MARBELLA CLUB

Jeffrey Michael O'Shaughnessy (32), from Limerick, is alleged to have indecently assaulted the woman in a lift, before trying to strangle her as she attempted to escape. The 45-year-old Spaniard was on her way to work in a law firm, when the alleged attack happened on Wednesday morning in Malaga on the Costa del Sol. She has told police that Mr O'Shaughnessy followed her into the lift as she headed to the lawyer's office where she works, grabbed her by the neck and indecently assaulted her. Colleagues heard her cries for help as the lift reached the third floor of the building in central Malaga – and have told detectives they raced out to find the Irishman trying to strangle her with one hand and forcing her mouth shut to stifle her screams with the other. A police patrol which was near the scene arrived minutes later to take O'Shaughnessy away in handcuffs. The alleged victim has told investigators she had never seen the Irishman before. Today O’Shaughnessy was in custody pending a court appearance before an investigating judge who is now probing the incident. The court hearing will be closed to the press and the public and is expected to conclude with O'Shaughnessy's remand in custody. A spokesman for Malaga's National Police said: “A 32-year-old Irishman is currently being held in custody on suspicion of indecent assault and attempted murder.” A source added: “If it had not been for this woman's colleagues hearing her screams and coming to her aid, we could have had a murder on our hands. “The attack took place in daylight in a public place. It defies logical explanation.
“We're not sure if the attacker had been following his victim or was an opportunist who struck when he got his chance. “An investigating judge will now try to get to the bottom of what has happened.”

Achmad Olong, 42, pleaded guilty to a charge of people-smuggling last week.
A Northern Territory court was told Olong arranged the passage of 353 asylum seekers, charging fees of between $US1700 ($2000) and $US3500 each. After two failed attempts, the vessel headed out to sea from Indonesia with its human cargo but was stopped in November 1999 by HMAS Dubbo at Ashmore Reef, about 800km west of Darwin.
Olong's defence lawyer Greg Smith said his client had smuggled the people, who were mostly Iraqis, because he felt sorry for their suffering under Saddam Hussein.
Handing down a five-year sentence today with a minimum non-parole period of 30 months, NT Justice Stephen Southwood said the vessel was overcrowded and rank.
"Some passengers were holding up children and yelling out for assistance," he said.
"The Australian boarding team were confronted with an overpowering stench, rubbish littering the decks, stifling heat, and numerous people were ill, including a woman who was in labour and another woman experiencing a possible miscarriage."
The sentence was welcomed by Federal Minister for Immigration Senator Chris Evans, who called people-smuggling an "abhorrent crime".

Pamela Crane, 72, a British citizen and a permanent resident of New Zealand, disappeared last year after visiting Russia with a tour group. Her son went to pick her up at the Auckland Airport on June 10, 2007, but found she was not on the flight.
The British and New Zealand embassies, together with local authorities, conducted an extensive search, and Crane's body was found a week later near Sergiyev Posad, a tourist destination 70 kilometers northeast of the city. Prosecutors said she had left on her own for Sergiyev Posad but are not sure what happened after that. They said she had apparently been strangled with a rope and robbery was a possible motive. No arrests have been made.Korobkov, the police spokesman, said relatives who suspect foul play should turn to prosecutors. "If you are sure that your relative has became a victim of a crime, you should file an appeal with the prosecutor's office," he said.
U.S. citizen Pete Kendrick about $45,000 and hours in the Russian Embassy in Washington to bring his father home after a car crash.But his efforts proved in vain. Lawrence Kendrick, 68, died in intensive care shortly after his return to Kentucky. The son worried for days that the delay might have led to his death.
