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A towering sculpture of eight cars made famous in the movie Wayne’s World is up for sale on eBay.

The suburban Chicago landmark is named the Spindle and features cars from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s skewered on a metal spike.

Bids open at $50,000, and the auction closes Thursday. The eBay listing says it will cost $100,000 to ship the 50-foot structure.

The Spindle — also known as the “Car Kabob” and the “Eight Car Pileup” — draws fans of the 1992 comedy starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey.

Berwyn residents are divided on what to do with the structure, which is covered with rust and pigeon droppings. It was supposed to be dismantled last year to make way for a pharmacy, but preservation groups formed and protested.

California artist Dustin Shuler built the piece in 1989.

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According to local news reports a successful Hong Kong architect fell 19 floors trying to prevent childhood friend to commit suicide.

Leung Kam-kong was 28 years old. He was honored at an Design awards ceremony just a few hours before the tragedy, the South China Morning Post reported.

News reports say that according to the police sources Leung went to the help his childhood friend Chan Kei-tai, a 27-year-old, who was depressed and suicidal because he lost his job and had split with his girlfriend.

Leung went to a block of flats where Chan had lived as a child. He fell to his death as he tried to stop his friend from committing suicide by leaping from a 19th-floor.
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At least 47 people, nearly all children heading to school for final exams, drowned yesterday when their bus plunged off a bridge in western India, According to Reuters.

Distraught parents rushed to the scene of the disaster in Gujarat state as rescue workers struggled to find survivors in the water and a huge crane was used to haul the smashed vehicle out of the Narmada canal.

The accident in Bodeli, about 170 kilometres from Ahmedabad, the state’s commercial capital, was Gujarat’s worst road accident, local media reports said. Police said the death toll could rise.

At least 44 children, the driver and the bus conductor, as well as an unidentified woman died in the early morning accident. The bus veered off the road and smashed through a concrete barrier.

The children - aged 13 to 15 - were travelling to school to take final exams, a Gujarat state transport official, G.M. Aloriya, told the NDTV news channel.

Wailing parents of 15 of the dead - all girls from the same village of Bamroli, close to the accident site - carried their children’s bodies to the cremation ground late yesterday for one of several mass funerals for the victims.

Parents emerged from their houses carrying their daughters on wooden biers as the funeral procession wound slowly through Bamroli village. Stores closed their shutters as a mark of respect.
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An alleged stand-over scheme at a Kings Cross strip club involving two burly brothers and another man nicknamed “fat boy” whom police say is a member of a large cocaine ring … it was as if a Raymond Chandler novel had come to life.

But instead of the story appearing on the pages of a crime novel, Central Local Court played host to the colourful story - set in an part of Sydney ruled by a “code of silence”.

Three men, Luke “Fat Boy” Sparos and brothers Helal and Hysam Safi, faced the court yesterday charged with the kidnapping of the manager of a strip club, Stripperama, Adonis Yourelis, on April 19 last year.

The trio allegedly kidnapped Yourelis to extort money from the club’s owner, John Kopasakis.

Police said the three men entered the club - now called Strippers - and took Mr Yourelis, demanding he ring his boss and get him to come and meet them.

But instead of acceding to the men’s demands Mr Kopasakis went to Kings Cross police station and reported the kidnapping, police allege. The three men released Mr Yourelis before police arrived but CCTV footage from the club showed them with him, it is alleged.

The Chandler-esque in yesterday’s hearing was perhaps best exemplified during an exchange between the defence solicitor, Jim Nicopoulos, and a Kings Cross detective, Troy Smith.
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A mother has made a heartfelt plea for an end to hospital-focused childbirth, after describing her birth of a child in hospital as by far the most gruelling.

Liz Schipper has had four children but told the commission of inquiry into hospitals yesterday that by far “the most painful experience I have been through” was in Goulburn Base Hospital.

The housewife from Bungonia in the Southern Highlands told the commission that after giving birth to two children at her home in the Netherlands, she had returned to Australia and went to Goulburn Hospital to have her third child.

Her daughter was born uneventfully but not before she was subjected to interventions by the obstetrician, including the application of a fetal heart monitor and fetal scalp monitor, an attempt to insert a drip for pain relief which was abandoned at her request, and a request that she lie on a bed with her legs in stirrups when she had been used to walking and standing during labour.
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THE key witness in Australia’s biggest terrorist trial lived a life of luxury, communicated with birds and saw a she-devil, a court heard yesterday.

