QUIRKY WORLD ... A daily look at some of the world’s stranger stories
Rugby league player Anthony Watts has denied biting an opponent’s penis during a tackle in a local league game earlier this month.
Watts, a former player in Australia’s top-flight National Rugby League, was handed an eight-match ban following a video review of the incident in a Gold Coast match two weeks ago.
Footage posted on YouTube showed the Tugun Seahawks utility pulled down in a tackle near the tryline and subsequently becoming involved in a melee with remonstrating players from the Bilambil Jets team.
The video later showed one of the Jets players pulling down his shorts in front of the referee.
“I was wearing a mouthguard and there’s no way I bit him on the dick,” Watts told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.
“The claim is laughable but I’ve still had to live with it. I know I didn’t do it and the people close to me know I didn’t do it, either.”
Watts was handed the ban after being found guilty of “contrary conduct” by the Gold Coast Rugby League last week.
Dumped by NRL team Sydney Roosters in 2011 for disciplinary problems, Watts was sentenced to community service in June for being involved in a brawl between rival motorcycle gangs on the Gold Coast.
That followed a conviction on a weapons possession charge by a New South Wales court after he had been found carrying knuckle-dusters.
Watts said he had been victimised as a former NRL player and the ban was an attempt to drive him out of the game.
Thieves in northern Italy broke into a prison and made off with a safe containing thousands of euro in the early hours, Italian media reported.
The theft occurred shortly after midnight when the robbers eluded surveillance systems and entered the director’s office at the prison in Pavia, near Milan, daily Corriere della Sera said. The safe, which was removed whole from the wall and spirited away, contained about €5,000.
Indian court slams police for tea-drinking arrest
INDIA: A court has reprimanded police for arresting a man they accused of drinking tea in a “suspicious” manner at a roadside stall.
Vijay Patil was arrested in February under section 151 of the code of criminal procedure, which allows an arrest to prevent someone imminently expected to commit a crime.
Police said there was no “satisfactory explanation” for the 49-year-old’s tea-drinking behaviour and “found his conduct suspicious”, according to the court order. Bombay High Court threw out the case, describing the police motive as “bewildering”.
“We were unaware that the law required anyone to give an explanation for having tea, whether in the morning, noon or night,” said Judges GS Patel and SC Dharmadhikari in the order. “One might take tea in a variety of ways, not all of them always elegant or delicate, some of them perhaps even noisy. But we know of no way to drink tea ‘suspiciously’.”
An official was sacked after an online video showed him complaining about the ingratitude of Chinese citizens while he ate lobster and drank expensive liquor, in the latest instance of government excess to spark anger.
A five-minute video, widely circulated on Chinese social media sites, captured Liang Wenyong, the Communist party secretary of Gushanzi town, in the northeastern province of Hebei as he consumed costly food and drink while castigating fellow Chinese.
“They have rice in their hands and pork in their mouths and still they curse you,” the portly Liang said in the video, shot secretly in May but posted to the internet in mid-September.
“This is what the common folk are like. They are shameless and you can’t give them face.”
State broadcaster China Radio International said that Liang was removed from his post indefinitely.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
