PUBLISHED: 12:41 EST, 1 November 2013 | UPDATED: 12:41 EST, 1 November 2013
An elderly couple found buried in the back garden of their home were both shot, police have said.
The remains were found in the garden of a house in Forest Town, Mansfield, on October 9, and are believed to be William and Patricia Wycherley - though formal identification has yet to be confirmed - who lived at the address in the 1990s.
Daughter Susan Edwards, 55, and her husband Christopher, 57, were arrested at St Pancras International railway station in London on Wednesday evening on suspicion of their murders, though police have refused to confirm the identities of the pair.
Police have said an elderly couple found in this garden in Forest Town, Mansfield, were both shot
They continue to be questioned by detectives in relation to the deaths as police revealed the cause of death had now been determined.
Mr and Mrs Wycherley disappeared from the house in 1998, according to neighbours.
A spokeswoman for Nottinghamshire Police said: 'Following an examination of the remains, discovered in the back garden of a house in Blenheim Close, Forest Town, on Wednesday 9 October 2013, a Home Office pathologist has determined that both people died as a result of being shot.'
Murder inquiry: The outside of the semi-detached house in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, where police three weeks ago found the remains of William and Patricia Wycherley buried in the back garden after a tip-off
Mr and Mrs Wycherley moved into the house in 1987.
A murder inquiry was launched after the bodies were unearthed in the back garden of the semi-detached house following a tip-off to the police.
Neighbours said Mr Wycherley, a former merchant sailor who would now be 100, and his wife, who would now be 79, 'disappeared' from the property in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in the late 1990s.
Rumours later circulated locally and within their extended family that the couple had moved to either Ireland or to the Lancashire coast.
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Google has released its latest major Android build, version 4.4 codenamed KitKat, and has started selling its new Nexus 5 smartphone as the first device to run the new OS.
Behold, Google's shiny new mobe ... the Nexus 5
KitKat, aka Android 4.4, has faster multitasking and full voice control, according to Google, and a smarter caller ID system so that if the number dialing in isn't on your contacts list then Android will take a guess at who it is using businesses listed on Google Maps.
KitKat devices can now send documents to printers directly using Google Cloud Print or HP's ePrint system, and Quickoffice has been redesigned to make finding files easier and editing documents and spreadsheets more simple. The email application has also had a facelift, as has the download function.
The Chocolate Factory promises that KitKat will be able to run on a wider variety of hardware than other versions because it doesn't require the latest and greatest hardware to run. By shutting down background services and trimming memory requirements, Google reckons KitKat will need just 512MB of RAM to run smoothly.
That said, in the near future it's only going to be available for high-end hardware such as the Nexus 4, 7 and 10; the Samsung Galaxy S4; and the HTC One Google Play edition. As for the Nexus 5, of the major US carriers only Verizon isn't carrying the handset, and it is also available unlocked in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and South Korea.
Google has stuck with LG as its hardware maker for the Nexus 5, rather than switching to Motorola as some rumors had suggested. The mobe comes with a five-inch 1920-by-1080-pixel display (that's 445 pixel per inch) and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor running at 2.3GHz with 2GB of RAM.
LTE and dual-aerial Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac) is built in and the handset has two cameras – a bog-standard 1.3Mp front facer for videoconferencing and an 8Mp rear camera. For auteurs, there's also a new HDR+ mode that takes multiple shots quickly and combines them into a single photo that takes the best features from each image.
The new Nexus – one of the most gossiped-about smartphones in a while – is the slimmest one yet at 69.17 x 137.84 x 8.59mm and weighs in at 130g. Google claims the 2,300mAh battery is good for 17 hours talk time, 300 hours of standby and 8.5 hours of use with Wi-Fi, or seven hours on LTE. Wireless charging and NFC is also built in.
