■ Saudi Arabia
Bride beats up guest
A furious Saudi bride beat up a woman who used a mobile phone camera to photograph her at her wedding party, a local newspaper reported on Sunday. The bride "beat up the woman, completely destroyed her phone and pulled her by the hair in front of a big crowd of guests" for taking pictures in the women-only section of the wedding at Taif, in western Saudi Arabia, Al-Jazirah daily said. The bride was applauded by guests for her "vigilance," the paper added. Women and men are usually segregated at wedding parties in the deeply conservative Muslim country, allowing women to remove their veils without being seen by men.
■ United States
`Mozzarrella Mary' sold
A woman who said her 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich bore the image of the Virgin Mary will be getting a lot more bread after the item sold for US$28,000 on eBay. GoldenPalace.com, an online casino, confirmed that it placed the winning bid, and company executives said they were willing to spend "as much as it took" to own the 10-year-old half-sandwich with a bite out of it. "It's a part of pop culture that's immediately and widely recognizable," spokesman Monty Kerr told The Miami Herald. ``We knew right away we wanted to have it.'' Photos posted on eBay show what can be viewed as a woman's face emblazoned on the sandwich, a bite taken out of one end.
■ United States
Star officer caught stealing
A young Philippine army officer has been caught shoplifting in the US, where he was undergoing advance schooling, an army spokesman said yesterday. Second Lieutenant Rolly Joaquin, who was deported to Manila on Oct. 28, has been restricted to quarters pending an investigation on his alleged crime, according to Major Bartolome Bacarro. Bacarro said Joaquin could face court martial and administrative charges if investigators find strong evidence against him. Joaquin, valedictorian of the Philippine Military Academy class 2004, was attending a course at the US Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia.
■ Iraq
`Tomb raider' convicted
An expert on Iraq's postwar reconstruction was sentenced Monday to six months under house arrest and two years of probation for trying to smuggle into the US 4,000-year-old artifacts stolen from Iraq's national museum in the chaos after the US invasion. Joseph Braude, 30, pleaded guilty to smuggling and making false statements. Braude could have gotten 16 years in prison. Braude is a Middle East expert fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi. For years he had assisted the FBI and CIA with counter-terrorism efforts. When he returned from Iraq last summer, Braude was stopped by customs agents at Kennedy Airport after he failed to declare he was carrying three ancient seals.
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