Quirky World: Sexual groping for humour is okay says Italian court
An man accused of groping female colleagues is not guilty of sexual harassment because he was driven by an immature sense of humour rather than a desire for sexual gratification, a court in Sicily has ruled.
The ruling drew condemnation in a country where the national statistics bureau says around a third of women between 16 and 70 years old have suffered physical or sexual violence.
A junior colleague accused the 65-year-old of touching her sexually. A second woman said he treated her “as if I were a little girl ... as if he were giving me a light slap on the behind”, according to a document explaining the reasons for the ruling.
The court in Palermo said it was proven he had behaved as the women alleged but acquitted him nonetheless.
The judges said the contact was not “lascivious” and the boss, who was described as being “severe” in his workplace dealings, was not touching his staff for sexual pleasure.
“Objectively, it was brought on by an immature and inappropriate sense of humour, mixed in with a veiled abuse of power and an albeit improper way of establishing hierarchical relationships in the office,” they said.
Commentators and a trade union lambasted the ruling.
“The Palermo court’s sentence is worthy of lawmakers in Saudi Arabia,” well-known commentator Massimo Gramellini wrote in a front-page opinion piece in La Stampa newspaper.
“The august assembly seems to suggest that the women who were felt up caused the real offence.”
The UIL trade union’s Sicilian branch said it was “amazed and puzzled” by the decision.
A starving sea lion has been rescued after finding its way into a fancy San Diego restaurant.
Experts at SeaWorld were called to the Marine Room, an ocean-front restaurant where they found an eight-month-old female pup asleep in a dining booth. The pup, which was severely underweight and dehydrated, was taken back to SeaWorld’s Animal Rescue Centre and experts are cautiously optimistic about her recovery.
There has been a surge in sea lion mortality over the past year. Scientists say the animals’ food supply has been affected by higher-than-normal ocean temperatures linked to El Nino.
A teenager who found a 500g gold bar in an Alpine lake in Germany last year and handed it in to police has been told she can keep it.
The girl, who has not been identified, was on holiday at Koenigssee lake in south-east Germany in August when she found the gold bar about 6ft under the surface.
Police in Berchtesgaden confirmed that authorities had been unable to find an owner for the bar so, six months after the find, the 16-year-old girl gets to keep it. The bar is worth about £14,000 (€18,219), but it is still not clear how it ended up in the lake.
If you are going to rob a photo booth, a mask might be a good idea.
A photo booth snapped several photos of a man who allegedly stole $75 out of the booth at the Funway Amusements arcade and bowling alley in Batavia, Illinois, a town west of Chicago.
Police distributed the photos and asked the public if they recognise the suspect.
“With this machine, if you try to manipulate or damage it in any way, it snaps a picture of you,” said Batavia police detective Kevin Bretz.
“I don’t think he paid for the pictures.”
The detective said the alleged theft occurred in November, but the police department was just able to recover the photos this week after the machine was repaired.
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