Now that's storming the castle!

The couple were spotted on a grass bank near the castle gates before being taken away by police and cautioned with public decency offences.

A Thames Valley Police spokesman, said: “We can confirm that two people were arrested for outraging public decency and were cautioned for the offence.”

The Queen was believed to be in residence at the time on 26 April.

Windsor Castle declined to comment.

Courtesy BBC

We don't know who this guy is. Maybe he's looking for a team?

The University of Oregon’s club-sports board stripped the season away from the national title contenders just because the team, in achieving its high ranking and higher consciousness, stripped away the shackles of society’s clothing puritanism for a game at Oregon State on April 11.

Here we are obligated to note that “Animal House” was filmed at Oregon.

The team was placed on double-secret probation in November after police broke up a party featuring kegs and minors. Also, there was a rash of speeding tickets as the boys headed down I-5 to play Stanford.

“Speeding, drinking, nudity — they’re not bad things,” co-captain Dusty Becker said. “They’re things a big portion of the community doesn’t think are wrong.”

Said Greg Marmalard, er, Jeff Gibb of the club sports committee: “I’m not sure I can say that I trust the judgment of the Ultimate team — that’s why it’s so hard for me to give you another chance.”

The only hope is a reprieve from the student government. Here’s hoping they get it. After all, the issue is not whether they broke a few rules or took a few liberties with their female party guests. They did. (Wink.) But you can’t hold a whole Ultimate Frisbee team responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals.

Courtesy Mercury News

As a boy I was a huge professional wrestling fan. My brother and I spent hours on our trampoline reenacting the theatric matches we watched each Saturday morning. Like many kids, we eventually lost interest in professional wrestling when we discovered that while the wrestlers were tremendous athletes, the matches were illusions.

For a long time I never understood why so many adults continued to follow these staged matches when there were alternatives like boxing and MMA fighting. Then one day I found myself indulging in an awful action movie. I realized that I like the illusion of living through these invincible characters, of overpowering a platoon of trained soldiers and enduring torturous pain at the hands of a crazed villain.

Fetish wrestling fulfills these same needs. It provides an arena where women can become she-gods, tossing opponents around with superhero strength and style. It allows those who like a certain amount of pain to be slammed on a mat beneath a hard body. While I may not want a woman dressed in a mask and cape to throw me in a headlock, I can appreciate the desire to be manhandled.

In an article for Nerve.com, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, explores the underground world of fetish wrestling. Below is an excerpt from her experience with a female fetish wrestler named Zelda, who also happened to be her neighbor.

Courtesy Creative Loafing

The law makes no prohibitions towards other species

The Senate unanimously passed a bill (SB 448) Tuesday that would make it a third degree felony for anyone to have sex with an animal. A similar bill in the House has not been debated on the floor.

Florida is one of 16 states without a law banning bestiality.

The bill sponsored by Sen. Nan Rich, D-Weston, would make the offense a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. The Florida law would not apply to veterinary practices.

According to the national Humane Society, several studies highlight a link between sexual assault of animals and sex crimes against humans.

Courtesy Miami Herald

T&A, T&A

The angry fiancee, named only as Valeria A. by Italian media, plastered posters all over the Italian capital Rome when she saw snaps of her husband-to-be, identified only as Antonio M. by Italian media, embracing another woman on the social networking website.

She and a pal printed and stuck up hundreds of posters at train stations and office blocks around the city where her fiance and their friends work.

A picture – taken from Antonio’s Facebook profile – shows him nestling his head between a girl’s naked boobs.

“Thank goodness there’s Facebook! At least I’ve disovered you’re a traitor pig before the wedding! Signed, your former betrothed bride and the 548 guests of our wedding,” wrote Valeria, 28

Courtesy Metro.co.uk

In Pakistan’s commercial capital, Karachi, a company that makes 2,000 fetish and bondage products operates next to a mosque.

