An Australian man has been charged with assault after reportedly tattooing a 40-centimetre penis on his friend’s back after an argument, police said yesterday.

Detective Constable Paul Malcolm said a 25-year-old man had gone to the alleged offender’s house and “somehow in the course of the conversation the subject of tattoos came up”.

“The victim wasn’t interested at first but he was talked into it and he said he wanted a yin and yang symbol with some dragons,” Malcolm said, according to Ipswich’s Queen­sland Times. “The bloke started doing the tattoo and there was another bloke standing there watching saying, ‘Mate, it’s looking really good’.”

“When he got home he showed it to the person he lives with and she said: ‘I don’t think it’s the tattoo you were after’,” Mr Malcolm said. (AFP)

Bank of Sugar

Thousands of fake bank notes bearing the face of Lord Sugar were handed out along with £500 in real cash.

The “Bank of Sugar” £55 notes were stuck on a hoarding, as well as 10 actual £50 bills, to promote the launch of The Apprentice star’s autobiography.

Passers-by were encouraged to pluck the money off the “cash point”, which was put up in Golden Square near Regent Street, central London. (PA)

President pleads for maid on death row

The President of Sri Lanka has appealed for clemency for a maid awaiting beheading in a Saudi Arabia prison, his office said yesterday.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa wrote to Saudi King Abdullah after a court confirmed the death sentence of Sri Lankan maid Rizana Nafeek for killing an infant five years ago, a government statement said.

Ms Nafeek was first sentenced to death in 2007 – sparking protests by international human rights groups that say Ms Nafeek was a minor when the incident took place and the infant died because of suffocation when the maid tried to bottle-feed him.

Ms Nafeek appealed her sentence and her parents travelled from a poor village in eastern Sri Lanka to Saudi Arabia to meet the baby’s parents and ask for a pardon. But they were refused a meeting. (AP)

Major hiccup

A woman whose uncontrollable hiccups brought her worldwide fame has been charged with killing a man during a robbery.

Three years ago Jennifer Mee, 19, from Florida, suffered up to 50 hiccups a minute for five weeks before they suddenly stopped.

Police say she lured the robbery victim to a home where others shot him several times. (PA)

Return to lender

A library book taken out from a Virginia college in 1975 has finally made its way back to the shelves.

Former student Pat Harkin found the copy of Leon Uris’s QB VII in a box. The library caps its fees at $35, otherwise the fine could have hit $1,400. (PA)

Danger distractions

Flirting motorists are being driven to distraction by attractive road users, a survey shows.

More than two in five drivers admit to flirting while at the wheel, the poll by car insurance company Diamond found.

And 15 per cent have had an accident or a near miss after being distracted by an attractive motorists, the survey revealed. (PA)

Boy lives after plunging 20 floors

A 10-year-old Chinese boy survived falling 20 floors from an apartment window.

The boy fell from the open window and landed in a car, shattering its back window.

A doctor at the People’s Hospital of Guizhou in southern China said he suffered skull fractures and bleeding on the brain and remains under close observation.

Last month a New York man survived after falling 39 stories and crashing through a car’s back window. (AP)

Nude performance

Twenty naked dancers will perform at world famous ballet venue Sadlers Wells next spring.

Alistair Spalding, the theatre’s chief executive officer, admitted the Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde was “really testing” but said when he saw it performed he was left “breathless”.

“It is not that we are deliberately interested in shocking people but I think that people really enjoyed this. It was like a jet plane taking off over you,” he said. (PA)

Pot luck

A man called police in Pennsylvania to complain about the quality of marijuana he had just bought.

He told officers “it was nasty” when he smoked it and when police tested it they discovered it was not a drug.

But even though the 21-year-old did not technically buy marijuana, he could still face a charge of possessing a counterfeit controlled substance. (PA)

Cops and curlers

A robber was thwarted from holding up a New York beauty salon by an off-duty officer who was getting her hair done.

The gunman demanded cash in Sabine’s Hallway beauty salon in Brooklyn.

A 50-year-old customer identified herself as a police officer and ordered him to drop his gun, but the man shot at her and missed. She returned fire, hitting him in the right arm and thigh. He fled on foot. (PA)

Rubber souls

A Catholic church in the Swiss city of Lucerne has sparked controversy among believers with an Aids awareness campaign that involves distributing to teenagers condoms bearing the slogan “protect thy neighbour as thyself.”

The church plans to hand out 3,000 condoms as part of an effort to engage young people turned off by the Vatican’s long-standing opposition to the use of condoms.

A spokesman said the campaign drew mostly positive reactions but some Catholics have expressed concern. (PA)

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