NEWS 929

A funeral car broke rank mid-procession and sped off toward its passenger’s house – where a squirrel had started a fire.

Friend of the deceased and former Havering councillor Alby Tebbutt, 73, was in the final car of a procession in Brentwood Road in the afternoon of Friday, March 8, when he received an unwelcome phone call.

“I had a fellow in my house putting a new bathroom in,” he told the Recorder. “He had the window open and saw smoke coming out the garage roof.

“So he rang the fire brigade and then rang me.”

Mr Tebbutt initially believed the caller was pulling his leg – but as it dawned on him the fire was no wind-up he realised he had to get home, funeral or no funeral.

“I said to the driver: ‘I’m telling you, my house is on fire. Go left here.’

“The driver said: ‘I can’t go left – I’m in a funeral.’

“I said: ‘Never mind that. Turn left.’”

The driver did as he was bidden and chauffeured the former Tory councillor, along with a number of family members of the deceased, to his Main Road home in Romford – pausing while Mr Tebbutt negotiated his way through a road block set up so the fire brigade could run a hose across the street.

He arrived to find three fire crews battling the flames, which ended up damaging 50 per cent of the garage and costing upwards of £20,000.

But it wasn’t until a fire investigation team pinpointed the cause of the incident that the strangest aspect of the afternoon’s proceedings came to light – the fire had been started by a squirrel.

A fire brigade spokesman said the mischievous rodent had chewed through the cable of a fluorescent light, sparking an electrical fire that quickly spread through the garage.

“It’s nuts to think that squirrels can start fires, but that’s exactly what happened here,” he admitted. “We think it was nesting in the garage and caused the blaze by chewing through some cables.”

Self-proclaimed “animal lover” Mr Tebbutt said he was nearing the end of his tether with the rodents.

“I put nuts out for the birds but the squirrels keep eating them,” he revealed. “Whatever contraption I put up, they seem to beat me. It’s a battle between me and the squirrels.

“I put up with that but now they’ve set my house on fire I’ve decided I’m going to shoot them all.”

Under UK law, it is legal to shoot grey squirrels but illegal to cause them unnecessary pain.

The RSPCA website warns that “squirrels may suffer if the shooting is not accurate”.

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Aishat Maksudova, 56, was attacked outside her sister’s home in Russia’s province of Dagestan in the North Caucasus Mountains.

A lone wolf attacked 56 Aishat Maksudova outside her sister’s home in Russia’s province of Dagestan in the North Caucasus Mountains.

The animal bit the farmer on her arm and her leg and she fell to the ground, crying out for help from other villagers. No one was in earshot. So she reached for an ax she had brought along to repair a fence, and with remarkable aplomb, she hit the wolf over the head several times until his teeth unclenched.

The wolf later died.

Maksudova has become a hero in the Caspian Sea province that lies east of Chechnya. She was still being treated for her wounds Tuesday at a local hospital after last week’s incident. Doctors said she is recuperating well.

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You may suspect she’s taking the piss, but one woman claims she has beaten cancer – by drinking down her own piss.

Carrie Steele had driven her malignant melanoma cancer into remission – which she puts down to her use of alternative therapies – when she was struck by a brain aneurysm in 2006.

But after two years of struggling with painful headaches and fears her cancer would return, in 2008 Carrie had a dream in which she was told to start drinking her own piss.

After researching the idea, she discovered “piss therapy” – and overcame her disgust to begin knocking back a glass of piss every day.

In just 30 days, she claims, the pain she had felt for two years was gone, and she felt much healthier.

And now the 54-year-old, from Colorado, US, chugs down up to five glasses of the stuff each day, and even brushes her teeth with it.

She also uses her piss as a moisturiser, adds it to her bath water, and runs it through her hair to add an extra shine, explaining: “I like warm piss. It’s comforting.”

Despite not taking any medications since 2008, she says she has not suffered from any pain, and her cancer has not returned.

She added: “Sometimes it’s salty, sometimes tastes like plum champagne. Mmm, maybe a little lemony.”

Carrie is such a fan of her smelly habit that she encourages friends and family to try it out, as well as running a YouTube channel and classes to teach people about piss therapy.

Carrie appeared on US TV show My Strange Addiction, where she spoke openly about her unusual love for drinking her own piss.

