Each year, Nepalese youth in two villages in the south of the Himalayan country save up their choicest insults for a 10-day "cursing festival" that reached its climax yesterday.
The youngsters in Parsawa and Laxmipur hurl insults at each other, their neighbours, villagers and passers-by - and then laugh. Insults like "Monkey face, I hope your sons are as ugly as frogs," and "I hope your buffaloes die of diarrhea" ring out with more obscene curses. On the last day of the festival they set heaps of straw ablaze and celebrate the Hindu festival Holi, which is marked by raucous fights using powdered coloured paints and water.
"We don't get to curse at any other time. But during the festival we're allowed to - even in front of our parents - and we all have a jolly good time," 16-year-old Raju Raut said after cursing his best school friend.
Locals find tanks in forest
Russians were amazed to discover dozens of T-80 battle tanks seemingly abandoned in a local forest.
Nearly 100 tanks were found near the Elanovskaya railroad station outside the Urals Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Their presence was revealed after a local news website posted a video of the tanks, covered in a deep layer of snow between the railroad and the woods with no military personnel in sight.
"There are tanks all over the forest, abandoned. If you need one, come and get it," an unnamed person behind the camera says in the video, as the camera spins around to show dozens of unguarded tanks.
A spokesman for the branch of the Russian army which oversees the area said the tanks were being transported to a storage site and all the vehicles were under guard by military patrols consisting of officers and soldiers.
From Russia with love
An investigator in St Petersburg, Russia, was sentenced to prison for freeing a jailed convict with whom she had fallen in love.
The city's Kuibyshevsky district court sentenced Yana Antonova to a year and eight months in prison for abusing her position after she "for personal reasons freed a man accused of a serious crime".
Ms Antonova, a 35-year-old police investigator, fell in love with the convict, Mikhail Beryukov, as she investigated a case in which he was involved. Mr Beryukov was being investigated for fraud and also had a previous murder conviction. Ms Antonova then faked a document ordering him to be transferred from a pre-trial detention centre in St Petersburg to one in the nearby Novgorod region. She also dismissed a police convoy assigned to transfer Mr Beryukov and took him to an apartment where they spent the night, prosecutors said.
Rare bronze statue seized by police
Police in northern Greece have arrested two men after they allegedly tried to sell a rare fourth-century BC bronze statue for seven million euros, authorities said yesterday.
The two Greeks, aged 48 and 51, were arrested near Kavala after the statue of a naked youth, believed to represent the Macedonian warrior-king Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), was found in their car, police in Thessaloniki said.
A search of their homes also produced two bronze heads and coins of gold, silver and bronze, the police said in a statement.
They added that culture ministry archaeologists who examined the objects said the statue had "unique" archaeological and commercial value.
Greek law prohibits the collection of antiquities without a licence from the culture ministry.
Deadly cheese contamination
Austria's Linz-based company Prolactal said yesterday contamination of its cheese which caused eight people to die from listeriosis was due to human error during the manufacturing process.
In November 2009, preservatives supposed to prevent the development of listeria in cheese were accidentally replaced twice "by cultures that do not give enough protection", the company said.
The cheese was recalled on January 23.
Eight have died in Austria and Germany from eating the contaminated dairy product.
Listeria is the bacteria responsible for listeriosis, a serious infectious disease that affects mostly pregnant women, newborns, the elderly and people with a weak immune system.