But deep in the nation’s commercial capital, just next door to a mosque and the offices of a radical Islamic organization, in an unmarked house two Pakistani brothers have discovered a more liberal and lucrative use for the scourge: the $3 billion fetish and bondage industry in the West.

Their mom-and-pop-style garment business, AQTH, earns more than $1 million a year manufacturing 2,000 fetish and bondage products, including the Mistress Flogger, and exporting them to the United States and Europe.

The Qadeer brothers, Adnan, 34, and Rizwan, 32, have made the business into an improbable success story in a country where bars are illegal and the poor are often bound to a lifetime in poverty.

If the bondage business seems an unlikely pursuit for two button-down, slightly awkward, decidedly deadpan lower-class Pakistanis, it is. But then, discretion has been their byword. The brothers have taken extreme measures to conceal a business that in this deeply conservative Muslim country is as risky as it is risqué.

It helps that the dozens of veiled and uneducated female laborers who assemble the handmade items — gag balls, lime-green corsets, thonged spanking skirts — have no idea what the items are used for. Even the owners’ wives, and their conservative Muslim mother, have not been informed.

“If our mom knew, she would disown us,” said Adnan, seated on a leopard-print fabric covering his desk chair.

“Due to cultural barriers and religion, people don’t discuss these things openly,” Rizwan said. “We have to hide this information.”

Even customs officials were perplexed at how to tax the items, not quite sure what they were, they said.

Recently, when a curious employee inquired about the purpose of the sleep sack, a sleeping bag-like product used in certain kinds of bondage, she was told it was a body bag for the American military in Iraq.

Adnan Ahmed, a former air traffic controller who is now AQTH’s chief operating officer, said the items were undergarments. When asked if he considered a red-hot puppy mask an undergarment, he had a straightforward, but honest reply: “No. It’s just for joking.”

Still, word of the business has at times escaped. Last year four “powerful guys” from a conservative Muslim group threatened to burn down the factory if it was not closed within a week. The brothers calmly explained that it was merely a business, and that the items were not used in Pakistan. The next day they bribed a local Islamic political organization to ensure their safety.

AQTH, founded by Rizwan Qadeer, pictured, and his brother, Adnan, earns more than $1 million a year in exports.

Since President Asif Ali Zardari took office, Adnan said, trade unions have been legalized and prices of some raw materials, including leather, have shot up, as have interest rates. The result: a 15 percent dip in AQTH’s profits.

Echoing the pervasive fears of entrepreneurs across the country, the brothers are considering relocating to East Asia if Pakistan becomes more unstable — or if they receive another threat.

The shoddy factory seems like an ode to their humble upbringing. Adnan’s executive bathroom has no toilet paper. Rizwan has no office. And their preferred lunch is Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Their inspiration for success came from their father, a civil servant who supported a family of six with a $150 monthly salary. While other children were forced into labor, or played aimlessly, the Qadeer brothers had to study.

In 2001, after the brothers graduated from a university, their father lent them $800, enough to purchase their first computer and to cover several months of rent on a studio apartment. There, the brothers searched the Internet day and night for a high-value garment product that was not widely available.

They experimented with basic leather goods, like jackets and pants. Adnan slept at mosquito-infested stitching factories to oversee sample runs that, in the end, proved more costly than their Chinese competitors.

“It was very hard time,” Adnan said. “We had nothing in our pockets, not even money to fuel our motorbike.”

Rizwan said: “People used to say: ‘You can’t do business in Pakistan. You’re wasting your time. Just go get a job.’ ” But our father boosted our morale.”
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The brothers said Pakistan’s “stone-age production” worked to their advantage. The country, they said, lacks visionary product development. “Everyone’s still making the same products,” Adnan said.

Then, they discovered a kind of straitjacket online. At first, they thought it was used for psychiatric patients, but it quickly led them to learn about the lucrative fetish industry.

Without family connections in the finance industry, and with nothing to mortgage, they were refused a loan by four banks. “Our education was our only connection,” Rizwan said.

