A British woman returned from a holiday in Peru hearing scratching noises inside her head to be told she was being attacked by flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.
Rochelle Harris, 27, said she remembered dislodging a fly from her ear while in Peru but thought nothing more of it until she started getting headaches and pains down one side of her face and woke up in Britain one morning with liquid on her pillow. (Reuters)
Bacon brushes on auction
His paintings sell for millions at auction, but now a set of Francis Bacon’s paintbrushes will go under the hammer and are expected to fetch around €29,000.
The eight brushes which the Irish-born painter gave to fellow artist Clive Barker in 1978 are in a paint-splattered butter bean tin encased in a perspex box.
They will be auctioned at Christie’s in South Kensington, London, in September as part of its Out of the Ordinary sale.
Dublin-born Bacon, who died in 1992, is one of the most sought-after modern artists. (AP)
‘Dead’ mayor’s comeback
A man who faked his death to beat a rape charge, then later got elected mayor of a village in southern Mexico, has been arrested.
The Oaxaca state prosecutors’ office says Leninguer Carballido was arrested on charges of using fake documents and making false statements. He was found hiding in a heavily fortified room at his family’s home on the outskirts of Oaxaca City. He was elected mayor of the village of San Agustin Amatengo this month.
When authorities were looking for him in 2011 in connection with a 2004 rape case, his family submitted a death certificate saying he died of natural causes in 2010. The public records clerk who drew up the fake certificate has also been arrested. (PA)
Red faces over event fine
Leeds City Council has accepted that putting parking tickets on Bruce Springsteen’s tour trucks ahead of a landmark gig by The Boss was “a little embarrassing”.
A parking attendant stuck the tickets on the lorries as Springsteen prepared to play the first-ever gig at the brand new, Leeds Arena on Wednesday afternoon. Bemused fans watched the council officer ticketing the huge articulated vehicles that were parked on double yellow lines outside the venue at the end of the city centre. And pictures of the over-zealous warden soon started circulating on social networks.
Leeds City Council, which had been heavily promoting the concert, acknowledged that, given the special circumstances, the tickets would not have to be paid. (AP)
Skulls and bones ‘museum’
An Austrian man is to be charged with disturbing the peace of the dead after police found 56 skulls and 55 other bones at a museum he had created in his home. Police in the province of Burgenland said the relics were taken without authorisa-tion from a church cemetery and had now been returned. (Reuters)