Slovaks ban Czech booze as bootleg poisoning scare widens

 

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Slovakia banned the import and sale of Czech spirits on Tuesday after 22 people died in its central European neighbour from drinking bootleg vodka and rum containing poisonous methanol.

The Slovak move followed a similar ban in Poland on Sunday and showed that Czech authorities have not wholesale oakley sunglasses been able to bring their biggest health scare in decades under control.

The Czechs introduced a ban on all liquor containing more than 20 percent alcohol on Friday, forcing retailers to pull 20 million bottles off the shelves and dealing a blow to pubs and cocktail bars serving locals and tourists alike.

Slovakia followed suit after eight Slovaks were taken into hospital in the eastern town of Presov on Sunday after drinking Czech-made spirits at a party.

"We ... came to a conclusion that it is necessary to prevent further consumption and snapback hats sales of any Czech-made alcohol in Slovakia," Slovak Healthcare Minister Zuzana Zvolenska told reporters.

Agriculture Minister Lubomir Jahnatek said the ban would remain in place until Czech authoritiesgained control of the situation.

Four of the poisoned Slovaks were sent home on Tuesday and the other four were in good condition, the Healthcare Ministry said. Some 700 customs supreme hats officers were visiting sites across the country together with police to test suspect spirits.

Apart from the deaths, dozens of other people have been admitted to hospital in the Czech Republicwith methanol poisoning in the past two weeks, and some have gone blind.

Czech police have arrested 23 people on suspicion of producing or distributing the poisonous bootleg alcohol, a profitable business that avoids excise and value-added taxes.

The country's spirits makers estimate up to 25 percent of the alcohol in circulation is bootleg - often cheap vodka and rum made from industrial alcohol via a simple chemical process and sold under fake labels.

Police have been investigating how methanol got into the spirits. One theory is that it may come cheap oakley sunglasses from windscreen wiper fluid, possibly from Poland.

Methanol can sometimes result from home distillation, common in the Czech Republic, if it is done clumsily, but the victims said they had purchased bottles at kiosks and stores.

The Czechs, makers of the original Pilsner beer, have the world's highest beer consumption of about 140 litres per capita per year and are among the world's heaviest drinkers in general.

Death row inmate says he’s too overweight to be executed

Lawyers for a 480-pound death row inmate in Ohio say their client is too overweight to be put to death.

"Indeed, given his unique physical and medical condition there is a substantial risk that any attempt to execute him will result in serious physical and psychological pain to him, as well as an execution involving a torturous and lingering death," reads the filing made oakley sunglasses outlet on behalf of Ronald Post, 53, who was convicted of shooting to death hotel clerk Helen Vantz 29 years ago.

Post, who is set to be executed by lethal injection on January 16, 2013, says that his executioners would encounter several problems, including difficulty finding a viable vein for injection and the likelihood that with his unusual weight he would break any gurney used in the process.

The new era hats wholesale Ohio prison system relies on lethal injection in cases resulting in execution.

Ohio is tied nationally with Kansas for the 13th highest obesity rate in the country, with 29.6 percent of its residents listed as overweight.

However, in a statement, Post's federal public defender, Joseph Wilhelm, said the confession used to convict his client was also exaggerated.

"Post's case is about more than his weight, and his life tisa snapbacks should be spared for reasons wholly unrelated to his obesity," the statement reads.

The Associated Press reports that this is not the first case in which a death row inmate has attempted to use his weight to escape execution.

 

In 1994, a federal judge in Washington State ruled that 400-pound Mitchell Rupe was too heavy to be hanged and instead was eventually sentenced to life in prison. Rupe died in confinement in 2006.

However, other heavyset inmates have not fared so well in their pleas, such as in the cases of Richard Cooey in 2008 and Christopher Newton in 2007. Still, both of those men each weighed 200 pounds less than Post.

Newton, who was also from Ohio, had his execution delayed for two hours while prison staff struggled to find a vein to administer his lethal injection.

The U.S. and 20 of the world's 198 countries officially sanction oakley sunglasses cheap the death penalty, according toAmnesty International. The group reports that the U.S. executed 43 individuals in 2011. Of those, five executions were carried out in Ohio.

China is believed to have executed the largest number of individuals, though exact figures are not known. Amongst nations that have reported their number of executions, Iran leads the list, with at least 360 individuals executed in 2011.

Lawsuit between Google, authors in U.S. suspended pending appeal

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An appeals court judge on Monday suspended trial court litigation cheap oakley sunglasses sale involving Google Inc and thousands of authors pending appeal by the search engine giant of an order granting the authors class-action status.

A one-sentence order by a 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judgein New York said the Authors Guild, which sued Google seven years ago over the company's plans to create the world's largest digital books library, consented to the suspension.

In a case where billions of dollars are at stake, the appeals court has given Google permission to challenge a May 31 decision by a judgeletting authors sue as a group rather than individually. The appeals court has not yet scheduled oral arguments for the appeal.

