ABRACADABRA

Don’t talk Rubbish. Live without it.

Darshan Karwat, a post-doctorate at the University of Michigan, is making headlines for having maintained an incredibly frugal and sustainable lifestyle during his student years. The man gave up fast food, new clothes, and even toilet paper, until he got to a point where his trash for an entire year fit in just two plastic bags!

Karwat, who is originally from India, started the trash-free experiment when he lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and managed to keep it going for two and a half years. In the first year, he produced only 7.5 lbs of trash, and in the second year, he brought that number down to a meager 6 lbs, which is a mind-blowing 0.4 percent of the 1,500 lbs of yearly trash produced by the average American. Karwat says he doesn’t judge people who can’t follow in his footsteps. “Others don’t have the flexibility or means for this kind of activism,” he wrote.

When Norway declared Santa dead

Oslo: hildren can rest assured that Santa Claus is alive and well, after Norway's largest newspaper apologised for announcing that he had died at the age of 227. An obituary had appeared on Aftenposten's website  announcing that Santa had passed away after a very long and active life. The notice added that a funeral for Santa, born on December 12, 1788, would be held on December 28 at the "Chapel of the North Pole". It was unclear how the mischievous announcement managed to make it onto Aftenposten's site, but the newspaper has promised to "review its internal processes to establish what went wrong".

Slap yourself as punishment

Beijing: In a bizarre incident, a Chinese teacher asked students aged six or seven to slap themselves 100 times in face hard enough to make a hearable sound, forcing school authorities to expel her. According to the students' parents, the teacher was in bad mood at the time and ordered 56 pupils in the first grade of Hanyu Primary school in Linyi to slap themselves hard in face 100 times, the People's Daily reported today. Some pupils said their face, ears and mouth turned red after the slap, as the teacher told them to slap hard enough to make a hearable sound, the paper said.Fifty-six students slapped themselves 100 times as the teacher told them to, except for the leader of the class. The parents said that all the pupils are at the age of 6 or 7. They dare not to disobey the teacher. When asked why the children were punished, some said that the teacher was in a bad mood. Some said that the teacher got mad about the bad disciplines in the class. The principal of the primary school has confirmed the child abuse case and said the teacher has already been removed from the teaching post, and the local education department has reprimanded the young teacher for her behavior.

When ‘Kill you’ was just a spider

Piercing screaming and shouts of “I’m going to kill you” prompted Australian police to rush to a Sydney home at Zam, only to find an embarrassed man and a large spider. New South Wales police said officers raced to the house in Wollstonecraft after reports of a violent domestic dispute and sounds of furniture being tossed around. A man in his 30s, out of breath and flushed, came to the door and was immediately asked where his wife or girlfriend was. He said he lived alone and was only chasing a spider with a can of insect spray.

Smell of Money & Tax Collection A Russian Experiment

Moscow: In a bid to make Russian tax collectors more interested in their jobs, a local government has come up with a rather bizarre scheme – providing them with money-scented soap! The idea is that the special odor will stimulate and inspire tax collectors to love and enjoy collecting money.

The idea is the brainchild of Aman Tuleyev, governor of the Kemerovo Oblast region in Central Russia. He seems to strongly believe that by using cash-scented toiletries, the smell of money will linger around tax collectors all day, thus making them love it and increasing their tax collection rate.

The concept isn’t new though, as money-based perfume and soap have been around since at least 1998, when an Austrian artist managed to bottle the smell of cash. In 2011, a Japanese study found that having employees smell money all day long is a great way to improve their productivity.

Seeing Pornography: It has to be lunch time

Rome: Employees cannot be sacked for watching porn on the job provided they do so during their lunch break, Italy’s Supreme Court ruled, rejecting an appeal from car giant Fiat against a worker’s reinstatement. “The evidence was insufficient to prove that the employee viewed porn during his working hours,” the Court Cassation said in its ruling. The worker had argued that his porn viewing was limited to merely “catching a glimpse” of a film during his lunch break.