A six-storey-tall statue of Jesus Christ with his arms raised along a highway was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm and burned to the ground, the police said.
The “King of Kings” statue, one of southwest Ohio’s most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical SolidRock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati. The sculpture, 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signalling a touchdown in a game of football.
It was made of plastic foam and fibreglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained. The fire spread from the statue to an adjacent amphitheatre but was confined to the attic area, and no one was injured, police chief Mark Neu said.
Travellers on Interstate 75 often were startled to come upon the huge statue by the roadside.
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German breastfeeds while driving, held
Berlin, June 15: Germans have a relatively relaxed attitude to breastfeeding in public, and hungry babies can be highly demanding, but one woman went too far by suckling her child while driving, the police said on Tuesday.
The 47-year-old mother protested after being pulled over in her Opel Astra in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia on Monday with the 18-month-old at her breast that she only had a few hundred metres further to go.
But the surprised policeman was unmoved, and the woman now faces charges of failing to properly secure a child in a moving vehicle and of not wearing a seat belt herself.
—AFP