In March 2001, Judge Denny POLO hats Chin rejected a $125 million settlement of the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, saying it gave Google too much power to copy books en masse without permission from authors.

The cases are Authors Guild et al v Google Inc in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 05-08136 and in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 12-2402.

Arizona mother pleads not guilty to murder of her missing daughter

PHOENIX (Reuters) - An Arizona mother pleaded not guilty on Monday to first-degree murder over the presumed death of her missing 5-year-old daughter, Jhessye Shockley, whose body has not been found despite massive fitted hats search efforts, court officials said.

Police believe Shockley was killed and dumped in a landfill south of Phoenix, but authorities who conducted a search of her neighborhood and spent four months sorting through some 9,500 tons of trash failed to find her remains.

Authorities have said they were confident they have the person responsible for the little girl's death and can prosecute the case without finding her body.

Jerice Hunter, 38, entered her not guilty plea through her attorney in a brief arraignment in Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix, officials said. She remains in jail on a $500,000 bond.

Hunter, who also pleaded not guilty to child abuse charges, was arrested without incident on September 6 after being indicted by a state grand jury. Her attorney, Scott Maasen, said his client continues to maintain her innocence.

Hunter first reported Shockley missing in October 2011, telling police she left the girl in the care of her older children while out running an errand and that when dope snapback she returned home the child was nowhere to be found.

The mother was arrested in November on suspicion of child abuse in connection with the disappearance, but no formal charges were filed at the time, and she was released.

Police said investigators continued to build their case with interviews of additional witnesses and family, leading to the indictment.

Army doctor aims to prove innocence in 'Fatal Vision' killing

WILMINGTON, North Carolina (Reuters) - Attorneys began making a case on Monday for why an Army doctor whose conviction for the murders of his pregnant wife and two daughters spawned several books and a television mini-series discount oakley sunglasses deserves a new trial 42 years after their deaths.

Jeffrey MacDonald, a former Green Beret whose crime prompted the bestseller "Fatal Vision," is serving three life sentences for the stabbing and clubbing deaths of his family members in their Fort Bragg, North Carolina, apartment in February 1970.

MacDonald, now 68, has long maintained his innocence and blamed a foursome of drug-crazed hippies for killing his wife, Colette, and daughters Kristen and Kimberley, ages 2 and 5. He described one of the intruders as a blonde woman in a floppy hat who he said chanted "acid is groovy; kill the pigs."

Courts have so far upheld his conviction, but MacDonald's lawyers are hoping for a different outcome as they present new evidence uncovered since his 1979 trial at a federal court hearing that could last up to 10 days in Wilmington.

Unlike in previous appeals, the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ordered in April 2011 that Senior District Judge James C. Fox must weigh the new evidence in light of all the other evidence previously gathered rather than considering it piecemeal.

The evidence includes a sworn statement by a now deceased former federal marshal alleging that the lead prosecutor in the case intimidated a key witness into changing her testimony, and DNA test results of hair found by the bodies that did not belong to Jeffrey MacDonald or any of his family members.

On Monday, defense attorney Gordon Widenhouse said the claim by former Deputy U.S. Marshal Jim Britt and the unsourced hair samples would "compellingly demonstrate reasonable doubt." If jurors had heard those facts at MacDonald's trial, they never would have convicted him, Widenhouse said.

Prosecutor John Bruce reserved his opening statement for when the prosecution presents its evidence.

MacDonald, gray-haired and shuffling into the courtroom with chains around his ankles, waved to his now-wife Kathryn whom he married while in prison.

Much of the day's testimony came from Wade Smith, a Raleigh attorney who was part of MacDonald's defense team in 1979. Smith testified that Britt came to him out of the blue in 2005 to share information the former marshal said had weighed on him since the trial.

Smith said Britt told him that Helena Stoeckley, thought by MacDonald's backers to be the woman in the floppy hat, had admitted to him to being in the MacDonald home on the night of the murders and even described a broken hobby horse she had seen inside.

Smith testified Britt also said he heard prosecutor James Blackburn tell Stoeckley that if she told jurors she was in the family's house on the night of the murders he would charge her with first-degree murder. During the trial, Stoeckley testified that she could not remember what she was doing that night and had no recollection of being in the house.

Under supreme hats questioning by Bruce, Smith said he never personally heard Stoeckley confess to anything that was useful to the defense or prosecution.

"She was being totally uncooperative in every way," Smith said. "She wasn't giving us anything."

Neither Stoeckley nor Britt is alive to testify at MacDonald's latest hearing, having died in 1983 and 2008, respectively.

Britt's wife at the time of the trial, Mary Britt, testified on Monday that he also told her about Stoeckley's admission to being inside the MacDonald home.

Mary Britt said she remembered her then-husband's response when she asked about the outcome of Stoeckley's testimony. "He said they can't use her testimony because her brain is fried from the use of drugs," she said.

