QUIRKY WORLD ... A daily look at some of the world’s stranger stories
They say laughter is the best medicine but doctors have concluded it can be deadly dangerous, according to The Sun.
The perils include ruptures, hernias, heart failure, headaches, asthma attacks, jaw dislocation, and a condition called giggle incontinence.
Professor Robin Ferner, who reviewed reports dating back to 1946, said: “This refutes the proposition that laughter can be only beneficial. The harm that can occur during a prolonged overdose occur immediately after exposure.”
Dr Ferner reviewed 785 studies and just 85 showed benefits from laughing while 114 found dangers.
A life-sized replica of the Titanic will become the centerpiece of a landlocked theme park in China, featuring a museum and a shipwreck simulation to give visitors a harrowing sense of the 1912 disaster.
The Chinese version of “the unsinkable ship”, with a price tag of 1bn yuan (€120m) and an expected opening date in 2016, will be built at least 1,500km from the nearest ocean in the central province of Sichuan.
Su Shaojun, CEO of the Seven Star Energy Investment Group that funded the project, said Asia needs its own Titanic museum. “We think it’s worth spreading the spirit of the Titanic. The universal love and sense of responsibility shown during the Titanic shipwreck represent the spiritual richness of human civilisation,” he said.
The simulation will allow several hundred people at a time to feel what the shipwreck was like. “When the ship hits the iceberg, it will shake, it will tumble,” Su said.
“We will let people experience water coming in by using sound and light effects... They will think, ‘the water will drown me, I must escape with my life’.”
A flight that was due to arrive on Sunday night at Branson Airport in southwest Missouri instead landed at an airport 11km north — with a runway about half the size of the intended destination.
Southwest Airlines Flight 4013, carrying 124 passengers and five crew, was scheduled to go from Chicago’s Midway International Airport to Branson Airport, airline spokesman Brad Hawkins said.
But the Boeing 737-700 landed about 11km northeast at Taney County Airport — also known as M Graham Clark Downtown Airport.
Hawkins did not have information on why the plane went to the wrong airport.
Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Tony Molinaro says the agency is investigating the incident.
“The landing was uneventful, and all customers and crew are safe,” he said.
An Olympic judo silver medallist has been held in military detention for eight days for using his mobile phone during compulsory training.
All able-bodied South Korean men must serve about two years in the military and they are not allowed to use phones during their service.
Wang Ki-chun, who won a silver at the men’s 73kg class at the 2008 Beijing Games, was sent to a jail south of Seoul from the four-week training course.
A 76-year-old woman revealed she paid out over £200,000 (€240,000) after she became addicted to scam mail — for 56 years.
Sylvia Kneller, of Farnham, Surrey, first started responding to the fraudsters when she was 20 and says she became “a believer”, convinced she would one day win a fortune.
But now the pensioner, whose first husband left her over her refusal to stop responding to the letters, has spoken of the impact on her life in a bid to warn others.
Police are investigating after a $2,000 (€1,440) cash stash was found by a child at a bush dump site behind a police check point.
Officers are suspected of hiding the money, believed to be bribes from motorists.
Villagers say the 10-year-old girl, who found the money while foraging, believed it was a gift from the ancestral spirits and her family consulted a spiritual healer. Word spread, alerting the police where the money was. Officers seized back the bag in a raid on the family’s homestead.
Once considered the preserve of poachers and rustic country folk, ferrets have become the target of a sinister new trend sweeping the south of England.
The humble pet is suddenly on the hit-list of organised gangs that snatch the mischievous animals from their hutches in the dead of night.
The thefts have baffled ferret owners because the furry creatures cost very little and a litter of young can be bought at a country market for loose change.
However, the series of robberies has sent the ferret- keeping community into near-panic as they convert their normally open back-yards into fortresses, bristling with CCTV, motion sensors, and guard dogs.
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