Eideard

A suspected cannibal was arrested in Slovakia after his ‘dinner guest’ changed his mind and alerted police.

The would-be victim from Switzerland answered an internet advert from the 43-year-old man seeking a person who would agree to be killed, cooked and eaten.

He claims he thought the offer was nothing more than a ‘macabre fantasy game’.

But after telephone conversations with the unnamed man, he realised he was “deadly serious”, he said.

He alerted Swiss police who informed their Slovakian counterparts…They sent in an undercover officer posing as the victim in a sting operation to catch the suspected cannibal.

During the arrest, a gunfight ensued in which the cannibal and a police officer were both injured…

A Kysak police spokesman said: “One of our officers and the suspect both suffered gunshot wounds during the arrest and are both being treated in hospital.”

I presume they’re both being treated tenderly.

 
A court in eastern Pakistan has extended the police custody of two brothers charged with cannibalism, officials say.

Arif Ali and Farman Ali were arrested earlier in the week. Police say they caught them making a meal of a corpse they had recently stolen from a grave.

The brothers’ alleged cannibalism was discovered after the body of a newly deceased woman was found to be missing from her grave in the city of Sargodha. Her family then alerted the police.

“We have charged them under the anti-terrorism act,” Inspector Abdur Rahman of Darya Khan police told the BBC…

The family of the woman said to have been eaten became suspicious when they visited her grave a few days after she had been buried to find that it had been disturbed.

After digging to check the body was still there, they found it to be missing. A police complaint was lodged – and the subsequent investigation led to the house of the brothers.

“They had cut a part of the corpse and were cooking it when we appeared on the scene,” a police official said.

The other remains of the 24-year-old, who died of cancer, were recovered from the brothers’ residence.

Police have not revealed any clear reason as to why the men are said to have resorted to cannibalism.

They say the pair appear to be in sound physical and mental condition and were living in seclusion with their sister, whose mental condition is said to be unstable.

Neighbours have expressed shock at the discovery, saying they never suspected that the two men could be involved in such acts.

I had to include that last sentence to keep the attention of a whole class of our readers. I’m certain a number of you have been conducting a lifelong study on the trite things people say when they discover a friend, neighbor or family member is a ghoul.

Last night, the only place to be was at king-of-all-venture-capitalists John Doerr’s house in Woodside, California, where President Barack Obama sat down with none other than Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz and a handful of other billionaire tech titans.

The White House Flickr feed shared the above image, taken by Pete Souza, identifying these people only as “Technology Business Leaders,” though bloggers made small work of attaching names to faces. According to the the New York Times political blog, The Caucus, the remaining folks in the shot are: Cisco’s John Chambers, Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Stanford University president John Hennessy, Genentech’s Art Levinson and “cleantech” entrepreneur Steve Westly.

And a good time was had by all.

The mansion where the private banquet was held

After a night of wining and dining 50 of China’s richest people in the name of promoting philanthropy, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates told a horde of journalists on Thursday that the biggest difference between eating with Chinese tycoons and Western ones was the food.

Thus ended the two billionaires’ mission to promote charity in China, a journey that provoked weeks of breathless speculation here about whether this nation’s much-resented class of superrich was too miserly to measure up to Western philanthropic standards.

At a news conference, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates said the answer was an emphatic “no.”

“I was amazed last night, really, at how similar the questions and discussions and all that was to the dinners we had in the U.S.,” said Mr. Buffett, who had wisecracked about the food. “The same motivations tend to exist. The mechanism for manifesting those motivations may differ from country to country…”

On Thursday, the two men pronounced the dinner an unqualified success, saying that two-thirds of those who were invited had shown up, and that more than half of those at the dinner had offered their own ideas on how Chinese philanthropy should work…

China is widely reported to be second only to the United States in the number of dollar billionaires. Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett said the nation was unique in that its wealthy class had arisen almost wholly in the past 30 years, so philanthropic practices that are entrenched among European and American dynasties are new here, and open to change.

“What you have is a first generation of fortune,” Mr. Gates said, “and it’s natural that they’re thinking through, in this society in particular, ‘What do you do?’ ”

But Mr. Gates suggested that their philanthropic globetrotting was not yet over. “We may do an event in India,” he said.

I’ve worked on a number of homes for the nouveau riche who ended up choosing Santa Fe either as their primary residence or just a holiday home. Cripes, I worked on a “vacation cottage” that was 24,000 square feet in size.

I think a fair number of folks who earned their own way remember where they come from.

As the food crisis began to bite, the rumblings of discontent grew louder – and finally, after a day of discussing food shortages and soaring prices, the famished stomachs of the G8 leaders could bear it no longer.

The most powerful stomachs in the world were today compelled to stave off the great Hokkaido Hunger by lining themselves with an eight course dinner prepared by 25 chefs.

This multi-pronged attack on global leadership pangs was launched only hours after a not inconsiderable lunch – four courses, washed down with Chateau Grillet 2005 — which had clearly fully failed to quell appetites possibly enlarged by agonising over the starving citizens of the world.
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