A British aviation enthusiast searching for scores of Second World War Spitfires he believes are buried in Burma has said he will continue his quest even though his main sponsor has backed out.
David Cundall (pictured), from Lincolnshire, said that he is confident of enough funding to continue his search despite the withdrawal of the Belarusian video gaming company Wargaming.net.
The company said last week it believes the planes do not really exist and descriptions of their burial by allied forces as the war drew to a close are a myth.
Mr Cundall contends that as many as 140 Spitfires may have been buried in near-pristine condition in Burma.
No traces of any have been found in digging that began in December. (AP)
200 hunters kill one boar
Efforts to cull a sprawling population of wild boar in Belgium’s northern forests met with limited results this week after a party of 200 hunters managed to kill only one animal.
The hunt was organised on Monday by local wildlife officials in a northern forest near the town of Postel, where several road accidents have been linked to wild boar.
Hunters spotted groups of about 60 animals but, apart from the one animal killed, all the others slipped away with some possibly fleeing across the Dutch border, a spokesman said.
“One group also contained too many young animals and we decided not to shoot on that group,” said Dirk Bogaert, spokesman for the Flemish Agency of Nature and Forestry.
The animal shot would be divided among the hunters, the agency said in a statement. (Reuters)
Teddy bears outfox guard
A Belarusian border guard has been jailed for two years for failing to protect the ex-Soviet nation from foreign teddy bears.
The Belarus Supreme Court said the guard has been convicted of failure to report an intrusion of a light plane that dropped hundreds of teddy bears decked out in parachutes and slogans supporting human rights over the tightly controlled country of 10 million.
The court wouldn’t give his name or rank. Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko, dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” in the West, has already sacked several top defence officials over the July 4 incident.
Two Swedish advertising agency employees piloted a light plane into Belarus’s heavily guarded airspace in a show of support for Belarusian human rights activists. (AP)
Going naked at Naked Men
The exhibit in Vienna’s Leopold Museum is entitled Naked Men, so a group of nudists and naturalists took the curators at their word and showed up to see it on Monday in the buff.
“It is good to be free, I am seeing this exhibition for the second time now and it is perfect to see Naked Men as a naked man,” said one of the visitors who called himself Max and who on his previous visit wore his clothes.
The exhibition, which has been extended until March 4, is designed to show the diverse and changing depictions of male nudity in art history.
Among its exhibits is a grotesque self-portrait by Egon Schiele and a photograph by French artists Pierre & Gilles called Vive La France of three men of different races wearing nothing but blue, white and red socks and soccer boots. (Reuters)