1.A federal politician has been found dead in his car in Western Australia.
MP Don Randall, who led the charge against Tony Abbott during a leadership crisis earlier this year, is believed to have suffered a heart attack.
His car was found in Boddington, in the WA wheat belt. Mr Randall was 62, and is survived by wife Julia and two children.
Police issued a brief statement late on Tuesday, saying: “Just before 3pm this afternoon, WA Police were advised that a 62-year-old man had been found unresponsive in his vehicle on Club Drive in Boddington.”
Marcela Castaneda.
2.A Sydney woman accused of killing her fiancé with a knife says he was abusive, and she was frightened of him.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Marcela Castaneda has told a NSW court that she looked up the definition of “wife” in the dictionary, and showed her fiance.
“I said to him, ‘Read there and tell me if it says anywhere that you pull your wife’s hair, that you choke her, that you slap her’,” the Herald reports.
She stabbed Gregory Peck on February 22, 2013, after she told him she wanted to cancel their wedding. She is claiming self-defence.
Mr Peck was an American aviation engineer.
His fiance was originally accused of murder, but Justice Helen Wilson directed the jury to find her not guilty because the evidence was not capable of proving that charge.
The jury has been told that Mr Peck died from a stab wound that penetrated his heart.
Shardz Hourani.
3.A Sydney man who claimed to be a fashion designer has been charged with five counts of assault, after more than 30 models complained that he abused and manhandled them during fashion shoots.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Shardz Hourani, 31, faces accusations that he “groped, harassed and exploited young female models.”
“A man posing as a fashion designer has been charged over allegedly assaulting models and committing acts of indecency in Sydney,” NSW police said in a statement on Tuesday night.
The action comes after 3000 people joined the ‘Say No to Sanjia Fashion’ Facebook page, which launched last month.
Dozens of models have posted on the page, describing their own negative experiences working for Hourani.
The Herald quotes one woman saying Hourani “touched me inappropriately, tried kissing me and told me if I didn’t kiss him back then he would be angry … grabbed my hand and made me touch his erected penis. We need to stop this.”
Fairfax Media also spoke to a photographer who worked with Hourani and claimed he would “insist on groping the models to arrange them into poses.”
“He would touch them inappropriately. I kept thinking, ‘Why do they let him touch them like that?’ ” he said.
“It made me very uncomfortable. I stopped working with him after two days and I’ve told other photographers and models not to work with him.”
4.More bad news on the diet front: if you get fat, you’ll almost never be able to get slim again.
The BBC reports that a person’s chances of returning to a normal weight after becoming obese is about one in 200 for men, and one in 120 for women.
A team from King’s College London is calling for “wider-reaching public health policies” to prevent people becoming obese in the first place.
The lead researcher Dr Alison Fildes said the main treatment options offered to obese people in the UK – especially diet-and-exercise regimes recommended by their GPs – were not working for the vast majority.
“Treatment needs to focus on stopping people gaining more weight and maintaining even small levels of weight loss,” she said.
“Current strategies that focus on cutting calories and boosting physical activity aren’t working for most patients to achieve weight loss and maintain that.
“The greatest opportunity for fighting the obesity epidemic might be in public health policies to prevent it in the first place at a population level.”
The study didn’t take into account people who had had weight loss surgery, for whom results are better, for longer, although you can still get fat after having lap band surgery.
