Wet baby in tumble dryer : man charged

SMH
May 30, 2006

A 13-month-old baby suffered horrific burns when she was put in a clothes dryer, police say.

The baby was left with her mother's boyfriend at a home in the Perth suburb of Warwick while the woman went to a gym for about an hour last Thursday, police said.

Police were told the baby had spilt liquid on herself and the man put her in the clothes dryer and turned it on.

"The person we allege has done the act has stated that he has put the child into a clothes tumble dryer, closed the door and turned it on for a couple of minutes,'' Senior Detective Deb Newman said.

"The child had burns to both feet, to one of her hands, burns and bruising to her back and bruising to her forehead,'' she said.

"The injuries are horrific. In my years of being a police officer I have not seen or heard of this type of injury before.''

The mother returned home to find her daughter suffering serious burns but her boyfriend did not mention the dryer, she said.

Police investigated after the hospital where the baby was treated informed them the child's injuries were suspicious and highly unusual.

Snr Det Newman said the mother was distraught but the toddler should make a full recovery and be released from the burns unit at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children later this week.

Samuel Marc Barnes Siddall, 21, of suburban Beldon, appeared in Perth Magistrates' Court today charged with causing bodily harm or danger.

He was granted bail on condition that he did not approach, or contact, the mother and child.

He is due to appear in the Joondalup Magistrates' Court at a date to be set next month.

AAP

From the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre

Many of you may have read the story this morning regarding ecstasy deaths, reported in the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun.

The opening paragraph claims the following: The party drug ecstasy is killing more than one person every fortnight nationwide, with almost a third of deaths occurring in car crashes.

As is often the case the story is not entirely accurate, so I would like to give you a little more information.

Unfortunately the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) mortality register does not distinguish between ecstasy and other amphetamine type substances (ATS) related deaths. However, the National Coronial Information System (NCIS) does make this distinction, however these data are quite limited in the information they provide.

The NCIS defines a primary contribution as “producing the actual physical harm, most closely linked to the cause of death”, secondary contribution as “involved at the start of the injury event”, tertiary contribution as “other mechanisms involved in the injury event”.

If it is thought that drug use contributed to the risk of road traffic crashes, for example, it would be a secondary contribution; if the cause of death was drug toxicity or drug overdose and a drug was one of those detected, it would be implicated as one of the primary contributions to death (note that since ecstasy was usually one of a range of drugs detected, other drugs would also be classed as a primary contribution).

So what does the data tell us? Over the four year period 2001-2004, NCIS identified 112 ecstasy-related deaths. Although ecstasy was deemed to be a primary contributor in 51 (46%) of these, MDMA was the sole drug present in only six (5%) of these deaths. It is important to note that the majority of deaths were due to either a road traffic crash (RTC, 28%) or drug toxicity (40%).

Importantly, MDMA was rarely the only drug identified in drug toxicity deaths (3 of 45 deaths), and never the only drug in the overdose deaths. Some of the causes of the ecstasy-related deaths are particularly interesting and quite bizarre – three deaths were due to drowning, six were hangings and 8 were falls from a height!

Two implications of this data are firstly that death as a direct result of ecstasy consumption seems to be very rare in Australia compared to the extent of use, and ecstasy is usually only one of a range of drugs detected at death (a point that the newspapers chose to ignore!). Secondly, a substantial proportion of ecstasy-related deaths involve a motor vehicle accident. If you wish to read more about this, you will find the full PDI Bulletin (Kinner, Fowler, Fischer, et al (2005)) at the following location:


http://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/NDARCWeb.nsf/resources/BulletinsPDI_2005/$file/PDI+APRIL+2005.pdf

Paul Dillon
Manager
National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre
UNSW SYDNEY NSW 2052

Scorpions Logo

Go the Scorpions !!!

Just outside the top 8.

Go Barry Hall !!

Go Dal Santo !!

Dr Mendelsohn

A North Shore doctor who appeared on the television show RPA has been accused of raping one of his female patients at his Chatswood rooms.

Martyn Stuart Mendelsohn, an ear, nose and throat surgeon and former visiting medical officer at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, is charged with one count of aggravated sexual assault.

Mendelsohn, 46, allegedly had non-consensual sexual intercourse with the woman during a consultation at his surgery on Malvern Avenue between 6pm and 7.40pm on May 30.