"The prognosis of Russian doctors was a good bit different than the hospital over here," he said by telephone from Lexington.Later he learned that the head injuries had been so serious that no doctor could have saved his father.No official statistics are kept for the number of foreigners who have suffered a car accident, heart attack, violent robbery or other life-threatening emergency in Russia. But everyday headaches only seem to multiply, leaving anxious relatives scrambling to cut red tape, navigate an unfamiliar bureaucratic system and raise funds to cover costs.If the loved one is in a coma or dead, relatives can wait for weeks to learn what happened.Lawrence Kendrick, a member of a Baptist missionary group, traveled to Bryansk in early June to visit friends he had made on a previous trip to Russia, his son said. A dump truck hit the taxi that he and others were riding in on June 6, striking Kendrick's side of the vehicle.Kendrick, who was left in a coma, suffered brain injuries and fractures to his ribs, pelvis, left hip and leg. One other person was lightly injured in the accident.Kendrick's participation in the missionary group meant his friends relayed the news of the accident back to his family in the United States immediately.Prompt information can be vital in an emergency. U.S. journalist Daniel Nehmad was hit by a car as he was crossing Moscow's busy Leningradsky Prospekt in 2002 -- but his family and friends only found out a week later.
Friends contacted the police and U.S. Embassy after not seeing Nehmad for several days. They found him, however, by calling hospitals in and around Moscow and discovering that an unidentified patient matching Nehmad's description was lying in a coma at the Botkin Hospital. Nehmad, who wrote several articles for The Moscow Times, had no identifying documents with him."It was a miracle that he survived," his mother, Diane Nehmad, said Tuesday by telephone from Maplewood, New Jersey.
"Because he had no documents to identify him, he was placed with homeless people who did not get much attention in the hospital. But one of the doctors realized that he was not just a beggar because he was clean and had wonderful American teeth," she said. "Since he needed expensive antibiotics, which hospital lacked, she bought them with her own money and thus saved him from death."His parents came to Moscow and arranged to have him airlifted to the United States. He has nearly made a full recovery, his mother said.With tougher visa rules introduced last year, it took Kendrick's family a week and more than $1,000 to obtain their Russian visas. "Literally, it took us a whole day just to figure out which form was right," Pete Kendrick said. There is no procedure in place to offer expedited visas for the families of those injured in Russia.The family spent thousands of dollars more for transportation to Moscow and on to Bryansk, located 380 kilometers southwest of the capital. When Kendrick's son and wife, Ramona, arrived in Bryansk, they were told that doctors knew he had suffered brain injuries but were unsure to what extent.
"The thing that was a surprise to us was that it's a pretty big hospital there in Bryansk, but to get his CAT scans done they had to put him in an ambulance and bring him somewhere else," Pete Kendrick said.Because of his critical condition, Kendrick was transferred to the American Medical Center in Moscow nearly a week later.
"Moscow's kind of a big bear to navigate without any help," the son said.He and his mother began making arrangements to have Kendrick flown by air ambulance back to Lexington. With the flight costing $150,000, Kendrick's wife put their home up for sale.Unexpectedly, their travel-insurance company agreed to cover 50 percent of the airlift, leaving $75,000 to raise, Pete Kendrick said.In a twist of fate, the family of a U.S. patient in Italy who had ordered an air ambulance no longer needed it after their loved one died. Not wanting to lose the money they had paid, they donated the flight to the Kendricks.With the flight booked, the doctors began to worry whether Kendrick would survive the trip without undergoing brain surgery first. After a few days of tests, they agreed to let Kendrick fly without an operation. When he finally arrived back in Kentucky on June 23 -- 17 days after the accident -- he was rushed to the University of Kentucky's Chandler Medical Center and placed in intensive care. He died on July 2, never recovering consciousness.
The family wondered whether a misdiagnosis or the delay in flying to the United States might have caused the death. A team of University of Kentucky doctors ran their own tests and determined that Kendrick's injuries had been fatal, said Steve Fegenbush, associate pastor of First Baptist Church in Junction City, where Kendrick was a member.While the Kendricks had no trouble locating their loved one, Nils Kalvatn Schoeyen from Norway was less fortunate. He spent two weeks searching for his uncle, Erling Selmer Larsen, who had failed to return to Oslo from a Christmas vacation in Thailand in 2002. Schoeyen found him lying forgotten in a Moscow morgue.No one contacted Larsen's family or the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow, even though Larsen was carrying his passport. He died of a heart attack on an eight-hour Aeroflot flight to Moscow, where he was supposed to transfer to an Oslo-bound plane.
