40-year-old Japanese artist Daisuke Skagami from Toyko, who goes by the name of EndCape, creates astonishing pictures on bananas by artfully bruising them with a single pin pushed into the peel.

It’s a past-time known as banana tattooing, but technique-wise is similar to pointillism. This is where pictures are created using tiny dots of pure colour.

Cape’s creations take around five hours to make – sometimes longer – and include Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the Mona Lisa and Virgin boss Richard Branson.
He’s also created jigsaw patterns, a banana ‘zip’, and a the face of Japanese actor Sei Hiraizumi.
Each banana lasts up to two days, at which point the artist eats his creations, but EndCape is now looking for ways to preserve his work.

His designs have been featured on Japanese TV and in art galleries in Toyko.

But Vijay Singh, who also has 12 toes, is planning a move to Britain after he failed to get a job typing despite applying for 50 jobs.

The 48-year-old, from Agra in northern India, said: ‘They want pretty women, not some guy who has 12 fingers.’

Polydactyly sufferers are seen as lucky in India, with Mr Singh especially fortunate as he is able to use all his digits whereas most sufferers of the condition are not.

But despite this gift, which makes him a self-proclaimed ‘whizz on the computer’, he has yet to secure employment and now wants to travel to the UK in the hope there will be something for him here.

We like his chances – having 12 fingers is certainly an unusual entry on your CV…

More than 150 soldiers in Bangladesh were sentenced to death Tuesday for murder, rape and arson during a 2009 mutiny.

Seventy-four people, including 57 army officers, were killed in the mutiny at the headquarters of Bangladesh’s border guards in Dhaka in February 2009.

Several thousand armed soldiers of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) unit took control of their own headquarters in the capital for two days and massacred scores of people, including officers of the Bangladesh Army who were stationed with the BDR.

State prosecutor Mosharrof Hossain Kazal told CNN that 161 people, including Pintu and Ali, were sentenced to life in prison.

A total of 262 people were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three years to 10 years and 271 were acquitted of the charges against them.

state media and a local official said Saturday.

Most of the victims were female workers who were assembling fuses for firecrackers, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

It said the blast took place on Friday and reduced the factory in the city of Cenxi in the Guangxi autonomous region into rubble. It shook nearby buildings and blew out windows.

The cause was not immediately clear, Xinhua said.

Investigators have shut down a newly-completed, “highly sophisticated” drug tunnel running under the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.

It hasn’t been utilized,” ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said late Wednesday. “We were able to shutter it before it was utilized to bring drugs into the interior.”

The discovery was made by the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, which includes members of ICE, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The investigation is ongoing, according to Kice.

Like a 600-yard tunnel discovered along the border in November 2010, this tunnel had lighting and a rail system.

The earlier tunnel connected a warehouse in Tijuana with one in the Otay Mesa industrial area of San Diego.

About 30 tons of marijuana were discovered in that operation, U.S. officials said.

Drug cartels on the border have become so powerful and sophisticated in recent years that many Mexican communities and areas along the border are patches of uncontrollable violence, experts say.

Police in Brazil have smashed a high-end prostitution ring that delivered well-known Brazilian models and cover girls to businessmen and politicians in Europe and Africa, it was reported today.

The women, who according to police appeared regularly on Brazilian TV and in men’s magazines, are believed to have been paid as much as £60,000 a week, investigators said.

Police claim the gang transported as many as 90 women a year from Brazil to wealthy clients in Angola, South Africa, Portugal and Austria in a racket believed to have amassed them over £28 million since 2007.

Federal police officers moved in on the gang yesterday following a year-long investigation, arresting three men and two women in the state of Sao Paulo, southeast Brazil.

Eleven luxury cars, as well as 23 passports, 14 visa requests for travel to Angola, foreign money and drugs were also seized, police said.

Police chief Luiz Tempestini, who led the investigation, told Brazil’s O Globo newspaper that many of the women, who have not been named, worked as dancers, models or actresses on popular Brazilian TV shows.

The gang members who were arrested have been charged with participation in organised crime, international people trafficking, embezzlement, false imprisonment and endangering the health and life of others, and face a maximum jail term of 30 years.

Two other suspects wanted by Brazilian police and believed to be living outside the country were placed on Interpol’s red notice list.

At least 253 students are undergoing treatment following suspected food poisoning this week in northern China, state media reported.

In addition to students, two teachers were also hospitalized, Xinhua news agency reported.

The incident occurred Thursday at a middle school in Baotou, which is in China’s inner Mongolia autonomous region.

Victims suffered various symptoms, including stomach ache and vomiting after eating at the same counter in the school dining hall, the news agency said Friday.

Employees who work at that counter are in police custody undergoing questioning, according to Xinhua.