absolutely no symbolism was intended,” the company said.
But the Dunkin’ Donuts ad was pulled because “the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee,” the Associated Press reported.
Ms Malkin later said it was “refreshing to see an American company show sensitivity to the concerns of Americans opposed to Islamic jihad and its apologists”.
Serial killer couple given life sentences
May 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A FRENCH court has given life sentences to self-confessed killer Michel Fourniret and his wife Monique Olivier in one of the worst serial murder cases in recent French history.
The couple showed no reaction after the court in northern France found Fourniret, dubbed the “Ogre of the Ardennes”, guilty of killing and raping or attempting to rape seven women and girls aged between 12 and 22 from 1987.
The case, among the most gruesome seen in France since World War Two, helped lead to a shake-up of the way French police investigate serial murders including better coordination between different authorities.
Fourniret, 66, will be able to seek a reduced sentence, according to very strict conditions, but only after serving 30 years in jail. Given his age, he is unlikely to ever walk free.
Olivier, 59, must spend at least 28 years in jail for the part she played in some of the murders and a rape, the court said.
Fourniret, who admitted to his crimes, operated mostly in the heavily wooded Ardennes region of northern France and in Belgium.
His wife was accused of helping him to select his victims, capture them and hide their bodies.
The judge gave the verdict one day after the jury retired to make their conclusions.
The emotionally-charged trial, which has seen harrowing details splashed all over the newspapers and shocked the country, has raised serious questions over the functioning of the country’s judicial system.
The couple, linked by what prosecutors called a “criminal pact”, became acquainted after Fourniret placed an advertisement for someone to write to while serving a prison sentence for sex crimes in the 1980s.
He has a long history of rape.
A series of mishaps and lost opportunities to catch the criminals included the failure to launch an inquiry into the disappearance of the couple’s first victim in 1987, Isabelle Laville, despite the police lodging a kidnap report.
At the time, Fourniret, who had just been released from prison and was technically on probation, was living just a few kilometers away from the place Laville disappeared.
“There was a lost opportunity to identify the Fournirets,” said Alain Behr, a lawyer for Laville’s family.
The system also failed to revoke a decision to discharge Fourniret following appearances for numerous offenses in the 1990s, allowing the couple to continue carrying out their crimes over 16 years.
Psychologists who examined the couple have said they were not insane and were slightly above average in intelligence. The specialists concluded that the self-obsessed, authoritative Fourniret took a sadistic pleasure in rape and murder.
In addition to the murders for which he has been sentenced, Fourniret is suspected by police of a number of other killings including that of 20-year-old Briton Joanna Parrish in 1990, raising the specter of further possible trials.
Fourniret, who has said he was fascinated by virgins, was arrested in Belgium in 2003 after one of his prospective victims escaped and called the police.
