Coffin Conversations - by dementia

Philippine police chased down an unfit thief on Tuesday after he ran out of breath and asked his pursuers for a "time out."

"He was panting and gasping for air when we caught up with him after a 500 meter sprint," Erwin Buenceso, one of the arresting officers, told local radio station dzBB.

Buenceso said the man and an accomplice broke into a house in the Philippine capital and stole two expensive mobile phones. Screams from the residence alerted a local police patrol, which gave chase.

The robber asked for a "time out" using hand signals.


After he regained his composure, police seized the two stolen phones and brought him to a station for questioning

A Japanese man who set a world record by wolfing down dozens
of hot dogs within minutes has suffered a severe jaw injury due to his
rigorous training, making his next title uncertain.

Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi said he can only open his mouth to make a gap the
size of a fingertip after being diagnosed with jaw arthritis.

In an entry on his blog entitled "Occupational hazard," Kobayashi said: "My
jaw refused to fight any more."

The injury occurred only a week after the slender 29-year-old started
training to win his seventh straight title at the annual July 4 Nathan's

Famous hot dog eating event on New York's Coney Island.

"I feel ashamed that I couldn't notice the alarm bells set off by my own
body," he said. "But with the goal to win another title with a new record, I
couldn't stop my training so close to the competition.

"I was continuing my training and bearing with the pain but finally I
destroyed my jaw."

Kobayashi, who has become a niche celebrity in Japan and the United States,
had already halted his competitive eating activities for several months due
to mourning after his mother's death earlier this year.

But he said he still wanted to go to the competition in New York.

"I want to be the pride of my mother," he said in the blog entry posted
Sunday.

Last year, Kobayashi put down a world-record 53 and three-quarters hot dogs
in just 12 minutes.

In addition to the Nathan's Famous titles, he holds world records for
scoffing cows' brains and rice balls.

In 2004, he founded the United Food Fighters Organisation in hopes of making
people take competitive eating seriously as a sport.

Despite Japanese people's reputation as moderate eaters, Kobayashi helped to
turn competitive eating into a television sensation with "food fighters"
downing everything from sushi to cakes.

But Japanese television began to shy away from such contests after a
14-year-old junior high school student choked to death in 2002 trying to
imitate competitive eating during school lunch.

Mexico's gruesome drug war and its hundreds of executions a year are the inspiration for an art exhibit of red-splattered blankets meant to represent shrouds used by hitmen to dispose of their victims.

Rosa Maria Robles has laid tattered blankets, some of them with bits of plastic tape stuck to them, on floors in a museum in Sinaloa, a rural northern state that has long been a hotbed of drug smuggling and gangland murder.

Organized criminals in Mexico often cover the corpses of their victims, hands taped together and shot in the head, with a blanket before dumping them on quiet roads or abandoning them in the trunk of a car.

Robles exhibit, called the "Red Carpet" and open since May, had included blankets from actual crimes, complete with real blood, museum curator Rosa Maria Hass told Reuters.

"We decided to hand them over to the attorney general's office for investigation," Hass said, adding the artist has refused to say where she got them.

Evening news programs in Mexico regularly show images of forensic investigators photographing bodies draped in bloodied covers and the verb "to blanket" has taken on new meaning.

Another part of Robles' exhibition draws attention to beheadings, increasingly used by drug gangs to terrorize rival groups and even the army.

The government has sent the army to hotspots across Mexico to dismantle smuggling cartels battling for lucrative territory along the U.S. border, but there are few signs of improvement.

Four Asians who murdered another Asian and then ate his body were caught when one of their victim's finger was found in the stomach of one during treatment for acute food poisoning, the daily Al-Sharq newspaper said today.

The Qatari newspaper said the four men had to seek emergency hospital treatment after eating part of the corpse, various bits of which, including a finger, showed up on hospital X-rays. The paper did not give the men's nationalities.

