Taipei, June 18: A jobless Taiwan man released from prison stole a box of cotton swabs just to get arrested again because he “could not forget the police department boxed lunches,” officers and local media said Tuesday.
The homeless man in Taipei first stole a pair of shoes on Sunday, was detained and released, the Liberty Times said. He then resorted to stealing again the next day just to get back inside and be fed for free.
London, June 18: Brazil’s playboy magazine is set to hit the market shelves with a photograph featuring President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The 63-year-old appear fully clothed in a photograph reproduced alongside the magazine’s nude centrefold, a Rio de Janeiro dancer and model who looks as if she is about to plant a kiss on the head of state’s image.
And surprisingly the Brazilian premier isn’t aware of his photo being used.
“Nobody knew they were going to use a photo of the president in this shoot. It was a surprise,” the Telegraph quoted spokesman for the president said.
Erie, June 18: A man floating on an air mattress in a Lake Erie bay had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and was taken into custody by Erie, Pa, police.
Police said two boaters called 911 after a fisherman told them his friend was in the water. The Coast Guard crew pulled the man from Presque Isle Bay about 60 yards from shore at about 11:20 p.m. Tuesday.
New Delhi, June 17: Amid the drama surrounding the on-today-off-tomorrow Chand Mohammed-Fiza saga, lady love Fiza insists that she may have let Chand back into her house, but he is yet to conquer her heart
Chand Mohammed alias Chander Mohan may have returned to his love nest, but is yet to conquer his love.
After months of hiding from his lady love Anuradha Bali alias Fiza Mohammad, Haryana’s former deputy chief minister is back in her Mohali home.
On the first day of his return the couple held hands and put up a show for the media waving in apparent joy.
Bangalore, June 17: It’s been almost eight years since Prasad migrated from Suganahalli, a small village in north Karnataka, to earn his livelihood in India’s tech hub. After failing to land a job, he took to begging and is ‘happy’ earning around Rs.40 a day now.
‘I didn’t come to Bangalore to be a beggar. After failure to get any job, I decided to beg. I manage to earn Rs.30-40 a day and am happy,’ Prasad, 40, told IANS near Cubbon Road in the heart of the city’s central business district.
New York, June 16: A man who says he’s afraid to fly is spending the month of June living on a plane.
Mark Malkoff, 33, a comedian and filmmaker, boarded his first flight June 1 from LaGuardia in New York, where he lives, heading to Atlanta. He plans to stay on AirTran flights until June 30. The airline offers wireless Internet service, so Malkoff is posting updates about his trip on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and on his blog, http://www.MarkOnAirTran.com.
London, June 16: It’s official. The 10-letter word ‘definitely’ is the most commonly misspelt word in English.
A new study by market research company www.OnePoll. com has found that most Britons struggle to spell ‘definitely’ correctly, mixing up the second ‘I’ with an ‘A’ on a regular basis.
According to the study, the second most commonly misspelt word is ‘sacrilegious’, which leaves people confused over whether it has an ‘E’ or ‘I’ in the middle, followed by ‘indict’, which is often misspelt as ‘indite’.
New York, June 15: A raunchy Calvin Klein billboard depicting a teenage girl in a threesome has come under fire for being “borderline pornographic”.
Passers-by have expressed their fury at the massive, sexually suggestive ad on a building at Lafayette and Houston Sts in SoHo.
The endorsement shows a topless young woman on top of a bare chested lad, while engaged in a lip lock with a second shirtless male on a sofa.
A third male with unbuttoned pants and shirt can be seen lying on the floor below the pair, with suggestions of a foursome.
Panaji, June 16: A Goan couple that went on a tour to Jordan, Egypt and Israel has returned with unpleasant memories of ‘humiliation’ by Israeli soldiers. They allege that the soldiers segregated the wife because they suspected the vermilion mark on her forehead to be ‘a trigger for a bomb’.
They suspected not only the ‘kumkum’ mark a symbol for married Hindu women but also her large hair bun, which she had tied in a typically Goan fashion. They made her untie it and remove the pins.
Shrirang Narvekar, a popular humour playwright, and his wife S.S. Narvekar had gone on the trip in May.
London, June 15: A couple were left embarrassed after a talking CCTV camera in a town centre caught them having sex, and ordered to stop.
The pair had been drinking earlier, and when they heard the booming command issued by operators, they immediately stopped and fled from the scene in Northampton.
Northampton Borough Council has talking cameras trained in three town centre streets, which issue warnings about littering, fighting, and street drinking.
While most messages are pre-recorded, there are some specific warnings that are issued by the CCTV operators themselves.
Washington, June 15: A high-ranking South Carolina Republican activist has issued an apology after comparing First Lady Michelle Obama to a gorilla.
Rusty DePass, a former chairman of the Richland County Republican Party, made the comments in a friend’s Facebook status update line after a gorilla was reported to have escaped from Columbia’s Riverbanks Zoo.
According to FitsNews, the status line read: “I’m sure it’s just one of Michelle’s ancestors — probably harmless.”
Toronto, June 15: A Canadian woman was forced to strip at the Montreal airport to check a pink tattoo on her butt after her name and birth date matched that of a wanted criminal.
Sylvie Menard, 43, who is a manager with a wine company in Montreal, was returning home after holidaying in Mexico in April when the airport computer flagged her since her name and birth date matched that of a criminal sought by police, the Canadian Press reported Sunday.
