QUIRKY WORLD ... A daily look at some of the world’s stranger stories
The owner of a rent-a-reindeer business is driving over 4,800km to the Arctic Circle and back to boost his herd in the run-up to Christmas.
George Richardson, 42, is taking his powerful Mitsubishi 4x4 and the largest towable cattle trailer he can pull and bringing back 10 females and two bulls from northern Norway to his site in the appropriately-named Cold Hesledon in Durham.
The garden centre owner started six years ago with three reindeer and has bred a herd of 15 which are a major attraction every Christmas. He rents them out to shopping centres, fetes, Christmas tree barns, schools, and museums.
Richardson, who has loved reindeer since childhood, is bringing fresh stock in to improve the herd’s bloodlines.
He has befriended Sami reindeer herders living beyond the Arctic Circle who have huge herds which are kept for meat.
Richardson is taking a truckers’ ferry from Immingham to Gothenburg, then up Sweden, across Finland, and into northern Norway, setting out on Friday.
Ants are “nosy neighbours” who frequently compare their homes to other properties around them, a study has found.
The creatures must often decide — like humans — whether they should upgrade or remain in their current home.
But unlike humans, who are susceptible to housing bubbles, the ants seem to invest in their property market in consistent and rational ways, scientists say.
Research by the University of Bristol found rock ants “continually monitor their neighbouring real estate” to scope out potential future homes.
Their efforts depend on the quality of nest they currently inhabit, with those in poor accommodation searching more than others in better homes.
Carolina Doran, PhD student from the University of Bristol’s school of biological sciences, said humans could learn from the ants’ behaviour.
“This strategy of adjusting their information gathering according to their actual needs and the real value of higher rungs on the property ladder may help ants to evaluate their housing market in a measured and thorough way that puts many of us to shame,” she said.
A thief was caught not so much red-handed as green-faced in London after breaking into a car which sprayed him with a liquid that glows emerald under ultra-violet light.
Yafet Askale, aged 28, denied entering the vehicle that police set up with a dye-trap in Harlesden, north-west London, to catch thieves in June.
But he was found guilty of stealing objects inside the car after police produced photos showing his face covered with the liquid, invisible under normal light.
Askale, from Harlesden, was sentenced to 49 hours of community service and ordered to pay £400 (€480) costs.
Police are searching for two men who appear to have parachuted onto a lower Manhattan street near Ground Zero early on Monday and disappeared, authorities said.
Two men wearing black suits and black helmets were spotted by a security camera alighting onto a street near Goldman Sachs Group’s lower Manhattan headquarters at 3.07am on Monday, said NYPD chief spokesman John McCarthy.
The pair landed near 200 West St, a 43-storey office tower located several blocks west of One World Trade Center. Cameras near the site captured the final descent, but authorities have yet to determine whether the men jumped from a nearby rooftop or out of an aircraft.
The founder of the royalist Yellow Shirt movement has been jailed for two years for defaming the monarchy.
A Bangkok appeal court found media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul, aged 65, guilty of lese majeste for quoting remarks made by an anti-establishment activist to the crowd at a protest in 2008.
The lese majeste law is the world’s harshest, mandating a jail term of three to 15 years.
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