FACTS & ARGUMENTS - Jail walk
published:
Friday | May 16, 2008
A 72-year-old Chinese man walked more than 600 miles to visit his son in prison. The man walked for 71 days from his hometown at Taihe town, Anhui province, to the prison at Lianping town, Guangdong province.
The pensioner had planned to take the train but had his savings stolen shortly after leaving home.
The father, who walks with a stick, says he begged all the way, and sometimes ate rotten food from bins during his two-month journey.
He said: "I didn't see him for two years. I am here to visit him and tell him not to worry about me and transform himself for good, while in prison."
Prison wardens were so touched by his story that they even bent the rules to allow him to see his son.
Fireman flag
A British fireman is set to be prosecuted after he flew a skull and crossbones flag outside his home for his daughter's pirate-themed birthday party.
David Waterman, 41, faces legal action for refusing to remove the Jolly Roger flag he hoisted to celebrate his girl's eighth birthday after a neighbour complained.
Under current British laws, any flag flying outside a residential property has to have planning permission, unless it is a national flag.
Waterman said: "It's a £5 flag, not hurting anyone, and they're probably spending hundreds of pounds of our cash getting me to take it down. That could be spent on improving the local area - it's disgraceful."
A spokesman for his local council said: "We received a complaint about the flag flying outside Mr Waterman's house and are duty-bound to investigate."
Porn demotion
A Japanese civil servant has been demoted after he viewed pornographic websites more than 780,000 times during office hours over a nine-month period.
The man, an employee of the Kinokawa government in western Japan, visited porn sites from June last year to February 2008, Kinokawa official Tomiko Waki said.
Despite his frequent porn viewing, none of his colleagues noticed his activities.
The man's superiors discovered his extensive porn-site visits after his computer became infected with a virus, prompting officials to examine his web browser's history.
Violin thanks
A British man who left a 285-year-old violin in the back of a New York cab has played a concert to thank the driver who returned it to him.
Philippe Quint gave a private 30-minute performance in the taxi waiting area at Newark Liberty International Airport, after leaving a 1723 Kiesewetter Stradivarius, worth £2 million, in a taxi on the way back from the airport.
The driver, Mohamed Khalil, got in touch the next day to return it.
Quint said: "I cannot describe it in words, the feeling that I was going through at the time. I was frantically looking for the violin that whole morning."
Singing hiccup
A British singer has had hiccups for 15 months.
Christopher Sands, who suffers every day, sometimes every two seconds for up to 12 hours at a time, will now undergo an operation to help cure him.
The guitarist and professional backing singer believes he must have hiccuped 10 million times since September 2006.
"I've tried everything to stop them. I must have drunk water a hundred different ways. Sometimes if I hunch into a ball I can hold them off for a bit, but it freaks people out," he said.
Doctors have diagnosed a faulty stomach valve and will operate to create a new one.
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Toilet roll
A German tourist was left terrified when his caravan rolled 200 yards down a hill while he was on the toilet.
Juergen Winkler, 48, was emptying his bladder when the caravan crashed into a lamp post and then into a ditch in an orchard in Austria, where he was on holiday. He was still sitting on the toilet when the fire brigade arrived to pull his caravan out of the ditch.
A spokesman said: "He has only a few very slight injuries but he was as white as a sheet and still sitting there on the toilet."