The Nexus 5 will cost $349 for the 16GB version and $399 for 32GB of storage, but there's no slot to fit any removable media, presumably since we're all supposed to be cloudy these days. Google has also eschewed Apple and Motorola Mobility's fruity color schemes – the Nexus 5 is available in black and white only. ®
The newborn baby girl found abandoned in a carrier bag (Picture: PA)
Authorities have released a picture of a newborn baby girl found abandoned in a carrier bag in Birmingham, as they continue to look for her mother.
West Midlands Police are appealing for the woman, who is thought to have left her child in Marlborough House Community Park off Stuarts Road in the Stechford area, to come forward.
They have released a photo of the infant, who was named Jade by nurses, in order to try and solve the mystery of who her mother is.
Birmingham East Chief Inspector Ian Green said: 'It is fantastic news that baby Jade is recovering well in hospital.
'I'm told she's very alert and a contented, happy baby. She's doing well and should make a full recovery over the next couple of days – but of course what she really needs is to be in her mother's arms.'
The girl has been described as 'alert' and 'happy' (Picture: PA)
The girl is said to be doing 'really well' after being found wrapped in a blanket following a call out to police at 2pm yesterday by a member of the public.
'We attended and found a baby wrapped in a light blue towel in a carrier bag,' added Mr Green.
Police at the scene where a new born baby girl was found abandoned in a carrier bag (Picture: PA)
'She has been taken to hospital and is doing really well. Our concerns now are for the mother to make sure she gets the medical attention she needs.'
Mr Green said the young girl had been at the location for half an hour when she was found and asked for her mother to come forward so they could reunite them.
The girl was found in a carrier bag (Picture: PA)
'You are not in trouble, we need to get you back together with your lovely daughter,' he said.
A spokesman for the West Midlands Ambulance service said the girl was being assessed at a local hospital after being treated by paramedics.
West Midlands Police confirmed they had sent the carrier bag and towel the baby was found in to be forensically tested and added DNA samples from the baby were also being looked at in the hope they would lead to her mother.
Anyone with information should ring the police on 101, or the mother should go directly to a local A&E or doctor's surgery.
Johannes Kana, 22, admitted raping Anene Booysen but not killing her
A South African man found guilty of the rape and brutal murder of a 17-year-old girl has been sentenced to two life terms in prison by a court near Cape Town.
State prosecutors had requested this sentence - without parole - for 22-year-old Johannes Kana.
Anene Booysen died in February, hours after she was mutilated in a case that caused national outrage.
South Africa has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world.
Shortly before his sentence was handed down I approached Johannes Kana and asked him how he was feeling. "I feel good because I know I'm not guilty of killing Anene," he said confidently. He confessed to assaulting and raping the teenager during the trial but denied killing her.
He did not show any emotion as Judge Patricia Goliath referred to the brutality of his attack on Anene Booysen. She said the "barbaric attack gave the court an idea of the type of person Kana is" and that the 22-year-old "did not show any remorse for the crimes he committed".
When the judge handed down the sentence, some of Miss Booysen's relatives started sobbing quietly. But Kana's uncle reacted by clapping his hands and laughing. He described the verdict as "a joke".
The attack sparked anger and outrage over the high levels of violence against women in South Africa. The government and police often come under fire for the low conviction rate of sexual offenders. But this time things were done differently: the trial was fast tracked and a stiff sentence was handed down.
The BBC's Nomsa Maseko at the court in Swellendam, 220km (136 miles) from Cape Town, says Kana's uncle clapped his hands and laughed as the judge announced the sentence.
"This is a joke," he said, adding that the system was unjust.
Many of those attending the trial feel justice has been served, our correspondent says.
But some in the community have raised questions about whether Kana was the only person involved in the attack as Ms Booysen told police before she died that there were several assailants, our reporter says.
She was left for dead at a construction site near her house in Bredasdorp and later died in a Cape Town hospital after she had been raped and disembowelled.
At the time President Jacob Zuma described the attack as "shocking, cruel and most inhumane".
He called for courts to impose the "harshest sentences" for sexual crimes.
