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A Banksy artwork cut down from a north London street is to be auctioned, just months after another in the same borough was controversially sold for a reported £750,000 (€868,724).
No Ball Games was removed from the side of a shop in Turnpike Lane and will be sold next year by the Sincura Group – the company which arranged the sale of Slave Labour in May.
The street graffiti shows two children playing with a sign that reads No Ball Games. (PA)
Pink Panther escapes jail
Armed men have broken a member of the so-called Pink Panther gang of jewel thieves out of a Swiss prison, police said on Friday.
Bosnian gang member Poparic Milan escaped the jail in the Swiss canton of Vaud on on Thursday night, along with another prisoner, after accomplices in two vehicles forced their way through a gate and fired at prison guards.
The Pink Panthers, who have a weakness for expensive watches, have staged about 340 robberies on luxury stores in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the United States since 1999, making off with booty worth more than €330 million, according to Interpol.
Milan, 34, had been serving a jail sentence of six years and eight months for robbing a jewellery store in Switzerland’s watch-making capital Neuchatel in 2009. (Reuters)
Bird suspected to be an Israeli spy
Turkish authorities detained a bird on suspicion it was spying for Israel, but freed it after X-rays showed it was not embedded with surveillance equipment, newspapers said on Friday.
The kestrel aroused suspicion because of a metal ring on its foot carrying the words ‘24311 Tel Avivunia Israel’, prompting residents in the village of Altinayva to hand it over to the local governor.
The bird was put in an X-ray machine at a university hospital to check for microchips or bugging devices, according to the Milliyet newspaper, which carried a front-page image of the radiogram with the title ‘Israeli agent’.
Ties between Turkey and Israel, long military allies, have been tense since May 2010 when Israeli commandoes killed nine Turkish activists aboard the Mavi Marmara, a ship in a Turkish-led convoy seeking to break a naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. (Reuters)