Officials from the police and the Botkin Hospital morgue, where the body was sent, explained at the time that they had tried to contact the embassy but could not get through because they had the wrong phone number.Under the law, a morgue is only required to hold a body for two weeks. If no one claims the body, it is buried in a grave marked with a number. Cases of exhumation from these graves are rare.
Schoeyen found his uncle, an unmarried retiree with no children, after calling around and stumbling across a passenger who had been on the Aeroflot flight. The passenger said someone had died on the plane. Schoeyen immediately contacted the Norwegian Embassy, which traced Larsen to the morgue. "I'm not angry, just disappointed and very surprised that this could happen," Schoeyen told The Moscow Times at the time. "I just can't see why they should take so long."Moscow police spokesman Vladimir Korobkov refused to discuss any specific cases, but he said the first thing a foreigner should do if someone has disappeared is call the Accident Registration Bureau. Since 2006, every large city has the bureau, which collects information about unidentified people brought to hospitals, drunk tanks, morgues and police stations. Multiple calls to the Moscow bureau (688-2252) went unanswered Tuesday. An operator at the St. Petersburg bureau (812-579-0055) said no one spoke English there.If the bureau cannot provide assistance, Korobkov said, contact the local police station by telephone or in person, and the police officer on duty will fill out a missing persons report. He suggested providing the police with photographs of the missing person, any available identification documents, and items the person touched for fingerprints.Another option is to call the police hotline, 02, if no other phone numbers are available. Operators who speak English are available.By law, police are supposed to open a criminal investigation if a person is not found in 10 days, but in reality, they tend to do so after about a month. As such, people often turn to private investigators."Of course, the earlier we start to search, the more likely we are to find the missing person," said Sergei Igolkin, head the Bureau of Private Investigations, a private detective agency in St. Petersburg.Igolkin said the hardest cases to crack are instances when foreigners are targeted by criminals, such as a prostitute slipping drugs into a foreigner's drink in nightclub and robbing him. Criminals who use barbiturates or other substances can overdose their victims."In this case, the body is hidden in a remote area, and the chances of it being found and identified quickly are low," Igolkin said.

Charlie Northfield was smuggled across the border to Senegal by agents for a British security firm. He returned to his home in Plymouth yesterday, having spent six months in the Gambian Mile 2 Prison or under under house arrest in the capital, Banjul. The father of three was spirited out of Banjul at the weekend and driven 125 miles though the bush before swimming a flood-swollen river to cross the border into Senegal. He was flown from the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to Morocco and then on to Britain. Mr Northfield, 48, had been held on the orders of the Gambian Government, which accused his employers, Carnegie Minerals, of illegal exporting. He was held in prison for ten days before being released on bail of $450,000 (£253,000) to await trial on three charges of “economic crime” and one of theft. He described the escape as being like “something in a film”. Mr Northfield said yesterday: “I was driven in a few different taxis and we passed through several police checkpoints. The driver sorted things out, but I was worried someone would recognise me as my face had been plastered on the front pages of their papers. “Probably the most frightening part was reaching a river that I had been told would be shallow enough to walk through. It was swollen and quite fast-flowing so I had to strip off and swim across. The river was about 50 yards across and I was swept another 100 yards downstream. By the time I reached the other side I was completely knackered. I really have a great sense of relief. The whole thing has been a nightmare.” Mr Northfield said that he had left The Gambia because he believed that he would not be given a fair trial. “I had been to court 13 times but they were no closer to starting the trial and I had a strong sense they never would be,” he said. “The ordeal was not going to end unless we did something. We had tried negotiating but to no avail, and I was feeling desperate.” Mr Northfield's passport had been confiscated by the Gambian authorities and he had to obtain temporary papers to fly home. He is now waiting for a new passport before he can travel to Thailand to be reunited with his wife, Neung, and children, Charles, 18, Thomas, 11, and Natalie, 7. “It has been extremely difficult for them, as it was hard to communicate,” he said.