They finally secured a loan from an American bank, and then the Sept. 11 attacks offered a timely chance. Orders for garment exports were canceled across Pakistan in the slower economic climate, allowing the prices of raw materials like leather to be cut in half.

But fear after Sept. 11 raised suspicions among their own Western clients. On Sept. 12, 2001, a customer sent an e-mail message with a photo of two F-16s flying over Pakistan. Orders were canceled.

Today, they sell their products to online and brick-and-mortar shops, and to individuals via eBay. Their market research, they said, showed that 70 percent of their customers were middle- to upper-class Americans, and a majority of them Democrats. The Netherlands and Germany account for the bulk of their European sales.

“We really believe that if you are persistent and hard working, there is an opportunity, in any harsh environment, even in an economically depressed environment like Pakistan,” Rizwan said.

A major perk, they say, is attending international fetish shows to see how their products hold up in action.

“I go to Sin City every year,” said Rizwan, referring to Las Vegas in a sheepish laugh. It’s all business, he said. “Clients know our country and culture, and they don’t invite us to participate. We’re a little bit shy.”

Courtesy New York Times

BOULDER, COLORADO – A 69-year-old man is caught masturbating behind a Dumpster at the University of Colorado in 2006. He was ticketed for public indecency, a petty offense carrying a punishment slightly harsher than littering.

A 46-year-old man was found shirtless, drunk and urinating on the side of the road in east Boulder County the same year. He was ticketed for indecent exposure, a class 1 misdemeanor that carries mandatory registration as a sex offender if convicted.

Public nudity in Boulder isn’t exactly uncommon: Last year, more than 60 cyclists biked bare to protest oil-burning cars; a CU student ran naked across campus while tripping on acid, and another, also tripping, jumped naked out of a car and rolled around in the street; a 55-year-old man took several nude jogs along Folsom Street; and a teenager streaked the Boulder-Fairview football game.

But how the nude offenders are ticketed by police — if they are ticketed at all — can vary widely, resulting in either a relatively minor offense or life-changing registration as a sex offender.

In the wake of last year’s naked pumpkin run, when a dozen “Naked Pumpkin Runners” were ticketed for indecent exposure on Halloween, public frustration with Colorado’s nudity laws came boiling up. Now, the American Civil Liberty’s Union is lobbying for changes that would keep streakers off of sex-offender lists and protect nudity as a constitutionally sheltered freedom of expression.

“We are trying to make changes at the state level,” said Judd Golden, who chairs the Boulder County chapter of the ACLU. “We are very concerned about the way in which the Colorado sex-offender registry is set up, resulting in sex-offender status for these kinds of activities.”

The ACLU lobby, busy with a recent push to end Colorado’s death penalty and facing a legislature buried in a laborious budget-balancing process, hasn’t made much progress on the nudity front, Golden said. But they’re not giving up.

The group is hosting a public forum Tuesday called “Naked in Boulder,” which will discuss whether streakers, naked bike riders and the sort should be treated as “pranksters and protesters, or criminals and sex offenders.”

Looking for a law that fits

Police officers faced with a naked Boulderite have few choices in terms of charges.

Indecent exposure applies to people who have bared their genitals in a way “likely” to upset someone, and public indecency applies to someone who had sex, masturbated or lewdly exposed their body in public. Of the two, indecent exposure may be the better fit for streakers, but carries the much harsher consequence of sex-offender registry.

Over the years, both charges have been given out for seemingly similar offenses. A 22-year-old CU student who, overcome by the joy of finishing finals, danced naked through the streets in downtown Boulder was ticketed for public indecency. When a 17-year-old Boulder High student streaked a school football game, he was charged with indecent exposure.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a 38-year-old man who sent images of himself masturbating over the Internet to a teenage girl was charged with indecent exposure. A man seen with his pants and underwear pulled down and waving to children playing in the school yard at an elementary school was charged with public indecency.

