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Champion of nudity found dead in jail cell 'Naked Guy' won fame in Berkeley, challenged values Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, May 21, 2006 Printable Version Email This Article The Naked Guy, whose au naturel jaunts through Berkeley spurred a nudity revolt in the early 1990s and earned him national fame, died in a San Jose jail cell, apparently of suicide. ...After his days as the Naked Guy, Martinez spent the next decade bouncing among halfway houses, psychiatric institutions, occasional homelessness and jail. ...In typical Berkeley fashion, Martinez's nudity soon hatched a political movement. In September 1992, Martinez organized...

Runaway camel manages to reach Trans-Israel Highway, where he began to go wild and interfere with traffic A camel breached the Trans-Israel Highway Wednesday and interfered with traffic on the road. Police say he also attacked a traffic warden in the region. The camel began to behave wildly and endanger vehicles. Motorists in the area noticed a camel walking on the side of the road heading east. Some of them reported the disturbance to the National Traffic Police, which dispatched units to try and apprehend the camel, but it managed to succeed in escaping and getting on the Trans-Israel highway....

BEARS killed and ate a monkey in a Dutch zoo in front of horrified visitors. Several Sloth bears chased the Barbary macaque into an electric fence, where it was stunned. It recovered and fled onto a wooden structure, where one bear pursued and mauled it to death. Witness Marco Berelds posted a detailed report on the incident, including photos, on a Dutch Web site. He said one Sloth bear tried unsuccessfully to shake the monkey loose after it took refuge on the structure, built of crossing horizontal and vertical poles. Ignoring attempts by keepers to distract it, the bear climbed...

A patient's "gas leak" is being blamed for bringing a hospital operation to a fiery end. The man suffered minor burns in a brief but "dramatic" operating theatre fire which is believed to have been caused by flatulence, The New Zealand Herald reported today. The man was at the Southern Cross Hospital in Invercargill to have haemorrhoids removed and was singed in the "exceedingly rare" incident involving his own gas. "This was thought to be flatus containing methane igniting," a health source told the newspaper. "There was a sort of flashfire and that was it, but it was fairly alarming...

A McHenry County man is suing his marriage counselor, contending the therapist he hired to help improve his marriage instead began an affair with his wife. That relationship eventually prompted the couple to divorce, according to the breach-of-contract suit filed by 35-year-old Scott Buetow of Lake in the Hills. His lawsuit seeks more than $200,000 in punitive damages from his former counselor, Dan Blair, and the Arbor Counseling Center where Blair works. "He [Blair] had an obligation to provide services, and he willfully abused that for his own benefit," said attorney Hans Mast, who represents Buetow. Fraud, malpractice allegedThe lawsuit...

A new kind of malware circulating on the Internet freezes a computer and then asks for a ransom paid through the Western Union Holdings money transfer service. A sample of the Trojan horse virus was sent to Sophos, a security vendor, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant. The malware, which Sophos named Troj/Ransom-A, is one of only a few viruses so far that have asked for a ransom in exchange for releasing control of a computer, Cluley said. The new Trojan falls into a class of viruses described as "ransomware." The schemes had been seen in Russia, but the first...

Rebooting Your Airbus (After All The Screens Go Dark) April 24, 2006 By Russ Niles, Newswriter, Editor Cures aside, pilots of Airbus A320-series airliners are getting new guidance on what to do if the screens on their electronically biased aircraft go blank. "Checklists will be streamlined so re-booting of power is quicker," an Airbus spokesman told the London Daily Mirror after Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch released a report on an incident aboard a British Airways A319 last October. The plane was carrying 76 passengers to Budapest from London when most of the electronic displays went blank. The crew was...

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- A Salvadoran woman is in some trouble after she allegedly tried to smuggle into the country's main prison a military grenade and marijuana hidden in her vagina. The cylinder was about 10 inches long and 4 inches wide. Officials didn't say what prompted them to check Lidia Alvarado, 44, but authorities have raised the security level at jails across the country, fearing inmates may be planning something.

A romantic stargazer who was just days away from whisking away his girlfriend on a surprise Paris trip to pop the question plummeted to his death early yesterday morning when he fell from the roof of his Massachusetts Avenue apartment. “He had the tickets. He had the ring. He just didn’t have the time,” said Don Coulon, whose 28-year-old son, Gregory, was found dead after falling from the roof at 552 Massachusetts Ave. Coulon, 28, a Boston University systems analyst and computer programmer, was set to jet his girlfriend of several years, Michelle Kovach, to the City of Lights Wednesday...

JERSEYVILLE, Ill. Police in Jerseyville say they arrested five Alton High School students after four of them climbed through a first-floor window at Jersey Community High School and used squirt guns to spray a classroom full of students who were taking a history. The incident occurred Thursday afternoon. Rachael Jones, a 17-year-old junior, said she was in her U-S history class along with about 20 other students when she heard a noise outside. She said she saw four boys dressed all in black and wearing bandanas over their faces crawl through the windows and into the classroom, where they used...

