Quirky World: Rudolph red-faced as bad Santa steals helicopter
Brazilian police are hunting for a Sao Paulo Santa Claus who kicked off the Christmas shopping season by stealing a helicopter.
The thief rented the aircraft from an air taxi service at the Campo Marte airport in Sao Paulo for a Black Friday “surprise”, the Sao Paulo state security secretariat said.
During the flight, the Santa forced the pilot to fly to a small farm outside of Sao Paulo city, where they were met by a third person, the secretariat said.
The pilot was tied up and the two perpetrators flew away. After several hours, the pilot managed to escape and alert police. There has been no sign of the helicopter, a Robinson model 44, authorities said.
A scientist has uncovered the fossil of a dog-sized horned dinosaur that roamed eastern North America up to 100m years ago.
The fragment of jaw bone provides evidence of an east-west divide in the evolution of dinosaurs on the North American continent. During the Late Cretaceous period, 66m to 100m years ago, the land mass was split into two continents separated by a shallow sea. One of these rare fossils was studied by Nick Longrich, from the Milner Centre for Evolution based at the University of Bath’s Department of Biology and Biochemistry.
His study is published in the journal Cretaceous Research, which highlights it as the first fossil from a ceratopsian dinosaur identified from this period of eastern North America.
The Flying Scotsman has topped a poll of the world’s best known trains and locomotives.
People across four continents were asked to name five trains or engines they had heard of, and the famous green-and-black loco topped a league table that also included the Japanese bullet train, the fastest-ever steam locomotive, Mallard — and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express.
The National Railway Museum commissioned the worldwide survey, by YouGov, and released the result to coincide with the 81st anniversary of the Flying Scotsman being the first locomotive to break the 100mph barrier.
A highly unusual online exchange took place on Twitter between the prime ministers of Greece and Turkey before the former deleted his tweets — but only from the English version of his account.
The official English-speaking account of Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras posted four tweets addressed to his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu, needling him about Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet and Turkey’s violations of Greek airspace.
“To Prime Minister Davutoglu: Fortunately our pilots are not mercurial as yours against the Russians #EuTurkey”, Tsipras tweeted. Both prime ministers attended an EU-Turkey summit on refugees in Brussels. Mr Tsipras did not explain whether his tweets reproduced a conversation between the two or were written for Twitter.
The funeral of Leonid Gurevich Kulikovsky, the reclusive great-grandson of Russian Tsar Alexander III, has taken place in Darwin after he lived his final years in obscurity and alone with his dog in an Outback trailer park where he was known by locals as Old Nick.
Kulikovsky — a 72-year-old direct descendent of the penultimate Russian tsar and a distant relative of the Queen of England — died of a suspected heart attack on September 27 while walking his dog at his home in the northern territory town of Katherine, said Darwin’s honorary Russian consul Simon Andropov.
His body had remained in a hospital morgue since then while authorities searched for his family. They found a sister in Kulikovsky’s birthplace of Denmark. She then informed the Russian Orthodox Church in Australia that a member of the royal Romanov family exiled after the 1917 revolution was dead on Australia’s northern frontier, Mr Andropov said.
A man in the US has an unusual idea for generating economic activity off of Albany’s long history of ethically challenged lawmakers. He wants to open a museum of political corruption.
Bruce Roter envisions a museum that would not only detail Albany’s many political scandals but also offer some possible solutions to corruption.
Mr Roter is a music professor at Albany’s College of Saint Rose. He has been working on the project for two years. He is currently raising money and hopes to open the museum in about four years.
A bust of Abraham Lincoln that was stolen from outside a museum near where he delivered the Gettysburg Address has been found.
Hall of Presidents and First Ladies Museum manager Rose Little says the bust was found in a nearby cemetery’s bushes by some out-of-state visitors.
She told the that it appears to be in good shape, with just a bit of mud caked on it.
