This week the annual charity event known as the Sumo Run took place in London’s Battersea Park. To raise money for education in sub-Saharan Africa, participants don inflatable sumo suits and run the 5km course around the park, no doubt delighting passersby in the country that gave us Monty Python.
But when media outlets in Japan reported on the event, the audience here was not universally pleased, with some people calling it racist cultural appropriation.
That old Internet meme about stupid business plans that goes something like, “1) _____, 2) ???, 3) Profit!” can now apparently be applied to dumb revenge schemes, as a Vietnamese man, who, after becoming so incredibly furious at his wife that he simply had to do something to get revenge, put together this brilliant scheme: 1) cut off own penis, 2) ???, 3) SATISFACTION!!!!
Comic-Con International will finally be opening its doors on July 24 for four days of comic and entertainment madness. Thousands of people are already getting ready to flock to the San Diego convention site, with this year’s event set to attract more visitors than ever.
And this time, RocketNews24 is lucky enough to be in attendance! We can’t wait to get in there and bring you news, photos and video of all the coolest stuff on show as it happens! We know there’s nothing worse than news sites reporting on everything but the stuff you personally wanted to see, though, so if there’s something that you really, really want us to check out on your behalf at Comic-Con this year, leave us a note in the comments below.
You can also find us on Facebook or Twitter. We’ll be tweeting and Facebooking like crazy right the way through Comic-Con, so if you haven’t already be sure to follow us!
Kevin Whitney of Chickasha, Oklahoma, was working on his farm last October when his iPhone fell out of his shirt pocket and up a grain elevator, where it was deposited into a pit containing 280,000 pounds of grain.
“I never expected to see that phone again,” he told KFOR-TV. It was a reasonable conclusion.
A Tokyo office worker says former champion boxer Christian Eugenio-Gomez threatened him, saying “pay up or cut off your finger.” More details after the break!
On May 28 at a McDonald’s restaurant in China, six members of an alleged religious cult attacked and beat to death a 37-year-old woman after she refused to give them her phone number. The incident was caught on security cameras and filmed by fellow diners as they fled, but no one attempted to intervene.
A full-sized replica of the Great Sphinx of Giza has appeared in a Chinese village near Shijiazhuang in China’s Hebei Province. The sphinx is open for tourist visits, angering officials in Egypt who say the appearance of the Chinese sphinx is detrimental to their tourism industry.
Scientists at Southwest Jiaotong University in China have built a prototype testing platform for a near-vacuum high-speed maglev train that is theoretically capable of reaching speeds up to 2900 km/h or about 1,800 mph. Currently, the fastest commercially operated maglev reaches just 431 km/h and even the world record is just 581 km/hr.
Meet David Campbell and Ditlef Alexander Aasom Diseth, Asia’s latest internet sensation. A video showing one of them apparently stealing a girl from a Chinese guy in Hong Kong went viral.
A man surnamed Chen from Taiwan’s tech center of Hsinchu has allegedly had been spending the wee hours of the morning sneaking into a local morgue so he could ‘choke his chicken’ in front of a pretty picture of a deceased girl.
We never knew that an “adult movie moan” could ever lead to a finger-biting supermarket brawl, but that’s apparently exactly what happened in northeastern Taiwan.
A taxi driver in Osaka has been taken into police custody after it was discovered that he had given snacks laced with a powerful diuretic to as many as 50 of his female passengers and refused to let them exit the vehicle so that he could watch them squirm, and in some cases urinate, in the back of his cab.
In an empty field in Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi Prefecture, where many homes stood before a tsunami swept them away, there are hundreds of blue carp streamers floating in the breeze. Kento Itoh, 21 years old, has collected them from all over the country in honor of his brother Ritsu, killed in the March 11 disaster when he was just five years old.
On that day, Kento was in Sendai, his middle brother was at school and his father was in the hospital, so none of them were at home when the tsunami struck their small town. Ritsu, his mother and his grandparents were carried off by the surging waters. Only Ritsu’s body was ever found. The rest are still officially missing.
With his father ill, it fell to Kento as the oldest son to identify his brother’s corpse at the morgue and to search among the ruins for his missing family. He did not find them, but among the mud and muck, he did find something: Ritsu’s beloved blue carp streamer.
Japan is well-known for its low crime-rate. Only a select few are permitted to own firearms, theft is rare, and the country’s violent crime statistics are among the lowest in the world.
But while you’ll almost never hear of a drive-by shooting in Japan, it turns out that members of the public in one Osaka town have been living in fear recently after a band of rambunctious scallywags took to cruising the streets at night and pelting pedestrians with eggs from the window of a moving car, at one time even stocking up on as many as 50 eggs with which to launch their reign of tamago terror.
While some of us get to spend our days taking selfies, slurping on Starbucks and shopping at designer stores, others are not quite so lucky.
In a crushing reminder of the disparities and injustice that exist in our world, a woman shopping at luxury New York department store Saks Fifth Avenue has discovered a noteat the bottom of her bag written by a man imprisoned in a forced labour camp in China, pleading for help contacting his family and the United Nations.