Twenty Chinese men, including several on the country's richest list, paid US$8,000 a head to attend a matchmaking party with 30 "single young beauties", state media said yesterday.
The controversial party was held at a luxury European-style villa in Shanghai, the birthplace of China's Communist Party. Guests arrived in stretch limousines and disguised their identities by wearing a face mask, some even using a paper bag.
The women, chosen for their "looks, kindness, thought and taste", were selected from thousands of candidates. The social network website which organised the event has drawn criticism for treating women as objects but Tan Chao, the site's marketing director, said, "For those who pay most, we will try different means, not within our own club, until we find them the right one."
Cyber granny
Maria Amelia Lopez, a Spanish great grandmother of 95, has become a cyber celebrity after her grandson gave her a blog.
With 60,000 regular readers, Ms Lopez's homely mix of memory and chat on her blog has put her back in touch with the younger generation.
"No one pays any attention to old women any more. But I was surprised by the internet, because young people who were 18 years of age, or 14 or 15, tell me about their lives and what they think and ask my advice."
On her blog she makes references to her youthful good looks, "Ah, how pretty I was, and how little I realised it. I had a very happy youth. Young men were different back then. They brought us flowers, gardenias, violets, chocolates. Not like the foul-mouthed bunch today."
Goat thief ordered to say sorry
An Australian woman who stole a goat and was involved in slaughtering it in a mock Satanic ritual, was ordered by a court yesterday to apologise to the church and the dead goat's owners.
Tracey Arnold, 26, was drinking with friends at a Friday the 13th party last year when she decided to steal the pet goat from the garden of a house in Brisbane. The partygoers then broke into a local church, dragging the goat and killed it in a mock Satanic ritual.
Ms Arnold's lawyer said that when his client drank alcohol she made poor decisions but the magistrate ordered her to apologise to the goat's owners and the Community Church and undergo psychiatric treatment. She was also ordered to pay compensation to the goat's owners and for damage caused to the church.
Trabant is German cult object
When Martin Teucher drives his car, it's the thumping bass in his Trabant's backseat that keeps him awake.
The 24-year-old from Bruchmuehle has tuned his 1980 "Trabi", the smelly two-cylinder symbol of communist East Germany, into the hip-hop generation as fifty years after the first Trabant rolled off an assembly line, the boxy vehicle has become the focus of a cheap-chic hot rod culture.
The Trabant was designed as the communist answer to the Volkswagen Beetle but it was built on the cheap until production halted in 1991. The car clattered at a top speed of 100 kph, trailing a distinctive odour of mixed petrol and oil. Consumers didn't get to choose their colour, and if you crashed your Trabi you might wind up with replacement parts that didn't match.
Super-dry Tibetan autumn
Moisture has become a luxury in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa where many locals are waking up to nosebleeds in the dry autumn as the Himalayan region faces a growing threat of global warming.
As it stands, there is little water component in the air in the Sunlight City which sits at 3,700 metres above sea level, making the weather extremely dry and things flammable, according to the Lhasa Observatory which has reported record low humidity in Lhasa since October.
Tibet, is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world and scientists have warned that the warming Qinghai-Tibet plateau will melt glaciers, dry up major Chinese rivers and trigger drought, sandstorms and desertification.