Man arrested in Central Park attack on woman, 73

NEW YORK (AP) — A heavily tattooed homeless man with a history of violence was arrested Thursday on charges he retaliated against a 73-year-old birdwatcher who took a compromising photo of him by brutally raping her in broad daylight in a normally serene part of Central Park.

Three rookie police officers took David Albert Mitchell into custody on Wednesday night after dope snapback spotting him walking on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not far from where the woman said the attack occurred.

The woman picked the 42-year-old Mitchell out of a lineup on Thursday, New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne said.

Investigators believe Mitchell was the man shown in footage from police security cameras leaving the park with the woman's backpack. Browne said Mitchell had some of the woman's belongings, including photo memory cards, on him when he was picked up.

Mitchell was arraigned early Friday on charges of first-degree rape, robbery, assault and other charges and ordered held without bail, prosecutors said. The name of his attorney was not immediately available.

Earlier, Mitchell said nothing as he was led from the special victims unit to face charges in court, but he spat at reporters gathered there. He also was facing charges he threatened a man last month with a knife in the same area of the park.

He told the man, according to investigators: "I have no problem stabbing you as many times as I want and making this circle full of blood."

Relatives in Virginia, reached by phone, said Mitchell — who has tattoos of the grim reaper, castles, Nordic warriors and dragons all over his body — was a heavy drinker who had spent most of his life in and out of jail. They said they weren't surprised by his latest brush with the law.

A sister-in-law and onetime girlfriend said he had been arrested in 2003 after trying to sexually assault her and dragging her out of her home in a drunken rage. Records show he was sentenced to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to an abduction charge.

His trouble "was always sexually driven," Saretta Mitchell told The Associated Press. "He was a sick individual as far as sex goes. ... I was just a dumb, naive person to get involved with him."

Mitchell's extensive criminal record in Virginia and West Virginia included a 1989 arrest on murder and rape charges. He was acquitted at trial.

The last time Mitchell was seen in Virginia was at the beginning of August, his relatives said.

The birdwatcher had told police she was attacked at around 11 a.m. Wednesday in a wooded area near Strawberry Fields, a spot that serves as a memorial to John Lennon and is one of Central Park's busiest sections. The woman told investigators a man threw her to the ground and attacked her, then made off with a backpack that contained her camera.

She had also said she thought the assailant was a man she photographed fondling himself about nine days ago in a more isolated spot known as the Ramble. She said he demanded she delete the image and tried to grab her camera but didn't succeed. Police said that initial encounter wasn't reported.

Investigators said Mitchell was known as Keith in the park and had been haunting the Ramble and other locations. It's unclear how long he had been in New York.

In an interview with the New York Post published Thursday, the woman recounted how the man jumped on her back, pummeled her, grabbed her throat and threatened to cut her jugular when she screamed. She said she feels jittery but is mostly enraged.

"Kill him. Cut off his penis. That's fine," she said. "Cut off his feet, then hit him over the head. Then give him life in prison."

Although the park is considered safe and there have been few reported crimes there in the past several years, there have been some headline-grabbing exceptions.

On April 19, 1989, an investment oakley polarized sunglasses banker was found after being attacked while jogging. She became known worldwide as "the Central Park jogger."

She was in a coma for 12 days before beginning her near-miraculous recovery. The jogger, Trisha Meili, disclosed her identity in 2003 and published a memoir.

Meili said her "heart was just aching" when she saw headlines about the birdwatcher's attack.

"I want to send loving thoughts of healing to this woman and let her know that thousands are thinking about her and sending prayers for her vibrant spirit ... to move forward from this horrible violation," she said.

Meili, who no longer lives in the New York City area, still jogs and is even back in Central Park from time to time.

"There are wonderful things that happen in that park, too," she said.

Hatton's father arrested after assault on son: reports

LONDON (Reuters) - Ricky Hatton's father was arrested on suspicion of assaulting his son the day before the British boxer announced his comeback, the BBC reported on Saturday.

Ray Hatton, 61, was given a police caution after the alleged incident outside Ricky Hatton's health and oakley sunglasses wholesale fitness gym in Hyde, Greater Manchester, on Thursday.

Hatton, 33, and his father traded punches following a heated argument, the Independent newspaper reported.

A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said: "Shortly before 11:45 BST on Thursday, police received reports that there had been a fight involving two men outside a health and fitness club on Market Street.

"A 33-year-old man was assaulted by a 61-year-old man, who was arrested on suspicion of common assault and subsequently given a police caution."

The statement said the 33-year-old man was not injured.

Hatton, the former welterweight and light-welterweight world champion,wholesale snapback hats confirmed on Friday he would return to professional boxing with a fight against an unnamed opponent in Manchester in November.

He retired with a record of 45-2 (32KO) after a devastating two-round knockout by Manny Pacquiaoin May 2009. He checked into a rehabilitation center in London in 2010 after being the subject of allegations of cocaine abuse.