Oddly News Around The World

Unveiling the blinking dress

Reporting by Catherine Bosley

LONDON, ENGLAND - Former Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova presented a prototype dress to reporters that is designed to light up when the wearer's mobile telephone rings.

British fashion student Georgie Davis dreamed up the knee-length sleeveless white dress as part of a school project with mobile phone-maker Sony Ericsson to figure out ways of incorporating new technology into fashion.

Davis said the dress is designed to eventually be connected to the wearer's phone by Bluetooth wireless technology, so she can be alerted to a call even in noisiest of places.

The right shoulder of the dress is embellished with translucent white scales that move and light up.

Sharapova showed off the dress to a gaggle of photographers and a crowd of passers-by from the window a luxury department store in central London.

Cocaine haul found hidden in frozen sharks

Reporting by Robin Emmott

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO - Mexico's navy has seized more than a tonne of cocaine stuffed inside frozen sharks, as drug gangs under military pressure go to greater lengths to conceal narcotics bound for the United States.

Armed and masked navy officers cut open more than 20 shark carcasses filled with slabs of cocaine after checking a container ship in a container port in the southern Mexico state of Yucatan, the navy and Mexican media said Tuesday.

"We are talking about more than a tonne of cocaine that was inside the ship," Navy Commander Eduardo Villa told reporters after X-ray machines and sniffer dogs helped uncover the drugs. "Those in charge of the shipment said it was a conserving agent but after checks we confirmed it was cocaine," he said.

Drug gangs are coming up with increasingly creative ways of getting drugs into the United States -- in sealed beer cans, religious statues and furniture -- as Mexico's military cracks down on the cartels moving South American narcotics north.

President Felipe Calderon has sent 45,000 troops and federal police across Mexico to try to crush powerful smuggling cartels. But traffickers armed with a huge arsenal of grenades and automatic weapons are far from defeated, worrying Washington as violence spills over into U.S. states like Arizona.

Some 2,750 people have died in drug violence in Mexico this year, a pace similar to that of 2008, when 6,300 were killed.

Led by Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, smugglers from the Pacific state of Sinaloa are fighting a turf war with rivals. Guzman seeks to control Mexican and Central American smuggling routes into the United States.

US man dressed as dead mother to collect benefits

NEW YORK - A New York man has been charged with fraud after dressing up as his dead mother so he could collect more than 100,000 dollars in welfare benefits, prosecutors said.

Thomas Parkin, 49, and accomplice Mhilton Rimolo, 47, face a 47-count indictment for collecting social security benefits amounting to 52,000 dollars and 65,000 dollars in rental assistance, according to Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes.

Prosecutors said the pair doctored Parkin's deceased mother's death certificate and provided a false Social Security number.

Parkin dressed in drag to impersonate 77-year-old Irene Prusik and visit the local Department of Motor Vehicles office to renew her driver's license.

As part of a separate probe into irregularities in the Brooklyn property in Prusik's name, Parkin and Rimolo arranged a meeting between investigators and the older woman.

When prosecutors and detectives arrived, they found Parkin wearing a red cardigan, lipstick and manicured nails.

Cats and dogs meet up online in Colombia

Not satisfied with social networking sites for humans, a Colombian engineer has launched mypetbum.com, which aspires to become a Facebook for cats and dogs.

My Petbum users can search the site for other pets, get advice from veterinarians or schedule muzzle-to-muzzle or paw-to-paw outings.

"It's an advanced form of interaction: people who participate in the forum do so because they are telling a story," site founder Paul Becerra, an industrial engineer and journalist, told El Espectador newspaper.

Becerra said the idea for a site came after a friend owning a boxer dog whose type is rare in Colombia was desperate to find a partner for the pet.

After the first 500 users signed up in Colombia, Becerra obtained a new server to boost access, with hopes to make the site a regional model.

Source:

Wait! Read More Odd News...