“We have issued the order to the factories to switch off for five hours every evening in a desperate move to save electricity so people can watch the play on televisions,” said Saleh Ahmed, managing director of the Dhaka Electric Supply Company.

“This is an undesirable decision from an economic point of view but we were rather compelled,” he told reporters.

The month-long World Cup finishes on July 11.

Although Bangladesh, ranked 157th in the world, lost 6-1 to Tajikistan in a two-legged first round Asian zone qualifier for this year’s finals, the country’s young and old, in urban and rural areas, just go crazy whenever the finals are held.

Read the rest of Bangladesh closes factories for World Cup

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Men weigh up potential partners almost instantaneously based on their appearance because their “ancient” genetic preference for attractive mates leads them to, experts claim.

According to research, a woman with an attractive face is taken by men to be fertile and able to continue the family line, appealing to the man’s survival instinct.

In contrast women take longer to decide their feelings for a man because they need to weigh up whether he will be a committed partner who will provide for them well – part of their survival programming.

Read the rest of Men judge women in milliseconds

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The unfortunate sheep was spotted bleating for help more than 15 feet above the ground next to an telegraph pole.

Amazed onlookers watched the ram descend from a grazing pasture – apparently accidentally – while dangling from a live wire.

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Published: August 2, 1985, The New York Times

Tags: weird, news, lifeguards, drowning

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For three weeks Armando Del Manso believed his dog was responsible for the dead snakes showing up with teeth marks all over them on his East Barron property’s lawn each morning.

But it turns out it was a pair of rampaging rabbits killing the snakes.

The 42-year-old boilermaker first made the discovery Tuesday night when he spotted the two wild rabbits attacking a king brown snake.

“The snake was raised up in the air in the striking position and the two rabbits worked their way around him and killed him in two minutes,” Mr Del Manso said.

“I’m gobsmacked, it’s absolutely incredible.

“We were watching from the veranda with a spotlight, and I thought, who is going to believe this, they’ll think I’m crazy.”

Wildlife expert Paul O’Callaghan of the Cairns Wildlife Safari said it was the first time he had heard of rabbits attacking snakes.

The report also met with disbelief from a number of cairns.com.au readers.

Source: cairns.com.au

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A judge in the juvenile court, noting the premeditation and the “extremely aggressive” manner in which Denote Moore, 13, pointed an unloaded handgun at several bank tellers last month, ordered his case be moved to adult court.

The mid-day heist on April 13 shocked many in this Rust Belt city.

Sheriff Michael McCoy said Moore was the youngest person to be arrested for bank robbery in his 37 years on the force. A prosecutor said he could not remember another such case in his 19 years of work.

The move means a potential prison sentence for Moore of 21 to 45 years.

Had the case remained in the juvenile courts, Moore’s imprisonment would have ended on his 21st birthday.

The robbery occurred at about 11:35 am.

Moore was arrested within 30 minutes after hiding in a garage only a few blocks away from the bank. His clothing was stained red from a dye pack that had exploded in the pillow case where tellers had put the money.

Moore told police he thought he had been shot, hearing the pop and seeing a big puff of red smoke.

The teen told police he had run away from home a month earlier and was stealing to get money for “clothing and stuff.”

Illinois law allows a juvenile to be tried as an adult if he or she is older than 13 and a judge finds “it is not in the best interest of the public” for the minor to remain in the juvenile justice system. Moore will turn 14 next month.

The judge, noting Moore was on probation and failed to comply with counseling and missed several appointments with his probation officer, found the boy to be a poor candidate to work with officials further.

An estimated 200,000 juveniles are tried, sentenced or incarcerated as adults every year in the United States, according to the Campaign for Youth Justice.

An average of 7,500 juveniles are incarcerated in adult jails at any given time and 40 states allow youths charged as adults to be held in adult jails while they wait for their case to be heard.

Source: Breitbart

Tags: bank, robber, 13, years, old, us, jail

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The owner of the Purr-Fect Pets shop says he’s never seen anything like it in 25 years in the business. He says the bunny eats, drinks and hops around like the rest of the litter.

Beardsley Zoo director Gregg Dancho says the deformity could be the result of too much inbreeding or the parents’ exposure to pesticides or poisons.

