Cops Settle With Couple Forced To Have Oral Sex While Officer Watched

Las Vegas police have to put their money where one couple's mouths were when they were forced to go down on each other by one of L.V.'s finest. A Swedish teacher says female colleagues forced him to strip and calls it sexual harassment. And you're about to meet the town known as the gender bending capital of the world - and it isn't the town you might think it is, either. The Newsex Roundup, as usual, rounds up the usual unusuals... nrnLAS VEGAS - Las Vegas police will have to have to put their money where a couple's mouths were when they were forced to go down on each other by one of L.V.'s finest. The couple the officer forced to perform oral sex while he watched will receive $50,000 each in a settlement approved by the Metropolitan Police Department's oversight board. Michael Healy and Norma McKee sued separately in September 1998 over an October 1996 incident in which then-officer Michael Ramirez detained them unlawfully and forced them to perform oral sex while he watched. "He was negligent in the incident, and he was employed by the department when it happened, so we're liable," Metropolitan Police spokesman Lt. Marc Joseph told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Ramirez was fired in February, 1997. The incident occurred when Ramirez encountered the couple, who were engaged at the time, at Red Rock Canyon National Park. He approached them while they looked at the night sky, showed his badge and gun, asked them to step out of their car, shined a flashlight at McKee's groin, told her to pull up her dress and then to fondle her genitals, the Review-Journal said. Healy said he performed oral sex on his then-fianc'e while Ramirez watched, and that Ramirez threatened to frame them for a crime unless they cooperated. nrnRamirez has since been sentenced under a plea agreement to indeterminate probation including six months of house arrest. nrnSTOCKHOLM - A teacher says his female colleagues forced him to stand on the school stage and strip to his underpants - so he's filed a sexual harassment complaint. The Swedish tabloid Expressen said Bjorn Skalen has since left the school. "If a woman had been forced to stand in front of 50 men in only her stockings, everyone would agree she had been insulted. A man should be treated just as seriously,'' the 52-year-old teacher told the tabloid. Headmistress Ursula Hector told the tabloid only that the incident didn't quite happen the way Skalen said it did. nrnTRINIDAD, Colo. - This old mining town is being called the gender bender capital of the world these days. Trinidad is said to be home to more sex-change operation recipients than any other locale to date; but the natives are indifferent about the potential notoriety. "Nobody cares,'' Main Street Bakery owner Monica Violante told the Associated Press. "It's just a part of Trinidad.'' The surgeon performing most of the operations? Former rabbinical aspirant Stanley Biber, who came to Trinidad in 1954 following a stint as a MASH surgeon in Korea and a tour at Colorado Springs' Camp Carson, and came for the area's good fishing and mountain life. But in 1969, when Trinidad's mining life all but ended, a social worker approached him for a sex-change operation, which he undertook with the help of a consulting physician from New York and sketches from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Its success triggered a migration of surgery hopefuls to Biber, since he's the only Trinidad general surgeon to begin with. But not everyone is enthralled with his transgender surgeries. Rev. Verlyn Hastor of the First Baptist Church told the AP Trinidad looked the other way because of the economic boost. "People will overlook a lot of evil to have a stronger economy," he said. Biber's procedures had brought the town's only hospital a million dollars a year at one point, the AP says. Biber now performs far less than the 150 such operations per year he performed at his peak, and spends much of his time in general practice now. nrn--- Compiled by Humphrey Pennyworth