World Briefs

A guide dog with a special ability to sense when people are about to fall ill has been given an award for his talents.

Gino, a three-year-old Labrador-retriever cross, alerted a bus driver by barking moments before a pas­sen­ger suffered a fit and spotted that a diabetic’s blood sugar levels were low even though she was unaware, according to the dog’s owner.

Paralympian judo player Maxine Ingram accompanied Gino to a ceremony in central London to collect the award after he was named Guide Dog of the Year.

Ms Ingram, 29, from Kidwelly in south west Wales, was born blind and has had Gino since 2008. (PA)

Snake of darkness

An entire Philippine island lost electrical power yesterday after a snake reportedly climbed onto a power transmission line, causing it to short out.

The snake slithered on a transmission line on Bohol island, a popular tourist site, before dawn, resulting in the electrocution of the reptile and the breakdown of a power transformer, ABS-CBN television reported in its website.

The National Grid Corporation, which is in charge of power transmission, reported that the snake left Bohol without power for more than half a day until a replacement transformer was installed. (AFP)

Chopper tracks naked train-stopper

German police said yesterday that they were forced to close a busy stretch of railway for an hour and a half during a helicopter hunt for a naked man on the line.

The man was apparently surprised by a woman walking her dog near Solingen in before 10 p.m. on Thursday and jumped over a wall onto the railway line and fled.

While police looked for the man with the help of a helicopter, the man returned home and his wife, who decided to drive her hapless husband straight to the police station.

The 41-year-old “said that he had taken to running naked some time ago as it helped him to deal with stress,” police said in a statement. “He took care to always do it at night, so as not to frighten anyone,” a spokesman said. (AFP)

Harasses neighbour with recorded barking

An unemployed engineer who recorded his neighbour’s terrier barking and replayed it in the early hours to annoy her was sentenced to a 12-month community order yesterday.

Andrew Nicklin, of Birmingham, admitted waging a campaign of harassment against Catherine Farrell and an earlier hearing was told that he banged on Ms Farrell’s fence and played his drums loudly after becoming angry at the barking of her Yorkshire terrier cross.

But despite being arrested several times by police, 50-year-old Nicklin continued to harass Ms Farrell, whose sleep was disrupted.

Balraj Singh Sahota, representing Mr Nicklin, said Ms Farrell’s decision to buy a dog had caused the problem. (PA)

Lightning kills four at wedding

A lightning strike killed four people at a wedding in a village in Mauritania yesterday.

Wedding guest El Hadi Ould Mohamed said the lightning bolt killed two women and two men.

He said two other people were taken to hospital with burns east of Nouakchott, the capital. The bride and groom were not injured. (PA)

Funeral bans

Sports anthems and popular songs such as Frank Sinatra’s My Way have been banned from funerals at more than 200 Australian churches after new orders from Melbourne’s archbishop.

The edict follows a study that found the signature song for Australian Rules Football team Collingwood was one of the top requests at Melbourne funerals, along with My Way and the Bette Midler version of The Wind Beneath My Wings.

Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart said sports songs were not appropriate for a service which emphasises the solemn nature of death and is not designed as a celebration of the deceased’s life. However, one parish priest from South Melbourne, said he preferred to see funerals as “family affairs attended by clergy, not a clergymen’s affair attended by family”. (AFP)

‘Distraction burglar’

A “distraction burglar” unable to work because of a bad back was given an 11-year jail term yesterday after a court heard how he used computer technology to target lone elderly women victims across England.

Father-of-two Neil Seagrave, 49, of Norwich, stole more than £40,000 during a 10-month campaign in which he burgled the homes of pensioners while posing as a policeman, a water board official or an electricity worker. The court heard Mr Seagrave’s oldest victim was 101 and his youngest in her 70s.

Police said he hired cars to drive as far north as Cumbria, as far south as Essex, as far west as Kidder­minster, Worcestershire, and as far east as Lowestoft, Suffolk - staying in hotels while planning sprees in particular areas. (PA)