QUIRKY WORLD ... A daily look at some of the world’s stranger stories
A German furniture store chain has apologised for selling coffee mugs featuring faint portraits of Adolf Hitler it had mistakenly ordered from a Chinese supplier, a news report said.
The vintage-style ceramic cups feature a faint image of a Nazi-era postage stamp that shows a black and white profile of Hitler, postmarked with a swastika stamp, all obscured by other design elements including a rose and cursive script.
The Zurbrueggen furniture chain had ordered a batch of 5,000 of the mugs and had already sold at least 175 when the mistake was noticed, reported the Neue Westfaelische Zeitung daily from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The owner blamed the “terrible” mistake on “a stupid chain of unfortunate circumstances” involving a Chinese designer who had mistakenly chosen the image of the Nazi leader, the news report said.
“No one noticed the problem during unpacking,” the store owner told the newspaper, adding that every customer who had bought a mug would be compensated with a €20 gift voucher.
A woman who fell over a wall at a Roman site after looking for somewhere to “wee” after an evening’s drinking has lost her £1m (€1.2m) damages action.
Lisa Driver, 47, suffered a skull fracture which left her with epilepsy after landing at the bottom of the moat at the Roman Painted House in Dover, Kent, in the early hours of July 15 2007. The mother-of-two has no recollection of the accident but her friend, Elaine Bristow, said that they were not drunk although Mrs Driver had consumed five vodka and Cokes — two at home and the rest in three different pubs.
But, Judge John Leighton Williams at London’s High Court said he was not satisfied she had an accurate memory of the detail of what happened or that he had heard a true account of how much each woman had drunk.
A band of rioters is set to descend on the English parliament in scenes not witnessed in Westminster for a century.
But MPs need not take cover; the 250-strong mob are extras in a major film being shot on the estate.
They are appearing in Suffragette, which tracks the struggle for women to get the vote and stars Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as Irish actor Brendan Gleeson.
A woman has been shown on TV being robbed — while being interviewed about crime near Rio de Janeiro’s main railway station.
Brazilian TV showed the woman complaining about the lack of police presence near the station when the mugger approaches her from behind and rips off what appears to be a gold necklace.
The TV Globo clip shows the thief fleeing down a busy street and the reporter chasing him for a few seconds.
The thief, however, was left empty -handed. He dropped the necklace, which was returned to the woman.
A man who sucked an unwilling woman’s toes in a department store has been sentenced to 60 days in jail.
Michael Brown told the woman he was a podiatry student and asked her to try on shoes for him in the shoe department of the Wal-Mart in Lincolnton, North Carolina, police said.
Investigators said Brown eventually stuck the woman’s foot in his mouth and sucked on her toes, then offered to pay for her groceries after she appeared outraged.
Brown, 31, apologised for his actions during his court appearance as he was convicted of assault, and a judge agreed to deduct the three weeks he had already spent behind bars.
The government is facing an unusual crisis: Prison under- crowding. There are now more guards and other staff than prisoners in the Netherlands for the first time, according to data released by the Justice Ministry. In 2008, there were more than 15,000 inmates, but by March this year there were 9,710, compared with 9,914 staff.
Crime rates have fallen slightly in recent years but are not notably lower in the Netherlands than in neighbouring countries, and many Dutch people think sentences for violent offenders are too light. Justice Ministry spokesman Jochgem van Opstal said: “We’re studying what the reason for the decline is.”
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