Thursday April 5, 2012

Phone fun can be hard on finger

SIN Chew Daily reported about a Taiwanese man who “lost” the use of his index finger after playing games on his touch-screen smartphone for up to six hours each day.

The paper said the finger had stiffened because the cartilage between the joints had weakened.

He said he would feel excruciating pain each time he tried to bend the finger.

Five months of physiotherapy had also failed to improve his condition.

He is facing difficulty in writing, holding objects and carrying out chores.

The man has vowed never to play games on his mobile phone again.

> China Press reported that a 30-year-old man and two accomplices in Kuala Lumpur orchestrated the kidnapping of his younger brother to settle his gambling debts.

However, he failed in their bid to collect the RM50,000 ransom from their father.

The report said the suspect deceived his younger brother by asking him to walk to a nearby convenience store and pick up a “package” supposedly sent to them by their sister working in South Korea.

The accomplices then abducted the victim and took him to a nearby hotel, but he managed to flee before his father could hand over the ransom money.

Police arrested the suspect after they traced the handphone number used by him to call his father. The accomplices are still at large.

> Nanyang Siang Pau reported that two “monks” in yellow robes were spotted hugging two women and had then booked rooms in a five-star hotel in Beijing.

Photographs of the men, one of them hugging a woman, were posted on the Internet.

They were seen using Louis Vuitton sling bags and drinking beer in a subway station.

Netizens poured scorn on the two for acting inappropriately in public.

● Other News & Views is compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with this > sign, it denotes a separate news item.

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