Offbeat

Newsreader ‘buries Putin’

A newsreader who slipped up and said bloggers were debating whether Prime Minister Vladimir Putin should be buried has become an Internet sensation and received thousands of grateful posts in Russia.
Maria Bukhtuyeva, a newsreader from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, made the mistake when wanting to say presidential hopeful Mikhail Prokhorov had proposed holding a referendum on whether Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin should be removed from a Red Square Mausoleum and buried.
“Shall we bury Vladimir Putin?” Bukhtuyeva of Krasnoyarsk’s TVK television channel inquired instead last week. “This topic is now being actively discussed on the Internet.”
The Russian blogoshere exploded with delight, with thousands of commentators sending her virtual flowers and leaving numerous posts on the young woman’s page on the social site VKontakte, a Russian version of Facebook. The YouTube recording was viewed half a million times over three days.
“Masha is the voice of the people,” read one post, referring to her by her diminutive name. “Masha, you said everything right,” read another post.
Masha said it was just a slip of the tongue.

Baboons wreak havoc in Zimbabwe

Troops of bag-snatching, truck-looting baboons are causing chaos at a border post between Zimbabwe and Zambia in daily raids for food, NewsDay reported on Tuesday.
“Baboons are an issue that must be dealt with here because they destroy travellers’ goods,” the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority station manager at the Chirundu border post, Tichaona Phiri, told the newspaper.
“Sometimes they bite or clap people on their faces if they try to defend their property and they can snatch ladies’ handbags and even destroy cars as they search for food.”
The apes also tear up sacks of maize on trucks moving through the border, a committee of lawmakers was told during a visit to the site, located in a national park.
“These baboons can smell maize on trucks and considering their huge numbers, it is very difficult to control them,” the newspaper quoted Phiri as saying.
“But the problem is that they behave like human beings and are very good tricksters,” said Phiri.