The witness, Izzydeen Atik of Newport, told the court on Tuesday the group’s alleged leader, Abdul Nacer Benbrika, told him the group planned to attack the 2005 AFL grand final at the MCG and Melbourne’s Crown Casino during the 2006 Grand Prix.

Mr Atik is a key witness in the trial of 12 men accused of being members of a terrorist organisation. All have pleaded not guilty.

Remy van de Wiel, QC, a lawyer for Benbrika, told the court of a psychiatric report in 2002 in which Mr Atik claimed that birds often told him their problems.

“If you spend a day with me you will see the birds follow me and talk to me,” Mr Atik told the psychiatrist who compiled the report.

Mr van de Wiel told the court the report quoted Mr Atik as saying: “I see another one, a girl, not human, a devil. She says she loves me [and] she won’t let me have a relationship. She scares me.”

But under cross-examination yesterday, Mr Atik told the jury he had no recollection of hearing the voice of the girl.

The jury heard Mr Atik lived a life of luxury, funded by credit card fraud while receiving a pension in 2003 and 2004.
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A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA’s estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth after spotting the boffins had miscalculated, a German newspaper reported.

Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a one in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid would collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only one in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizz-kid had got it right.

The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13, 2029.

Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second, at up to 35,880 kilometres above Earth - and the Apophis asteroid will pass by Earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres.

If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit Earth on its next orbit in 2036.
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Texas child welfare officials have brought in mental health professionals and behavioral experts as the agency tries to ensure a sense of normalcy for the more than 400 children removed from a polygamous sect’s enclave, an agency spokeswoman said.

But for all their lives, the boys and girls of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have been told the outside world was hostile and immoral. Venturing beyond the brilliant white limestone walls of their compound would consign them to eternal damnation, their church leaders preached.

Now, if the state gets its way, hundreds of children could be put in foster homes, in what could be a wrenching cultural adjustment that may require intensive counseling.

“What they are up against is having to deprogram an entire community,” said Margaret Cooke, who left the sect with seven of her eight children near the end of 1994. The children “are so naive and they have been sheltered to the point that they don’t even trust their own judgment.”

Marleigh Meisner, a spokeswoman for the state Children’s Protective Services, said the agency is working with mental health and other experts to meet specific needs of the children. That information would be passed to foster families if a judge decides the children should be transferred to foster homes, she said.

“We want to keep their world as normal as possible,” Meisner said. “We also want to be certain that these children have gained a trust with us. We want these children to know that even if they may not have been safe in the past, they will be safe as long as they are with us.”

Meanwhile, in court papers unsealed Friday, authorities said they found a “cyanide poisoning document” in their search of the compound in the town of Eldorado. But the 80-page list of items seized gave no further explanation.

Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Tela Mange said the document consisted of pages torn out of a first-aid book on how to treat cyanide poisoning. But she said she didn’t know why the sect would have such information on hand.

Child welfare officials seized more than 400 children, most of them girls, in the raid on the FLDS compound known as the Yearn for Zion ranch, saying the youngsters were in danger of physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

The renegade Mormon splinter group requires girls at puberty to enter into polygamous marriages with much older men and produce children, authorities say. The sect also teaches children to fear the outside world, including the very authorities who removed them until a court hearing Thursday that will help determine their future.

“You’re taught to fear everyone and everything,” said Cooke, herself a 16-year-old bride.

The children and the 139 women who followed them voluntarily out of the compound are being so secretive that child welfare officials are having trouble sorting out who the youngster’ parents are.

Most of the children are the offspring of the faith’s inner circle - including its now-imprisoned prophet, Warren Jeffs - who were born since construction began on the compound in 2003, or were hand-selected by Jeffs to come to the enclave, which the sect regards as part of Zion on Earth.

In 2003 and 2004, Jeffs, the spiritual leader of an estimated 6,000 followers in two adjoining towns along the Utah-Arizona line, plucked children under the age of 6 to bring to Texas, some without their parents, former sect member Isaac Wyler said.