The Scots College and University of Sydney graduate is now under strict bail conditions which require an approved "chaperone" be present during any consultations with patients.
Mendelsohn carries out plastic surgery work through his business, Stuart Clinic.

His website details several appearances on the medical reality television show RPA.

Mendelsohn, who resigned from RPA in 2003, also appeared in newspapers and magazines in relation to work earlier this year on the face of a Big Brother contestant, Aphrodite Vuitton.

Koch and Mel need a good kick up the bum

By Jane Holroyd
May 12, 2006
smh


Claims that Channel Seven television presenters were not responsible for broadcasts identifying a child who divorced his mother have been disputed in court.

Sunrise hosts David Koch and Melissa Doyle, newsreaders Jennifer Keyte and Natalie Barr and Today Tonight host Naomi Robson are among a group of employees from Channel Seven and The Sunday Herald Sun to plead not guilty to charges stemming from the identification of a child involved in a Children's Court proceeding in 2004.

The charges stem from the identification of a boy who divorced his mother in May 2004, when a children's court judge allowed the Department of Human Services to become his legal guardian.

Sunday Herald Sun journalist Chris Tinkler wrote an article about the boy and his mother, published on June 20, 2004, under the headline: "Divorced by my son: teen may never see mum again."

The article detailed the case in which the boy divorced his mother, citing irreconcilable differences.

The individual defendants face a maximum penalty of up to two years' jail, or a $10,481 fine, while the companies involved The Herald and Weekly Times, Channel Seven Melbourne and Nationwide News face fines of up to $52,405 each.

Magistrate Lisa Hannan, who is due to hand down her decision at 3.30pm on Monday, said the charges were very serious and carried a jail sentence.

Mr Koch, Ms Doyle and Ms Barr sat in court this morning, listening to Prosecutor Jim Kennan, QC, make his final submission. Ms Robson and Ms Keyte, who were in court yesterday, did not attend the hearing today.

Mr Kennan said the stories clearly identified a matter that was proceeding in the Children's Court and the parties involved in that matter.

He disputed the defendants' argument that identifying the child was in the public interest, saying the story could have been published or broadcast without identifying the parties concerned.

Publishing the identities of the child and his mother "was all gratuitous," Mr Kennan said.
Channel 7 news director Stephen Carey and Sunrise executive producer Adam Boland told the court yesterday that they were responsible, and not the defendants, for the items broadcast on the program.

Mr Kennan today disputed that, saying the person presenting or writing the story was legally responsible.

He said Mr Tinkler's story, which also published the names of the child's siblings, clearly related to the Children's Court proceedings, he said.

All defendants told the court they had sought legal advice before broadcasting and publishing their respective stories.

"They knew there was a problem publishing identifying details, and yet they went ahead," Mr Kennan said.

"Mr Tinkler's story expressly refers to the Children's Court in the interstate publication" he said, referring to other News Ltd newspapers who ran the story.

But he said the Melbourne publication, knowing it was a likely infringement, tried to get around it through "careful choice of words", Mr Kennan said.

Yesterday, former Sunday Herald Sun editor Alan Howe told the court that he took responsibility for his newspaper first publishing the story in June 2004.

Mr Howe said he was "not necessarily" aware the matter was before the Children's Court.
"It was a fair and balanced report using the facts that we had," he said.

"It was my belief that the Children's Court was not necessarily involved. Another court may have been involved."

The story was then covered by Seven News as well as the network's current affairs program, Today Tonight. It was also discussed on Sunrise, where Mr Koch said: "This kid is a brat, obviously. This kid needs a kick up the backside."

Cannibal jailed

May 10 2006
Armin Meiwes waits for the verdict in his retrial at a regional court in Frankfurt on Tuesday.
Photo: AP

A German self-confessed cannibal was jailed for life after a court in Frankfurt found him guilty of murder for killing and partly eating an allegedly willing victim he had met on the internet.

The court in the western German city of Frankfurt found that Armin Meiwes, known as the "cannibal of Rotenburg", killed his victim to satisfy his sexual urges.

But it rejected the prosecution's demand that Meiwes be disqualified for release after 15 years, as is usual for prisoners serving life sentences in Germany. This means he could, potentially, be freed in 2021.

