An angler who won a fishing competition with a huge sea bass he stole from an aquarium has been spared jail.
Matthew Clark, 29, stole the 13-pound fish from Guernsey Aquarium in St Peter Port and pretended he had caught it during a sea fishing contest.
He won the £800 first prize and proudly posed for pictures with his “catch” but a competitor recognised the fish from a recent trip to the aquarium and alerted staff.
Clark was given 100 hours community service at Guernsey Magistrates’ Court. (PA)
Escalator changes direction
Five people were hurt when an escalator suddenly changed direction at a railway station in Jersey City.
Commuters panicked when the escalator malfunctioned and some jumped off mid-ride. A station spokesman said injuries included back and neck pain, scrapes and bruises. (PA)
£100m modern art sale
A sale of paintings by some of the masters of 20th century art is expected to raise around £100 million (€121,000,000).
Work by Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Matisse will all go on sale at Christie’s auction house in London on February 6.
The highlight of the impressionist and modern art sale is Modigliani’s Jeanne Hebuterne (au chapeau) – a 1919 portrait of his lover.
Two works by Picasso, a 1960 female nude called Nu accroupi (see picture) and Minotaure aveugle conduit par une petite fille are estimated to fetch £5 million and £3.5 million respectively.
The sale of the 37 lots is expected to raise between £67 million and £99.7 million. (PA)
US war veteran’s reunion
A US Second World War veteran who served in France has been reunited with his Army-issue duffel bag nearly seven decades after it went missing.
Ninety-two-year-old William Kadar, of Indiana, opened a carefully wrapped parcel to find the drab green bag inside. The bag is still stencilled with his name and serial number.
Kadar said he last saw the bag in November 1944, a month before he was captured by the Germans. His granddaughter, Arleen Haas, said a letter in the package said a 16-year-old French boy found the bag in his grandfather’s house. (PA)
Buggy thefts on the increase
The theft of baby buggies is increasing, partly because of the rising cost of new models. A survey of 2,000 parents with young children showed that one in seven has had a buggy stolen.
Insurance firm LV= said its research also showed that two out of five parents who have had buggies stolen did not report the theft to the police. Most of those stolen were taken from outside the owner’s home. (PA)
Museum returns artefact
The J. Paul Getty Museum said it plans to return to Sicily a terra-cotta head depicting the Greek god Hades after determining it was clandestinely excavated from an archaeological site in the 1970s.
The Los Angeles museum took the initiative to investigate the piece’s origins after seeing fragments in a publication that could join to the head, which dates to about 300 or 400 BC.
The terracotta body of Hades is undergoing an extensive restoration at the Museo Archeologico in the Italian city of Aidone. (AP)