FOOLED: New York University (NYU) officials weren’t laughing when hundreds of people mistakenly received word that they’d been accepted to graduate school on April Fools’ Day.
NYU says it sent out acceptance e-mails on April 1 to 489 applicants to the Robert F Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Those applicants should have received rejection letters instead.
The school sent out a second e-mail about an hour later to the applicants, saying they hadn’t been accepted after all. —— Msnbc.
NUTTY NITPICKER: A German woman has divorced her husband because she was fed up with him cleaning all the time.German media reported the wife got through 15 years of marriage putting up with the man’s penchant for doing household chores, tidying up and rearranging the furniture.But she ran out of patience when he knocked down and rebuilt a wall at their home when it got dirty, Christian Kropp, court judge in the central town of Sondershausen, said on Thursday.“I’d never had anyone seek a divorce for this,” he said. —— Reuters.TOOTHPASTE BULGE: Police in northern Germany are searching for a man who tried to walk out of a supermarket with 68 tubes of toothpaste stuffed into his clothing.“We don’t know if he had bad teeth,” a police spokeswoman in Rostock said Friday.Noticing his bulging jacket, a store worker grabbed the man when he refused to stop and the tubes of toothpaste spilled all over the floor, police said.The thief struck the woman in the face and ran out. —— Reuters.
HIGH-TECH CHEATS: Eight Chinese parents who used high-tech communications equipment, including mobile phones and wireless earpieces, to help their children cheat at university entrance exams have been jailed on state secret charges, local media said.The eight, from the wealthy eastern province of Zhejiang, got together in 2007 to plot how to help their children as “they knew their achievements were not ideal”, the official Legal Daily said.One of the parents hired university students to provide answers which were sent to the children via wireless earphones while they were in the exam room, the report said.But their ruse was discovered after police detected “abnormal radio signals” near the school, the newspaper said .—— Reuters.
RUNAWAY PLANE: An aircraft took off on its own when the pilot could not get into the cockpit in time after starting the propeller manually.Hundreds of visitors to an air show at Goodwood airfield watched in horror as the runaway biplane took off, soared into the air and then crashed into trees, reports the Daily Telegraph. —— Ananova.
SPEAR BOOMERANGS:Â Surgeons successfully removed a 15-centimetre fishing spear from the brain of a man who was struck while diving off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, doctors said on Sunday.Emerson de Oliveira Abreu apparently fired the spear, which ricocheted off rocks and penetrated his own head so deeply that only the tip was showing, family members and authorities said. Local media initially reported that Abreu was accidentally shot by a friend.Doctor Manoel Moreira told Globo TV that the it took five hours of high-risk surgery to remove the projectile from Abreu, who is doing well and is not likely to suffer major, lasting damage.The spear entered just above Abreu’s left eye and missed the most critical areas of his brain, Moreira said. –Â Msnbc.
