Month: April 2015

A lip-smacking model of “The Imitation Game” star Benedict Cumberbatch has been created out of chocolate.

The 6ft statue is made from 40kg of thick, hollow Belgian milk chocolate, and it took eight people a total of 250 hours to create it, reported Daily Telegraph.

The team began by learning the 38-year-old actor’s measurements and looking at images of Cumberbatch’s red carpet poses.

A final look was decided on to reflect the star’s many red carpet appearances, and then the painstaking carving process began.

A freezer trawler with an international crew of 132 has sunk in the Sea of Okhotsk off of the Kamchatka Peninsula and at least 43 crew members have been killed, rescue workers said.

The emergency services in Kamchatka, citing the head of the rescue operation, said 63 crew members were rescued and the fate of the remaining 26 from the Dalny Vostok trawler was unknown.

More than 25 fishing boats in the area were helping to rescue the crew members, the emergency services said in a statement on their website.

A Chinese woman was due in court today accused of killing a four-year-old boy in Australia with garden shears before laying in wait for his grandmother and stabbing her to death.

Cai Xia Liao, 45, was allegedly having an affair with the boy’s Melbourne-based grandfather Brian Mach, 61, whom she bound and gagged in his home on Tuesday morning.

Police allege she then killed four-year-old Alistair Mach as he lay in bed during a visit to his grandparent’s house while his parents worked, stabbing him repeatedly in the head and neck with the shears.

At least 55 dead greyhounds have been found dumped in Australia, with police today investigating the grisly find which comes on the heels of a live baiting scandal rocking the dog racing industry.

The carcasses were discovered in various states of decomposition by a member of the public near Bundaberg, 360 kilometres (223 miles) north of Brisbane in Queensland state, on Tuesday.

US Senator Robert Menendez has been indicted on charges of public corruption, following a two-year federal investigation into his ties to a friend who contributed large sums to his re-election campaign.

Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and lead author of legislation aimed at tightening sanctions against Iran, will temporarily step down from his role on the panel.

A human rights group says Gambia has sentenced three soldiers to death after a secret trial in which they were convicted of participating in an attempted coup.

Amnesty International said yesterday that the death sentences were handed down Monday, along with life sentences for three other soldiers.

The rights group called the death sentences a “cruel violation” and said they should be commuted to prison terms. It also called for a new trial.

Lt Malick Sanyang, a spokesman for the Gambian Armed Forces, declined to comment when asked about the sentences yesterday.

More than 750 plaintiffs are suing the Johns Hopkins Hospital System Corp. Over its role in a series of medical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s and 1950s during which subjects were infected with venereal diseases.

The lawsuit in Baltimore seeks USD 1 billion in damages for individuals, spouses and children of people infected with syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases through a US government program between 1945 and 1956.

California has announced sweeping statewide water restrictions for the first time in history in order to combat the region’s devastating drought, the worst since records began.

Governor Jerry Brown issued the declaration at a press conference in a parched, brown slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains that would normally be covered by deep snow.

“Today, we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet (1.5 meters) of snow,” Brown said yesterday. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action.”

President-elect Muhammadu Buhari today vowed to rid Nigeria of the “terror” of Boko Haram after his historic election victory marking the first democratic transfer of power in Africa’s most populous nation.

The 72-year-old former military ruler also pledged reconciliation with political opponents who fear a return to his autocratic regime of the 1980s, and a government representing “all Nigerians”.

Britain today hailed the successful presidential election in its former colony Nigeria and voiced hope that the transition of power to vote winner Muhammadu Buhari would be “peaceful”.

“I congratulate Muhammadu Buhari on his election victory as the next president of Nigeria and also President Goodluck Jonathan for the statesmanship he has shown in delivering free and fair elections and accepting the result,” Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in a statement.

“It is now important for both parties to ensure the transition to a new government remains peaceful,” Hammond said.

New dating of South Africa’s most famous hominid fossil confirms it is older than widely thought, boosting the country’s claim to be a home of humankind, scientists said today.

Named “Little Foot,” the skeletal remains are those of a small ape-like creature who fell into a pit in South Africa’s Sterkfontein cave complex millions of years ago.

How many years, though, is the question, and teams have put forward an extraordinary range of estimates, from 1.5 to four million.