Playmobil stirs controversy with apparent slave figurine
A California mother said she was shocked to discover her son’s Playmobil pirate ship came with a dark-skinned figurine apparently meant to be a slave. Ida lockett of Sacramento said she was helping her five-year-old son assemble the Playmobil set he received for his birthday when she noticed the instructions call for the dark-skinned figurine to don a neck-mounted accessory that appears to be a slave collar.
“You cannot have this specific accessory and call it anything else,” lockett told KHTK-TV. “The fact that you can Google it, look it up, say what it is — it’s a slave collar.” lockett said the figurine, which is the only one in the set with dark skin, wears tattered pants and no shoes.
“It’s definitely racist,” she said. “It told my son to put a slave cuff around the black character’s neck, and then to play with the toy.”
Playmobil said in a statement, “If you look at the box, you can see that the pirate figure is clearly a crew member on the pirate ship and not a captive. The figure was meant to represent a pirate who was a former slave in a historical context. It was not our intention to offend anyone in anyway.”
(UPI)
50-lane traffic jam on china toll road
Drone footage from a Chinese toll road near Hong Kong shows thousands of cars at a standstill in a traffic jam spanning the 50-lane road. The footage recorded near the Hong Kong border on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway shows thousands of vehicles stopped on the road amid a traffic jam branded “carpocalypse” and “carmageddon” online. China’s state-run Xinhua news agency said: “The traffic jam resulted from a combination of tourists returning from their October 1-7 Golden Week vacations, foggy conditions and the road’s 50 lanes being bottlenecked to 20 by a new checkpoint.
(UPI)
Burger King’s black bun blamed for customers’ green poop
Burger King customers sampling the new Halloween Whopper said the burger’s black bun carried an unexpected side effect — it turned their poop green. The fast food chain unveiled the Halloween Whopper last month, saying the bun’s black colour comes from A1 steak sauce, but some customers posting on social media said another, unknown ingredient is believed to be the cause of their feces turning a bright green.
“Yesterday I had the Halloween Whopper... Today my poop is green. Yesterday was the last time I’ll have the Halloween Whopper,” @Danny_Seth tweeted. Not all customers were dissatisfied with the side effect. “Took like three days for my poop to stop being green, but was totally worth it, @BurgerKing” @ImHunterStanton wrote on Twitter.
The hashtag “#greenpoop” was trending last Tuesday on Twitter. A Burger King representative told ABC News the bun contains less than 1 per cent food dye, and the dyes “are commonly used in the industry and approved by the FDA”.
The company did not specify whether the bun contains Green #3, a food dye known to cause green-coloured stool. The colour is also known to result from food not being broken down quickly enough by bile.
(UPI)
‘Something long and Complicated’ proves his identity to Facebook
A British man whose legal name is Something long and Complicated said Facebook suspended his account and refused to believe his driver’s license. Something long and Complicated, 30, who was born William Wood and changed his name legally in 2007, said in a Facebook post after his account was reinstated that he has been on Facebook for eight years and previously had trouble verifying his identity, but the most recent incident was the most complicated.
Complicated said his troubles started recently when he attempted to log into his Facebook account and instead received a message saying his identity needed to be verified before he could log into the social networking site.
The user said he submitted requested copies of his driver’s license, passport, credit cards, but the site continued to tell him the documents were not sufficient to confirm his identity.
Facebook reinstated Complicated’s account and told him he would no longer be able to edit his name on the site, instead giving a link to a form for the process should he need it.
(UPI)
Thai beauty queen in a tuk-tuk costume
The smoke-belching, ear-splitting, undisciplined rickshaws known as tuk-tuks are part of the chaos on Bangkok’s clogged streets. Soon however, the tuk-tuk will stroll down a more refined runway, when Miss Thailand pays homage to her country at the Miss Universe 2015 pageant dressed as the iconic motorised rickshaw. Her outfit comes complete with headlights and handlebars.
The “Tuk Tuk Thailand” dress will be worn by Aniporn Chalermburanawong in the national costume round at the pageant in December in the United States. It was the winning design from 356 entries in a contest held by Miss Universe Thailand.
(AP)