Saudi woman avenges husband with $ 80,000 traffic fine
Dubai: A scorned Saudi woman has taken revenge on her husband for marrying a second time by taking his car for a joyride and raking up USD 80,000 in deliberate fines on his wedding night.
The disgruntled wife took her husband’s pickup truck as he was celebrating his second marriage and asked her brother to purposefully drive it through red lights where the licence number could be picked up by cameras. A video clip that went viral on the internet shows the vehicle driving through a red traffic light, getting caught by the camera and then reversing to repeat the violation, Gulf News reported.
The final fine tally amounted to around 300,000 Saudi riyals, or USD 80,000. According to news site Al Marsad, the brother and sister spent much of the evening jumping red lights to register the highest number of fines by Saher, the system introduced by Saudi traffic authorities to check chaotic driving and monitor violations, mainly jumping red lights. The clip of the pickup purposefully jumping red lights drew mainly cheers from social media users. (PTI)
Gold-filled Ming Dynasty tomb found in China
Beijing: A 500-year-old gold-filled tomb of a concubine turned military strategist from the Ming Dynasty has been discovered in China.
The brick tomb containing gold treasures was found at a construction site in Nanjing by archaeologists from Nanjing Municipal Museum and the Jiangning District Museum of Nanjing City. The tomb also contains two stone epitaphs that tell the story of Lady Mei, a woman who went from being a concubine to becoming a political and military strategist.
The epitaphs unveil that Lady Mei was a 21-year-old “unwashed and unkempt” woman who “called herself the survivor.” She later became the mother of a duke who ruled a province in southwest China, ‘Live Science’ reported. According to the epitaphs, which were translated from Chinese, Lady Mei came to wield much power, providing her son with “strategies for bringing peace to the barbarian tribes and pacifying faraway lands.” The treasures in her more than 500-year-old tomb include gold bracelets, a gold fragrance box and gold hairpins, all inlaid with a mix of gemstones, including sapphires, rubies and turquoise. Lady Mei was one of three wives of Mu Bin, a Duke of Qian who ruled Yunnan, a province in southwest China, researchers said. (PTI)
Japanese strawberry weighing 250 g is world’s heaviest
Tokyo: A strawberry grown by a Japanese farmer that weighs a whopping 250 grammes has won the Guinness World Records title for the heaviest strawberry. Farmer Koji Nakao from Fukuoka, Japan, contacted Guinness World Records when he found an unusually large strawberry during harvest. The mutated strawberry weighs a whopping 250 grammes with an approximate height of 8 cm, length of 12 cm and circumference of 25 to 30 cm. Mutations can occur for a variety of reasons, for example, when frost damage affects to the flowers of the strawberry plant. In this case, multiple berries have grown and fused together to form one single large strawberry. Koji’s extraordinary and unusual fruit, a Japanese variety called Amaou, has been given the Guinness World Records title for heaviest strawberry. The fruit has broken a long standing record held for over 30 years. The previous record holding strawberry weighed 231 grammes and was grown by G Andersen of Folkstone, Kent, UK in 1983. (PTI)
New cat-sized rodent named after naturalist James Bond
London: Researchers have discovered a cat-sized rodent in a Caribbean island and named him after James Bond, a real-life naturalist who also gave his name to Ian Fleming’s fictional British spy. The rodent, which weighs more than a kilogramme, was discovered in Hispaniola island by Samuel Turvey of the Zoological Society of London and colleagues.
The rodent is a type of hutia, a family of secretive rodents that live in the Carribean islands, ‘New Scientist’ reported. The rodent has been named Plagiodontia aedium bondi after Philadelphia ornithologist James Bond who studied the distribution of hutias and their relatives in the Caribbean. Writer – and avid birder – Fleming was a fan of Bond’s Birds of the West Indies and named the fictional character in his novels James Bond, otherwise known as 007, after him.
The newly discovered resident may be one of only eight types of hutia left. Although there were once more than 30 species, most hutia have been driven to extinction by the colonisation of the islands. (PTI)
