Thieves have stolen a Maybach luxury limousine worth €530,000 while the car's owner had dinner in a Moscow restaurant, Russian media reported yesterday.
The thieves bundled the owner's chauffeur into the back seat and threatened to kill him. The driver was later abandoned outside Moscow's ring road. Police said they suspected the car was stolen to order by a special gang for sale in Kazakhstan or Ukraine.
The Maybach has been adopted as the ultimate status symbol by Russia's super-rich. There are only a few dozen in Russia and this was the first case of one being stolen.
Museum makes rare find
A Canadian museum that went hunting for a dinosaur skeleton, discovered it already had the massive creature buried in its own collection.
The 24-metre long Barosaurus had been obtained by Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum in 1962 and forgotten over the years, the museum said. An employee searching for a dinosaur skeleton in the US read an old article that said the museum already had exactly what he was looking for. As the museum did not have the space to display the assembled creature when the skeleton was obtained, the bones were divided among collections, but without a note saying they belonged to a single animal.
German told to learn German
A 70-year old German seeking Swiss citizenship was told to go back to school to learn his own native tongue despite being proficient in German. The Swiss town of Dielsdorf ordered Ulrich Kring - who lived in Switzerland his entire life but is only now applying for citizenship - to take a German language course to the tune of 250 Swiss francs ($222.6).
The class was obligatory for all foreigners seeking a Swiss passport and the town would not make an exception for the German national..
Roughly two-thirds of Switzerland's 7.5 million inhabitants are German speakers. Many German nationals find the Swiss spoken dialect hard to understand, although the official written language taught in schools is the same as in Germany.
Robot guitar tunes itself
The world's first robot guitar is finally at hand - the electric guitar not only keeps itself in tune even after string changes but also allows players to access six non standard tunings at the push of a button.
After 15 years of research, Gibson Guitar is launching a limited edition Les Paul Robot Guitar next month that has set players abuzz with both enthusiasm and skepticism.
"It will not make you a better guitar player but it will allow the average player to access some very sophisticated tunings," Gibson Guitar Chief Executive Henry Juszkiewicz said yesterday. Gibson says the robot guitar is aimed at amateurs who have a hard time keeping their guitars in tune, as well as professionals who now use technicians during concerts to keep about 100 guitars tuned to different keys.
Gibson said the robot guitar is the biggest advance in electric guitar design in more than 70 years.
Virtual thief
Dutch police have made their first arrest of an online thief - a 17-year-old accused of stealing virtual furniture from rooms in the Habbo Hotel - a popular teenager networking website.
An Amsterdam police spokesman confirmed a report that the teenager was accused of stealing €4,000 worth of virtual furniture by hacking into the accounts of other users. Four other 15-year-olds have also been questioned in the case, which was instigated by the website. They are suspected of moving the stolen furniture into their own online hotel rooms.
Habbo users can create their own characters, decorate their own rooms and play a number of games, paying with Habbo Credits, which they have to buy with real cash.
Invitation to 'Spiderman'
China has invited French "Spiderman" Alain Robert back to scale a mountain, despite banning him from the country for five years after he climbed a Shanghai skyscraper without permission.
The 45-year-old free-climber, renowned for climbing the world's tallest buildings, was jailed briefly and then deported after making a bare-handed ascent of the 88-storey Jin Mao Tower wearing a Spiderman suit in May. Mr Robert had been invited by a local government, who at first did not know he had been banned, to climb the 1,518-metre Tianmen mountain in Zhangjiajie, a scenic region in the southern province of Hunan.
The local government hoped the climb, to be made without any mountaineering gear and broadcast across China, would boost the profile of the region and bring in tourists.