Following a doctor’s warning that toxic waste in piss could make her ill, she decided to ditch the weird habit – but when her pain returned months later, she soon returned to her miracle cure.

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Submitted by Warpdog

A MAN has been arrested for having sex in a street with a SOFA.

Gerard Streator, 46, was spotted bending over the abandoned yellow settee with his trousers round his ankles.

The hotel worker was seen by an off-duty cop at 11pm “thrusting his hips” against the sofa which was in full view next to the kerb. Nobody was on the “love seat”.

As the officer yelled at him, Streator fled to a nearby apartment block in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

He was later arrested and charged with one count of lewd and lascivious behaviour.

Streator could face up to nine months in jail and a £7,000 fine.

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A man arrested after children found cocaine amongst sweets collected at Halloween has pleaded guilty to possession of drugs.

Two snap bags of the class A drug were identified by the police officer father of children trick-or-treating in Royton, Oldham, Greater Manchester.

Donald Junior Green, 33, told Oldham magistrates he would not knowingly have given drugs to children.

The court heard Green was mortified by his “terrible mistake”.

Green said he handed two packets of what he thought were Haribo sweets to children, who were of primary school age.

He realised his mistake when he put his hand in his pocket and discovered packets of sweets instead of the cocaine, for which he had earlier paid £200.

He said he went out to try to get the drugs back, but he could not find the children.

The court heard the drugs were spotted by the father of three children when they returned home and were dividing up their sweets.

He reported the find to police colleagues and Green was arrested.

Green’s solicitor Steven Sullivan told magistrates: “When he was arrested he justifiably fell upon his sword and was expecting them and knew exactly what it was for.”

He described the mistake to the court as “grossly foolhardy but none-the-less accidental”.

“He did not set out to commit a crime and did try to put it right.”

Green is due to be sentenced later.

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A Norwegian driver who tried to avoid crashing into a moose hit a bear instead, a wildlife official said.

The accident took place on Wednesday night on a rural road 225km (140 miles) north of Oslo, in Hedmark county.

While the driver escaped uninjured, a search party was tracking the bear after finding traces of blood, local wildlife official Svein Erik Bjorke told the Reuters news agency.

“We are currently tracking the bear and we have found traces of blood indicating internal injuries.”

“The driver’s car sustained some damage in the accident. The moose managed to flee the scene unharmed.”

Submitted by Walthamstow Official Tourist Board

A 61-year-old woman Friday attacked another woman with three knives, including a meat cleaver, imbedding a knife point in the victim’s skull and cutting off part of her right ear, police and the victim said.

“The blood was everywhere. I thought I was going to die. I was begging for my life,” said Gina Damiano, 47, assaulted at about 5 p.m. outside the elevator on the 11th floor of Rowan Towers on the 600 block of West State Street.

Damiano sustained no life-threatening injuries and was released after obtaining “numerous stitches” at Capital Health System-Fuld.

Police declined to release the name of the alleged assailant but noted she was taken to the crisis center at Fuld, a unit devoted to the care of the mentally ill.

Both the victim and the alleged assailant have lived at Rowan Towers for at least 20 years and knew each other, according to Damiano.

“I had always been nice to her, even bought stuff for her 16-year-old daughter,” said Damiano, who claims she has no idea why she was attacked.

Damiano recalled that the trouble started while the two rode the elevator upward. The woman, she said, had secreted the knives in a pile of mail she had been carrying.

Suddenly, Damiano said, the assailant turned and began to make a bizarre threat.

“She turned and looked at me and kept saying, ‘You know what time it is, bitch, you know what time it is. You know what these are for’,” Damiano recalled.

“I was begging for my life, saying, ‘Please Miss Pauline, you’re going to kill me,” the victim recalled. “I was finally able to grab her hand, but I already had four deep lacerations in my head and she had taken part of my right ear off. I guess I’ll have to have it reconstructed.”

The irony, Damiano said, is that she does many kindnesses for the young people in her building, including the daughter of her alleged assailant.

“I would buy them book bags. If they needed clothes, I would buy them clothes,” Damiano said, adding she never had harsh words with her assailant before.

In the end, she said, she thanks God for her neighbors’ bravery and also for the quick action of police and first responders, who showed up in minutes after a neighbour placed an emergency call.

“I’m just blessed, I guess,” said the bludgeoned hag.

