Canadian man arrives home after 11-year walk around world
Melbourne: A 56-year-old Canadian man who left home after his business went bankrupt has completed a 11-year walk around the world, and finally made it back to his homeland.
Jean Beliveau, who arrived on Sunday to a hero’s welcome in Montreal from loved ones, MPs and supporters – said his “real mission” was to lobby Canada and other governments to create “ministries of peace.”
“We are all different, and that is what is beautiful about life on Earth – our different colours, different beliefs, different political systems,” the Telegraph quoted him as saying.
“Those are all musical notes… we must create harmony from them, create a common tune,” an emotional Beliveau told the crowd assembled at city hall in the old part of the city.
Beliveau left Montreal on the day of his 45th birthday – August 18, 2000 – after his small sign business went bankrupt. He decided to run around the world to try to escape the pain.
The Canadian ran all the way to Atlanta, Georgia before slowing his stride for what would become the longest uninterrupted walk around the world: 75,000 kilometres across 64 countries.
Upon his return on Sunday, Beliveau reunited with his mother, whom she had not seen throughout his 11 years on the road. She welcomed him in a tight embrace.
More than 100 supporters walked the final kilometres with Beliveau through the streets of Montreal. (ANI)
Mexican footballers in trouble for mock gunplay
Mexico City: Mexicans were aghast after a soccer player pretended to shoot one of his teammates in the head to celebrate a goal, a prank that fell flat in a country where nearly 50,000 have died in gangland violence in less than five years.
The incident took place in the 32nd minute of Saturday’s first division match between the Chivas del Guadalajara and Estudiantes Tecos.
After Marco Fabian scored for Chivas on a pass from Alberto Medina, the two men simulated an execution-style shooting.
The celebration spurred an avalanche of criticism in the media and on social networks, as even Chivas fans described the stunt as gratuitous and inappropriate.
The outcry prompted the club’s management to issue an apology.
“We regret the celebration carried out by our players Marco Fabian and Alberto Medina after the goal Fabian scored against the Estudiantes Tecos team,” Chivas said Monday in a statement.
Fabian and Medina “will be reprimanded by the institution, because they are an example for the children and young people of our country”, the club said.
Mexican soccer has first-hand experience of the violence that has rocked the country since the government militarised the struggle with organised crime in December 2006.
In early 2010, Paraguayan striker Salvador Cabanas, playing for Mexico’s America club, was shot in the head at a bar in the Mexican capital.
Cabanas barely survived and has yet to return to soccer, though he did take part in a special exhibition match in Mexico organized in his honour. (IANS)
German yachtsman feared eaten by cannibals
Melbourne: Trip of a lifetime turned out to be a nightmare for a German traveller, who is feared to have been eaten by cannibals in South Pacific.
Stefan Ramin, 40, had set off to traverse the globe, in his search for paradise, in 2008 and was accompanied by his girlfriend Heike Dorsch, 37.
But unfortunately, the trip took a horrible turn when he reached Nuku Hiva, an island of 2,789 people, in French Polynesia, where the couple had planned to spend several months to experience a traditional goat hunt.
The remote tropical island was the last place where Ramin was seen before the charred remains, believed to be his, were uncovered.
Experts believe he was ‘hacked to pieces and burned’ and eaten by suspected cannibals.
According to Radio New Zealand International, testing will conclude whether the ashes belong to Ramin, the Courier Mail reported.
Police are searching Henri Haiti, a local guide who went on a hunting trip with Ramin and then tried to sexually assault Dorsch, when he returned to alert her of an apparent accident.
Although, Haiti tied her to a tree but she managed to flee and alert the local authorities.
Haiti is still missing and is the subject of now seven-day manhunt from police and soldiers.
“The foreign ministry and the federal police are aware of the case and in contact with local authorities,” said a spokesperson from the German foreign ministry.” (ANI)
Man opts for mummification for TV documentary
London: A man in Britain has become first individual to be mummified in the style of ancient Egyptians for at least 3,000 years.
Using the techniques that preserved king Tutankhamun’s body after his death in 1,323 BC, scientists have embalmed the 61-year-old Alan Billis of Torquay town in Devon county, following his death from lung cancer, the Daily Mail reported.
Billis, who worked as taxi driver, loved watching documentaries, agreed to have his body preserved after seeing an advertisement from a television company looking to film the process.
Billis’ wife Janet, 68, said: “He just said: ‘I’ve just phoned someone up about being mummified.’ I said: ‘You’ve what.’ I thought here we go again. It’s just the sort of thing you would expect him to do.”
But Janet and the couple’s three grown-up children approved his decision and the resulting programme — Mummifying Alan: Egypt’s Last Secret — is to be screened on Channel 4 Monday.
Billis, who has been dubbed Torquay’s Tutankhamun, explained his unusual decision in the documentary, saying: “People have been leaving their bodies to science for years, and if people don’t volunteer for anything nothing gets found out.”
Over a period of several months following his death in January, Billis’ internal organs were removed and kept in jars, with the exception of his brain and heart.
His skin was covered in a mixture of oils and resins and bathed in a solution of Natron, a salt found in dried-up river beds in Egypt.
After a month in a glass tank at the Medico-Legal Centre in Sheffield, which houses the city’s mortuary, his body was taken out, placed in a drying chamber and wrapped in linen.
Stephen Buckley of the University of York, who helped research Egyptian mummification techniques before the programme, said Billis’ body could now last several millennia. (IANS)
Medieval-armour clad man held
New York: A man from Washington has been arrested for challenging his teenaged daughter to duel and beating her with a wooden sword.
According to The Olympian newspaper, Seay, of Yelm, allegedly sat on his daughter and beat her with sticks before punishing her with the sword for going to a party without permission. (ANI)