The escape was organised by Martin McGowan-Scanlon, a former army captain who heads a security consultancy in Torquay, Devon. He said that he had arranged the rescue because he was incensed at Mr Northfield's treatment. “The regime in Gambia used Charlie as a pawn in its disagreement with his former employers,” he said.
Mr Northfield travelled to The Gambia last October to manage the company's operations there. In February the authorities charged him and the company over the alleged understatement of the value and content of mineral exports, and cancelled the company's mining licence. They denied all charges. Crispin Grey-Johnson, the Gambian Foreign Minister, said that 20,000 tonnes of sand with “heavy concentration of uranium” had been exported to Australia and China between 2006 and December 2007.

FBI doubles reward for 'most wanted' fugitive James "Whitey" Bulger
The FBI has doubled to £1 million the reward for information leading to the capture of a notorious Mob fugitive last seen in Britain. James "Whitey" Bulger, a Boston Irish mobster, has been on the run for 13 years and has been charged with 19 murders.
After Osama bin Laden, Bulger - head of Boston's feared Winter Hill Gang - is regarded as America's most wanted fugitive and was an inspiration for the Oscar-winning thriller The Departed.Now 78, the convicted bank robber and government informant was last seen in Piccadilly Circus in September 2002.The FBI went to Italy last year after a man and woman resembling Bulger and his girlfriend were captured on video footage but they turned out to be Germans.The pair have avoided the authorities since 1995 when they vanished after Bulger was tipped off by a former FBI agent that he was about to be charged with racketeering.
The FBI believed he fled America before 2001 and has been living under a false passport and alias, surviving off millions of dollars secreted in bank safety deposit boxes.Unconfirmed sightings were subsequently reported as far apart as Canada, South America, Europe and Thailand.Bulger, who is balding, had links with corrupt federal agents while his brother led the Massachusetts Senate for nearly 20 years.He was the inspiration for Frank Costello, the Boston crime lord played by Jack Nicholson in The Departed."I am confident that he will be captured," Warren Bamford, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office, said on Thursday.
Mr Bamford said the FBI would issue a new "Top Ten" wanted poster with new Bulger head shots to its 56 field offices in the United States and 60 offices around the world.

Thai officials say they are seeking to shut down hundreds of Internet Web sites as part of their state of emergency decree to counter anti-government protests.
Mun Patanotai, the country's Minister of Information and Communications Technology, says his department has told Internet service providers to close down about 400 Web sites which the government deems to be national security threats, the British newspaper The Guardian reported Wednesday.Thai communications officials claim the sites "disturbed the peaceful social order and morality of the people, and/or which were considered detrimental to national security."The Guardian said Patanotai has also gone to court seeking permission to block an additional 1,200 Web sites.
Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej Tuesday announced a series of emergency measures curtailing civil liberties in an effort to ease the protests, in which thousands have taken to the streets to demand his resignation.

Harry Nicolaides (aka King Kong) latest appointment as senior lecturer in social psychology at the Prince of Songkla University was the result of an extensive email campaign before he left shores in the Antipodes in July 2003. Joseph Goebbels, German Nazi leader and the minister for propaganda in the Third Reich, would have been proud of the mass dissemination of my CV to most educational institutions in Thailand. My CV may have even crossed the desk of a few paramilitary organisations and revolutionary groups on the border of Thailand and Burma. My anarchic tendencies would have made these applications ill fated as even terrorists are inclined towards petty officialdom. Notwithstanding the loss of these fertile opportunities as a writer I have managed to transform the current position at the university into a great source of inspiration for my students and myself. I just hope Identity fraud is not a serious crime in Thailand...
