A MAN HAS put his 25-year-old wife for sale on a website specialising in used cars. Alex Cretu (20), from Bucharest, Romania, hoped to get around €5 million but has lowered his price to €3,800 for a quick sale.
His ad on www.okazii.ro reads: "Wife for sale. Model 1983, good condition. Full option, nice suspensions, spacious boot, second owner. Price is negotiable, comes with three-year-old and five-year-old accessories. Seriousness demanded."
Cretu said he placed his ad on the site partly because he had got fed up with his wife nagging him all the time, and partly as a joke. He said he waited until his wife left for a job in Spain so as she wouldn't know about the sale.
He received a number of offers but none were acceptable so far, as the potential purchasers either offered too low a price or wanted to buy her in instalments.
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A restaurant in southwest England is doing its bit to protect red squirrels - by putting grey squirrels on the menu. Ed Chester, chef of Otterton Mill in Devon, said squirrel meat is delicious. As a result, his menu now sports grey squirrel kebab, paté and fricassee. "Squirrel is great meat. It is genuinely good and this is not a gimmick," said Chester. "Some people will turn their noses up but . . . I am never going to put anything horrible on the menu."
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A man caused a two-hour train delay when he got his arm stuck down a toilet while trying to retrieve his mobile phone.
The 26-year-old passenger's arm became trapped up to the shoulder by the powerful suction flushing system on board France's high-speed TGV train from Paris to La Rochelle.
Firefighters took more than an hour to free him. "He was cut free from the toilet on the platform and apart from suffering bruising and smelling a bit, he suffered no other injuries," said a spokesman.
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A minibus driver in Poland steered straight into a lake - because his satellite navigation system told him to.
Stunned police got a frantic call from the bus driver inside his Mercedes van, screaming that he and his two passengers were drowning.
"A man phoned in panic. He managed to say that he had driven into a lake and he was sinking fast," said police spokesman Marcin Guzenda in Glubczyce, southwest Poland.
Police, fire and ambulance services rushed to the lake and found the driver and his passengers perched on the top of the mini-bus's roof. The trio were taken to hospital and treated for shock.
"There used to be a road there until last year [when] the local water company flooded the valley to build a new reservoir lake," said a police source. "It seems that the GPS [sat nav] hadn't been updated and was still showing a usable road running through where the lake now is. It's a huge lake and it's hard to imagine how you could ignore or not see it but the driver had such faith in his sat-nav that he didn't even notice all the signs saying the road had been closed."
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And so, as America prepares to vote and maybe - hopefully - make a momentous, uplifting decision on Tuesday next, Magpie must bid a fond farewell to Meghan.
To who?
To Meghan. Meghan McCain, daughter of the candidate who says he's not George Bush. Meghan has been entertaining cyber time-wasters with her online campaign diary, www.mccainblogette.com.
She has been following Dad McCain on the campaign trail since early in the year with loads and loads of photos and occasional, out-of-left-field observations. She is almost invariably shod in Uggs (though she scrubs up well in the evenings) and is very supportive, in a nice daughterly way, with some great sideways takes on her father.
But the really refreshing thing about mccainblogette is that the blogetter seems to be free to say whatever she wants. And so, for instance, McCain has described herself as an independent who is "liberal on social issues", and has said that she voted for John Kerry during the 2004 presidential election. (Wonder what Sarah P has to say about that!)
She says that if her father wins New Hampshire, she will have the state motto (Live Free or Die) tattooed on her body (no, she didn't indicate which bit). She has also described Barack Obama as "cute". In an interview with CNN's Larry King on September 15th, Meghan said she has been too busy to have a romantic relationship while on the campaign trail.
Form an orderly queue please . . .