During the trial, doctors who treated Ms Booysen described her horrific injuries - one said they were the worst injuries she had ever seen.
Just before she died, she said in hospital that five or six men had been involved in the attack.
But state prosecutors say that at the time she was intoxicated, in pain and under heavy medication so she may have been confused.
Three suspects were initially arrested but only Kana stood trial.
He confessed to raping Ms Booysen but denied killing her.
Meanwhile, charges against four of five men accused of kidnapping, raping and killing two young girls in Diepsloot, a shanty town north of Johannesburg, were withdrawn at the Pretoria Magistrate's Court on Friday.
The state prosecutor said evidence showed the men were not in Diepsloot at the time of the crime last month.
A fifth man remains in custody and the case was postponed until 27 November to allow for further investigation.
Last year, South African police figures show that 64,000 incidents of rape were reported last year.
Police say that a child is raped every three minutes in the country.
The BBC's Stephen Evans in Berlin says that it's not yet clear what this will mean for German law on marriage
Germany has become Europe's first country to allow babies with characteristics of both sexes to be registered as neither male nor female.
Parents are now allowed to leave the gender blank on birth certificates, in effect creating a new category of "indeterminate sex".
The move is aimed at removing pressure on parents to make quick decisions on sex assignment surgery for newborns.
However, some campaigners say the new law does not go far enough.
As many as one in 2,000 people have characteristics of both sexes.
'Bruised and scarred'
Sarah Graham, intersex woman and counsellor: "This pink and blue thing is a nonsense"
They are known as "intersex" people because they have a mixture of male and female chromosomes or even genitalia which have characteristics of both genders.
The intense difficulty for parents is often that a gender has to be chosen very quickly so that the new child can be registered with the authorities, the BBC's Steve Evans in Berlin reports.
Sometimes surgery is done on the baby to turn its physical characteristics as far as possible in one direction or the other, our correspondent says.
The law in Germany has been changed following a review of cases which revealed great unhappiness.
In one case, a person with no clear gender-defining genitalia was subjected to surgery. The person said many years later: "I am neither a man nor a woman. I will remain the patchwork created by doctors, bruised and scarred."
German passports, which currently list the holder's sex as M for male or F for female, will have a third designation, X, for intersex holders, according to the interior ministry.
Silvan Agius, ILGA-Europe: "It does not address the surgeries... and that's not good"
It remains unclear what impact the change will have on marriage and partnership laws in Germany.
Current laws define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and civil partnerships are reserved for same-sex couples.
Silvan Agius of IGLA-Europe, which campaigns for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex people, said the law needed to go further.
"While on the one hand it has provided a lot of visibility about intersex issues... it does not address the surgeries and the medicalisation of intersex people and that's not good - that has to change," he told the BBC.
While Germany is the first country in Europe to legally recognise a third gender, several other nations have already taken similar steps.
Australians have had the option of selecting "x" as their gender - meaning indeterminate, unspecified or intersex - on passport applications since 2011. A similar option was introduced for New Zealanders in 2012.
In South Asia, Bangladesh has offered an "other" gender category on passport applications since 2011.
Nepal began recognising a third gender on its census forms in 2007 while Pakistan made it an option on national identity cards in 2011.
India added a third gender category to voter lists in 2009.
While transgender or intersex people have long been accepted in Thailand and are officially recognised by the country's military, they do not have any separate legal status.
Then News of the World editor Andy Coulson told a senior journalist investigating an exclusive story on television celebrity Calum Best to "do his phone", a court has heard.
Mr Coulson emailed the instruction to his then head of news, Ian Edmondson, prosecutor Andrew Edis QC said.
They feared a rival paper may get the story about the son of George Best and a woman, Mr Edis told the Old Bailey.
Mr Coulson and Mr Edmondson deny conspiracy to intercept communications.
Mr Edis said that in 2006, the now-closed News of the World (NoW) was investigating Calum Best, who was thought to be the father of a child with a woman who was willing to sell the story.
