Thief who swallowed diamonds must retrieve them from bowel movement himself (Video)

An accused jewel thief who swallowed two diamond engagement rings before his arrest has been ordered to retrieve them himself.

Mark Watts is being held in the Brisbane city watchhouse until he returns the rings, with police insisting he does not need a hand.

"At the moment he hasn't passed them,'' said Francesca Antonaglia-Monteverde, from the chain of stores that owns the rings. "He's in the watchhouse and there's a toilet there. He has to retrieve them himself.''

Watts has been sitting on the country's most anticipated bowel movement ever since the case was revealed in The Courier-Mail on Tuesday.

He is accused of swiping the rings, worth a combined $59,000, after posing as a customer at Crown Family Jewellers at Indooroopilly Shopping Cente on Friday.

When workers cornered him, he swallowed the rings - a one carat diamond solitaire ring and 1.53 carat yellow diamond surrounded by 28 white diamonds.

Doctors have told Watts the jewellery could take five to seven days to reappear...

Source: News.com.au

Update, Dec 6:

Police trusted the alleged ring thief to return his swallowed loot - but he never delivered.
X-rays have confirmed David Watts now has only one of two stolen rings inside him.
The other lost ring is suspected to have been in waste bags he handed to police, which were disposed without a search.
Deputy Commissioner Ross Barnett today said internal investigators from Ethical Standards Command had been called in and police would discuss compensating the owners for their loss.

 

Camera stolen by eagle retrieved, bird's eye view footage recovered (Video)

[Western Australia] Aboriginal rangers had set up the motion-sensor camera at a gorge on the Margaret River in May, to try and capture images of fresh-water crocodiles.
Gooniyandi ranger Roneil Skeen says the camera disappeared not long afterwards.
"Unexpectedly our camera went missing so we thought we had lost it because it fell into the water," he said.
But a few weeks ago, they got a phone call to say a Parks and Wildlife ranger had found the small device at the Mary River, about 110 kilometres away.
They have been able to extract three 30-second clips that reveal the culprit to be a thieving sea eagle.

Man burned friend alive for drinking his last four beers

From Darwin, Australia:

Gary Stewart Miles has pleaded not guilty to murdering Paul John Stamp, 47, on September 19 last year.
The men had been drinking at home when Mr Stamp was warned not to take any of Mr Miles' remaining beers.
He drank the last four. When this was discovered, Mr Miles and his friend Gregory Channing beat Mr Stamp, breaking eight ribs and causing extensive internal injuries.
They dragged him into the car boot and drove to an industrial area, where they planned to "teach him a lesson" by dumping him to find his own way home.
But the car ran out of petrol and when the pair returned with fuel, Mr Miles allegedly poured it all over the car and ignited it.
Channing was found guilty in September of assaulting Mr Stamp and depriving him of liberty and is serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence.
Channing told the Northern Territory Supreme Court on Tuesday that Mr Miles had snapped when they had returned to the car, shouting "I'm going to kill this c---" as he doused the car in petrol.

Snake, crcodile and dugong abuser fined in Australia again

His name is Beau Daniel Cleland Greaves and on Friday he was fined fined $6000 for hugging and sitting on a dugong in Australia's Great Barrier Reef. This comes after being fined in May for wrestling a crocodile.

The latest incident occurred in August 2011 when Greaves, 23, was working on a crayfish trawler in Princess Charlotte Bay and jumped into the water to pose for photos with the animal. He later posted  images on Facebook and other social media sites that showed him hugging the dugong, swimming with it and sitting on its tail.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority frowns on such things, so after receiving a tip about the photos, launched an investigation which led to last weeks court case and fine.

Last May, Greaves was fined $4500 after he posted photos and a video showing him wrestling a crocodile on Hicks Island near Lockhart River. In that incident, which also took place in 2011, a 21-year-old friend by the name of Theodore Peter Hewish also received a fine, this one for $1000, for filming Greaves wrestling the croc.

Greaves was described to the court as a serial offender, who had also previously been in trouble for taking pythons and sea snakes and posing with them in photos.

Although it seems he has removed, or at least made private, Facebook pictures of himself with the dugong and crocodile, a photo of him with the python remains, as you can see above. It has a caption that reads: "don't play with big snakes they bite harder."

The photo of a naked and bloodied-looking Greaves below appears on the Facebook page of a friend, with a comment from Greaves that explains (?!), "thats the work of our friendly little pet grogsy he loves biting naked drunk people."

Rare albino kangaroo sighted in Australia (Video)

From Down Under:

Lazing in the middle of a kangaroo mob just a half hour drive from city suburbs is a truly incredible tale of survival, rarely seen in the animal kingdom: an albino kangaroo that has survived beyond its perilous childhood.
Its pure, almost dazzling white coat strikes an amazing contrast against the lush greens and bush greys of the valley floor in the ACT’s Namadgi National Park.
The kangaroo, an eastern grey, is believed to be two years old. Experts said this is old for an albino kangaroo, which stands out against the Australian bushland and therefore attracts more predators such as wild foxes and dogs. Albinos are also apparently more susceptible to skin cancer and sunburn and are more likely to have sight and hearing difficulties.
The albino, first captured on film last weekend by a park ranger at the Namadgi national park near Canberra, stands in stark contrast to the family of grey kangaroos with which it roams.
Surrounded by its extended family of grey eastern greys, this young kangaroo looks alert but at ease. It appears to notice the clicking of a camera, and moves with its mob as we near.Since it was first captured on film in a fuzzy shot by a ranger on Sunday, the park has received reports of at least two other albino kangaroos in its vast expanse in the ACT’s south.

