Tid Bits

Arkansas , September 25: In a rare medical development an Arkansas couple Todd and Julia Grovenburg’s discovered that the already pregnant Julia was pregnant with another baby during a routine Ultrasound at the doctor’s clinic. Doctors discovered another, smaller baby boy who may have been conceived about two-and-a-half weeks after Jillian, who is the older baby.

Any woman can be pregnant with two babies, generally called twins. The Grovenburg babies may be a rare case of superfetation, or conceiving while pregnant, doctors say.

Jakarta, September 24: An Indonesian woman has given birth to an 8.7-kilogramme (19.2-pound) baby boy, the heaviest newborn ever recorded in the country, a doctor said Wednesday.

The baby, who is still unnamed and is 62 centimetres (24.4 inches) long, was born by caesarean section Monday at a public hospital in North Sumatra province, a gynaecologist who took part in the operation told.

“This heavy baby made the surgery really tough, especially the process of taking him out of his mum’s womb. His legs were so big,” Binsar Sitanggang said.

Lucknow, September 22: Sachin Arora has been collecting currency notes for nearly 15 years and now many Muslim clerics have offered up to Rs50,000 to possess just one of them. The collection is no ordinary one all the notes bear the number 786, an important religious symbol in Islam.

A resident of Shamli town in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, Arora has a fetish for the number 786, the numerical expression of the Quranic verse Bismillah Al Rahman Al Rahim (In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful).

Lucknow, September 19: Eid is round the corner, so sevian can’t be far behind! A shop in this erstwhile city of the nawabs has come up with mouthwatering varieties of the sweet vermicelli dish, the most elaborate being priced at Rs10,000 per kg.

Naushijaan, one of the prominent Mughlai food restaurants in Lucknow, has opened its sweet shop that is offering delightful vermicelli dishes days ahead of Eid which falls on Sep 21.

Sydney, September 16: A box of 12 Australian mangoes received a record bid price of $40,000 at a fundraiser here.

The Age reported that Sydney Markets staged its 19th annual charity auction Wednesday to mark the official start of the mango season and raise money for the Westmead Children’s Hospital and the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia.

The season’s first tray of 12 Blush Packing House mangoes, grown in the Northern Territory, attracted four bidders.

“We are absolutely overwhelmed with that result,” auction spokeswoman Retina Hong was quoted as saying.

Kuala Lampur, September 15: A 107-year-old Malaysian woman has said she wants to get married again, for the 23rd time, as she fears her husband wants to leave her, says a report.

When Wook Kundor married four years ago to a man 70 years her junior their wedding photos made regional media.

But now she fears her husband will not return home after completing treatment for drug addiction in Kuala Lumpur.

She told reporters she felt “lonely” without her husband, ahead of the Muslim feast at the end of Ramadan.

‘Insecurity’

Beijing, September 11: A millionaire in northern China paid four million yuan ($600,000, BD226,200) for a dog and ordered 30 luxury cars to come to the airport to greet her and the animal, local media reported. The woman and her new pet – a black Tibetan Mastiff – flew into Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi province, a report on popular news portal sohu.com said.

Los Angeles, September 10: Nine couples marked Wednesday’s special date 09/09/09 by getting married for the low price of just 99 cents.

The mass ceremony took place as part of a special promotion for the 99 Cents Store in Hollywood, California.

Local TV station KTLA showed the brides and grooms sauntering down the aisles adorned in 99-cent flowers and other bargain decorations.

The ceremony was followed by a buffet of 99-cent food, before the store whisked the happy couples off for luxury honeymoons.

–IANS–

Beijing, September 09: Tens of thousands of Chinese couples rushed to tie the knot across the nation Wednesday, or 09/09/09, hoping that the “triple 9 day” will bring them good luck and eternal love. In Mandarin, the number “9″ is pronounced the same as the word “jiu” that means “forever, perpetual or eternal”.

Chhattisgarh, September 09: He hasn’t stepped out of his house for 25 years. No, he isn’t physically challenged. This 44-year-old man, who lives in a Chhattisgarh village, is simply scared of the sun and its rays.

Gautam Singh Parihar has kept himself confined to his small house in Dhamtari district’s Hinchhapur village for all these years because of his great fear of the sun rays – a phobia neither doctors nor witch doctors have been able to cure.

Hong Kong, Septembern 08: A PhD scholar from Stanford University who drives a taxi after he lost his job at a Singapore research institution has become a star of sorts after he began blogging about his “uniquely Singapore” experiences.

Cai Mingjie, who was born in China and got his PhD in biochemistry from Stanford, lost his job in May 2008 at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), where he had worked for 16 years as principal investigator.

Khartoum, September 07: A Sudanese judge convicted a woman journalist on Monday for violating the public indecency law by wearing trousers outdoors and fined her $200, but did not impose a feared flogging penalty.

Lubna Hussein was among 13 women arrested July 3 in a raid by the public order police in Khartoum. Ten of the women were fined and flogged two days later. But Hussein and two others decided to go to trial.

“I will not pay a penny,” she told the Associated Press while still in court custody, wearing the same trousers that had sparked her arrest.

Washington, September 07: Crying is known to be a symptom of physical pain or stress but it can improve personal relationships, says a new study.

New analysis by Tel Aviv University (TAU) zoologist and evolutionary biologist Oren Hasson shows that while tears signal distress, they also function as an evolution-based mechanism to bring people closer.

