Dead Pool 7th September 2014

Afternoon peeps, and as sure as rain falls from the sky,  more celebrities have unfortunately died. But surprisingly, nobody listed Joan Rivers this year!! To think we all could have scored 69 points of the death of that hateful old gobby cow!! Anyhow, the woman who once said that all Palestinians deserved to die and also belittled our much loved Adele, is now thankfully dead. Woo!

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Jimi Jamison, 63, American musician (Survivor), suspected heart attack.
• Gottfried John, 72, German actor (Berlin Alexanderplatz, GoldenEye), cancer.
• Roy Heather, 79, English television actor (Only Fools and Horses).
• Donatas Banionis, 90, Lithuanian Soviet actor (Solaris), stroke.
• Clare Cathcart, 48, Northern Irish actress (Call the Midwife, Doctors).
• Joan Rivers, 81, American actress and comedienne, respiratory and cardiac arrest.
• Simone Battle, 25, American singer (G.R.L.), apparent suicide.

In Other News

The author Jenny Diski has revealed in an essay that she’s been given an inoperable cancer diagnosis and “two to three years” by her doctor. Diski, who is 67, is currently writing her new memoir “a fucking cancer diary? Another fucking cancer diary” which will be published in parts in the London Review of Books. The author thanked readers for the “kindly thoughts” which have poured in, but is too grumpy and chemoed to reply individually at the mo.”

A woman from Mexico celebrated what was believed to be her 127th birthday on Sunday, making her the world’s oldest living person. Leandra Becerra marked the occasion with her grandson’s family in Zapopan, western Mexico. She has lived with his family for the last five years. Her grandson, Samuel Alvear, said he was told that Ms Becerra’s original birth certificate was burnt during the Mexican revolution of 1910 to 1917. Ms Becerra was issued with a new birth certificate in 2009 after an investigation of 20th century electoral documents by the government. The document states her date of birth as August 31 1887. The Guinness World Record for the oldest living person is currently held by Japanese national, Misao Okawa, who is 116 years old.

Justin Bieber was arrested Friday after crashing an ATV into a minivan and getting into a fight. Bieber, 20, was arrested at about 3pm Friday by Canadian provincial police and charged with assault and dangerous driving in rural southwestern Ontario, in the town of Perth East. Police said that Bieber’s vehicle collided with a minivan and that Bieber then got into a fight with one of its occupants. Authorities didn’t say whether anyone else was arrested in the incident, and declined to provide a mug shot. He was released without bail, and is scheduled to appear in Stratford, Ontario court on 29 September. Bieber is already on probation in California. It’s unclear whether the arrest could constitute a violation.

On This Day

• 1695 – Henry Every perpetrates the most profitable pirate raid in history with the capture of the Grand Mughal ship Ganj-i-Sawai. In response, Emperor Aurangzeb threatens to end all English trading in India.
• 1895 – The first game of what would become known as rugby league football is played, in England, starting the 1895–96 Northern Rugby Football Union season.
• 1909 – Eugène Lefebvre crashes a new French-built Wright biplane during a test flight at Juvisy, south of Paris, becoming the first aviator in the world to lose his life in a powered heavier-than-air craft.
• 1936 – The last surviving member of the thylacine species, Benjamin, dies alone in its cage at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania.
• 1978 – While walking across Waterloo Bridge in London, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov is assassinated by Bulgarian secret police agent Francesco Giullino by means of a ricin pellet fired from a specially-designed umbrella.
• 1986 – Desmond Tutu becomes the first black man to lead the Anglican Church in South Africa.
• 2008 – The US Government takes control of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Deaths

• 1978 – Keith Moon, English drummer, songwriter, producer, and actor (The Who and Plastic Ono Band) (b. 1946)
• 1994 – Terence Young, Chinese-English director and screenwriter (b. 1915)
• 1996 – Bibi Besch, Austrian-American actress (b. 1940)
• 2002 – Uziel Gal, German-Israeli gun designer, designed the Uzi (b. 1923)
• 2003 – Warren Zevon, American singer-songwriter (b. 1947)

 Jack the Riper Solved! by IFLS

An amateur investigator has claimed to have identified Jack the Ripper, the archetypal serial killer. The claims are still far from verified, but that hasn’t stopped tabloids declaring the case solved.

Between 1888 and 1891 eleven women were murdered in the Whitchapel area of London. Of these, five are believed to have been committed by the same killer, dubbed Jack the Ripper, while the others may have been the victims of copycats or people they knew.

The new claim is that DNA has been found connecting suspect Aaron Kosminski to the murder of Catherine Eddowes, one of the so-called “canonical five” killed between August 31 and November 9, 1888.

Though it’s been more than 100 years since Jack the Ripper terrorized the streets of London, his crimes survive in the public imagination.

After seeing the movie From Hell, businessman Russell Edwards was intrigued enough by the crimes to have bought a shawl that was supposedly found near Eddowes’ body. The shawl was collected by one of the police officers investigating the crime, though preservation of evidence was more lax in those days.

While other “Ripperologists” have dismissed the shawl as a fake, Edwards believed its Michaelmas flowers were an obscure clue left by the killer warning of his next attack, which occurred on November 8, 1888 at the Eastern Orthodox Churches’ Michaelmas festival.

Edwards had the shawl tested and found not only blood, but also semen. The DNA was too degraded by the passage of time for microsatellite analysis, but Dr. Jari Louhelainen, a senior molecular biology lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, matched the mitochondrial DNA from the blood to a descendent of Eddowes, using a technique he developed for extracting genetic material from cloth.

Edwards has also claimed to have matched the DNA from cells in the semen to a descendent of Kosminski’s sister. Kosminski was long considered one of the main suspects for the crimes. He lived in the areas where they occurred and was known for his severe mental illness and his misogyny. In addition, the crimes of the original Ripper stopped after he was committed to a mental institution. 

Edwards is claiming the evidence as conclusive, but has chosen to publish his claims in a book and the frequently anti-science Daily Mail, rather than a scientific publication.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Richard Gere (65), Chris Tucker (43), Lily Tomlin (75), Barry Gibb (68), Gloria Estefan (57), Keanu Reeves (50), Salma Hayek (48), Charlie Sheen (49), Raquel Welch (74), Michael Keaton (53), Rose McGowan (41) and Pippa Middleton (31).

2013 League Table

{confidential}

Next week peeps!