From Sweden’s new dancing queen to Turkey’s boy racer transport minister. Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.
Move those (replaced) hips
An 81-year-old DJ is filling dance floors across Sweden with groovers who would rather dance to a reasonable hour in the early evening than into the night.
Madelein Mansson, aka DJ Gloria, “was listless and sad” after her husband died.
Then one summer night drinking wine with friends “I heard myself say, ‘I think I’m going to be a DJ,’” she told AFP.
But she discovered there wasn’t a single club that opened before 11 pm.
“Scandalous! I want to be home and in bed by 11,” she said.
“So I asked a friend, ‘Do you want to start a 50+ disco with me?’”
Now she plays Sweden’s hottest clubs with special early evening gigs for crowds of over 50s – ID cards required – that are a big hit with women who just want to get down and boogie.
Written in blood
You also have to take you hat off to the Chinese cleaner who came up with an ingenious – if painful – way of raising the alarm after she was trapped in a hotel room for 30 hours.
With no phone, no food and water, no toilet and no one to hear her cries when the door lock malfunctioned, the woman bit her finger until it bled and wrote an SOS message in her blood on a pillowcase, which she then dropped from a sixth floor window.
Authorities in Sichuan’s Leshan city said she took the drastic action “out of desperation… after many failed attempts to save herself”.
Luckily her message was spotted by a food delivery driver, Zhang Kun, who called the police after working out that her message, “110 625”, meant she was in Room 625 – 110 being the emergency police number in China.
Family rules
The son of Equatorial Guinea president President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has been found guilty of selling a plane belonging to the national airline and pocketing the cash.
Ruslan Obiang Nsue must pay the airline $255 000 for the missing aircraft – which costs around $14 million new – as well as a fine and damages, or be jailed for six years.
His half-brother, the country’s vice-president Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, put him under house arrest in 2023.
Obiang Mangue himself was fined $35 million and given a suspended jail sentence by a French court in 2021 for embezzling public funds.
Pedal to the metal
And finally, Turkey’s transport minister has been slapped with a speeding fine after posting a video of himself racing down a new motorway with the hashtag #TurkeyAccelerates.
Abdulkadir Uraloglu could be seen hitting speeds of 225km/h – 100km/h over the limit – as he blasted out folk music and speeches by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his car stereo.
“I took to the wheel to check the Ankara-Nigde highway and unintentionally exceeded the speed limit for a short period,” he later wrote.
“With the video I effectively denounced myself… I will be much more careful from now on.”
What’s the craziest news you heard this week?
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By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse
