The Lighter Side
To the lighter side we go once more and we start in South Africa, where an car owner has found an unusual hitchhiker.
The woman from Johannesburg was driven to desperation when she found a family of Cape Hyrax, small animals that resemble guinea pigs, living in the engine of her BMW. She attempted to shake off the animals by driving high speed to her local dealership on the other side of town but this did not work and in the end she was forced to abandoned the in the wash bay of the BMW dealership.
Staff at the dealership called Johannesburg Zoo to ask them to come and collect the Hyrax.
The guys (BMW staff) called us and said that there was movement in the engine, that there were animals (there)…When we opened the bonnet the dassies were running about the engine and chassis plate, under the engine and inside the bumpers of the car…Dassies can get quite big, the size of a cat. If you can imagine having six cats in your engine.
Dominic Moss ,collection manager at Johannesburg Zoo
With the state of the engine it looked like they had been there for a while as a lot of dung was found. The warmth of the BMW engine may have been an ideal substitute for the natural rock habitat.
Moving on to France and a cafe owner in the western city of Rennes has found a friendly way of enforcing France’s new smoking ban: by lending his customers jackets to wear while they stand outside to smoke.
Cafes, restaurants and nightclubs across France became smoke-free as of January 1 when a nationwide ban on smoking went into effect. Gilles Berard, owner of the Chat Qui Peche cafe in central Rennes, has bought 30 sleeveless fleeces emblazoned with the name of his cafe, however some customers have complained that the jackets have hoods and sleeves.
Any smokers who are caught lighting up in cafes can be fined between 68 and 450 euros, while café owners can be fined 750 euros.
And finally an Egyptian woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband’s declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid
Following a missed call, Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from her husband saying “I divorce you because you didn’t answer your husband,” the state-run newspaper Al-Akhbar said.
The text was the third of it’s kind and prompted Abul Nasr to seek clarification from a family court on the status of her marriage. If confirmed it would be the first divorce by SMS in Egypt.
It is a controversial subject in the Muslim world and according to the statistics bureau in Egypt, a couple files for divorce every six minutes.
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 and is filed under Views on News.
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