“We’re dealing with a square peg in a round hole,” said Stan Garnett, who became Boulder County’s district attorney shortly after the pumpkin running incident. “Most people would say people running down the mall with pumpkins on their heads may not be somebody who is at risk of becoming a sex offender in the future.”

None of the pumpkin runners was actually found guilty of indecent exposure. Most pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a crime that doesn’t mention nudity and carries a gentler punishment.

“Prosecutors end up charging people with offenses that don’t really fit in order to avoid some of these absurd consequences,” said Rep. Claire Levy, a Democrat representing Boulder in the Colorado general assembly. “Then there’s an offense on the record that doesn’t fit the crime and the public truly doesn’t know what a criminal record means.”

Levy said that while it makes sense for some people convicted of indecent exposure to be registered as sex offenders, allowing more judicial discretion could be a good thing. She said that legislators should examine how the entire registry is working, but said it’s not a priority right now.

The legality of nude

While indecent exposure and public indecency are clearly different, both depend on the person being more than just naked. To fit the bill, someone else has to be offended.

“You need to have somebody that says they would have been alarmed or affronted,” said Andy Schmidt, a lawyer of one of the pumpkin runners, speaking about indecent exposure. “In this situation, that was not going to happen.”

Schmidt’s client, Ty Tuff, was the only runner who didn’t take a plea deal and eventually had all of his charges dropped. In Schmidt’s opinion, his client couldn’t have been found guilty because he didn’t do anything wrong.

“The only law broken in the pumpkin run is that police detained people unlawfully,” he said.

There is no law that prevents people from just being naked in Boulder when no one is offended.

On the evening of the pumpkin run, which was well publicized and scheduled late at night, the Pearl Street Mall was packed with a throng of spectators waiting to see the streakers, and Schmidt would argue, they were hardly offended.

If Boulder did have a law preventing general nudity, it would be constitutionally dubious, according to the ACLU, since stripping down can take the form of protected speech.

“Where is the line between those who are engaging in expressive speech and may do so under the First Amendment versus the criminal approach?” he said. “We are concerned about a chilling effect on otherwise protected speech.”

Garnett, who will speak at the ACLU panel alongside Schmidt, doesn’t agree.

“I have a little trouble with the argument that there’s a constitutional right to run around naked,” he said. “I don’t have much difficulty, philosophically, with passing laws that require people to keep their clothes on.”

Courtesy Daily Camera

No more freezing hikes in Appenzell Innerrhoden

Appenzell is considered one of the most conservative regions of Switzerland; it gave women the vote only in 1990.

Locals have been outraged by an apparent upsurge in hikers who think the best way to appreciate the mountains is with their clothes off.

The vote was taken with a show of hands at Appenzell’s annual Landsgemeinde, an open-air meeting of all registered voters held in the town square.

Appenzell is one of only two Swiss cantons that still decide local government policy in this way.

There was a big majority in favour of prohibiting naked hiking, and introducing fines of Sfr 200 ($175).

Not everone in Appenzeller wants to go nude in public

Among local people, it is hard to find anyone who has a good word to say for the hikers.

“I think it’s disgraceful,” said one elderly gentleman. “God may have created us naked, but he gave us clothes to walk around in.”

“It’s just not right,” said a woman. “Not at all appropriate for our country.”

Interestingly, however, no-one actually seems to have seen a naked hiker.

“No, I’ve never seen one,” said a local farmer. “Thank goodness, because if I had they would certainly have got a piece of my mind.”

Hiker disappointment

Among naked hikers themselves, there is disappointment at what they see as an over-reaction to an innocent hobby which disturbs no-one.

“I’m not out to annoy anyone,” insists one of them, who goes by the colourful pseudonym of Puistola Grottenpösch.

Puistola and many other naked hikers may be comfortable baring their all up in the mountains, but the controversy in Appenzell has made them very shy about revealing their real names.

