7-year-old swearing macaw Barney is apparently teaching other birds how to swear.

According to news reports Barney never stopped swearing despite being taken to a language specialist.
His most shocking outburst was when he told a mayoress, a vicar and two police officers to ‘f*** off’ and called them ‘w******’ when they visited Warwickshire Animal Sanctuary in Nuneaton, central England.

“He’s told a lady mayoress to f..(expletive) off and he told a lady vicar: ‘And you can f… off as well’,” sanctuary worker Stacey Clark said.

“Two policemen came to have a look at the centre. He told them: ‘And you can f… off you two wankers’.”

News archives say that Berney was previously owned by a lorry driver who emigrated to Spain. Berney has been banished from public areas in a British animal sanctuary for swearing.

“He does say ‘Hello, big boy’ and ‘Thank you’ when you give him a biscuit,” she added in her news interview, “But it’s mainly naughty words and always to the wrong people. We’re trying to teach him not to swear. Macaws are very intelligent birds.”

Apparently that didn’t work out so well. Berney has now been spreading his obscene vocabulary to the other parrots, at the centre.
Owner Geoff Grewcock said: “It sounds like a builders’ yard sometimes when we come in here, what with all the abuse flying about.”

“They just sit there swearing at each other now, all kind of foul language - it’s unbelievable.” adding that they even have favorite swearing words: “The terrible trio’s favorite rude words are ‘f*** off’, ‘b*****ks’ and ‘t**s’.”

He added: “These birds can live until they are 70 so there are potentially another 60 years of this to contend with.”

Parrot expert Rob Harvey said birds usually talk to get the attention of their owners, and added that: “This case is unusual because parrots are copying another parrot.”

An Indian girl born with two faces is eating and breathing normally, despite also having two pairs of eyes, lips and two noses, say her parents.

Considered by many to be a deity in this deeply conservative Hindi country, the yet to be named baby born to factory worker Vinod Kumar and his wife Sushma has been drawing crowds of curious observers.

”I had never seen something like this in my life so naturally I was a little scared when I first saw her,” her father said at the weekend at the family’s mud-and-brick house in Noida town, about 50 kilometres northeast of New Delhi.

The girl has found easy acceptance in Kumar’s large, extended family, who say they have no plans to consult doctors to check if the girl can receive treatment or corrective surgery.

”The doctor said everything is normal when she was born. So where’s the need to get medical help?” said the child’s father.

”She’s fed through one mouth and sucks her thumb with the other. We use whichever mouth is free to feed her,” the 24-year-old Kumar told AFP, adding she is eating and breathing normally.

Doctors said it was an extremely rare case, with the girl having two skulls joined together, and that separating them was out of the question.

”Since the heads are fused, separating them is not possible,” paediatrician DK Gupta of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences told the Hindustan Times newspaper on the weekend.

But doctors said the girl should be examined thoroughly to study the possibility of complications.

”Clearly the child is in no immediate danger but it has to be checked whether the oral and nasal cavity and other passages” are functioning properly, paediatrician Gupta said.

The case comes just months after Indian doctors performed a rare marathon surgery to remove the extra limbs of a girl born with four arms and legs.

Two-year-old Lakshmi Tatma’s case captivated the nation last year as domestic and international media focused on her complicated surgery performed in southern Bangalore city in November.

This year, Lakshmi started taking her first steps with the help of a baby walker, delighting her parents and doctors.

Lakshmi, named after the four-armed Hindu goddess of wealth, was born fused to the pelvis of a twin that had stopped developing in her mother’s womb - a condition that occurs once in 50,000 conjoined twin births.

Kumar said he had heard about Lakshmi, but did not want to change anything about his daughter’s features.

”Whatever God has given me is acceptable. What can we do about it?” he said, lifting the baby to take her away after allowing a brief glimpse of her as neighbours crowded around her cot.

”This child is very special to us,” the baby’s grandfather chimed in, gazing lovingly at the infant.

AFP

A SOUTH Australian father and daughter who made world headlines after showing television audiences the child they conceived together had another baby seven years ago, who died from a congenital heart defect, court transcripts reveal.

John Earnest Deaves, 61, and Jennifer Anne Deaves, 39, told Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes they fell in love in 2000 when they “discovered each other later in life”.

The pair claim it was after meeting each other for just the third time in 31 years that they formed an attraction, ended their marriages and moved in together along with the daughter’s two children, aged nine and 14.

The pair each pleaded guilty in the South Australian District Court on March 20 to two counts of an act of incest with the other. The second count related to the intercourse that resulted in the birth last year of their daughter, Celeste. The first count related to the conception of a child who died in 2001 after a few days because of a heart disorder, court transcripts revealed.

Judge Steven Millsteed banned the couple from having sex with each other, but released the two on a three-year, $500 good behaviour bond.

Deaves’s former wife, Dorothy, told the Herald she was “devastated” when her husband ran off with his daughter after 16 years of marriage but disputed their claim that they were virtual strangers when they fell in love.

“They were in contact all the time,” Dorothy said, claiming that Jennifer Deaves stayed with her father four times during their marriage, and four times during Deaves’s previous marriage, his second. She “stayed with us for a week in 1985,” Dorothy, 69, said. “When we got married we had a wedding reception in Sydney and she came to it.”

She suggested Deaves and his daughter may have profited from their crimes by being rewarded for the interview. “I know they [Channel Nine] bought clothes for them and going by what I have heard they are getting paid,” she said.

A Channel Nine spokeswoman said the network never commented on such “investigations”.

The Family First MP Dennis Hood yesterday called on the State Government to investigate whether to remove the baby. “Clearly this is a very unfortunate environment for a child to be raised in,” he said.

The South Australian branch president of the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, Richard Bruggemann, said that while the incest was wrong, it was in the past and the baby should be removed only if the parents were neglectful or abusive.