Groom's escape, and more

Reluctant bridegroom charged with arson

A reluctant Japanese bridegroom has been arrested and charged with arson, after he set fire to the hotel where he and his fiancé were due to be married. Tatsuhiko Kawata, 39, later told police that he set the fire because “there were definite reasons I could not get married”—specifically, that he was already married to another woman.

Paris Hilton and the light-years’ thing

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Paris Hilton is worried about Einstein’s relativity theory. The hotel heiress is one of 157 people to have already paid a $200,000 deposit for a seat on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic commercial space-flight service, but this week confessed to being “very scared” that if the spaceship flies too fast, its passengers will experience relativity’s predicted distortion in the passage of time. “With the whole ‘light-years’ thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later and everyone I know is dead?” said Hilton. “I’ll be like, ‘Great. Now I have to start all over.’”

Following GPS instructions at all costs

A Polish bus driver drove his bus into a lake because his satellite navigation system told him to. The driver was able to call police before the bus went fully underwater, and rescuers arrived to find the driver and his passengers balanced on the roof of the half-submerged vehicle. “There used to be a road there until last year,” said a police official. “It seems that the GPS hadn’t been updated.” Nevertheless, said the official, “it’s a huge lake, and it’s hard to imagine how you could ignore or not see it.”