Legacy Matters
Fury as museum bosses cover up naked Egyptian mummies to protect 'sensitivities' of visitors
The last time they had the chance to offend anyone was 2,700 years ago when they were wandering around ancient Egypt.
Since then the mummies have led a blameless existence, spending the last 120 years in a museum where countless thousands of visitors have managed to see them without anyone becoming in the least bit upset.
So museum officials in Manchester covered them with shrouds to protect their modesty and, following government policy, began a process of public consultation.
Josh Lennon, a museum visitor, said: "This is preposterous. Surely people realise that if they go to see Egyptian remains some of them may not be dressed in their best bib and tucker.
"The museum response to complaints is pure Monty Python - they have now covered them from head to foot rendering the exhibition a non-exhibition. It is hilarious."
The Kingwood teenager's story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.
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Not until police went to the home of another Kingwood 17-year-old, Matthew Richard Gonzalez, did the officer believe the tale.
"He regurgitated in his plate of food when I asked him about it," Adkins said. "So I knew there was some truth to the story."
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Houston police believe the teens disturbed the grave of an 11-year-old boy who died in 1921.
The child was buried at an unmarked cemetery believed to be reserved for black veterans and their families, Adkins said.
Under the law, a person can be charged with abuse of a corpse simply by vandalizing, damaging or treating a gravesite offensively — even if the human remains buried there are not touched, Adkins said.
3 accused of using corpse head to smoke marijuana
Carla Del Ponte who was the chief prosecutor at the tribunal in the Hague for crimes committed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s said Serb prisoners 'were stripped of their organs' which were sold by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war.
According to the sources, senior figures in the Kosovo Liberation Army were aware of the scheme, in which hundreds of young Serbs were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs were removed. Miss Del Ponte provides grim details of the alleged organ harvesting, and of how some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed.
"The victims, deprived of a kidney, were then locked up again, inside the barracks, until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. In this way, the other prisoners were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source, pleaded, terrified, to be killed immediately," Miss Del Ponte writes.