Weird

Smugglers, trying to make a profit from the tax differences between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, have been caught after their pulley and zip-line was discovered by customs officers.

The creative smugglers attached one end of a strong fishing line to the 21st storey of a Shenzhen high-rise and shot the other end across the Sha Tau Kok river to a small rural house in Hong Kong with a crossbow!.

iPhone 4’s and iPad 2’s were then hoisted along the line in black nylon bags via a make shift pulley in the early hours of the morning — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The mayor of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, has released a video of himself crushing a car with an armoured vehicle to try to stop drivers parking illegally in cycle lanes.

Arturas Zuokas, 43, is grinning as he demolishes the Mercedes S-Class in the video footage. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that if you have a car and lots of money, it still doesn’t mean that you can park your car wherever you want, Mr Zuokas said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A New Zealand man has been decapitated by a propeller while demonstrating a home-made hovercraft to his family, local media reports say.

Dr Alastair Kenneth Senior, 40, died instantly when his hovercraft suffered a mechanical failure, causing a blade to shear off and hit him in the head.

The accident happened at Muriwai Beach, west of Auckland– via redwolf.newsvine.com

We thought we had a winner for most gutsy bar exam performance of July 2011. On Thursday, a woman taking the New Jersey bar exam passed out during the test — then picked herself up off the floor, and went right back to typing.

That’s impressive — but we may have spoken too soon. Here’s a labour-intensive story that tops it.

A friend of mine went into labour while taking the Illinois bar exam, a tipster told us. She calmly finished, went to the hospital, and had her baby an hour or two later. Girl’s a real trooper — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Soon after Seemona Sumasar started dating Jerry Ramrattan, she had an inkling that something might be wrong.

He said he was a police detective, but never seemed to go to work. He seemed obsessed with CSI, Law & Order and other television police dramas.

About a year after he moved into her house in Queens, New York, their relationship soured. One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Ramrattan was arrested.

But he soon took his revenge, US authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A Darwin-based RAAF airman suffered serious burns when the portable toilet he was inside exploded at Rockhampton Airport in central Queensland — via redwolf.newsvine.com

An eccentric, or perhaps just egocentric, Shiek in Abu Dhabi has carved his name into the desert of an United Arab Emirates island he owns in giant 1000 meter letters. And it just happens to be visible from space — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Naming your new bundle of joy Lucifer has been effectively banned by New Zealand’s names registrar after three parents had the odd request knocked back.

The country’s Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages has been cracking down on mums and dads getting too creative with their children’s names, ruling out punctuation marks such as . (Full Stop), * (Asterisk) and / (presumably Slash).

The list of 102 names rejected in the past two years includes Baron, Bishop, Duke, General, Judge, Justice, King, Knight and Mr, all deemed too similar to titles.

Messiah was also turned down, as was 89, and the single letters, C, D, I and T, although q and J were accepted after being queried — via redwolf.newsvine.com

An Ohio man accused of killing 11 women and storing their decomposing bodies for two years told police he suffered blackouts and heard voices in his head.

Anthony Sowell, 51, has been little heard from during three weeks of gruesome testimony including the jury’s tour of the house of horrors in Cleveland, Ohio, where he allegedly raped, killed and buried his victims — via redwolf.newsvine.com

An eight-year-old boy who got lost while walking home alone was killed and dismembered by a stranger he had asked for directions. His remains were found stuffed in a rubbish bin and the man’s refrigerator, police said on Wednesday.

The gruesome killing of Leiby Kletzky has shocked the Jewish community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in part because it is one of the safest sections of New York and because the man under arrest is an Orthodox Jew — via redwolf.newsvine.com