Giant Lego man found in Dutch sea

A giant, smiling Lego man was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort on Tuesday. Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-meter (8-foot) tall model with a yellow head and blue torso. "We saw something bobbing about in the sea and we decided to take it out of the water," said a stall worker. "It was a life-sized Lego toy." A woman nearby added: "I saw the Lego toy floating toward the beach from the direction of England." The toy was later placed in front of the drinks stall.

Crocodile falls 12 floors in escape bid

A crocodile survived a fall from the 12th floor of a Russian apartment block after making an escape bid through a window, emergency services said on Wednesday. Diving out of the window has become a habit for the crocodile, called Khenar, with concerned neighbors saying it was the third time he had used that method to flee, Moskovsky Komsomolets daily reported. The crocodile lost one tooth in the latest fall but was otherwise unscathed, said a spokeswoman for the emergencies ministry in the Nizhny Novgorod region of central Russia. "It seems the owner was not at home when the crocodile came out of the window," she said. Emergency services put the crocodile in a local aquarium to recover from his fall. Within a few hours his concerned owner came to pick him up and the crocodile was last seen lying on the back seat of his owner's car.

Farmer attacks police with muck spreader

A German farmer angry with police for trying to confiscate his tractor wrecked three patrol cars and evaded capture for seven hours before an elite unit managed to arrest him, a police spokesman said Wednesday. The farmer, 53, was pulled over by police for driving his tractor without a license, despite several previous warnings. The officers called in three patrol cars for help before asking the farmer to get out of his vehicle. He refused, and proceeded to ram the cars with his tractor, making full use of its attached muck spreader and hydraulic fork. Officers were only just able to scramble out of harm's way. The farmer then drove into a forest, where he eluded a manhunt involving two helicopters and an armored car for seven hours. He was finally found by an elite police team in a barn on his farm in Lauterbach, in central Germany. "In the countryside we're used to people going at police with muck spreaders, but this was something else," a police spokesman said. The farmer faces charges of assault and resisting police.

Fatter corpses cause hazard for mortuaries

More than two-thirds of Australians living outside major cities are overweight or obese, and extremely obese corpses are creating a safety hazard at mortuaries, according to two studies released Sunday.

 

Nearly three quarters of men and 64 percent of women were overweight in a study of people in rural areas. Just 30 percent of those studied recorded a healthy weight, said research published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

 

"Urgent action is required at the highest level to change unhealthy lifestyle habits by improving diet, increasing physical activity and making our environments supportive of these objectives," wrote the lead researcher, Professor Edward Janus.

 

The figures were much higher than for the general population, where statistics show about 3.2 million of Australia's 21 million people are obese.

 

Meanwhile, pathologists are calling for new "heavy-duty" autopsy facilities to cope with obese corpses that are difficult to move and dangerously heavy for standard-size trolleys and lifting hoists.

 

The bodies presented "major logistical problems" and "significant occupational health and safety issues," according to a separate study, which found the number of obese and morbidly obese bodies had doubled in the past 20 years.

 

Specially designed mortuaries would soon be required if the nation failed to curb its fat epidemic, providing "larger storage and dissection rooms, and more robust equipment," said Professor Roger Byard, a pathologist at the University of Adelaide.

 

"Failure to provide these might compromise the post-mortem evaluation of markedly obese individuals, in addition to potentially jeopardizing the health of mortuary staff."

 

In the past year, there have also been requests for larger crematorium furnaces, bigger grave plots as well as super-sized ambulances, wheelchairs and hospital beds.

 

 

No more crispy duck served at toilets

Food stalls attached to Beijing's public toilets will be removed in good time for next year's Olympics, state media said Saturday. Complaints over toilets with poor sanitation and toilet operators turning them into commercial operations led to the ban, which comes into force in October. "It is not proper to sell soft drinks or snacks right at the toilets," the Beijing News said, citing sources within the Beijing Municipal Administration Commission. "The city authorities also plan to publish a toilet guide, provide toilet information over the telephone and the Internet and erect more road signs to help toilet users." Billboards near toilets will also be banned, Xinhua news agency said. Notoriously polluted Beijing is cleaning up its act before it hosts the Olympics. It has also announced crackdowns on spitting and smelly taxis.

Chicken and rice ends thief's toilet trauma

Dozens of bananas failed to do the trick but an Indian thief has finally produced a gold necklace he had snatched and then swallowed after police fed him a hearty meal of chicken, rice and local bread. Sheikh Mohsin, 35, grabbed the 45,000-rupee ($1,115) necklace from a woman in the eastern city of Kolkata Friday and popped it into his mouth when cornered by police. Officers then fed him 40 bananas over a few hours believing they would act as a purgative, and sat back and waited for results. Mohsin passed an uncomfortable night in jail, but not the piece of jewelry. Police said Sunday he was then given more substantial fare. "Now he wants to go free and doesn't want to even hear about bananas any more," senior officer Gyanwant Singh told Reuters. A tired and rueful Mohsin was, however, staring at 3 years in jail if convicted, Singh added. "Bananas were good enough for another thief who had swallowed an ornament a few months ago, but Mohsin was definitely a tough cookie," said one clearly impressed police constable.

Pencil removed from woman's head after 55 years

A 59-year-old German woman has had most of a pencil removed from inside her head after suffering nearly her whole life with the headaches and nosebleeds it caused, Bild newspaper reported Monday. Margret Wegner fell over carrying the pencil in her hand when she was four. "The pencil went right through my skin -- and disappeared into my head," Wegner told the newspaper. It narrowly missed vital parts of her brain. At the time no one dared operate, but now technology has improved sufficiently for doctors to be able to remove it. Most of the pencil, some three inches long, was taken out in an operation at a private Berlin clinic, but the tip had grown in so firmly that it was impossible to remove.