Submitted by Walthamstow Official Tourist Board

A 22-year-old man hurled his girlfriend’s hamster against the wall then stamped it to death before feeding it to his dog – all because she dumped him.

Ryan O’Brien killed the helpless pet called Dave to get back at Jemma Tracey, 23, after she ended their six-year relationship.

Magistrates heard Jemma visited jilted O’Brien’s home in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, in July last year to collect her belongings, including her two pet hamsters.

Fearing he was facing eviction on top of losing his girlfriend, jobless O’Brien refused to hand the animals over and demanded a £20 ransom for them.

But when Jemma refused to pay O’Brien picked up one of the hamsters, called Dave, and warned her she had “one more chance”.

She again refused to give him the money so O’Brien hurled the pet against the wall of his flat.

It crashed off the wall and initially survived the horrific attack until O’Brien, realising the rodent was still alive, crushed the dazed animal under his boot before calling over across his bulldog – to lap up the remains off the floor.

Heartless O’Brien reached for the second hamster and threatened to slit its throat before desperate Jemma paid his demand of £5 and fled with her surviving pet.

Jemma said: “I couldn’t stand what he did, I just watched and I couldn’t believe it.

“It’s disgusting. He was laughing he thought it was funny, he said he wanted to hurt me and that was the best way he could think of.

She added: “I had had enough of the way he was treating me and I wanted better for my child so I ended it.”

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In an article in Science, researchers suggest that alcohol stimulates the flies’ brains as a “reward” in a similar way to sexual conquest.

The work points to a brain chemical called neuropeptide F, which seems to be regulated by the flies’ behaviour.

Human brains have a similar chemical, which may react in a similar way.

The connection between alcohol and this chemical, which in humans is known as neuropeptide Y, has already been noted in studies involving hard-drinking mice.

The new work explores the link between such reward-seeking and the study of social interactions.

“It is thought that reward systems evolved to reinforce behaviours that are important for the survival of both individuals and species, like food consumption and mating,” Dr Shohat-Ophir told BBC News.

“Drugs of abuse work by hijacking the same neural pathways used by natural rewards, so we wanted to use alcohol – which is an extreme example of a compound that can affect the reward system – to get into the mechanism of what makes social interaction rewarding for animals.”

‘Control system’

Working in the laboratory of Ulrike Heberlein at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr Shohat-Ophir and colleagues subjected a number of flies to a wide variety of fates.

In one set of experiments, male flies were put in a box with five virgin females, which were receptive to the males’ advances. In another, males were locked up with females that had already mated and which thus roundly rejected the males’ attempts at sex.

Offered either their normal food slurry or a version charged with 15% alcohol, the mated males avoided the alcohol, whereas the sexually deprived males went on a comparative bender.

The team then went on a hunt for a chemical that could tie the two parts of this story together, hitting on neuropeptide F (NPF).

In mammals, the “rewarding” brain chemical is called neuropeptide Y. They found that the heavy-drinking rejected males had a lowered level of the chemical, and sated, mated males had an elevated level.

To show that the NPF is actually responsible for the change rather than just associated with it, the researchers actively manipulated just how much NPF was in the flies’ brains.

Those with depressed levels turned to drink with the same enthusiasm as the rejected males, while those with elevated levels were not interested in the alcohol on offer.

It is tempting, given that humans share a similar brain chemical, to imagine that NPF drives human behaviour as well.

However, in an accompanying article, Troy Zars of the University of Missouri wrote that “the relevance to human behaviour is obviously not yet established”.

Nevertheless, he suggested that the work linked “a rewarding social interaction with a lasting change in behaviour”.

“Identifying the NPF system as critical in this linkage could potentially influence our understanding of the mechanisms of drugs of abuse.”

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With the latest switch-off, only a handful of places in the UK still have Ceefax. In a personal view, long-term addict Matthew Engel mourns its demise.

“Living in deep country, I have been grieving for nearly two years now. Londoners, as usual, are about the last people in Britain to find out.

“But today they will finally get the message. Or, to be more precise, they will have stopped getting the message.

“One of the last major areas of population in the UK – London – has switched over to digital TV, enabling licence-fee payers to watch, without further payment, 40 channels instead of five.

“However, my digibox still doesn’t seem to work reliably, something I might try to do something about if there was much on any of the 40 channels I ever wanted to watch.”

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