Today I learned...

[TingTong]

A 15yo Chinese tourist carved "Ding Jinhao was here" in a 3,500yo Egyptian temple and the Chinese are very ashamed of him.

Hong Kong (CNN) -- Parents of a 15-year-old Chinese tourist have apologized after the teenager defaced a stone sculpture in an ancient Egyptian temple with graffiti.

The act drew ire in both Egypt and China -- generating a massive online backlash amongst China's unforgiving netizens.

The vandal carved 'Ding Jinhao was here' in Chinese in the 3,500 year old Luxor Temple.

This was photographed by an embarrassed Chinese traveler and shared on weibo, China's micro-blogging site on May 24.

"The saddest moment in Egypt. I'm so embarrassed that I want to hide myself. I said to the Egyptian tour guide,'I'm really sorry,'" that traveler wrote on the original weibo post.
"We want to wipe off the marking with a towel. But we can't use water since it is a 3,500 relic."

It didn't take long -- actually, just a day -- before outraged netizens tracked down Ding in Nanjing.

Slammed online and exposed further in the mainstream, Ding's parents quickly contacted media outlets.

 

[TingTong]

Indians are starting to get a taste for beef

NEW DELHI — When night falls in this gritty capital, gangs troll the darkened streets looking for easy prey among a portion of the city’s vast homeless population; thousands have been rounded up and carried off in trucks in recent years. The police say they have increased patrols and set up roadblocks in an effort to stop the trafficking. In some cases, officers have infiltrated gangs in hopes of catching them in the act. But the brutal kidnappings continue, and the victims — scrawny cows, which are slowly losing their sacred status among some in India — are slaughtered and sold for meat and leather.

Cattle rustling, called “lifting” here, is a growing scourge in New Delhi, as increasingly affluent Indians develop a taste for meat, even the flesh of cows, which are considered sacred in Hinduism. Criminals round up some of the roughly 40,000 cattle that wander the streets of this megacity and sell them to illegal slaughterhouses located in villages not far away.

 

[TingTong]

The last 24 remaining members of a species of giant stick insect were found under a bush on a remote spike of rock off Australia

They call it "Ball's Pyramid." It's what's left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone.

What's more, for years this place had a secret. At 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush, and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don't know.