Indonesian businessman to shower money to sell book

JAKARTA (Reuters) – An Indonesian businessman will throw 100 million rupiah (5,429 pounds) from an airplane on Sunday as part of a marketing ploy for his second book, organisers said.

Tung Desem Waringin, author and motivational speaker whose first book was a bestseller, is known for his unorthodox marketing methods.

A spokesman for the organisers, Diki Sidik, said Jakarta police had refused to issue a permit for the event but Tung would go ahead with the plan outside the capital.

“Rather than spend a lot of money for unsuccessful marketing, better give the money to the people,” Sidik said.

Millions of Indonesians live on less than 2 dollars a day and the event comes at a time when the poor are still smarting from rising food and fuel prices.

Lawyer sues Delta for ruining family vacation

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York lawyer is suing Delta Air Lines for $1 million, saying his family vacation turned into a nightmare after they were stranded in an airport for days and treated disdainfully by airline employees.

Richard Roth, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of himself and his mother, said he planned the Christmas 2007 trip to Buenos Aires to celebrate his mother’s 80th birthday. She had grown up in the city, but had not returned in years, he said.

Instead, Roth, his two teenage children, his wife and mother spent three days in airports, went days without their luggage, were treated rudely by airline employees and were forced to spend $21,000 on unused hotel rooms in Argentina, replacement clothes, and other costs.

Who’s the daddy? Swiss zoo in gorilla paternity mix-up

GENEVA (AFP) – Monkey business is clearly afoot in a Swiss zoo after a paternity testrevealed Thursday that one of its gorillas has effectively been cuckolded by a young pretender half his age.

Zookeepers in the northern city ofBasel were shocked to discover that Kisoro, a 17-year-old gorilla, is not the father of little Chelewa — instead it’s Viatu, another male who is just nine years old.

The situation was “almost unbelievable,” and the precocious Viatu has “broken all the rules that apply in gorilla communities,” the zoo said in a statement.

Normally, only male gorillas aged 12 or over have the right to have sex with females in the tribe.

The facts came to light when the zoo carried out the test as part of the data it keeps on animals born in captivity.

Source ~ AFP

 

Nude man accused in 10th-floor balcony break-in

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Ann Arbor police are not sure how a naked man managed to get to a 10th floor apartment balcony for a pre-dawn break-in. Police in the University of Michigan campus town said a resident called about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, saying someone was breaking in through a sliding glass door on his balcony.

Officers said the naked, wet intruder ran out the apartment’s front door and tried to escape, but police caught him in the parking lot of Huron Towers Apartments. Police sent the 42-year-old Ann Arbor man for psychiatric observation at the university’s medical center.

Detective Sgt. Richard Kinsey tells The Ann Arbor News the man once lived in the building. Kinsey says investigators can’t figure out how or why the man got in.

Source ~ The Ann Arbor News, http://www.mlive.com/aanews

Computer trained to “read” minds

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A computer has been trained to “read” people’s minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words, researchers said on Thursday.

They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information.

This might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities, said Tom Mitchell of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped lead the study.

“The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge?” Mitchell said in a telephone interview.

Fox News worker sues over bedbugs in NY office

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Fox News employee who says she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after being bitten by bedbugs at work filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the owner of the Manhattan office tower where she worked.

Jane Clark, 37, a 12-year veteran of Fox News, a unit of News Corp, said she complained to human resources after being bitten three times between October 2007 and April 2008. She said she was ridiculed and the office was not treated for months.

Beacon Capital Partners, which owns the tower in midtown Manhattan, said in a statement that it had not been made aware of the problem and that it was the responsibility of tenants to manage infestations.

Spoon fury earns attacker salary cut

TOKYO (Reuters) – A veteran sumo wrestler who attacked a junior grappler with a cooking instrument has been ordered to take a salary cut for his violent outburst.

Toyozakura, whose ladle-wielding assault left the victim bleeding and needing eight stitches, will take a 30 percent pay cut for three months, Japanese sumo officials said on Thursday.

The same punishment was meted out to gym chief Magaki for beating a junior wrestler with a bamboo sword in the latest in a series of incidents of bullying to tarnish sumo’s image.

Sumo dates back some 2,000 years and retains many Shinto religious overtones but the roly-poly sport has been plagued by scandal in recent months.

Japanese scientists create microscopic noodle bowl

TOKYO – Japanese scientists say they have used cutting-edge technology to create a noodle bowl so small it can be seen only through a microscope.

Mechanical engineering professor Masayuki Nakao said Thursday he and his students at the University of Tokyo used a carbon-based material to produce a noodle bowl with a diameter 1/25,000 of an inch in a project aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology.

The Japanese-style ramen bowl was carved out of microscopic nanotubes, Nakao said.

Marriage proposal triggers UFO alert

BERLIN – Police say a young man’s creative marriage proposal triggered reports of unidentified flying objects from worried Germans. Bavarian police say several people called late Wednesday evening to alert them to what they thought were UFOs and unusual lights drifting across the sky above the sleepy town of Plattling.

They say a police patrol set off to investigate — but was disappointed in its quest for unusual visitors.

A police statement Thursday said officers found a 29-year-old man who had just proposed to his 27-year-old girlfriend.

He had accompanied his proposal by sending up 50 paper lanterns that glowed in the night. Police say his girlfriend said “yes.”

Source ~ AP

Who needs sex when you can steal DNA?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Tiny freshwater organisms that have amazed scientists because of their sex-free lifestyle may have survived so well because they steal genes from other creatures, scientists reported on Thursday.

They found genes from bacteria, fungi and even plants incorporated into the DNA of bdelloid rotifers — minuscule animals that appear to have given up sex 40 million years ago.

“Bdelloid rotifers are small freshwater invertebrates that apparently lack sexual reproduction and can withstand desiccation at any life stage,” Irina Arkhipova and Matthew Meselson of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and colleagues wrote in a report in the journal Science.

They spring back into action after being dried out and also resist radiation.