Oddly news around the world

From rag to riches

MOSCOW, Rusia – A 63-year-old homeless Russian man has gone from street life to stock market trader after collecting thousands of empty booze bottles for cash, a popular Russian tabloid reported on Tuesday.

Pictured in a majestic purple suit and matching violet jewelry, Leonid Konovalov told the Tvoi Den paper he collected around 2,000 bottles a day over the past year since the economic downturn hit Russia last autumn.

Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman

Incentive to keep marriage: Free honeymoon!

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Malaysia's eastern state of Terengganu is offering free honeymoons worth up to $440 each to rekindle the romance between married couples on the brink of divorce.

The honeymoon package comes with some counseling and is an attempt to slow soaring divorce rates in the state, according to The Star newspaper reported on Monday.

Reporting by Royce Cheah

Kebab sauce under investigation!

BERLIN, Germany - German police are investigating a chilli sauce to determine whether it was so spicy that it was capable of causing grievous bodily harm when used in an attack.

Police took a sample of the sauce from a kebab stand in Bremen's central train station after a kebab salesman threw it into the eyes of a customer during a fight over napkins.

Reporting by Dave Graham

What a plaster can do!

LONDON, England - A school in eastern England was ordered to pay 19,000 pounds ($30,140) Monday after a 16-year-old girl lost nearly all her fingers when she put her hands in a bucket of plaster of Paris during an art lesson.

The teen-ager was attempting to make a sculpture of her own hands during a lesson in January 2007 when the accident happened, Boston Magistrates' Court in Lincolnshire heard.

The plaster set around her hands and neither staff nor paramedics could get it off during the lesson at Giles School, in Boston.

The court was told that temperatures up to 60C can be generated in large quantities of plaster and the girl, who was not named in court, suffered terrible burns.

After a series of 12 operations, she was left with no fingers on one hand and just two on the other.

The school's governing body admitted breaching health and safety regulations and also failing to report the incident to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

Reporting by Michael Holden

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