“Crying is a highly evolved behaviour,” explains Hasson.

Kolkata, September 06: Call it the influence of a woman railway minister or an acknowledgement that the fairer sex is a better homemaker – the South Eastern Railway (SER) has deployed a team of its female employees to test the quality of food and beverages served in trains.

The initiative is a brainchild of SER general manager AK Jain who constituted the team comprising five women officials spearheaded by assistant commercial manager Indrani Bandyopadhyay.

The officials will pay surprise visits to trains in five different SER divisions to check the quality of food items.

Washington, September 04: A Salt Lake City woman who held a Guinness World Record for her long fingernails before they broke off in a car crash says it was the most dramatic event of her life. But Lee Redmond, who lost the fingernails in February, says it’s now much easier to do things and her hands seem to fly with the weight of the nails gone.

The 68-year-old won’t grow her nails out again, saying it took 30 years the first time and she may not live for another 30.

London, September 02: Speculation is rife that Carla Bruni may be pregnant after a holiday photograph showing hubby French President Nicolas Sarkozy protectively patting the 41- year-old former Italian supermodel’s belly has emerged.

Bruni, a mother of one, has made no secret of the fact that she is longing to have a baby with her 54-year-old husband who has three children from two previous wedlocks.

Buenos Aires, September 01: A bus driver returned a suitcase containing more than $460,000 to a passenger who left it on the vehicle while going to a bank in Argentinean city of San Juan.

Bus driver Alberto Rios got an $80 reward for his efforts from the passenger, a business executive, who said he was under great stress after losing track of the money belonging to the company he works for.

Rios found the suitcase, which contained pesos, dollars and euros, earlier this month while inspecting his bus at the end of a shift, the Diario de Cuyo newspaper reported.

Madina, August 30: Ramadan is a time when people unite in the mosques and at homes, and so is an especially tough time for those who have been forgotten or abandoned, as many elderly people feel has happened to them after being placed in care homes.

Some may say they are the victims of the erosion of values and Islamic traditions, as they have been left by their children to what one person describes as “a fate worse than death”.

Ferndale, August 29: Police in Michigan say a first date went from bad to worse when a Detroit man skipped out on the restaurant bill, then stole his date’s car.

Police say 23-year-old Terrance Dejuan McCoy had dinner with a woman April 24 at Buffalo Wild Wings in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale. The woman says the two met a week earlier at a Detroit casino and she knew McCoy only as “Chris.”

The woman told police that McCoy said he left his wallet in her car and asked for keys. He then sped away in the 2000 Chevrolet Impala.

Jakarta, August 28: An Indonesian teacher has been suspended after she allegedly burned her students with matches to make a point that hell is much hotter than match fire, a media report said.

The teacher at a junior high school in the West Java city of Bandung lit matchsticks and placed the flames close to her students’ hands during an Islamic religious lesson Tuesday, the Detik.com news portal said.

“She said hell was mostly occupied by women. That’s why we were targeted,” Detik.com quoted one of the students, Siti Nurjanah, as saying.

Kochi, August 27: Babuji Kattungal is trying to find a place in the Guinness Book again by copying the Holy Qur’an in big letters.

He has kept ready the copy of the 603 paged Qur’an after three years of continuous work. Babuji who is a painter engages in his work from his small house at Thazhathangadi Arupuzha in Kottayam in southern Kerala.

Babuji had earlier entered the Guinness by his 2 cm long and 1 cm wide copy of the ‘The Last Supper’. This oil painting was done on teak. He has painted thousands of pictures, some of which fetched about Rs 5000 reportedly.

Hong Kong, August 27: A bank worker assigned a “genderless toilet” by his employer HSBC after he started dressing as a woman in the first stage of a sex change has logged a complaint against the banking giant, a news report said Thursday.

The 55-year-old senior IT manager claims he has been not been able to use either the men’s or ladies’ staff toilets since he officially switched genders at the beginning of August.

Instead, he claims his employer has assigned him a “genderless toilet” in an act of discrimination against him.

Sydney, August 24: A Nigerain scam selling fake puppies and kittens is targeting Australian animal lovers.

Joanne Sillince, of the Pet Industry Association of Australia, said the scam, based in Nigeria and Cameroon, “cons consumers into buying non-existent puppies or dogs over the internet”.

The scammers steal the pets’ names and photos from legitimate Australian businesses to advertise non-existent animals on a fake website. They even mention the names of transport companies that will deliver the pets and say the pet will be killed if not sold quickly.

London, August 22: Egyptian grocers have named the finest variety of dates for the month of Ramadan after US President Barack Obama because of his popularity since his visit to the predominately Muslim nation last June.

Egyptian traders have the tradition of naming dates after politicians and celebrities to woo customers during Ramadan when the demand for dried fruits usually surges.

Muslims in the country usually break their dawn-to-dusk fasting with either dried dates or dates soaked in milk, reports a news daily.

Manama, August 18: A Tunisian woman is set to break the world’s multiple pregnancy record after doctors said that she could deliver duodecaplets or 12 babies this month.

The woman, an Arabic language teacher who has had two miscarriages since her marriage in 2007 with a colleague, said that she was feeling fine and that she was looking forward to hugging her six boys and six girls.

The family who live in Gafsa, southwest of Tunis the capital, said that the multiple pregnancy was an amazing and wonderful miracle.