The NoW wanted the story as an exclusive and were paying the woman a lot of money, but were worried that Mr Best - whose late father George used to play for Manchester United - might "leak" the story to their competition, the court heard.
During an email discussion on the matter, Mr Edmondson said Calum Best was "bragging I have close mates inside NotW".
Mr Coulson later sent Mr Edmondson a message which read: "Do his phone."
"What does that mean?" Mr Edis asked the jury.
He added the evidence against Mr Edmondson was "overwhelming".
Celebrity targets
The court was also told that journalists at the paper used hacking as a "perfectly rational but entirely illegal" way of standing up stories.
Reporters would receive a tip-off about a story, and then use surveillance and phone hacking to check whether it was true before confronting those involved.
Alleged targets of the phone hacking included former Home Secretary Charles Clarke, actors Jude Law and Sienna Miller, and former aide to Prince William and Prince Harry, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the jury heard. The list also included former politician Lord Archer, cook Delia Smith, and model Abi Titmuss.
The court heard the newspaper had been tipped off about a rumoured affair - which was untrue - between Mr Clarke and his assistant, Hannah Pawlby, and journalists watched her home and accessed her voicemails.
Mr Edis said this demonstrated how the NoW had used three ways to investigate stories - phone hacking, surveillance, and confrontation - and in this case Mr Coulson had approached their target.
"The editor is personally involved in the third. Obviously he knows about the second, surveillance - he must do. What about the first? Does he know about phone hacking? He says he doesn't, we say 'Oh yes, he did'," he argued.
Mr Edis also told the jury that a hairdresser called Laura Rooney had had her phone hacked, even though she had no connection with England striker Wayne Rooney. They had thought she was related to him, Mr Edis said.
He said phone hacking had uncovered a claim that Prince Harry had broken rules at military training academy Sandhurst by asking an aide for help with an essay.
Mr Edis said the story in the NoW in 2005 came from a voicemail that was illegally accessed by private investigator Glenn Mulcaire on behalf of the newspaper's then royal editor Clive Goodman.
Royal directories
Allegations of inappropriate payments involving Mr Coulson and Goodman, who was convicted of phone hacking in 2007, were also outlined by Mr Edis.
Police found 15 royal-related directories at Goodman's home, two of which the prosecution maintained were illegally bought from royal protection officers.
In 2003, Goodman emailed Mr Coulson to ask if he could pay a royal policeman £1,000 for another directory, saying: "These people will not be paid in anything other than cash because if they're discovered selling stuff to us they end up on criminal charges, as could we."
Mr Edis said that, as a result of that conversation, a cash payment of £1,000 was made to a David Farish, which turned out to be a false name.
"The investigation has never identified the policeman responsible for this," Mr Edis told the court.
But he added the conversation and payment were the "clearest possible evidence" of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office - a charge that Mr Coulson denies - and were linked to phone hacking.
The court heard the telephone directories were needed to assist targeting Sir Michael Peat, former principal private secretary to the Prince of Wales. The NoW's private investigator targeted him on the day the book was purchased.
The court heard that in June 2005, Goodman sent Mr Coulson an email saying: "One of our palace cops has got hold of a rare and just printed Palace staff phone book.
"Every job, every name, every number. We usually pay £1,000 for these. It's a very risky document for him to nick. Ok to put the credit through?"
Mr Edis said Mr Coulson did not reply to this email, but after Goodman followed up asking again for authorisation, the editor replied: "Fine."
The prosecutor told the jury that the use of the word "nick" would have "told Mr Coulson precisely that he was paying a policeman to commit a crime".
Mr Coulson and Mr Edmondson are among eight defendants - including former Sun and NoW editor Rebekah Brooks - who deny a range of charges at the Old Bailey.
The court heard on Wednesday that three former News of the World journalists, who are not on trial, and Mulcaire had pleaded guilty to phone-hacking charges.