Garry Ridler, a friend from Australia was visiting Phuket as a tourist. I managed to convince him to assume my identity for the first lecture to the 120 students in the course of social psychology at the university. We had him tailored beautifully at Raymond’s on Rat-U-Thit Road, Patong Beach in a tattersall check shirt woven from Egyptian cotton with a silk, blue paisley tie and navy coloured, pleated trousers. As he stands nearly six feet 4 and is a man of generous girth the figure he cast was imposing. I briefed him on the subject matter and gave him an impressive resume which he noted on an overhead projector to the compliant audience of students in the massive university auditorium. PhD from Cambridge University, Doctoral thesis on psychoanalytic theory, Chairman of psychologists at Oxford University, author of two definitive textbooks in the field: Psychology and Society, 1987, 10th edition, Prentice Hall and Sociocultural Theories in the Modern World, 1962. None of the students recognised that as Garry looks about forty years old a book published in 1962 would make him somewhat of a child prodigy.
Garry spoke authoritatively about nothing for some time while all students paid meticulous attention and wrote copious lecture notes on the rambling dissertation. When I arrived and introduced myself as the course lecturer challenging Garry’s position an incredulous student remarked that Garry looked more credible than I did! In fact some thought I was his son! The exercise was an object lesson in the fallibility of human perception in the field of social psychology. Lecture number one was a resounding success. In the second lecture I presented a multiple-choice test which included the following question:
Behaviourism was developed through the empirical experiments of Ian Pavlov and
A. A dog that would salivate at the sound of a ringing bell
B. A monkey that would juggle coloured balls
C. A buffalo that could dance the Tango
D. A chicken that could sing the national anthem
One student circled D. This student has obviously been witness to the most astonishing case of identity fraud the world has ever seen (a man pretending to be a chicken)……. Now where did I put that gorilla suit……?

Harry Nicolaides is a famous tourism-award winning Australian and best selling Australian author. His first book – Concierge Confidential - published in 2002, generated unprecedented national publicity and attracted reviews from Australian political leaders and world famous sporting and entertainment figures. An iconic figure in the hospitality industry as magazine publisher, radio commentator and service professional, Harry was immortalised in Michael Heppell’s international best seller - Be Brilliant – as an individual who achieved brilliance with raw talent and tenacity. In 2003 Harry Nicolaides relocated to live in Thailand for two years. He worked as lecturer in Social Psychology at The Prince Of Songkla University in Phuket, where he taught for over a year. He drove across Thailand from south to north and gathered material for his new book. He is currently a lecturer in Tourism and Hospitality at Mae Fah Luang University in Northern Thailand and living in the heart of the Golden Triangle - Chiang Rai. His new novel – VERISIMILITUDE – is a trenchant commentary on the political and social life of contemporary Thailand. It is an uncompromising assault on the patrician values of the monarchy, the insidious infiltration of religious missionaries in the education system and the intimate relationship between American foreign policy and Thailand’s battle against Muslim insurrections in the south.
Savage, ruthless and unforgiving, VERISIMILITUDE pulls away the mask of benign congeniality that Thailand has disguised itself with for decades and reveals a people who are obsessed with Western affluence and materialism and who trade their cultural integrity and personal honour for the baubles of Babylonian America.
Working as a hotel concierge in Melbourne has prepared me well for the itinerant life as Writer-at-large in Thailand. My instinctive networking skills have gained me employment as an English teacher to beautiful Thai girls at the Amanpuri – the world’s most exclusive resort, helped me to develop friendships with the senior constabulary of the Phuket police force (avoiding liability for recklessly endangering the life of former Malaysian President Mahatir by nearly colliding with his 17 car motorcade on a private road) and become a senior lecturer to 120 students in social psychology at the Prince of Songkla University. A few phone calls and I can be on a million-dollar yacht sharing stories with a maverick boat captain who has smoked pot with Robert De Niro, got drunk with Mel Gibson and rubbed sun tan lotion on Nicole Kidman’s back. And all this happens in Phuket, Thailand exactly four degrees north of the Equator where there is just three degrees of separation between Nicole Kidman’s buttocks and my left hand.