Meiwes, 44, immediately indicated that he would appeal, signalling another round in a long legal process that has laid bare a hitherto secret market in cannibalism.

The Frankfurt trial was the second time Meiwes has been tried for killing Bernd Juergen Brandes in Rotenburg, Meiwes' home town, in western Germany in March 2001.

He was originally convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 8½ years in prison in 2004.

But on appeal, a federal judge dismissed the sentence as too lenient and ordered a retrial on the higher charge of murder.

Meiwes, a computer technician, has insisted throughout both trials that his victim had a death wish and had begged to be killed and eaten, saying it was the "ultimate kick" that both of them were seeking.

"He had wanted everything just the way it eventually happened," he said last week.

He met Brandes after advertising on the internet for a "slaughter victim" and invited him to his farm house.

Brandes, who had written a will, bought a one-way rail ticket, while Meiwes set up a beer-tent table in his house to serve as a butcher's block.

When the two men met, they made a videotape of their fatal encounter. It showed them having sex, then Meiwes severing Brandes' penis, which the two men then fried and tried to eat.

Meiwes later stabbed his bleeding, unconscious victim in the throat and cut away other parts of his body.

He admitted he eventually ate about 20 kilograms of Brandes's flesh, accompanied by potatoes and a pepper or wine sauce, served on "good crockery".

His lawyers argued that he was not guilty of murder but rather of the crime of "killing on demand", which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.

Psychologists told the court Meiwes was a deeply disturbed and lonely man but mentally fit to stand trial.

Meiwes testified that his fantasies about eating flesh dated back some 30 years. He said that after his father abandoned his family, he realised that he wanted to eat a school friend as a way of keeping somebody with him forever.

He has admitted recently that, even in his prison cell, he still fantasises about killing people when he sees attractive young bodies on television or in magazines.

Prosecutors said this was an indication that there was a high risk he would try to kill and eat somebody again.

Meiwes was arrested months after killing Brandes when an Austrian student noticed another internet advertisement and alerted police.

Investigators found that he had been in touch with more than 200 people who shared his fantasies, while Meiwes himself said there were about 800 cannibals in Germany who hoped to fulfil their urges.

He has urged them to seek psychological help.

His story inspired a US-made horror film called Butterfly, A Grimm Love Story, but Meiwes succeeded in blocking its release on the grounds that it was an infringement of his privacy.

AFP

Fake Botox injection with cooking oil leads to murder charge

Bay City News Service

SALINAS - Monterey County prosecutors announced late this afternoon that the charge against Martha Mata Vasquez has been upgraded to murder for allegedly injecting cooking oil into a woman's buttocks, causing her death.

According to authorities, Vasquez, 39, injected the substance into the buttocks of Olivia Castillo last fall, leading to her death on November 24 from an embolism.

Castillo believed the substance would `enhance her buttocks'' and may have believed it was Botox, Monterey County Assistant District Attorney Berkley Brannon said in March after Vasquez's initial arrest.

Vasquez had been charged with manslaughter in connection with Castillo's death but further investigation uncovered additional witnesses and evidence that led prosecutors to file a murder charge, according to a statement from the Monterey County District Attorney's Office.

Vasquez is currently in custody on $1 million bail.

Winner and loser

John Daly says he has lost between $66 million and $79 million during 12 years of heavy gambling, and that it has become a problem that could "flat-out ruin me" if he doesn't bring it under control.

Daly discussed his addiction to gambling in the final chapter of his autobiography, John Daly: My Life In and Out of the Rough, to be released next Monday.

He told one story of earning $992,000 when he lost in a playoff to Tiger Woods last year in San Francisco at a World Golf Championship event.

Instead of going home, he drove to Las Vegas and says he lost $2.18 million in five hours playing mostly $6,600 slot machines.

He entered himself into a drug rehabilitation clinic for alcoholism in 1993 and has been divorced three times.

He said he owed $5.3 million to casinos in two years of gambling until he won the 1995 British Open at St. Andrews, his second major. That victory and the ability to get handsome appearance fees, enabled him to pay off the debt.

Daly says he has taken more control of his life in the last six years.

"I'm off those ... medications. I don't drink JD (Jack Daniels) anymore. I don't beat up on hotel rooms and cars as much. Only gambling remains a problem," he wrote.

AP