Man arrested after 28 yrs for hugging woman
Beijing: A Chinese man who was accused of ‘hooliganism’ for hugging a woman against her will 28 years ago was finally arrested under the now obsolete charge, but police found the accuser and the accused living a happy married life.
The charge no longer exists under the Chinese law but in the 1980s was a serious offence and a conviction for hooliganism could result in a death sentence. The man named Chen Zonghao, then in south China’s Hainan province, had hugged a colleague without her consent, following which her parents reported him to the police.
He fled to his hometown in the nearby Guangdong province and was a fugitive all these years. After a search for nearly three decades, during which even the charge under which he was wanted was nullified, police eventually arrested the man on October 3 driving down 1,100 kilometres in a heavy typhoon, the China Daily reported.
China had in the 1980s toughened measures against “immoral” behaviour, the paper said, but the charge was deleted from the criminal law during a revision in 1997. (PTI)
Woman raises false alarm to ground plane
Beijing: A Chinese plane headed to Xinjiang province was forced to make an emergency landing after a woman passenger, troubled over relationship with her boyfriend, raised a false bomb alert.
The plane, with 160 passengers and 10 crew members onboard, made a forced landing at Jiayuguan Airport in Gansu Province yesterday following which police detained the 27-year-old passenger, state news agency Xinhua reported.
The flight was heading for Xinjiang capital of Urumqi after taking off from Beijing’s Nanyuan Airport when the woman claimed there was a bomb onboard, the official media reported.
The woman, surnamed Wang, had a problem with her boyfriend and she was heading to Xinjiang to talk to him, police said, adding an investigation was underway. (UNI)
Average car use period hits new high in Japan at 7.74 years
Tokyo: The average duration of ownership of new passenger cars came to 7.74 years as of March 31, the longest since the record keeping began in 1975, an automotive industry body said on Thursday.
The figure was 0.18 year longer than a year earlier and hit a new high for the 19th year running mainly because new car sales slowed after the end of the government subsidy program for eco-friendly car buyers in September last year, according to the Automobile Inspection & Registration Information Association.
The data do not cover minivehicles with engines of up to 660 cc. (UNI)
Spoiled convicts of Britain
London: Prison officials at one of Britains’s busiest jails are faced with a strange situation. They are being literally bombarded with thousands of trivial complaints by inmates.
These complaints include criminals demanding investigations into heating, DVDs, undelivered TV magazines and lack of hot chocolate, the Daily Express reported.
As per details collected through a Freedom of Information request, staff at HMP Manchester, a high-security male prison, known as Strangeways, were inundated with 3,500 formal inmate “grievances”, an average of 10 a day, in last one year.
Among others, the list of grievances include complaints of temperature of the showers, quality of meat in the canteen, a confiscated pen, outstanding DVD orders, smelly milk, missing newspapers and calls for individual thermostats on cells so prisoners can turn up their own heat.
Matthew Elliott, from the TaxPayers’ Alliance,Britain’s independent grassroots campaign for lower taxes, said: “Prison officers are meant to be keeping inmates in line, not acting as butlers.” (IANS)
Tech-savvy baby tries to flip mag pages like iPad!
New York: Here’s an evidence to show the effect technology is having on today’s children.
A French father has uploaded a video, which shows his one-year-old daughter attempting to manipulate a magazine like an iPad or an iPhone.
The video shows the toddler totally perplexed as to how to manipulate the paper pages of Marie Claire magazine and attempts to use her fingers to scroll the paper pages, but nothing happens.
The poster, who has been identified as Jean Lois, living in Paris, said that the video was a comment on how Apple has re-coded our brains with its operating systems. (ANI)
First self-portrait of Michelangelo is a unique marble relief!
Washington: Italian art historians have announced that a unique marble relief might be the first known self-portrait of Michelangelo.
Belonging to a private collection, the sculpture is a white marble tondo, or circle, about 14 inches in diameter. It depicts a bearded head in three-quarter profile.
“It’s a very high-quality sculpture, carved with precision and delicacy. It certainly deserves much attention,” Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, told Discovery News.
Late James Beck, professor of art history at Columbia University, identified the carving as a possible work by Michelangelo back in 1999. In his monograph “The Three Worlds of Michelangelo,” Beck called the artwork a “possible Michelangelo self-portrait” and dated it to about 1545. (ANI)