“For me hiking naked is all about getting out into natural surroundings, peaceful surroundings, and challenging myself a little bit,” says Puistola.

“Of course I meet people from time to time, but they always say hello, sometimes they ask aren’t you cold. But they’re just as friendly as if I was wearing clothes.”

Nevertheless, as Puistola strides along a snowy hiking trail wearing nothing but a hat, gloves, and hiking boots, it’s hard to see what the attraction of naked hiking really is.

“Of course the human body needs protection,” he concedes.

“So right now I’m wearing hiking boots and gloves and a hat, because it’s a little bit chilly. And if it’s really cold, or windy, or wet, then of course going naked just doesn’t work, and I wear clothes just like everyone else.

“But right now it’s nice, there is a gentle breeze, and I can feel the Sun on my body; you can’t because you’re dressed.”

The canton was keen to stamp out nude hiking before the summer

Meanwhile some Swiss lawyers are describing Appenzell’s decision to prohibit naked hiking as akin to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

“I estimate there are only around 20 to 25 naked hikers in the whole of Switzerland,” says lawyer Daniel Kettiger. “So really arresting them and fining them is a bit silly. And our courts do have better things to do.”

What’s more, Mr Kettiger points out, Appenzell may have over-reached itself legally in deciding to introduce a prohibition.

“The Swiss parliament voted to remove public nudity from the penal code in 1991,” he explains. “So at a federal level, naked hiking is not punishable, and Appenzell’s laws are not higher than the federal ones.”

Image damage

But Appenzell is determined to go ahead. The canton has some of the most stunning mountain scenery in Switzerland, and its tourist board has been running a high-profile international marketing campaign, highlighting the beauty of Appenzell’s hiking trails.

Tourist officers were concerned to discover that Appenzell was regularly appearing in the internet chatrooms of German nudist groups, describing it as the best place for naked hiking.

This was not the image they were hoping for, and, Daniel Kettiger suggests, it might be the real reason behind Appenzell’s ban on naked hiking.

“They really did a great job building up the hiking tourism,” he explains. “And I think they fear naked hikers could harm their image. They want to be a Mecca for hikers – but not a Mecca for nude hikers.”

Appenzell Innerrhoden’s decision is being watched closely by other alpine regions of Switzerland, and the political climate for naked hikers does seem to be turning decidedly chilly.

Neighbouring Appenzell Outerrhoden is also proposing a ban on what local politicians call “shameless behaviour”.

And just over the mountains in canton Glarus, there is nervousness that if naked hikers are driven out of Appenzell, they may choose Glarus as their next favourite spot.

But Puistola Grottenpösch and his fellow hikers are defiant, believing they have Swiss federal law on their side.

“We naked hikers have never broken any law with our hobby,” he insists.

“And we will fight up to the highest federal court for our right to be naked in public, even in Appenzell.”

Courtesy BBC.co.uk

After this story, this dessert isn't nearly as enticing

His family took him to the local hospital along with his severed member in a plastic bag inside an icebox, before moving him to HCMC’s Cho Ray Hospital.

It took doctors more than two hours to reconnect the arteries, veins, nerves and other tiny parts of his penis.

“The severed organ has shown signs of revival after the reattachment,” said Dr. Duong Quang Vu, the main surgeon. “However, it will take a couple days more to ascertain (the extent of recovery).”

“Operating within six hours from the time the penis has been separated from its owner would ensure the operation’s success. But this is a 13-hour case,” he added.

Courtesy Thanhien News

Then last spring, the well-respected, married judge suddenly found his face splashed beside that of a troubled exotic dancer in a kimono.

She went on TV to claim they’d been romantically involved, and that he helped her hide money from creditors, even putting a rent-controlled New York City apartment under his name for her.

Newspaper columns were written. Jokes were made. Stringer’s 35-year legal career was tarnished.

