TWINS have died in Arizona after their mother let go of their stroller to swat a bee.
Alexis Kelsar was walking her sons, Silas and Eli, near a canal in Yuma when she briefly let go of the double stroller to swipe the bee. The Washington Post says the steepness of the banks meant that the stroller immediately rolled into the canal, and disappeared into deep water.
The distraught mother leapt into the waterway, but the fast moving current had already swept the babies away.
LISTEN up, Baby Boomers. We know how badly you want to give your kids a leg-up but if you’re dodging tax in the process, the ATO is this year going to be all over you like a rash.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australian Tax Office investigators intend to drop on by the homes of wealthy individuals who – perhaps in a genuine effort to help those youngsters (now in their 40s) get onto the property ladder, and surely not in an attempt to avoid paying capital gains tax – have shifted assets to their children.
ATO deputy commissioner Michael Cranston says the Tax Office had noticed lots of examples of people passing down assets to their children in ways that enable them to skip paying tax, and it’s either got to stop, or they are going to whack you for it. You have been warned.
FORENSIC teams in Victoria have begun digging for the bones of children who once lived at the old Ballarat Orphanage.
An inquiry into the abuse of children in State care last year found that many children disappeared from the orphanage, and there have long been rumours that some of the little ones may be buried in the grounds.
The ABC reports that Aboriginal women have been fighting for an investigation because many of the children taken to Ballarat were part of the Stolen Generation, whose parents did not even know they were there.
The forensic search was arranged after the orphanage site was sold to developers who want to build upon it.
A JAPANESE artist has been arrested and charged with acts of obscenity after distributing ‘vagina selfies.’
Megumi Igarashi, who calls herself Rokudenashiko (a good-for-nothing girl) regularly makes scans of her vagina and distributes them. She has also made a little model of her vagina, shaped as a canoe.
The 43-year-old artist told the Tokyo district court that she does not dispute the facts (that she made the vagina selfies) but says ‘my artwork is not obscene.’
She says there is a double standard at play, because pictures of penises are celebrated in Japan.
HE had a promising career as a male model but a young Melbourne man has instead been killed fighting for the Islamic State.
The Australian reports the death of Sharky Jama, in Syria, with his father saying that his son had been shot.
A second Melbourne teen, Jake Bilardi, died during a suicide bombing in March. He, too, had been recruited to the death cult that is ISIS.
MORE than 20 women have been imprisoned for suffering a miscarriage or stillbirth in El Salvador.
The LA Times today reports on several cases of women sentenced to up to 30 years in prison after courts decided that they must have somehow tried to end their pregnancies.
El Salvador has ‘the strictest abortion laws in the hemisphere. Virtually no exception is allowed for the termination of pregnancy, not for rape, incest, malformed fetus or danger to the woman’s life,’ the report says.
However, many women say they have been charged with abortion crimes after suffering miscarriages.
A Seattle businessman has announced that he will raise the minimum wage in his company to $70,000 per annum by cutting his own salary from upwards of a million dollars a year.
Dan Price, the founder of a credit card payment system company called Gravity Payments, told his staff that he had long believed that it was near impossible to live on minimum wage in the US, and you can see why: it’s $US 9 an hour, or roughly $25,000 a year for an adult working a 40 hour week.
ONE person who absolutely does not have any idea what it means to be poor is Hollywood actress, Gwyneth Paltrow.
Paltrow, who both married and then consciously uncoupled from Coldplay’s Chris Martin, this week agreed to take a poverty challenge, which involved trying to live on a food budget of $29 a week.
Gwyneth promptly went to the grocery store, and the photograph of her haul
included baked beans, two minute noodles, three loaves of cheap-and-nameless white bread and a jumbo carton of milk.
Just kidding! It actually featured seven limes, and kale.
“This is what $29 gets you at the grocery store,” Gwyneth said, and she’s so right, except that you just can’t live on limes and kale.
Unless you’re Gwyneth, which is surely the point.
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