New Delhi, June 15: They say nothing is personal in the cyber world. Everyone and anyone is vulnerable and can be hacked. Taking a cue, the Indian Army recently issued a circular asking its personnel not to post work-related information like ranks, place of posting etc on social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook.
“The circular has been issued recently in a bid to create cyber awareness among the net users in the army. It has been sent to all the units of the army across the country,” a senior army official confirmed to reporters, requesting anonymity.
Washington, June 12: The head of a Washington think tank has some unusual advice for President Barack Obama: visit India and see why ‘Jai Ho’ should be the key words of the US’ long- term foreign policy.
David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and president and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, a Washington DC-based international advisory firm, has been so impressed with India despite its dichotomies that he says Obama could profit more by a trip to that country than the headline-grabbing Egypt visit of last week.
Nagpur, June 12: ‘Shayad, aasman bhi ro pada apne haal dekh ke!’ (Maybe, the sky too has started weeping on seeing our condition) said cupid-struck Rupali (name changed) seated beside her beloved ‘gharwala’ Rupa (name changed) at a non-descript eatery at Khaparkheda on Thursday evening.
Mumbai, June 11: Around 12 first year BMM students from National College in Bandra had to pay a heavy price for sticking to their morals. The college failed around 12 students who protested and did not pay Rs 5,000 to install ACs in the educational institute.
Students frisked
Two students have spoken up about the injustice. Said Sanket Bhatt (19), “I passed my first semester with a first class in most subjects.
I have been deliberately failed because I protested and didn’t pay money for renovating the classrooms.
Tokyo, June 11: The sky has been raining tadpoles over a coastal region in Japan, according to reports. Residents, officials and scientists have been baffled by the apparent downpour of tadpoles in central Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture.
Clouds of dead tadpoles appear to have fallen from the sky in a series of episodes in a number of cities in the region since the start of the month.In one incident, a 55-year-old man who was caught in a tadpole downpour described hearing a strange sound in the parking lot of a civic centre in the city of Nanao.
Hyderabad, June 10: A man lodged a complaint against his wife, a software professional from the US, alleging that she had gotten married without divorcing him. Police said Sai Kumar, a resident of Mirzalguda in Malkajgiri, claimed that he was married to a software professional, Manasa, in 2001. Later, Manasa left for the US for higher studies. Sai Kumar also tried to go to the US but failed twice to secure a visa. “Sai Kumar is claiming that the marriage took place in 2001 while the parents of the girl are denying the same,” Malkajgiri police inspector M Madhusudhan Reddy said.
Los Angeles, June 10: Thomas Beatie, the transgendered man who created history last year by giving birth to a baby girl, has done it again.
ABC News reported that Beatie gave birth to a son early Tuesday in Bend, Oregon, and that the child would be nursed by his wife, Nancy.
Beatie, 35, was born a woman, but legally changed his gender. He decided to get pregnant after it emerged that Nancy could not conceive. Photos of a bearded pregnant Beatie caused a sensation last year.
Birmigham, June 09″ A blind man who has never held a driving licence was left stunned after he was arrested by the police for motoring offences. Mr Day, 50, from Birmingham, said he initially thought the arrest was a joke.
“A friend who I was staying with phoned me at work to say police were looking for me and had a warrant for my arrest to do with driving offences,” he said.
“I thought it was an April Fools joke at first.”
The father-of-one was blinded as a child after being hit on the head by a brick, which led to cataracts forming in his eyes.
Ahmedabad, June 09: Like any doting parent, Aspi Satarawala fulfilled all the wishes of his only son Pesi. Not only did he pay for his education till he got an MBA degree and got him married, the father spent his entire life’s savings to help Pesi settle in the US. But, at 65, Satarawala is regretting that he did so much for his son.
Chennai, June 09: It was only a small consolation for an old couple, but it turned out to be the highest compensation ever awarded by the Tamil Nadu Legal Services Authority (TNSLSA). An amount of Rs 60 lakh was given to the aged parents of a software professional, who was killed in a road accident near Chennai last year.
Chicago, June 08: A 90-year-old suburban Chicago woman who dropped out of school to help her family during the Great Depression now has her high school diploma.
Eleanor Benz left Chicago Public Schools’ Lake View High in 1936 during her senior year to take a job. Over the following decades she moved to the suburb of Gurnee and had 15 children, 54 grandchildren and 37 great-grandchildren.
Ghawhati, June 07: Fed up with the prolonged dry spell in the region, villagers in Assam married off frogs in a unique custom to please the rain god, asking for an early monsoon.
Residents of the entire Chipoha village turned out to witness the unconventional marriage ceremony of the two frogs, caught by the villagers themselves.
The frogs were decked up with fine clothes. The female frog was even gifted a necklace by the village women for the marriage, which was conducted by a priest according to traditional Hindu rituals.
Kentucky, June 06: An American pastor has invited his parishioners to bring their guns to church to celebrate the US Independence Day (July 4), in a show of support for the right to bear arms.
Gun-g Ho: Ken Pagano, the man behind the idea.
A former US Marine, Pastor Ken Pagano of New Bethel Church of Kentucky has asked handgun owners to attend this service, on June 27, openly wearing their sidearm.
But the move will be symbolic. The firearms must be unloaded.