An Israeli woman has begun an unenviable trawl through her country’s landfill sites after accidentally throwing out a mattress apparently stuffed with nearly US$1 million in cash.
The woman, who did not give her name, threw out her mother’s decade-old mattress at her home in Tel Aviv on Monday after buying her a replacement as a surprise gift. She was then shattered to learn that her mother had banked all her savings, in shekels and dollars, in that most traditional of hiding places. She rushed off to retrieve the mattress — only to discover the rubbish had already been collected.
The woman went into the street to find the mattress, but it had been taken away by rubbish collectors. She then took a taxi to the Hiriya site on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, a vast mountain of rubbish being turned into a park that serves as a way station handling all the rubbish for the city and its surrounding area.
PHOTO: AP
But she was too late. Three thousand tonnes of rubbish had arrived that morning from across the city and had already been loaded on to lorries to be shipped out for burial at landfill sites in southern and eastern Israel.
The woman hitched a ride with one of the truck drivers, who took her to the Ganei Hadas landfill site, near Be’er Sheva, in the southern Negev desert. But she could find no trace of the mattress and went on to another landfill site at Efeh, near the Dead Sea, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper said.
The paper published a photograph of the woman with her back to the camera searching through a vast and unpleasant pile of rubbish. A team of workers at the Efeh site were asked to stay on until nightfall on Tuesday to search for her mattress, but it was not found.
An Israeli police spokesman said he did not know of the case and no report had been made to police. There was no way to verify that the mattress was indeed stuffed with so much cash, but Yitzhak Borba, the manager of the Efeh dump, told Israel’s Army Radio that as the woman waded through the rubbish she seemed “totally desperate.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of