Girl escapes death despite being buried alive
London: A teenaged girl in Britain had a miraculous escape from death after being buried alive on a beach for 15 minutes as the hole she was digging collapsed.
Paige Anderson, 15, turned blue and had stopped breathing after being trapped under a 5- feet wall of sand for quarter of an hour as paramedics, police, lifeboatmen and coastguards frantically dug her out, Daily Mail reported.
She was playing with her sisters Jade, 19, and Taylor, nine, on the beach at Caister, a settlement near coastal town Great Yarmouth, Norfolk county, when the disaster struck.
She was about to climb out of the hole, they had been digging, when the sides suddenly caved in.
Paige, who survived by breathing a pocket of air under the compacted sand, said: “It just started as a bit of fun… I remember crouching down to go through the tunnel, then it all went black after that.”
The girl’s father Michael Anderson, 50, feared the worst as the huge rescue operation was launched Friday afternoon.
He said: “She is a brave girl. It’s a miracle she’s still here. The whole thing has restored my faith in people. I just can’t thank them enough.” (IANS)
Malaysian runaway bride in $365,000 lawsuit
Kuala Lumpur: A Malaysian man is suing his runaway bride for 1.1 million ringgit (USD 365,000) after she called off the wedding with just six hours to go, his lawyer said.
Civil servant Mohammad Masran Abdul Rahman, 32, is suing hospital technician Norzuliyana Mat Hassan, 28, in the second case of its kind in northern Kelantan state in just two months, his lawyer Latifah Ariffin told AFP.
“The groom had made full preparations and paid for all the food and wedding costs including invitations to over 1,200 guests to attend the wedding,” she said.
“Given the last minute cancellation, he ended up paying for a wedding that never took place.”
Latifah said the wedding was supposed to be held at the bride’s home on June 4 with a reception two days later in the groom’s village. She said that Mohammad Masran was claiming 100,000 ringgit in general damages and 500,000 ringgit each for exemplary and special damages.
Norzuliyana could not be reached for comment. Last month, a 30-year-old technician sued his bride-to-be for 320,000 ringgit after she cancelled their nuptials via text message a week before the big day, local media reported.
“It looks like such runaway brides are becoming a trend but the damage they are inflicting on the grooms by their very casual cancellations is tremendous,” Latifah said.
Religious officials in the state, which is known for its conservative brand of Islam, said such lawsuits were quite rare.
But they said they were monitoring the situation to see what could be done to help salvage relationships in difficulty. (AFP)
Woman seeks divorce over Ramadan cooking row
Cairo: An Egyptian woman has applied for divorce after her husbands’ cooking skills proved to be better than her own, the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper reported Monday.
The family row came amid the Islamic holiday of Ramadan, when observers fast from dawn to dusk and then break the fast with festive meals after night prayers.
Mohammed Said, a chef at a Cairo hotel, surprised his family with his excellent cooking skills when he took over kitchen duties from his wife Nahal at the beginning of Ramadan.
Nahal decided to divorce her husband after her two sons demanded that their father, not she, cook meals for family suppers from now on.
An Egyptian court has delayed the consideration of the divorce request until the end of Ramadan, expressing hope that by that time the reason for the divorce may disappear and peace in the family would be restored. (IANS)
Flirtatious msgs to mistresses land official in soup
Beijing: A senior Chinese official is facing disciplinary probe after his flirtatious messages to five mistresses were exposed online by a netizen.
An employee of the Taxation Bureau of Guiyang City, Guizhou Province, confirmed that the official surnamed Wang was a department chief, who lost his mobile phone containing messages sent to five women for a rendezvous, Shanghai Daily reported.
The messages were posted online on August 4 by the netizen who claimed to have found the lost phone.
The incident has provoked heated online discussion. However, Wang denied the allegation, saying it was a trick to tarnish his fame and blackmail him.
The official added he shared a good relationship with his wife and had no time to flirt with any mistress. (PTI)
Woman jailed for ‘wicked murder’
London: A woman in Britain who beat an elderly man to death before burying him in her garden was jailed for life Monday.
Ann Browning, 54, was ordered to serve a minimum of 25 years for the “wicked murder” of retired postman, 82-year-old widower William Williamson, after a judge ruled she planned the killing for financial gain, The Telegraph reported.
Browning, a cleaner, of Miltons Crescent, Surrey, pleaded guilty to murder but denied the crime was financially motivated.
She claimed she beat him with a plastic bat in a temper and then buried his body in her garden to cover up her crime.
She then stripped him naked, bound his legs with a belt, wrapped him in a shower curtain and put him head-first into a grave she had dug in the back garden of the home they shared.
Within days of his death in September 2010, she transferred 140,000 pounds from their joint account into her personal account. (IANS)
British troop chops off dead Taliban’s fingers as trophies
London: A probe was launched by the British defence ministry into claims that a soldier cut fingers off dead Taliban fighters to keep as souvenirs, BBC reported.
The allegations relate to a soldier from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who was serving in Afghanistan.
The claims centre on the battalion’s last tour of duty in the country. It was deployed in Helmand from September 2010 until April this year, tasked with training Afghan police.
Soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 5th Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Scotland, are recruited in Scotland but based in Canterbury, in Kent.
Douglas Young, executive chairman of the British Armed Forces Federation, said he was “shocked” to learn of the probe.
“While the facts still need to be established, if there turns out to be anything in these claims, clearly the MoD are correct to treat the matter very seriously.”
“The alleged behaviour is totally out of kilter with the ethos of the armed forces,” the BBC quoted him as saying. (IANS)
Needles – enemy for balloon dress
TOKYO: The latest in dresses from one Japanese designer is feather-light, see-through and comes with an unusual warning: watch out for needles. It’s a dress made from balloons — 200 of them, to be exact. (Reuters)