“It is axiomatic that ‘Judge’ and ‘Stripper’ showing up in a headline is never a good thing, especially if you happen to be the ‘Judge,’” then Tampa Tribune columnist Daniel Ruth wrote after the story broke.

Criminal charges are possible, though the FBI declined to comment. The state agency that oversees judges dropped misconduct charges after Stringer, who stepped down in February and draws monthly retirement benefits of $8,069, agreed never to be a judge again.

To his friends and the legal community, the speed of Stringer’s fall was shocking. Many are reserving judgment, while others feel their trust in him was misplaced.

Delano Stewart, a Tampa attorney who calls himself a former friend of Stringer, said Stringer’s conduct “disrespects all of what I have worked for all of my life.”

“I am so deeply angry with him,” Stewart said.

Stringer, who has said he had a friendship and business relationship with stripper Christy Yamanaka, declined to comment for this story. His attorney did not return repeated messages left at his office.

Yamanaka also declined to comment.

Stringer, 64, graduated from Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport in the 1970s. He became an assistant state attorney and later a circuit judge in Tampa’s Hillsborough County. There, in the family law division, he built a reputation as a judge who insisted that all sides be heard.

“I can tell you, the family lawyers idolized Tom Stringer,” said Chief Judge Stevan T. Northcutt of Florida’s 2nd District Court of Appeal.

In 1999, Stringer was appointed to that court, where judges make $153,140 a year.

Fast forward to March 2008. Yamanaka, 48, showed up on a local TV station, dressed in a yellow kimono with burnt orange flowers, her long, dark hair flowing.

She said she met the judge at an Italian restaurant in 1995, when she was a stripper in Tampa. Five years later, she was deep in debt and turned to him for advice. Later, she said she went public after Stringer refused to repay money he owed her.

Yamanaka had tried to file for bankruptcy in Nevada in 2000 and court documents show she owed American Express more than $78,000, racked up from stays at expensive hotels in Las Vegas and airline tickets. She owed Bank of America another $236,000. She listed her occupation as housewife and said she had just $450 in assets – family pictures, clothes and a wedding ring – and no income. The bankruptcy court denied her request, meaning she would have to repay the debts.

Yamanaka, who is divorced, said the judge helped by allowing her to deposit tens of thousands of dollars she made from stripping in Las Vegas and New York into his accounts so creditors wouldn’t know she had an income.

“Judge suggests to me to put the money into his account,” Yamanaka told WFLA-TV in Tampa. “Due to his position nobody bothered him so it would be safe.”

Stringer told reporters he let her use his accounts because she had terrible credit but denied helping her hide money.

The Judicial Qualifications Commission, which oversees judges in Florida, investigated and found probable cause to believe Stringer had opened bank accounts in his name and let her use them from 2003 to 2007 to hide assets. The commission’s inquiry does not say how much money might have passed through the accounts.

The allegations listed by the commission only get worse: Stringer listed himself as the sole owner of a home in Hawaii for her. He accepted a trip from her to Las Vegas, a gift he did not disclose though judicial canons require reporting all gifts over $100. He went to New York to sign a lease on an apartment for her, putting it under his name, and allowed her to treat him to a stay at The Waldorf-Astoria hotel. He asked her to buy two Rolex watches, one for him and one for his wife. He borrowed $50,000 from her in a no-interest loan that he failed to repay. None of the transactions was included on the financial disclosure report required of judges.

The alleged acts “constitute conduct unbecoming a member of the judiciary,” the commission concluded.

When the commission charged Stringer with ethical violations in January, his lawyer called it “tragic.”

“The time comes when the process demands that it be proven before someone’s career is permanently stained or in some fashion affected by this,” attorney J. David Bogenschutz said.

Celene Humphries, a former staff attorney at the appeals court where Stringer was a judge, said she can imagine him trying to help someone, without thinking of the personal cost.

“Everybody is subject to lapses of judgment,” she said. “It’s just that not everybody gets punished as severely as he did.”

Courtesy Miami Herald