Meanwhile, YouTube user Frenzix posted a video on November 5th, with the notation, 'spotted an Albino Kangaroo in Country South Australia.'

Australian man headbutts cars on busy highway (Video)

A man is being assessed in a West Australian hospital after headbutting several moving cars on a busy freeway in the southern suburbs of Perth. Authorities are also investigating whether alcohol and drugs were involved.

Teen with third-degree burns as car 'melts' during police chase

You see, police had spiked the stolen car's tires with a deflation devise, but the kid continued to speed away on the rims. From Brisbane, Australia:

Around 11.30pm police officers saw the cara and gave chase. They deployed stingers... The rubber disintegrated as the car continued slowly towards Brisbane's southside.

Stingers were deployed again...and took out the driver's side wheels. But the car allegedly continued at speed...

A senior police officer said without the friction of the tires the wheels starting spinning and became so hot the metal melted.

"It was spraying molten metal across the road," he said.

The car came to a stop and an 18-year-old passenger handed himself in. But the senior officer said the [17 year-old] driver tried to evade police and needed to be brought to ground.

The melted metal spattered across the road gave him third degree burns on his chest. He was taken to the PA hospital and remains in police custody.

Dad follows school bus to confront teens accused of bullying his children. Here's what happened next.

Claiming he intended to 'give them a talking to,' he apparently changed his mind when he saw how big the boys were. From Townsville, Australia:

Gareth John Jackson, 34, pleaded guilty to one count of common assault and one count of unlawful assault occasioning actual bodily harm in the Townsville Magistrates Court yesterday.

The court heard the father-of-two had just arrived home from work as a school bus dropped his children off outside their home on July 19. He learned his children, aged 12 and 14, had allegedly been bullied by two older boys on the bus.

Jackson then put his two children into the car and followed the school bus to the Caltex service station at Yabulu, where his children pointed out their alleged bullies, aged 15 and 16 years respectively.

Police prosecutor Sergeant Mick Harms told the court Jackson walked over to the teenage boys and said "why don't you pick on someone your own size?" before using an open palm to push one of the boys on the chest.

The push caused the boy, who sustained a bruise to his chest, to stumble backwards.

Jackson, using an open palm again, also pushed the other boy.

[Jackson' lawyer] told the court there was a "greater difference in size between these children (the alleged bullies) and my client's children than there was between my client and the two complainants".

Jackson entered in to a $750 bond with no convictions recorded.

For you non-Australians, the bond referred to is what's called 'a good behavior bond,' and is similar to probation. It works this way:

This is a sentence option under which a person found guilty of an offense promises to be of good behavior for a stipulated period. The bond may or may not be subject to supervision, and is usually sanctioned by forfeiture of a stipulated sum of money.

Astronomers identify intergalactic gas station on the outskirts of the Milky Way

Our Galaxy may have been consuming clouds of gas in a magnetic wrapper to keep making stars for the past eight billion years.

That’s the conclusion of astronomers at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.

Dr Alex Hill, the lead author of a study of the Smith Hydrogen Gas
Cloud, a large gas cloud falling into the our Galaxy from intergalactic space, explained:

“Clouds like this may provide the fuel for our Galaxy to make stars, but they must be held together by something, or they’d disintegrate when they hit the warm outer part of the Galaxy — the halo. They wouldn’t reach the Galaxy’s disk, where the star-making is going on.”

The investigators found that the Smith Cloud has a magnetic field. It’s 50 000 times weaker than the Earth’s, “but it’s probably still strong enough to keep the cloud together”, Dr Hill said.

The findings were published recently in The Astrophysical Journal.

“This is one of the few such clouds large enough for us to be able measure its magnetic field,” added Dr Naomi McClure-Griffiths, a member of the research team.

“It seems the cloud is protected by a magnetic bubble, the same way the Earth’s magnetic field protects it from the solar wind.”

Named after its discoverer, Gail Bieger (née Smith), the Smith Cloud is at least two million times the mass of our Sun. If it were visible to the naked eye, it would look 20 times wider than the full Moon.

The Smith Cloud is one of thousands of “high velocity clouds” of hydrogen gas flying around the outskirts of the Milky Way. Astronomers believe their origins are mixed, some stemming from burst “bubbles” in the gas of our Galaxy, some being primordial gas, and some associated with small galaxies our Galaxy’s gravity is shredding from a distance.

The Smith Cloud is probably either semi-primordial gas condensing from the halo of the Milky Way or gas stripped from another galaxy.

Traveling at around 80 miles a second (130 kilometers a second), the Smith Cloud is only 8 000 light-years from our Galaxy’s disk and will drive into it in less than 30 million years.Its impact should produce galactic fireworks of some sort – possibly a burst of star formation or a supershell of neutral hydrogen.

Related links:

An all-sky map of high-velocity clouds

Astronomy Picture of the Day: High Velocity Clouds and the Milky Wa

Two drunk, unlicensed drivers arrested driving the same vehicle minutes apart.

Sounds like a bit of police incompetence in Australia's Northern Territory.

According to the NT News, the cops first pulled over the Toyota Hilux pickup truck for speeding in the town of Patterson at around 10pm last night. The 22-year-old female driver, who only had a learner's permit, was reportedly doing 100km/h (62 mp/h) in an 80km/h (49 mp/h) zone and gave a .112 on her roadside breathalyzer reading.

Then 15 minutes later, police again pulled over the same truck about 17 kilometers (10.5 miles) away, in the town of Tivendale. This time it seems an unlicensed 27-year-old man was driving and his test returned a reading of .203.

Now, how could the same vehicle be pulled over by police 15 minutes later unless the police let the drunker of the two take off in the truck after the first stop?

Unfortunately, the NT News article sheds no light on this, whatsoever.