Store workers have begun a naming contest with Cyrano de Bergerac and Deuce among the contenders so far.

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But the contest took a fatal turn when one of the women, eliminated for her looks, drove the man and the four other competitors off a cliff, Chinese media reported.

The spurned mistress died and the other passengers were injured, the reports said.

Police initially thought the car had plummeted off a mountain road in eastern China on December 6 by accident. Then they learned of the contest through a letter the dead woman had left behind, the Shanghai Daily newspaper said.

The 29-year-old woman, identified only as Yu, was a waitress when she met the businessman at a restaurant in the coastal city of Qingdao in 2000.

At the time, the businessman, identified only by his last name — Fan — was married and had four other mistresses, according to the Peninsula Metropolis Daily newspaper in Qingdao.

The women knew of one another, but none elected to break up with the man and give up their rent-free apartment and a 5,000 yuan ($730) monthly allowance, the reports said.

When the economy soured, the businessman apparently decided to let go of all but one mistress.

He staged a private talent show in May, without telling the women his intentions. An instructor from a local modeling agency judged the women on the way they looked, how they sang and how much alcohol they could hold, the Shanghai Daily said.

The judge knocked out Yu in the first round of the competition based on her looks. Angry, she decided to exact revenge by telling her lover and the four other women to accompany her on a sightseeing trip before she returned to her home province, the media reports said.

It was during the trip that Yu reportedly drove the car off the cliff.

Fan shut down his company after the crash and paid Yu’s parents 580,000 yuan ($84,744) as compensation for her death.

The four other women left him, as did his wife when she learned of the affairs.

Source: CNN

Tags: economic, crisis, weird, news, china

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The beach will be next to the the new Palazzo Versace hotel which is being built in Dubai where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C.

The beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface.

The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.

Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, said he believed it is possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. “We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” he said. “This is the kind of luxury that top people want.”

Hyder Consulting, a British construction consultancy, is overseeing the engineering on the project. The hotel will be marketed strongly in the UK where Dubai is a popular tourist destination, attracting about 800,000 Britons a year.

Abedian’s firm began its association with Versace a decade ago with the idea of creating the first chain of luxury fashion-branded lifestyle resorts.

The first Palazzo Versace is already operating on Australia’s Gold Coast – where Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, the actors, have stayed – and the Dubai hotel will be the second when it opens late next year or early 2010. The 10-storey hotel will have 213 rooms, several with their own internal swimming pools, plus 169 apartments. Fifteen more such hotels are planned.

Competition to serve the world’s rich is getting intense, especially in Dubai. The city already boasts the world’s first seven-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab, while Armani, a competitor with Versace, is building a similarly branded Dubai hotel.

The refrigerated beach is designed to give Versace the edge in this battle of luxury lifestyles. The system will be controlled by thermostats linked to computers.

Versace’s plans have shocked environmentalists. Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, which promotes sustainable tourism, said that the carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change, whose worst effects would be felt by the poor.

“Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles,” she said.

Aided by cheap oil and gas, Middle Eastern nations have poured enormous resources into controlling temperature. About 60% of Dubai’s huge power bill is for air-conditioning; each person living there has a carbon footprint of more than 44 tons of CO2 a year.

Source: Times Online

Tags: dubai,, versace,, beach,, refrigerated,, global, warming

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The weight of the knobbly root vegetable has not yet been verified by the Guinness Book of Records, but could be several times heavier than the existing record holder – a 7lb 13oz spud grown in the Isle of Man.

“I’ve been working the land since I was a boy, and it’s the first time I’ve seen anything like it,” said Khalil Semhat, 56, a farmer near the city of Tyre 50 miles south of Beirut.

Describing his find as a “giant”, Mr Semhat displayed the potato for a photographer on a large set of scales.

The tuber was so heavy Mr Semhat said he had to call on a friend to help him pry it from the ground, according to AFP.

His farm, damaged during Israel’s heavy bombardment of south Lebanon during a brief war in summer 2006, mostly grows potatoes and bananas.

Despite the freakish size of the vegetable, Mr Semhat insisted he had used no artificial fertilisers: “I didn’t use any chemicals at all,” he said.

Mr Semhat hopes to have the potato registered by Guinness in its next book of records.

Source: Telegraph

Tags: potato, records, farming

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