Russian judge calls a halt to epic world walkBy Nick Allen in Moscow(Filed: 15/04/2006)An attempt by Karl Bushby, a former paratrooper, to walk around the world was as good as over yesterday as a judge on Russia's frozen east coast ordered his deportation for failing to have his passport stamped.Seven years and 17,000 miles into the trek from the tip of Chile back to his home town of Hull, the 37-year-old adventurer and an American companion, Dimitri Kieffer, will be flown to Alaska from the Chukotka Peninsula if an appeal is rejected. They protested that they had had to make...

UNIONTOWN, Pa. -- Police in Uniontown are holding a 58-year-old man who they suspect threw a microwave oven at his girlfriend and then beat her to death. Authorities said Walter Fordyce attacked her after she refused to heat up some sandwiches for him. Fordyce is jailed without bond and charged with criminal homicide. Police said he told them he began arguing with his live-in girlfriend Thursday, threw her to the floor, threw a microwave oven onto her chest, stomped on her and repeatedly banged her head on the floor until she lost consciousness. Police said he also said it was...

DEA Agent Who Shot Self In Foot Sues U.S. Seeks damages for distribution of humiliating gun accident video APRIL 11--A Drug Enforcement Administration agent who stars in a popular online video that shows him shooting himself in the foot during a weapons demonstration for Florida children is suing over the tape's release, claiming that his career has been crippled and he's become a laughingstock due to the embarrassing clip's distribution. Lee Paige, 45, blames the video's release on DEA officials in an April 7 federal lawsuit filed against the U.S. government. A copy of the pro se complaint by Paige,...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - April 10, 2006 - Think your phone bill is high? A Malaysian man says he nearly fainted when he got $218 trillion phone bill, and yes, that's in U.S. The man, Yahaya Wahab, says he's been ordered to pay up within ten days or face prosecution. The New Straits Times reports the bill was for a line that was supposed to have been disconnected in January. The unhappy phone customer says he can't wait to face Telekom Malaysia in court, if the company follows through with its threat.

Proof that Guns don't kill people, Bugs do.... by Barry Jantz - San Diego County 4-5-2006 11:54 am From the Associated Press.... Live round on desk blows off part of hand VENTURA – A teacher who kept a 40mm round on his desk as a paperweight blew off part of his hand when he apparently used the object to try to squash a bug, authorities say. The 5-inch-long round, which Robert Colla had found while hunting years ago, exploded Monday while Colla was teaching 20 to 25 students at an adult education class. Part of Colla's right hand was severed...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A red-faced Australian nudist who tried to set fire to what he thought was a deadly funnel web spider's nest ended up with badly burned buttocks, emergency officials said Monday. The 56-year-old man was at a nudist colony near Bowral, about 60 miles southwest of Sydney, Sunday when he spotted what he believed to be a funnel web spider hole. Ambulance workers, including a helicopter crew, were called to the scene after the man poured petrol down the hole and then lit a match in an attempt to kill the offending arachnid. "The exploding gasoline fumes left...

(AP) The long, strange trip continues for Jerry Garcia's toilet. Police say the Grateful Dead leader's commode was stolen recently from a driveway along with three other toilets and a bidet. Garcia's salmon-colored toilet was the subject of a legal battle before it was finally moved to Sonoma, to await shipment to a Canadian casino. It's unclear if the toilet was swiped by a wayward Deadhead or a thief remodeling a bathroom. Police have no suspects or leads. Henry Koltys bought Garcia's Marin County home for $1.39 million in 1997 and removed the toilet and other items he planned to...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Three men have been arrested on charges of performing castrations on apparently willing participants in a sadomasochistic "dungeon" in a rural house, authorities said Friday. "It's extremely bizarre," District Attorney Michael Bonfoey said in a telephone interview. "It's incredible the amount of ways that people can find to run afoul of the law." Sheriff's investigators said Richard Sciara, 61, Danny Reeves, 49, and Michael Mendez, 60, admitted performing at least eight surgeries, including castrations and testicle replacements, on six consenting clients over the past year. None of the three is licensed to practice medicine, officials said. The...

Regina, 77, and Lloyd Vogt, 80, retired farmers from Minnesota, had made a stop in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Socorro last week when they each had one of those oops! moments. They both went into Wal-Mart to browse, never running into each other in the vast super center. Lloyd came out before Regina did and hit the road for Tucumcari, the couple's destination that day. A thoughtful husband, Lloyd decided to let Regina sleep in. About 10 minutes later, Regina walked outside the Wal-Mart. Regina's plight was first noticed by Wal-Mart greeter Patricia Montoya, who saw her sitting on...

PALMDALE, Calif. -- This fast food bill was a real whopper. A man was charged more than $4,300 after placing his food order at a Burger King in California last week. The four burgers came to $4.33. The cashier entered the charge on George Beane's debit card, then mistakenly punched in the numbers again without erasing the original ones. That brought the bill to $4,334.33. The electronic charge drained a checking account and left Beane and his wife wondering how they'd pay their mortgage. But everything worked out. Burger King didn't charge the Beanes for their meal and the couple...