The Kink Factory's blog: "In the news!"

"Firefighters had to cut a man out of a titanium chastity belt intended for sex games last week. Crews from Kingston fire station were called to the red-faced man's home in Ham at about 11pm on June 27 after he had spent all day trying to free himself from the device. It took about 45 minutes for firefighters to release the man, believed to be in his 40s, from the structure. By this time he had slipped in and out of consciousness due to the pressure of the chastity belt on his genitals." Quotation from: www.epsomguardian.co.uk Never ride a motorcycle without a helmet; never tug on Superman's cape, and never put on a titanium chastity belt without making sure you have the key. The dude was hoping his girlfriend had the key, but she claimed not to have it. There's always the possibility that she wasn't in the mood for romance, and instead of using the excuse of having a headache, she lied and said she didn't have the key. The hapless fellow spent a whole day trying to extricate himself from the device, before he called for help. If I ever find myself in a similar predicament, I would be too embarrassed to call 911. I would simply wait until I lost so much weight, that I could slip out of the chastity belt. According to the www.epsomguardian.co.uk article the man's genital area was red and swollen from the pressure of the chastity belt; I bet his face was just as red. I hope the poor guy learned his lesson: Kinkiness and commonsense must go hand-in-hand. Robert Paul Reyes is a NewsBlaze writer on Politics, Pop Culture and Pointless Pontificating. Contact him by writing to NewsBlaze.

ROME (Reuters) - An Italian couple who were caught having sex in a church confessional box while morning Mass was being said have repented and made peace with the local bishop. The couple, in their early 30s, were detained by police earlier this month after they had made love in the confessional box in the cathedral in northern Cesena. They were cautioned for obscene acts in public and disturbing a religious function. Their lawyer said they had been drinking all night and realized they had gone too far. The lawyer told the area's local newspaper on Wednesday the couple met with the local bishop on Tuesday night, asked for his forgiveness and that he had given it. Last week the bishop celebrated a "Mass of reparation" in the cathedral where the confessional box incident took place to make up for the sacrilege.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A Singapore man with a penchant for sniffing women's armpits was sentenced to 14 years in jail and 18 strokes of the cane for molesting his victims, a local newspaper reported Friday. The 36-year-old, who the Straits Times said was mentally unstable, had previous convictions for drug and sex-related offenses. He molested 23 women over the course of 15 months, smelling their armpits and touching them in lifts, staircase landings and their homes, the paper said. He was caught after a housewife reported him to the police. The court meted out the jail term, normally reserved for hardcore criminals, saying the man was likely to commit crimes again, the paper reported. Caning on the buttocks is an additional punishment for male criminals in Singapore for offenses ranging from vandalism to illegal possession of drugs and rape. (Reporting by Melanie Lee, editing by M

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. ADVERTISEMENT Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur. Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings. Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure. "You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday. Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released. "I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said. "But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said. Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members. "It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station. (Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mary Gabriel)

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) - Senate lawmakers in Florida have voted to ban the fake bull testicles that dangle from the trailer hitches of many trucks and cars throughout the state. Republican Sen. Cary Baker, a gun shop owner from Eustis, Florida, called the adornments offensive and proposed the ban. Motorists would be fined $60 for displaying the novelty items, which are known by brand names like "Truck Nutz" and resemble the south end of a bull moving north. The Florida Senate voted last week to add the measure to a broader transportation bill, but it is not included in the House version. In a spirited debate laced with double entendre, Senate lawmakers questioned whether the state should curtail freedom of expression in vehicle accessories. Critics of the ban included the Senate Rules Chairman, Sen. Jim King, a Jacksonville Republican whose truck sported a pair until his wife protested. The bill's sponsor doubted it would succeed. "It's probably not going to make it through the process," Baker said on Thursday. "It won't be much of story in a few days."

LONDON (Reuters) - Fortune-tellers, mediums and spiritual healers marched on the home of the British prime minister at Downing Street on Friday to protest against new laws they fear will lead to them being "persecuted and prosecuted." Organizers say that replacing the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 with new consumer protection rules will remove key legal protection for "genuine" mediums. They think skeptics might bring malicious prosecutions to force spiritualists to prove in court that they can heal people, see into the future or talk to the dead. Psychics also fear they will have to give disclaimers describing their services as entertainment or as scientific experiments with unpredictable results. "If I'm giving a healing to someone, I don't want to have to stand there and say I don't believe in what I'm doing," said Carole McEntee-Taylor, a healer who co-founded the Spiritual Workers Association. The group delivered a petition with 5,000 names to the prime minister's office, although Gordon Brown is away in the United States. With the changes expected to come into force next month, spiritualists have faced a barrage of headlines gleefully suggesting that they should have seen it coming. But many don't see the funny side. They say the new rules will shift the responsibility of proving they are not frauds from prosecutors and onto them. "By repealing the Act, the onus will go round the other way and we will have to prove we are genuine," McEntee-Taylor told Reuters. "No other religion has to do that." The government said the new regulations form part of a European Union directive that is meant to harmonize unfair trading laws across the EU. It will introduce a ban on traders "treating consumers unfairly." The British Humanist Association, a charity which campaigns against religion and supernatural beliefs, said stricter regulations were overdue because the current laws don't work. "It is misleading for spiritualists to claim that, as religious' practitioners they should not be regulated under consumer laws," said Chief Executive Hanne Stinson. "The psychic industry is huge and lucrative and it exploits some very vulnerable, and some very gullible, people with claims for which there is no scientific evidence." (Editing by Steve Addison and Paul Casciato)