It said their victim was also of Asian origin, and that the affair, unprecedented in Qatar, was now in the hands of prosecutors.

Hand-written accounts of the Titanic disaster's aftermath go on sale next week, including log entries describing how bodies of passengers who drowned were buried at sea with 23-kg weights attached.

A Christie's auction of memorabilia from various ocean liners is expected to draw up to US$1 million ($1.3 million).

A ghoulish gravedigger stole a skull from a broken casket in a Massachusetts church cemetery and made an ashtray of it.

Keith Chartrand, of Fitchburg, also took a thighbone to make a pipe, police say.

PATNA, India (Reuters) - Rats are gnawing at beer cans and making holes in caps of whisky bottles stored in police storehouses in eastern India and apparently getting drunk, authorities said on Wednesday.

The rodents' love for liquor has the police department in Bihar state stumped as it tries to store hundreds of bottles seized from illegal sellers from across the state in Patna, the state capital, said Kundan Krishnan, a senior officer.

People can develop intimate, romantic relationships with objects (beyond mere fetishism, which produces only short-term arousal), according to one of Germany’s most renowned sexologists, Volkmar Sigusch, interviewed for a May report in Der Spiegel. A reporter claimed to find individuals infatuated with a Hammond organ (and who feared infidelity when a technician performed repairs), New York City’s Twin Towers (whose lover bathed with a miniature version), and the Berlin Wall (which a woman ceremoniously “married” in 1979 and legally changed her name in acknowledgment). Sigusch said this objectophilia was another indication of society’s increasing “neo-sexuality.”

Donald Stephens spent more than half a century at the helm of this Chicago suburb. Now, less than two months after his death, some say an eerie likeness of the late mayor’s face has appeared in the peeling bark of a 50-foot sycamore.

The image is fueling speculation and wonder in the village of 4,200 residents — the town Stephens is credited with transforming from a tiny enclave of just a few dozen people to a bustling community with one of the nation’s largest convention centers.

Officers seized more than 100 pet rats, dozens of rabbits and other animals including several birds from the home of an 81-year-old woman, who was later treated at a hospital for what appeared to be bites, authorities said.

“The woman had no food in the house for herself and seemed disoriented,” said Annette Ramirez, an officer with the city’s Animal Services Department. “Her arms were covered with open wounds apparently caused by animal bites.”

A Montana judge quoted 42 Beatles songs in sentencing a beer thief.

Andrew McCormack, 20, had said, "Like the Beatles say, 'Let it Be,' " when Judge Gregory Todd asked him what his sentence should be.

A radio listener helped save a disc jockey who suffered an on-air seizure and pleaded for help before passing out in his studio.

WOHS DJ Tim Biggerstaff, who has suffered from diabetes since childhood, has always been candid about his health. When he felt a seizure about to strike, he called out to his listeners.

Marilyn Manson wears his leather trousers for days on end - only removing them to have sex.

Firefighters in a Cleveland suburb have been ordered to cut grass and trim shrubs when they're not busy battling blazes.

"We have 54 firefighters, and they have a lot of downtime," said East Cleveland, Ohio, Mayor Eric Brewer. "Instead of sitting around the station, they'll be assisting us as we beautify the city."

Police in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, are investigating claims that an eight-year-old boy has killed in cold blood three babies — including his eight-month-old sister and nine-month-old cousin.

The case came to light when a mother could not find her six-month-old daughter after leaving her asleep at a school in Musahari village. After a police search the child’s body was found buried nearby.

(Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Four men are accused of drugging, raping and then injecting their male victims with their own HIV-infected blood Dutch police have announced.

Police said that two of the men have confessed.

German police came up short of stopping a kidnapping when they discovered the "boy" reported to have been thrown into the trunk of a car was actually a dwarf mechanic.

The dwarf, Klaus "Shorty" Mueller, had climbed into the trunk and asked to be driven around so he could find out where a rattling noise was coming from.