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| - Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world: Billions of sex-mad cicadas who have spent the past 17 years underground are emerging all over the eastern United States to eat, mate and die. But one man is licking his lips at the prospect of this biblical plague. Hong Kong-born chef Bun Lai got out his wok and invited people to join him in a Washington park to sample his fried cicada sushi. Stella Roque, 36, who grew up with a fear of insects, wasn't overly eager to eat the bugs which other chefs have used to fill gourmet cicada tacos. But she was "delightfully surprised" by Bun's cicada hunt and fry-up. "I was actually terrified when holding it in my hand," she told AFP of her first encounter with a cicada. "But it was actually really tasty." Melons are indisputably delicious. But would you pay $24,800 for two? That is what a Japanese baby food tycoon paid for a pair of Yubari melons from the famously chilly northern island of Hokkaido. The businessman said he shelled out to cheer everyone up and lift the pandemic blues. He can cheer us up anytime he likes at AFP. But smiles don't come cheap around here... The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may have learned their lesson about confused messaging on coronavirus. Now they are making it crystal clear. "Don't kiss or snuggle backyard poultry," the CDC warned this week, linking the fowl habit with a big spike in Salmonella poisoning since February. Too many Americans are getting too comfortable with their feathered friends, it clucked. Kudos to the Danish radio station reporter sent to cover the reopening of swingers clubs there after lockdown restrictions were lifted. Time-honoured journalistic tradition with these kind of stories is to "make your excuses and leave" before things gets too interesting. But our brave Danish colleague did not demure and put her body on the line to bring Radio 4 listeners the inside story, keeping her recorder rolling to the last shuddering gasp. Station chief Tina Kragelund hailed her vim, saying "I think it's great when our reporters experiment with other ways of doing journalism." The truth will soon be out there. A report on the US government's secret files on UFOs will finally be made public next month after years of sightings and videos suggesting that highly advanced extraterrestrials have been watching us. While hard-core conspiracy theorists scoff that only unclassified material will be included, military insiders have added to the paranoia by positing that the objects could be the work of superior beings... in China and Russia. One wonders what extraterrestials would think of the rain dance performed at the Nationals Park baseball ground in the US capital after a downpour stopped play between the Washington Nationals and the Cincinnati Reds. The smiling streaker provided far more entertainment than the teams, splashing and sliding on the infield tarp before evading security personnel by climbing into the tarp roller. The vintage viral home video "Charlie Bit My Finger" has sold for almost $761,000, the latest bit of internet culture to be auctioned off as a "non fungible token". Viewed more than 883 million times since 2007, the YouTube clip shows a British baby called Charlie bite his big brother Harry's finger when he puts it into his mouth. As the baby gums down, the small boy yelps the much-memed line, "Charlie, that really hurt." With such money to be made from digital ephemera, one wonders how many vloggers will now be inspired to film themselves putting their heads into lions', tigers' and hippos' mouths? And finally our Alexander Lukashenko Humanitarian of the Week prize goes to the Indian couple who got around their country's Covid restrictions by packing their wedding guests onto a Spicejet plane to get married at 30,000 feet while thousands of their compatriots expired from the virus below. Indians with more money than sense have already been blamed for spreading the variant to Bollywood's favourite holiday bolthole, the Maldives. burs-fg/jmy/spm
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