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has added ghosts, monsters and other things that go bump in the night to its list of banned video and audio content in an intensified crackdown ahead of the Beijing Olympics. Producers have around three weeks to look through their tapes for "horror" and report it to authorities, the General Administration of Press and Publications said in a statement posted on the government Web site. Offending content included "wronged spirits and violent ghosts, monsters, demons, and other inhuman portrayals, strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror," the administration said. The new guidelines aim to "control and cleanse the negative effect these items have on society, and to prevent horror, violent, cruel publications from entering the market through official channels and to protect adolescents' psychological health." The regulations suggest China, where graphic, pirated sex and horror movies are available on most street corners, is keen to step up its control of the cultural arena ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August, which are widely seen as a coming-out party for the rising political and economic power. They come just weeks after Beijing clamped down on "vulgar" video and audio content, slapped restrictions on Internet sites and handed down a two-year film-making ban to the team behind the steamy "Lost in Beijing." (Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson)

LONDON (Reuters) - A mythical and ghostly creature has appeared in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands -- and has been caught on camera. The rare white stag, from the red deer species, is believed to be among just a tiny handful living in Britain, according to a conservation group. The John Muir Trust is now keeping the stag's location secret for fear of poachers. "To see him amongst the other stags was truly thrilling because he does look like a ghost: you do a double-take," Trust Partnership Manager Fran Lockhart, who filmed the stag, told Reuters. White stags are seen as a magical and powerful force in many mythologies. The animal's ghostly glow comes from a recessive gene which causes leucism, a condition which reduces the normal brown coloring in hair and skin. They are not albinos, which have red eyes due to lack of pigment. In Celtic traditions, white stags represent messengers from the afterlife. Arthurian legend has it that the creature can never be caught -- King Arthur's pursuit of the animal represents mankind's spiritual quest. It is also said that for those who set eyes on the animal, a momentous moment is near. "They say their appearance is meant to herald some profound change in life for those who encounter them -- but I am still waiting," said Lockhart. Her dog, though, stood transfixed for 45 minutes watching the white stag, instead of his usual scampering around. Lockhart believes the Scottish Highlands' white stag is between 6 and 7 years old. She said he is maturing well, with a good set of antlers. The last official recording of a white red stag in Britain, not to be confused with the more common white fallow deer, was last October when the body of one was found decapitated on the moors between Devon and Cornwall.

RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's religious police have banned red roses ahead of Valentine's Day, forcing couples in the conservative Muslim nation to think of new ways to show their love. ADVERTISEMENT "The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" has ordered florists and gift shop owners in the capital Riyadh to remove any items colored scarlet, which is widely seen as symbolizing love, newspapers said. "They visited us last night," the Saudi Gazette quoted an unidentified florist as saying. It is not unusual for the Saudi vice squad to clamp down ahead of Valentine's Day, which it sees as encouraging relations between men and women outside of wedlock, the newspaper said. Saudi Arabia imposes an austere form of Sunni Islam which prevents unrelated men and women from mixing, bans women from driving and demands that women wear a headscarf and a cloak. Relations outside marriage are strictly banned and punishable by law. (Reporting by Souhail Karam; Editing by Giles Elgood)

LONDON (Reuters) - A British bus company has apologized to a girl who is led around on a leash by her boyfriend and describes herself as a human pet after one of its drivers threw her off a bus. Tasha Maltby, 19, told British newspapers she was the "pet" of her 25-year-old fiance Dani Graves. Pictures showed her dressed in black Gothic-style clothing with silver buckles on a silver chain -- which the driver of a bus from the firm Arriva took exception to. She told the Daily Mail newspaper Wednesday she was thrown off and told: "We don't let freaks and dogs like you on." Arriva would not comment on specifics but said it apologized if the couple felt they had been discriminated against. It added, however, that the driver was worried about safety and the company told Maltby to take the leash off in the future. "We have spoken to the driver who has talked about health and safety," a spokesman said. "Should she be attached to a chain and something happens on the bus, that could be dangerous. All we are saying is that she is very welcome to use the buses but not when she is on her lead." Maltby -- who lives on state benefits and got engaged in November -- said her choice of lifestyle might seem unusual but was harmless. "I am a pet," she told the Daily Mail. "I generally act animal-like and I lead a really easy life. I don't cook or clean and I don't go anywhere without Dani. It might seem strange but it makes us both happy. It's my culture and my choice. It isn't hurting anyone." (Editing by Michael Winfrey)