NEW YORK (AP) — The secretive British street artist Banksy ended his self-announced monthlong residency in New York City with a final piece of graffiti, a $615,000 painting donated to charity and a debate: Is he a jerk or a genius?
Banksy, who created a new picture, video or prank every day of October somewhere in the city, spent his last day like thousands of graffiti artists before him: He tagged a building near a highway with his name in giant bubble letters. The twist was that these letters were actual bubbles: balloon-like inflatables stuck to a wall near the Long Island Expressway in Queens.
As if to underscore his dual identity as both a street punk and an art-world darling, he also donated a painting that was auctioned off Thursday night for $615,000. The original painting first sold for $50 at a Manhattan thrift shop that benefits Housing Works, an organization that fights homelessness and AIDS. Banksy added a Nazi soldier to the landscape scene and Housing Works sold it in an online auction.
Throughout his 31 days here, Banksy put pictures of his work on BanksyNY.com, with clues as to locations but nothing precise. That spawned a treasure hunt by fans who tracked the works down, shared locations via social media, then swarmed to see them.
But by the time Banksy was done, New Yorkers were divided in their opinions. Some tweeted "Go home, Banksy!" Others declared their admiration.
The turning point for many was an essay he wrote criticizing the building replacing the World Trade Center. Banksy called the new design "vanilla ... something they would build in Canada," and added, "It so clearly proclaims the terrorists won." He offered the essay to The New York Times. The paper wouldn't print it, so he posted it on his website.
"The terrorists won" comment upset many New Yorkers, including Brian Major, 51, of Brooklyn. "Enough!" Major said. "Who is this guy? Everybody's got a right to an opinion but what gives him any kind of credibility in New York? Shut up, Banksy! Go home!"
A lifelong New Yorker, Major says he understands graffiti culture, and he also appreciates fine art. But he doesn't think Banksy's art is all that good — "though I'll give him credit, he's a good marketer."
But Sean Lynch, 25, of Staten Island, thinks Banksy is "one of the more captivating artists of our generation." Lynch said it was magical visiting Banksy sites around the city and hearing conversations about art that the works inspired, with "people of all different walks and cultures sharing opinions, sharing stories. ... The walls started to talk to them, in a way."
Banksy, who refuses to reveal his full identity, began his career spray-painting buildings in Bristol, England. In New York, many of his images were silhouetted figures or spray-painted messages. The art ranged from a stencil of a dog lifting his leg on a hydrant to a video of a "slaughterhouse delivery truck" filled with stuffed animals. Some works were defaced by other graffiti artists. But interest grew with each piece, and at least one Banksy street work was covered with Plexiglas to preserve it. He also sold some pieces, unadvertised, for $60 on the street.
Radhika Subramaniam, a professor at Parsons The New School for Design in Manhattan, says Banksy is part of a long tradition of graffiti artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat whose work ultimately earned recognition from the art establishment. But he also fits into a contemporary trend of opening up public spaces to conversations about who owns them and what can happen there — especially in today's cleaned-up New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg, when asked about Banksy, called graffiti "a sign of decay and loss of control."
OK, but is Banksy any good? "There's plenty of wit in what he does, as well as some thoroughly ordinary, sometimes pleasant, sometimes banal, but sometimes sweet things," Subramaniam said. But he's also "not a naïf in the art world. After all, who would care if you or I were to set up a blog and enact a residency like this? It's only because he's able to marshal this kind of PR and marketing that ... catapults his residency to another level and elicits these polarized points of view."
In a final gesture that was simultaneously serious and self-mocking, audio commentary posted Thursday on Banksy's website called his final piece— his name in bubble letters by the road — "an homage ... to the most prevalent form of graffiti in the city that invented it for the modern era. Or it's another Banksy piece that's full of hot air."
But three men apparently thought it was worth something. Newspaper photos show one of them on a long ladder, trying to reach the installation.
All three were arrested and charged with criminal trespass. One was additionally charged with criminal mischief. Police are seen in one photo cramming the bubble letters inside a van.
