From the dangers of letting women sit up front, to Hong Kong’s fishy lobster meatballs, here is a weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world:
BEWARE! WOMEN
A Ugandan traders association has banned women from riding up front in trucks saying short skirts and bare thighs could be distracting drivers and causing accidents.
Photo: AFP
Even wives are banned. Patrick Opio Obote of the Lira vendors group said that some hussies even “take the drivers to bars and drink alcohol and they end up causing accidents.”
Covering up is complicated by the fact that conservative Ugandans do not like women wearing trousers. While women’s rights groups denounced the lorry ban as more “male chauvinism,” some wondered if it would be safer if women took the wheel.
LOCKED IN LOVE
Relations between the sexes are running much smoother in China now after a woman stuck on a never-ending first date by a lockdown went viral last week by complaining that her suitor was “as mute as a wooden dummy” and a “mediocre” cook.
This week Zhao Xiaoqing, a 28-year-old woman from northern China’s Shaanxi province, got engaged to her beau after they too were trapped on a date. This time however love rather than boredom blossomed, although some Chinese social media users were skeptical.
“After a year or two you’ll get tired of each other and divorce... I’ve seen too many of these kinds of flash marriages,” one netizen wrote.
BUT IS IT ART?
A Russian artist has been arrested for creating a snow statue of a giant turd near a war memorial in central Saint Petersburg.
Ivan Volkov, 30, painted his five-meter-long creation brown and drew a yellow puddle around it before posting pictures of it on Instagram with the legend, Caca.
SHELL-SHOCKED
It may look like lobster and taste like lobster, but if you are eating it in Hong Kong, it probably isn’t, the city’s Consumer Council warned.
Gourmets in the food-obsessed city are more than a little crabby at the results of DNA tests on one of its favorite foods, lobster meatballs.
Crustacean DNA was not found in any of the 10 samples the council tested, including one which listed lobster as an ingredient.
The mystery now is what are they made of. “We found some other ingredients... that might be other seafood or even meat-type” things, the council’s chairwoman said.
LETTUCE PRAY
America’s most famous rabbit is no more. Former US vice president Mike Pence’s bunny Marlon Bundo became an unlikely gay hero after a parody book about him falling in love with another buck rabbit topped bestseller lists, satirizing his owner’s anti-LGBTQ stance.
Pence’s daughter, Charlotte, who authored the series of children’s books told from Bundo’s point of view, broke the bad news about Bundo’s death to Americans.
When the first Bundo book was released, British TV comedian John Oliver published a parody version to support gay charities. Its sales outpaced the original and at one point held the number one spot on Amazon.
May 23 to May 29 After holding out for seven years, more than 250 Yunlin-based resistance fighters were finally persuaded to surrender in six separate ceremonies on May 25, 1902. The Japanese had subdued most of the Han Taiwanese within six months of their arrival in 1895, but intermittent unrest continued — in Yunlin, the Tieguoshan (鐵國山) guerillas caused the new regime much headache through at least 1901. These surrender ceremonies were common and usually conducted peacefully, but the Japanese had different plans for these troublemakers. Once the event concluded, they gunned down every single attendee with machine guns. Only Chien Shui-shou
The toll rolls on. A gunman walks into a place where humans are peacefully gathering and slaughters them for a militantly-avowed racially-based nationalism, presented in a long manifesto. We are quickly told that the gunman was mentally ill. Obviously — who but a madman could do such a thing? The newspapers dust off one of their “education of a killer” pieces, change the names and run another 1,200 words useful only to those cultivating such killers. The latest of these attacks, on Taiwanese churchgoers in Laguna, California, has spurred much discussion of the long record of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) violence
Producing the world’s meat has rarely been this expensive. In southern Calgary, Don Lowe, who’s been a cattle rancher for 40 years, had hoped to expand his herd of 800 beef cows this year, but with feed prices skyrocketing, he’s struggling to hang on to the animals he has. Across the ocean in East Yorkshire, England, pig farmer Kate Moore says the upkeep of her 32,000-strong herd is becoming exceedingly hard. “It’s horrendous,” said Moore, who is now is chalking up a loss of about ￡60 (US$75) per animal because of the soaring cost of feeding and taking care of them. “There’s
Household appliances contain plastic components. Medical devices made of sterile plastic, such as disposable syringes and plasma bags, are indispensable to 21st-century healthcare. By preventing bruising and contamination, plastic packaging reduces food waste. Plastic cups and dishes are less fragile than ceramic tableware. PVC pipes and window frames have made house-building cheaper. But not everyone who benefits from this wonder material knows that plastics production requires huge amounts of energy, most of which is generated by burning fossil fuels. Plastics plants are also a source of harmful pollutants including benzene. Nor do all consumers appreciate the extent to which plastic
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