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.
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未) famous return to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been overshadowed by the astonishing news of the latest arrests of senior military figures for “corruption,” but it is an interesting piece of news in its own right, though more for what Ai does not understand than for what he does. Ai simply lacks the reflective understanding that the loneliness and isolation he imagines are “European” are simply the joys of life as an expat. That goes both ways: “I love Taiwan!” say many still wet-behind-the-ears expats here, not realizing what they love is being an
Google unveiled an artificial intelligence tool Wednesday that its scientists said would help unravel the mysteries of the human genome — and could one day lead to new treatments for diseases. The deep learning model AlphaGenome was hailed by outside researchers as a “breakthrough” that would let scientists study and even simulate the roots of difficult-to-treat genetic diseases. While the first complete map of the human genome in 2003 “gave us the book of life, reading it remained a challenge,” Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, told journalists. “We have the text,” he said, which is a sequence of
Every now and then, even hardcore hikers like to sleep in, leave the heavy gear at home and just enjoy a relaxed half-day stroll in the mountains: no cold, no steep uphills, no pressure to walk a certain distance in a day. In the winter, the mild climate and lower elevations of the forests in Taiwan’s far south offer a number of easy escapes like this. A prime example is the river above Mudan Reservoir (牡丹水庫): with shallow water, gentle current, abundant wildlife and a complete lack of tourists, this walk is accessible to nearly everyone but still feels quite remote.
It’s a bold filmmaking choice to have a countdown clock on the screen for most of your movie. In the best-case scenario for a movie like Mercy, in which a Los Angeles detective has to prove his innocence to an artificial intelligence judge within said time limit, it heightens the tension. Who hasn’t gotten sweaty palms in, say, a Mission: Impossible movie when the bomb is ticking down and Tom Cruise still hasn’t cleared the building? Why not just extend it for the duration? Perhaps in a better movie it might have worked. Sadly in Mercy, it’s an ever-present reminder of just
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