“Over age 6 they were too contaminated for the world to be of use to God,” said Wyler, who still lives in Colorado City, Ariz., and has 38 siblings. “He picked the ones that would be the most obedient, the ones that would be qualified to go to Zion.”

Authorities raided the Eldorado ranch April 3 after a girl from the clan made a whispered telephone call for help to a family violence shelter. The 16-year-old, who indicated she was a few weeks’ pregnant, said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. The girl has not yet been identified among the 416 children and may not even be among them.

In the call, the girl said that sect members warned her that if she ever left, outsiders would hurt her and force her to cut her hair, wear makeup and have sex with many men.

Most of the sect’s children have never attended public schools or worn modern clothing. The girls wear long, pioneer-style dresses and keep their long hair pinned up in a braid.

In their search of the compound, police uncovered dozens of journals and other documents that contain birth, marriage and other genealogical records. That may help social workers match children with their parents.
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Associated Press news agency reports today of a miraculous survival in Switzerland.

Swiss police say a baby suffered little more than a bump after being blown onto railway tracks and being run over by a train.

The incident happened Wednesday in the northeastern Swiss town of Moehlin, close to the German border.

Police say the six-month-old was in a buggy when a strong gust of wind blew it off a platform and into the path of an oncoming train.

Luckily the infant fell between the rails. Rescuers heard the baby’s cries and found it lying beneath the train, virtually unharmed.

The child and its mother were taken to hospital and treated for shock before being released.

“There wasn’t much left of the buggy,” said Bernhard Graser of the Aargau cantonal police.

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HER mother always knew. From the moment Julie-Anne Hand was told her pregnant daughter’s body had been found in the Blue Mountains in January 2006, she was certain her son-in-law was guilty of the murder. She had already suspected that he had tried to poison her daughter, Jody Galante, then 26, but no one had believed her.

A devastated Mrs Hand had to spend the next five weeks pretending Mark Galante was innocent - comforting him about losing a wife, publicly supporting him and even holding his hand at Jody’s funeral - while police gathered evidence.

Yesterday, more than two years after her daughter was last seen, Mrs Hand cried and whispered “yes” in the Supreme Court as Galante was sentenced to 27 years’ jail, with a non-parole period of 20 years, for murdering his wife, who was three months pregnant. Galante, 29, wearing the same black suit as when he married Jody, did not react to the sentence. But Mrs Hand did.

Outside the court, she said: “We got justice for Jody and her baby. And although it won’t bring Jody back, he got one year for every year that he took - 26 for Jody and one for the baby. I’m more than happy with that.”

Mark and Jody Galante had been married since 2002 and had a two-year-old child. But the relationship was deeply troubled. Jody was upset by Mark’s heavy cannabis use and threatened to leave.

In an interview with the Herald this week, Mrs Hand revealed the pain she endured during her charade to help police. When police found a body they believed was Jody’s, “I knew she was gone, I just knew, and I knew it was him - I just knew it was.”

Julie-Anne Hand’s nightmare began when Galante called her on Saturday, January 7, 2006, to tell her Jody was missing. Galante told her he had last seen Jody before she went shopping at Parklea Markets. Police began investigating that day.

At a press conference the next Wednesday, Galante cried as he made a public plea to Jody: “We all love you. Please come home. We’re really worried about you.”

On the next Saturday, police told Mrs Hand they had found Jody’s body. She immediately knew Galante was the killer.

“When he said that he took their child to the park to feed the ducks on the day, I knew categorically that was a barefaced lie,” Mrs Hand said. “He just doesn’t go out in the sun. He hates the heat and wouldn’t have done that for any length of time and he tells us that he was there for two hours.”

Mrs Hand’s mind raced back to September 2005, when Jody ended up in hospital after eating a two lollies Galante had given her.

A doctor told her that her daughter had suffered some sort of drug psychosis brought on by a strong drug. “I know I have no evidence but I don’t think this was his first attempt on her life and nothing will ever convince me otherwise,” Mrs Hand said.

When the body was found, she told police of her suspicions about Galante and they told her they shared them. But they asked her to pretend that she thought Galante was innocent while they gathered more evidence.

“A policeman told me he knew how hard it was but said it would be helpful to the investigation, so I just had to find the strength to keep going,” Mrs Hand said.
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